American Sucker David Denby by David Denby 9780759509436, 0759509433 instant download after payment.

In January 2000, as my marriage was breaking up and my life wandered off the tracks, I began keeping a journal of what kept me sane and made me crazy—my adventures as an amateur investor. A new life created new needs and new passions, and every night, in my computer, I noted down the movements of the market and the alterations in my finances, and other things, too—musings about technology and change and such personal currents as desire and regret, and indeed anything that seemed joined to the obsession of the moment, which, as anyone could see, was money. I tried to take notice of money’s related manias, like consumer envy and status. Busily, I raced around New York, horning in on investors’ conferences, eager to meet a financial guru or an entrepreneur who could teach me something. I kept track as well of my periodic disaffection from investing and the stock market—the longueurs, the intervals of rebellion, the loathing of the market. For even if we become obsessed with money, most of us love the rest of life no less than before. At least we try to love it no less. What, I wondered, did money hunger do to a man’s yearnings for love, for work, for entertainment and art? To his sense of himself, his place in the world? As the nineties boom gave way to the uncertainties and scandals of a new century, and a great many Americans fell into financial troubles of one sort or another, these questions seemed very much worth asking. For a writer, the questions are sharpened by habit. If a writer loses his dignity, he can still retain his wits; he can say when the baggy pants dropped, he can set down the ways in which greed overwhelmed the longing for consistency and self-esteem. I wanted, if possible, to restore to financial behavior the dimensions of psychology and morale as well as the crowding interests and conditions of daily life normally left out of writing about the market.