Rating: 
Summary: wow - the plights of upper west side new yorkers
Review: I agree: why should we care about Denby, who compared to most Americans, who have real problems, had an incredibly successful life? This book is so full of itself I could barely get past the 2nd chapter. I doubt it gets better. I'm selling it on half.com.
Rating: 
Summary: denby doesn't deliver
Review: I didn't find the book involving on any level. I expected a gripping read. After all, the memoir covers a period of Denby's life when he lost his wife to divorce and $800,000 to the stock market bubble. Denby hints at the personal devastation he experiences, but is far too guarded to allow the reader to feel the true depth of his turmoil. At least this reader. The book also lacks focus. Included are portions of movie reviews, re-worked New Yorker interviews with Henry Blodgett and descriptions of 'fabulous' parties held by Sam Waksal, the founder of ImClone. I found it hard to have empathy for Denby, who comes off as a name-dropping wanna-be rich guy who still hasn't learned his lesson.
Rating:
Summary: I wouldn't but this book with YOUR money
Review: I guess you don't have to be intelligent to work for the New Yorker. Denby proves this as he is stupid beyond belief. I refuse to subsidize his stupidity. If you HAVE to read it, do yourself a favor and simply check it out from your local library. Wait for inter-library loan if you have to. Nuff said.
Rating:
Summary: A must have for every insomniac
Review: I have read the book and the reviews...I find that the good reviews are very Denbyesk....I think David Denby spent more time writing reviews for his book than he did writing the book itself.
So self-indulgent and boring...a must have for the insomniac.
Rating: 
Summary: great advice!
Review: I'm only about 32% of the way through Mr. Denby's helpful guide, but so far so good! Based on his investment advice I decided to pick up some shares of a pharma company called "ImClones" (ticker IMCL) a few days ago, and the stock has gone up almost $10 since then! I'm definitely looking forward to reading the rest of the book and picking up some more tips from Mr. Denby. Highly recommended for any investors who (like me) wanted to stop missing out on all the Wall Street bucks but didn't know where to start.
Rating: 
Summary: Want more about his family and less about the stock market.
Review: In terms of page count, "American Sucker" is about obsessions like money and real estate. But what is going on beneath the surface is something about the loss of family values. [Hey, hang in there with me for a minute--I promise I'm not for Bush.] What we have, at least on the surface, is a happy and successful family, an American success story, if perhaps more New York, upper-west-side literaryish than most. Was there a mid-life crisis? Sure, it happened back before "Great Books," when Denby's wife Cathleen Schine told him "...why don't you take your Columbia courses again?" Why? Because "I no longer knew what I knew." A few years later, "my wife...announced that she no longer wanted to be married to me." So Denby, already vulnerable, is left with "there is no there there;" rudderlessness; oblivion. Porn, suit-in-the-closet affair, foolish investing? He didn't kill himself--he wrote a book! He's a survivor. I'm not all that up on the New York literary scene or the political correctness of women leaving men, but this strikes me as serious self-indulgence on the part of the wife. Schine's books don't exactly suggest that conventional marriages can endure. In "The Love Letter," the divorced heroine takes up with a younger man (the letter turns out to be from one woman character to another). I haven't read "She Is Me," but isn't it about a wife leaving her husband for a woman? See a pattern? How does it go? "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." Denby should have seen it coming, but who knows what he could have done about it. Sure, Denby wallows in self-interest and indulgence in this book; but his family is destroyed. Family values meant something to him. Too bad he couldn't figure out how to write about them in "American Sucker." It would have been a lot more interesting to me than the stock market stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Want more about his family and less about the stock market.
Review: In terms of page count, "American Sucker" is about obsessions like money and real estate. But what is going on beneath the surface is something about the loss of family values. [Hey, hang in there with me for a minute--I promise I'm not for Bush.] What we have, at least on the surface, is a happy and successful family, an American success story, if perhaps more New York, upper-west-side literaryish than most. Was there a mid-life crisis? Sure, it happened back before "Great Books," when Denby's wife Cathleen Schine told him "...why don't you take your Columbia courses again?" Why? Because "I no longer knew what I knew." A few years later, "my wife...announced that she no longer wanted to be married to me." So Denby, already vulnerable, is left with "there is no there there;" rudderlessness; oblivion. Porn, suit-in-the-closet affair, foolish investing? He didn't kill himself--he wrote a book! He's a survivor. I'm not all that up on the New York literary scene or the political correctness of women leaving men, but this strikes me as serious self-indulgence on the part of the wife. Schine's books don't exactly suggest that conventional marriages can endure. In "The Love Letter," the divorced heroine takes up with a younger man (the letter turns out to be from one woman character to another). I haven't read "She Is Me," but isn't it about a wife leaving her husband for a woman? See a pattern? How does it go? "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." Denby should have seen it coming, but who knows what he could have done about it. Sure, Denby wallows in self-interest and indulgence in this book; but his family is destroyed. Family values meant something to him. Too bad he couldn't figure out how to write about them in "American Sucker." It would have been a lot more interesting to me than the stock market stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: Searing self-rumination gets old after awhile...
