Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase

Fascinating - and flattering - profile of financial power

Duff McDonald's book covers a fascinating historical moment - the 2008-2009 Wall Street debacle - by profiling a pivotal character in the thick of it, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Having spent extensive time with Dimon, McDonald combines his reporting with published sources, Dimon's own writings and statements, and interviews with his associates, employees or relatives. McDonald covers Dimon's youth, business school education and evolving career. Dimon was a nonconformist in business school and politics, an astute lieutenant of his mentor Sandy Weill, and a pivotal figure in the financial crisis. Notably, he preserved JPMorgan Chase, bought Bear Stearns and helped lead the market back to stability. Readers interested in a critical take on Dimon may find the book too flattering, but if you want to see how the financial wars looked from the CEO's chair, getAbstract recommends this intriguing perspective.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Ascent of a Good Biography

After being decidedly disappointed with the House of Dimon I was pleasantly surprised with Duff McDonald's, Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase. McDonald doesn't get so caught up in the rush ahead to gleefully talk about present day events but instead takes a more tried & true approach of walking the reader chronologically through his early childhood, provides background into his heritage, parents and sibling. All of which allows a person who may already be familiar with Dimon to gain an additional few dimensions of what went into his development as a person.

One aspect that feels uncomfortable is that early on McDonald seems to be cobbling together pieces of other books to recreate his novel. While good for a historical thesis because it shows detail of research it begs the question, why read this book when I should be reading the ones McDonald quotes ad nausea.

It was also interesting to see the juxtaposition of the description of events particularly Dimon's final days at Citibank in comparison to those described in Sandy Weill's tomb, The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy. There is of course the very historic blow-up between Dimon & Maughan that seems to contain less expletives then other renditions I've read as well as a more detailed look at that final meeting where Weill tells Dimon it's time for him to go. While this isn't an autobiography one can tell that McDonald did have pretty good access to Dimon as well as several people close enough to him to be able to provide that counter-perspective.

It's also great that McDonald still took the time to go through Dimon's experiences at Bank One from how he whiled away his time following his Citibank departure to the early recruiting at Bank One and then to eventual take-over of the institution and the initiatives he implemented. The flow and cadence are well done to enable the reader to digest each event as they occur without the unnecessary correlation to how a specific skill helped him later in his career until we get to the crescendo of the piece which is, naturally, Dimon's return triumphant return to New York City with JPMorgan Chase.

But the crescendo itself is somewhat underwhelming in the details. When one reads other novels around the financial crisis, particularly those involving Bear Stearns or even Andrew Ross Sorkin's, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System - and Themselves you get a sense that there was a lot more meat on the bones that McDonald could have put together in relation to Dimon and the actions he (or his team) took. And yet all in all, this book delivers more then what one could have read in various news publications/stories and provides the reader a nice in-depth look at the man who for all intents and purposes was.the last man standing.

Problems in launching book on Nookcolor

Great book but I am half way through it and the book stopped launching on my Nookcolor. I was told through customer service that it was a "content problem" and they had to send it back to the publisher after 3 weeks of calling and wasting hours of speaking to a rep and having me do a number of troubleshooting exercises and even after they send me a replacement nook.

Great insight on Jaime Dimon and Chase!

This is a truly entertaining biography of Jaime Dimon.

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