Olga Skvo Skvo itibaren 6593 Kostilkovo, Bulgaristan
once i was always joe
We like to think that we create our own destinies. We are our own "Masters of the Universe." We go to good schools and work hard. We get good jobs and work hard. We reap the benefits of our own labor. It is ours and ours alone. Until something happens that shatters the myth. We are instead creations of something larger. We are not Masters of the Universe. There are other forces at work in our lives. We live off the backs of others, others we'd rather not think about. We can ignore them until something happens that exposes the less privileged. Katrina perhaps. In a Dickens-like manner Wolfe takes us into the privileged life of a Wall Street bond trader during the 1980s. He lives a life of excess without understanding how he makes his money. Even with his fortune he still has uncomfortable amounts of personal debt. He lives in a bubble where he thinks he is a Master of the Universe. Until one day the bubble bursts and exposes the world he ignored. What I didn't expect was how FUNNY this book is. I laughed and smirked my way through all 650 pages. The story is incredibly sad no doubt but Wolfe's wit reminded me of Jane Austen. He cuts right to the heart of American behavior. He does not hold back. I find it interesting that Wolfe was a supporter of Bush 43. During the Bush years these Masters of the Universe took excess to new levels, created financial products which even they didn't really understand, and then took the world economy down in a mighty crash. None of these Masters of the Universe went to jail, instead they got bonuses, while the less privileged suffered...and still do. I'm not a fan of sequels, but I'd love to see Sherman McCoy reappear in a story about the great crash of 2008. That would be good reading!
I wish I loved this book, but I don't. I loved "Galileo's Daughter." In addition I can sail, have made open-ocean passages without GPS, and have a rudimentary understanding of using a sextant. Nevertheless the author's cursory descriptions of the astronomical attempts to determine longitude, including using the moons of Jupiter(!), left me scratching my head. Had I not already understood how a chronometer helps determine longitude, this book would not have explained it to me.