Jared Dillian; Touchstone (356 pages, $26)
One grim night before Lehman Brothers imploded, trader Jared Dillian says he drank himself into a frenzied state, hugged his cat and downed half a bottle of the only drug he had on hand: Tylenol PM.
“I could not even kill myself properly,” he rages in his disturbingly candid memoir. The cause of Dillian’s distress wasn’t Lehman’s collapse; that drama unfolded some six years later. His despair reflected something much more common and corrosive about markets. His job, index arbitraging, had been automated by a computer program.
The book chronicles the personal journal of a poor kid who quit the U.S. Coast Guard to chase his dream of becoming a trader. Though his story traces the arc of Lehman’s last years — from the terrorist attack that engulfed its World Trade Center offices to its bankruptcy filing — the focus from start to finish is on Dillian’s trade-to-trade conflict. Though he can become boastful and vulgar, the dominant tone is unsparingly confessional and even modest. James Pressley, Bloomberg News
