Ghosts of Manhattan

When my lovely bride and I were first married, she worked on the 104th floor of Two World Trade as a bond trader for Shearson Lehman. So, this book was a trip -- both a reminder of one of Wall Street's many dark sides, and a deep dive into the psyche of a fundamentally good person who is making one......more

It appears as though most people who reviewed this book liked it. I found it to be one long insufferable whine about a guy working on Wall Street who hates his job, the culture he works in, and most of the people he works with. He belongs to a group of people who financially bankrupted the US with w......more

I've never worked in finance, so I was surprised by how much I loved this book. Doug Brunt has written a really compelling, funny, and realistic novel that is--on the surface--about the world of Bear Stearns in the lead-up to the financial meltdown: we see the traders at work and their crazy nights......more

So…"Ghosts of Manhattan” has been on my “to read” pile for a while. The premise was intriguing to me, a trader at Bear Stearns having a bit of a moral quandary in the years just leading up to the collapse of 2008. You can get a good novel out of that. Having read it, I am ambivalent (at best) about......more

"Ghosts of Manhattan" is sort of like, "What if Bret Easton Ellis wrote 'Bright Lights, Big City'?" Yuppies boozing and coking their way through Manhattan, pre-economic collapse. The protagonist is difficult to relate to--very angsty, and he doesn't take a lot of initiative in his own life. Therefor......more