Monkey Business

As eager-beaver business school students, Rolfe and Troob garnered job offers as junior associates at the elite Wall Street investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, lured by dreams of wealth, glamour and power. Readers whose fascination with Wall Street shenanigans has been fueled by Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker will find this thorough rundown of an investment bank associate's daily routine sobering. By the time Rolfe and Troob were able to discern the key fact that the "investment banking community has long been an oligopoly, with only a handful of real players with the size and scale to drive through the big deals," they were already grappling with the gritty reality of performing grunt labor in an environment ruled by despotic senior partners who called innumerable meetings to set unrealistic deadlines and make superhuman demands on anybody within screaming distance. The authors' resulting disappointment and disaffection leaps off every page. Unfortunately, they take out their frustrations with indiscriminate potshots at such easy targets as word processors ("Christopher Street fairies"), copy center personnel ("a platoon of patriotic Puerto Ricans" they offhandedly refer to as "militants") and female research analysts (whom they describe as "under-sexed, eager-to-please"). Long before the hapless authors have stooped to expressing their fury at the bank by such puerile antics as urinating into a beer bottle while seated at a banquet table at the Christmas party, readers will have had enough. (Apr.)

Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

John Rolfe grew up in the heart of Dixie. After stints at Virginia Tech and the University of Florida, he took a job doing broadcast research in New York City, convinced that "if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere." In 1993, after concluding that Frank Sinatra had sold him a bill of goods, John entered the Wharton School of Business, where he edited The Wharton Vulgarian. Following his sentence with DLJ, he was a principal with a private investment organization. Currently, John is a freelance man of sport and leisure, and is honing his panhandling skills for the next bear market.

Peter Troob grew up on the rough-and-tumble streets of Scarsdale, New York, and while in grade school starred in James and the Giant Peach. Peter attended Duke University, then worked for Kidder Peabody in New York City. In 1993 he entered the graduate program at the Harvard Business School, where he edited the humor section in the Harbus and wrote the "Kosher Korner" column. This made his mother proud. Peter is currently a partner with a private investment organization and is anticipating many happy years there.