dd

glossy investment junk mail brochures you get and immediately recycle as soon as you sign up for business week. The only difference, is how can one ever recycle 44 hours of their lives??
Some of the history was interesting, but it rapidly degenerated into a meaningless gloss job over a history that is surely so much more interesting. Where are the details of the deals that this bank made. Where is the insight into the vision that directed this bank for ~80? years ?? Where was the crucial background history of what was happening on wall street during this time?? Why did they succeed, when so many others failed? This book reads like a book-length brochure of why you should be investing your valuable bank with all these 'brilliant' 'gifted' investment bankers. Boring and useless! Compare and contrast this awful book with anything by Ian B Stewart, who wrote classics like Den of Thieves (also available on Audible), or Michael Lewis or Roger Lowenstien or Ron Chernow (all available on Audible). These authors certainly have their occasional duds (avoid Disney War, new new thing); nonetheless, they at least demonstrate that at some point they actually took an interview or two.
Is it so hard to interview people, to understand what they actually thought, what their fears were, why and how they made the decisions they made. None of these stories appear here. A sad waste of paper (and glossy paper to boot!!). I felt sorry for the poor narrator, probably the only person who had to actually read the whole thing. I just gave up about half-way through.
Note to future finance journalists, when making mas market books about bankers: Give us details!! Compare and contrast strategies, this is our only chance to understand how these events take place!
Your book should not be a big @ss-kissing bullet point in your resume!!!

no

the annoying politically correct tropes abounding through his prose, and the very predictable and non-scary plotline

she was fine

the author and his a channeling of Stephen King

Dont waste your time

This book is about many things: Its about tedium, attention span, its about the joy of focussing on a task. The agony of drifting focus.
I can see how these thoughts could be the meat of anybody that has to create for a living. In the IRS, he certainly found the best setting to talk about difficult tedious work requiring concentration.
It's like an ADD manifesto, and minefield all in one.
He describes the creative process or should I say the productive working process, his character's motivation and thought processes better than anything I have ever seen. I'm 70% so I don't know if he gets to put it all together at the end. But It is a really amazing Listen.
But I have to say, no Evelyn Wood would ever get me through this thing. Definitely an audible-only recommendation. If you really liked "but eventually you become yourself" you'll love this.

Why do the bad guys always have to be christian ministers?? Come on steven mix it up a little !! How about a kitten raping rabbi next time.

Ugh, I originally bought this book in hardcover, but only got through about 4 pages. I normally give a book a Steven King 50 but this one was off to the garage sale way before that. The only way I would ever get through it, I knew, was via audible. That poor narrator, how he must have suffered. I admit I bought it so that I could be cool with the in-crowd. I had read something about Delillio in one of those big thick magazines full of perfume adds. I had read an online review about a guy that took a whole year off from his english Ph.D. program to read and this was one of the books he chose. He never said whether he went back to school. It is very post-modern, which is code for pointless. I loved some of his dialogue though. All these fractured sentences that must have looked great all quoted up in the book. I like how he repeats certain phrases over and over again and rebuilds them with more stuff. He's good at that. But this is mere virtuosism. Post-modernize or deconstruct evrything and you will be left merely with ego, and it probably won't even be yours. The nice thing was that I did dawdle around the lab for two weeks listening to it running my gels, running my PCR reactions in a semi-catatonic state listening to the book as one would listen to some music. My experiments were sh@t the whole time, but it was fun.
I give it two stars, three would be too much encouragement, and one star is the exclusive domain of Dan Brown and his ilk. Mr. Delilo should be happy I grade on a curve, he's just gotten a C, a passing grade.

This book was awefull! It was so predictable, so full of propaganda. Don't waste your time. A better title would be '800 pages of semi-useable scrap paper'. The US won the cold war, it was the right side and all that, but having won does not mean that our sh&t smells any better than the former communists'. This book was like a hit parade of propaganda (from all three sides actually, if you count israel) strung together between the big events in the life of the CIA of the past few years. Who published this thing ?