The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane

I highly recommend this book--it is a fun read, and you'll learn a lot too about the nexus of entrepreneurialism and Wall Street. And, if you don't like non-fiction, just read it as if it is a novel...it is that well-written and easy to read! Randall Lane has done a marvelous job of capturing the phenomenon of financial and business bubbles, not only on Wall Street but in entrepreneurialism as well. The Zeroes is a thriller of a book, it reads like a novel, its story--though true--feels like fiction, with well-drawn characters, extreme in personality, risk-taking aggressiveness and ambition. Anyone who has or hopes to start a business - selling your business idea, attracting trustable partners, enticing paying customers, finding reliable and continuous funding--will find Lane's tale an excellent and easily-read primer on how to do so, and how difficult, disruptive and crazy it can be. What Lane does so well is to tie together Wall Street's latest over-investment bubble (ie, over-investing in real estate via packages of securitized mortgages) with the celebritized magazine business that he was attempting to build on the coattails of the Wall Street high-rollers and high-spenders who created--and benefitted from--that bubble. Highly recommended!

A Scalding Book Scalding about the Street, celebs, politicians, and scalding about the writer himself. Randall Lane opened up here and the book is one of the best reads I've had this year. I can't get some of the scenes out of my head. He is a really unusual as a writer and observer. I both admire him and feel sorry for him.

I bought this book yesterday afternoon and spent the entire night until 4 am reading it. This book manages to put the entire horrific decade in perspective. It is a really great read by a journalist/publisher who was in the middle of it all, but not rich himself. But he got caught up in the greed, and the desire to make a fortune and was destroyed financially along with so many of us. And he admits it. But man can Lane write. It's like being a fly on the wall in the homes of financial wizards, movie stars, athletes and artists. I was appalled but fascinated. And disgusted that it keeps going even after the decade of the Zeroes. Maybe there's a morality tale to be learned.

As the title says, highly entertaining -- on the other hand, I worked at Doubledown for its entire existence, so I'm biased. Then again, everyone's biased about Randall Lane these days, in one direction or another. I started the book not knowing what to expect; I stayed up late for a week to finish it. It's extremely readable, often quite funny and very illuminating both about the perils of running a small business you're rapidly trying to make bigger and about a extremely peculiar period in the financial history of the U.S. Take my sentiments with the requisite skepticism. But if you want an insightful potted history of a very bizarre economic decade whose excesses we will be dealing with for a long, long time, "The Zeroes" would not be a bad place to start. Doubledown Media as metaphor for Wall Street idiocy in the 2000s: Hey, I was there. Works for me.

The Zeroes has an incredible number of anecdotes and stories of people in and out of the financial world. John Travolta, Al Gore, John McCain, Diana Ross, Peter Max for starters. Usually a book of this scope is not well written, but Lane is an exceptionally colorful writer. I couldn't put the book down!