Wolf of Wall Street or The Art of War

Wolf of Wall Street

Author: Jordan Belfort

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called…

In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent.
Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits–for the house. But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics, and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named Steve Madden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into a harrowing darkness all his own.

From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wife as they ran a madcap household that included two young children, a full-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hidden cameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—tothe unbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down…

Publishers Weekly

Belfort, who founded one of the first and largest "chop shop" brokerage firms in 1987, was banned from the securities business for life by 1994, and later went to jail for fraud and money-laundering, delivers a memoir that reads like fiction. It covers his decade of success with straightforward accounts of how he worked with managers of obscure companies to acquire large amounts of stock with minimal public disclosure, then pumped up the price and sold it, so he and the insiders made large profits while public investors usually lost. Profits were laundered through purchase of legitimate businesses and cash deposits in Swiss banks. There is only brief mention of Belfort's life before Wall Street or events since 1997. The book's main topic is the vast amount of sex, drugs and risky physical behavior Belfort managed to survive. As might be expected in the autobiography of a veteran con man with movie rights already sold, it's hard to know how much to believe. The story is told mostly in dialogue, with allegedly contemporaneous mental asides by the author, reported verbatim. But it reports only surface events, never revealing what motivates Belfort or any of the other characters. (Oct. 2)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

A cocky bad boy of finance recalls, in much detail and scabrous language, his nasty career as a master of his own universe. At a young age, in an industry with many precocious bandits, Belfort ran a Long Island-based brokerage with the deceptively WASP-y name of Stratton Oakmont. It was a bucket shop habitually engaged in crooked underwritings. Its persuasive boss was a stock manipulator and tax dodger; he details the stock kiting, share parking, money laundering and customer swindles. Many millions poured in, and cash brought with it excess upon excess. Along with compliant women and copious drugs, there were multiple mansions, many servants, aircraft, yachts and, for all the guys on the trading floor, trophy wives. Among his under-the-table and beneath-the-sheets activities, the author's most imperative seemed to be sex and dope-taking, despite his professed abiding love for his (now ex) wife and kids. Belfort's portrait of his family is vivid, as is his depiction of the merry cast of supporting players: sweet Aunt Patricia, a Swiss forger, evil garmentos, Mad Max (Stratton's CFO and his father). The melodrama covers coke snorting, Quaalude eating, kinky sex, violence, car wrecks, even a sick child and a storm at sea. "A cautionary tale," the author calls it. It is crass, certainly, and vulgar-and a hell of a read. Belfort displays dirty writing skills many basis points above his tricky ilk. His chronicle ends with his arrest for fraud. Now, with 22 months in the slammer behind him, he's working on his next book. Entertaining as pulp fiction, real as a federal indictment. Agent: Joel Gotler/Intellectual Property Group

New interesting book: Trading in the Zone or Essentials of Corporate Finance

The Art of War

Author: Sun Tzu

Complexities of meaning and historical interpretations illustrate the timelessness of Sun Tzu's treatise on war.

Library Journal

This year's crop of Penguin "Great Ideas" volumes offers another eclectic dozen works that shaped society from the ancient Greeks to the 20th century. The books are fairly no frills, but the price isn't bad. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

What People Are Saying

Tony Soprano
Been reading that-- that book you told me about. You know, The Art of War by Sun Tzu. I mean here's this guy, a Chinese general, wrote this thing 2400 years ago, and most of it still applies today! Balk the enemy's power. Force him to reveal himself. You know most of the guys that I know, they read Prince Machiabelli, and I had Carmela go and get the Cliff Notes once and -- he's okay. But this book is much better about strategy.

Samuel B. Griffith
"As a reflection of the Chinese mind, this little work is as relevant as any Confucian classic." -- Brigadier General, ret. U.S. Marine Corps, is the author of The Battle for Guadalcanal, Peking and People and People's Wars, The Chinese People's Liberation Army, and editor and translator of Mao Tse-tung: On Guerilla War.

Table of Contents:

	Preface	11
	A Note on the Translation and Pronunciation	21
	Chronology of Approximate Dynastic Periods	25
	General Introduction and Historical Background	29
	Introduction	77
	The Art of War in Translation	163
1	Initial Estimations	165
2	Waging War	171
3	Planning Offensives	175
4	Military Disposition	181
5	Strategic Military Power	185
6	Vacuity and Substance	189
7	Military Combat	195
8	Nine Changes	201
9	Maneuvering the Army	205
10	Configurations of Terrain	211
11	Nine Terrains	217
12	Incendiary Attacks	225
13	Employing Spies	229
	Tomb Texts and Lost Writings	235
	Notes to the General Introduction and Historical Background	249
	Selected Notes to the Introduction	275
	Notes to the Translation	301
	Notes to the Tomb Texts and Lost Writings	331
	Selected Bibliography	337
	Glossary	351
	Index	363