While the premise of the book is great—Kevin Roose follows eight young Wall Street recruits, and utilizes their experiences as a focal point for exploring the hidden world they inhabit—the author falls seriously short with what this book could have been.



From the outset, it becomes abundantly clear Roose does not have anything remotely close to a central thesis or greater point. Besides rhetorically using these eight post-college recruits as a way to lionize 'the youth' and demonize Wall Street w

"That night, after going out to a bar with some friends, Jeremy [/ one of the people Roose interviewed] went back to his usual spot on the roof of his apartment building, lit up a joint, and broke down. It was raining outside, and the tears streaming down Jeremy’s face merged with the water droplets running down from his hair" (p. 206)

"It saddened me to imagine Ricardo and Arjun spending their lives as the vice presidents of such-and-such obscure finance subdivisions. Both of them had outside passions that, statistically, they were extremely unlikely to ever pursue, now that they’d survived their first two years on Wall Street and decided to press on in the financial industry. And I couldn’t help but think that they’d be able to contribute more, on balance, doing things other than serving as well-paid investors and intermediaries.



But they seemed to be happy to remain in finance. And all I could do was hope that they would remain scrupulous and thoughtful as they climbed the ladder, and that a career on Wall Street would leave their basic decency intact." (p. 429)

Kappa Beta Phi was, in large part, a fear-based organization. Here were executives who had strong ideas about politics, society, and the work of their colleagues, but who would never have the courage to voice those opinions in a public setting. Their cowardice had reduced them to sniping at their perceived enemies in the form of satirical songs and sketches, among only those people who had been handpicked to share their view of the world. And the idea of [me] making those views public had caused them to throw a mass temper tantrum.

While the premise of the book is great—Kevin Roose follows eight young Wall Street recruits, and utilizes their experiences as a focal point for exploring the hidden world they inhabit—the author falls seriously short with what this book could have been.From the outset, it becomes abundantly clear Roose does not have anything remotely close to a central thesis or greater point. Besides rhetorically using these eight post-college recruits as a way to lionize 'the youth' and demonize Wall Street without actually exposingkind of concrete malfeasance whatsoever. What he does do is let the 'young money' talk about the long hours, intense culture, excruciating ennui, and plain old status anxiety of The Street. While these are great ways to draw the reader in and to gather genuine sympathy for it's protagonists, this seems to be a double-edged sword because. Yeah, it's painful, but they are not forced to work there, and they are rewarded amply for putting themselves through this grueling process. This is a huge problem, because all Roose has done is detail what everyone already knows about working on The Street:And speaking of 'grueling', Roose's book, while starting off strong, was increasingly unbearably sullen throughout. With such melodramatic and maudlin prose like......one would think he was trying to write a YA novel rather than an exposé of the dark heart of the young finance world. That, and in a book where the author claims, there was nothing remotely objectionable outside necessarily tough bosses yelling at these young Wall Streeters when they mess up, and thereby costing their respective company a lot of money.Now, to Roose's credit, he lays out these details really well, and if this were a book he'd hope a potential recruit uses to gauge whether or not this is the lifestyle they want, then the book could be deemed a success in that respect. But Roose doesn't stay within these modest-but-useful parameters. He conspicuously virtue-signals throughout the book, positioning himself as a moral person, mourning how 'Young Wall Street' gets sucked into the supposedly corrupt and corrosive culture of The Street:He also makes a contrived 'mistake' of thinking those initial recruits going into Wall Street are initially 'bad', only to just-coincidentally-find-out that this is not the case at all. Instead he decides that its obviously more nuanced than that. So he goes out of his way to present an excruciatingly sensationalist , painful, and cringe-worthy event in his book:. While what they did in this meeting might be objectionable—told crude jokes that 'punch-down', performed risqué skits—he blatantly invades their privacy and tastelessly decides to use this event to not only demonize what he decided to call "Old Wall Street", but also makes claims and reports events that are not at all verifiable. (.) Not only does he utilize them to vilify all he perceives as bad about Wall Street, but he makes utterly dickish and unjustifiable characterizations of the group for things they supposedly decided to say and do in an explicitly private and intimate setting:To keep things short, what really bothers me about this book is Roose could have done so much better with the apparently ample time he had to prepare (several years, I believe). He either could have found actual illegitimate ongoings, or could have done more research to comment on the policy-side, or even showed the progression to 'the buy side' and up the ladder to give more perspective. This latter option would give more context to all that grueling work and show it's worth it for some people. Instead, in my view, he took the easy route and just positioning himself as a Wall Street culture critic . But to his credit, despite all of the aforementioned criticism, he does do a good job of going inside the experiences of these eight young recruits, and outside his book the research he has bother to do yielded great stuff on getting an internship on Wall Street . He also seems to be a fun and interesting writer when it comes to casual , more techy topics : while Roose is an interesting writer, he seems to be a lot more comfortable with more lighthearted fare, rather than with serious, highly dense and controversial topics. Based on this book, while decently interesting and worth a read for a potential Wall Street acolyte, he should probably stick to those.