APRIL 2022 - AudioFile
This new edition of LIAR’S POKER, a classic about turbulent 1980s Wall Street, is a template for the future of nonfiction audiobooks. It features a microphone-friendly author interpreting his work with the intimacy of an engaging podcast, along with production effects that incorporate historic news reports, sounds, and music. These last bits are placed further back in the audio spectrum than is typical in audiobooks (though not uncommon in podcasts). The sound effects—for example, a ringing telephone and a trumpeting elephant—are not employed theatrically but rather as audio emoji enhancing the text. This Alice-in-Wonderland journey through 1980s Wall Street is as contemporary as cryptocurrency. Even after three decades, the audiobook feels current, packed with entertaining narratives; unforgettable characters; and well-explained financial minutiae. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Library Journal
As described by Lewis, liar's poker is a game played in idle moments by workers on Wall Street, the objective of which is to reward trickery and deceit. With this as a metaphor, Lewis describes his four years with the Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers, from his bizarre hiring through the training program to his years as a successful bond trader. Lewis illustrates how economic decisions made at the national level changed securities markets and made bonds the most lucrative game on the Street. His description of the firm's personalities and of the events from 1984 through the crash of October 1987 are vivid and memorable. Readers of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities ( LJ 11/15/87) are likely to enjoy this personal memoir. BOMC and Fortune Book Club selection.-- Joseph Barth, U.S. Military Acad . Lib., West Point, N.Y.
Tom Wolfe
"The funniest book on Wall Street I’ve ever read."
People
"Often profane, always hilarious, right on the mark."
Fortune
"So memorable and alive . . . one of those rare works that encapsulate and define an era."
National Review
Lewis takes the reader through his schoolboy's progress as trainee and geek in the trading room, to high-powered swashbuckler. The author has a puckish appreciation for the comic. Yet he also has the knack of explaining precisely how complex deals really work. He provides the most readable explanation I've seen anywhere of the origin within Salomon Brothers of the mortgage-backed securities market....It is good history, and a good story.
Victor Mallet - London Review of Books
Lewis has a gift for the rapid portrait. Unless you find his flippant one-liners irritating, it is a pleasure to be guided around the jungle of bond markets by his reminiscences and trenchant asides. . . . Apart from the belly-laughs, one of the triumphs of Liar's Poker is that it makes the financial complexities of investment banking and the markets accessible to the layman. . . . Everything from yields to selling short is painlessly clarified in the course of the narrative.
