Summary

A boy from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, grows up dodging trolley tracks and exploring marsh mud, then somehow finds himself on Wall Street trading desks, Irish hunt fields, Chinese deal trips, private jets, and, finally, a tennis court on Nantucket—serving to his son at eighty three.

Along the way he helps fuel the IPO boom, watches decimalization upend trading, walks unscathed through the dot-com collapse and the Global Financial Crisis, and quietly winds down Maxim, the boutique firm that carried him from chaos to solvency. He builds ranches in Colorado, then signs their development rights away to conservation; he sells jets just before the market falls out from under them; he leaves Boulder for a glass-walled house in Montecito that a boy from Brooklyn would never have believed could be his.

This memoir is not a victory lap as much as a ledger of nearmisses and narrow-survivals: nine lives' worth of deals, horse ranches, jets, domestic and foreign markets, and small reinventions. For anyone who has ever wondered how thin the line is between disaster and good fortune, or how a childhood measured in subway tokens can end on a Montecito hillside and a Nantucket court, this book offers an answer that is equal parts cautionary tale and quiet celebration.