American Sucker

Join David Denby, New Yorker critic and otherwise sensible man, on a whirlwind ride through an exuberant stock market, investment feeding frenzy, and the cataclysmic result of greed and illusion.

David Denby was a happy man, a content man with a good job, a wife and two sons, and an Upper West Side apartment. But in 2000, his wife asked for a divorce and he needed to hold onto his beloved home. Denby's account of his frenetic, irrational lurch toward the gold parallels the wild, dangerous and finally tragic era of an inflated stock market, inflamed greed and the willful blindness of the nation during the first three years of the millennium.

Seduced by stock analysts, CNBC, tech gurus, and lying CEOs at investment conferences, Denby plunged into a season of mania. He befriended people like ImClone founder Sam Waksal and Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodgett, both now disgraced by scandal. As he explores his own motives, actions, and illusions, Denby reveals the underbelly of the irrationally exuberant beast that clutched the throat and brains of most Americans during the late 1990s and early 2000s. American Sucker is a wise, bitter, humorous, and candid memoir that documents one man's confrontation with midlife changes, money, illusions, and shifting values.