The Go-Go Years (ePub)

“John Brooks is an unbelievable business writer.” —Bill Gates

“[Brooks] provides the early version of what we think of as Malcolm Gladwell–style or Freakonomics-style lessons. . . . But Brooks features another trait that modern business writers, whether James Stewart, Malcolm Gladwell, or Michael Lewis, do not. Brooks is truly willing to give up his own views to get inside the mind of all his subjects.” —National Review

“The Go-Go Years is not to be read in the usual manner of Wall Street classics. You do not read this book to see our present situations reenacted in the past, with only the names changed. You read it because it is a wonderful description of the way things were in a different time and place.” —From the foreword by Michael Lewis

“Those for whom the stock market is mostly a spectator sport will relish the book’s verve, color, and memorable one-liners.” —The New York Review of Books

“Please don’t take The Go-Go Years too much for granted: as effortlessly as it seems to fly, it is nonetheless an unusually complex and thoughtful work of social history.” —The New York Times

“Brooks’s great contribution is his synthesis of all the elements that made the 1960s the most volatile in Wall Street history . . . and making so much material easily digestible for the uninitiated.” —Publishers Weekly

“Brooks . . . is about the only writer around who combines a thorough knowledge of finance with the ability to perceive behind the dance of numbers ‘high, pure, moral melodrama on the themes of possession, domination, and belonging.’ ” —Time