Review: In the late 1990's and early 2000's, movie critic David Denby went through a painful divorce and lost his accumulated savings -- to the tune of $900,000 -- in the 2000-2001 tech crash. This book chronicles his personal fall and his flirtations with the "big boy" investment gurus.
Denby should be congratulated for sparing no one, least of all himself (note the book's title), from guilt in the burst of the early 2000's tech bubble.
After awhile, though, it all starts to gets old. He ruminates endlessly about greed, guilt, his idolation of and identification with the power-brokers and big-time investment wizards. The main take-home points are driven home early-on, but he torturously runs it down our throats over and over, as he takes us through the fall of the market and his personal downward spiral with it. By the end of the book, Denby is literally in tears after seeing one of his tech heros led away in chains after the ImClone insider trading scandal. Although clearly in a disfunctional state due to depression, it's hard for us to have much sympathy for Denby at this point; most of us would say: "Come on, wake up, you self-indulgent idiot!
Ultimately, the moral of this cautionary tale for Denby is that family and writing are the things that always were important, and remain the important things.
In some ways, to complain about this book is to complain about Denby himself, for he exposes his entire soul here -- what you see is what there is. And he writes really well. But as soul-searching and intimate as this is, the endless guilt and meaderings on himself, greed, and human nature are just too much and too self-immolating. Even though much of what he endures might apply to any of us, at some point most readers are just going to say: "Enough already."
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Self-Indictment
Review: In this memoir of his misadventures in the stock market, movie critic David Denby quotes John Maynard Keynes: Investment "is intolerably boring and over-exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct." Denby's rigorous self-examination has made his investment history interesting to those who don't share his gambling instinct. However, I wonder if he has succeeded in truly apprehending the nature of his obsession.
Denby talks about greed a lot, but I question whether greed was so strong a motive in his case. Supposedly, his investment goal was to make a million dollars to enable him to hold onto his apartment after separating from his wife. Despite being frank about his investment income and loss, Denby never tells us how much he earns from his actual work and makes it impossible for the reader to determine how necessary this million dollars was. Also, the object of his greatest desire, the $42,000 Audi A6, was seemingly within the purchasing power of a successful journalist yet Denby refuses to buy it. I would submit that what motivates Denby most is the fear of being left behind a trend. He seems near to recognizing this, with all his talk of time, speed, and the "zipper," the electronic ticker tape visible from his office, and with the urgency he senses in finding popular yet artistic movies to tout. He even condemns Tyco crook Dennis Kozlowski for having conservative tastes in art rather than favoring trendy Rothkos.
Indeed, it is difficult to see how Denby could have been such a "sucker" if mere greed drove him. He has the advantage over most day traders and the like in having formed friendships with a couple of the big players in the 90s bubble, Henry Blodget and Sam Waksal. Instead of gaining wisdom from the two now disgraced operators, Denby is even more enthused by their elusive pronouncements. Incidentally, his portraits of Blodget and Waksal, despite being intermittent and comparatively brief, are unlikely to be improved on.
Unfortunately, Denby often slows down his narrative with efforts to find a deeper meaning to his obsession. Supplemented with references to "Great Books," these discussions can be tedious and unsatisfying. In similar fashion, some of his stories seem to be exaggerated for dramatic effect or to fit a metaphor. Despite these flaws, the book is well worth reading and helps illuminate the mentality of the Bubble 90s.
Rating:
Summary: In the Time of the Bursting Bubble
Review: It is depressing to read Denby's account of the bursting of the bubble. It is even more so when it is framed against the disintegration of his family after his wife leaves him and he tries to take care of their two boys and maintain a home for them. The experience tears him up. The American Sucker is also about the people (Henry Blodgett, Sam Waiskal, etc) that he met during the boom and how they let him down, as well as his obsession with the rising market in spite of all that he knew and all that he had studied. There are passages of insight but there is nothing funny about any of them. It became a "necessity " of sorts for him to profit from the boom, as he wanted to collect a goodly sum to buy his wife's share of their West Side apartment. Greed and desire got the better of him and so he hung on when the world around him was collapsing. He was aware of all that too. He knew what was happening. He knew how to extricate himself. Still he kept making mistakes, kept up the hope for the turnaround that never came. Denby is well read, of course. He reflects on Aristotle, Veblen, the Greenspan logic, and economic theory, He asks good questions, fundamental ones. He learned from the experience. We all did. He is cognizant of the danger of dismissing bad news, how easy it is to become blind to evidence contrary to your own views, or ignore the tell-tale signs of corporate malfeasance. And so the bubble burst. It was amusing to recall those days, those heady days that come, if you are lucky, once in your lifetime.
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