Mergers & Acquisitions. Dana Vachon [Anglais] [Broché]

A graduate of Duke University in 2002 and an analyst for J.P. Morgan for a few years after that, Dana Vachon is a writing wunderkind along the lines of Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis in Less Than Zero. However, the similarity ends with the theme of young guys on the razzle, because Vachon's protagonist, unlike his predecessors, observes and learns without falling into the honey pot. Tommy Quinn graduates from Georgetown and lands a job with J.S. Spenser, an investment banking firm. His major was Interdisciplinary Studies, a kind of Liberal Arts wastebasket, and he knows nothing about finance. In the brain-deadening Spenser training program he hooks up with Roger Thorne, a really crass human being, but one who knows all the moves. The genesis of the friendship sets the tone rather well: They are both wearing Gucci loafers and Rolex watches.

The story begins at Roger's engagement party, with Tommy waiting for his erstwhile girlfriend Frances to arrive. Everyone thinks that she has been at a spa, but she has really been in an upscale Home for the Unsure, being ministered to by a freaky shrink. The story then moves backward through Tommy's ruminations about meeting Roger, "the John Audubon of preppy flesh," and about connecting with Terence Mathers, Spenser's guru of mergers and acquisitions. At the end of Mathers's first speech to the new Spenserites, Tommy says: "We had all partaken of the capitalist Kool-Aid and the applause was as much a tribute to the stupidity of young men and women after four years of elite education as it was to the success of Spenser's training program." Greed is definitely good in this atmosphere--the more the better--but Tommy is not really a full-fledged participant. After Tommy blows his first assignment, he and Roger are sent to Cabo San Lucas on a major deal. What happens there is life-threatening and hilariously over-the-top but perfectly plausible and moves Tommy to rethink his life path. Vachon has left his own fledgling financial career behind, and instead has written a first-rate first novel that is smart, funny, witty, and wise. --Valerie Ryan --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Vachon's debut novel, the subject of frenzied speculation and assiduous hype, arrives on audiobook at the crest of a wave of excitement. Heyborne reads Vachon's brand-name, corporate-name–heavy prose with satisfaction, pounding on each punch line and luxury brand with panache. While it is jarring to hear him mispronounce the names of high-profile New York law firms, undercutting Vachon's brand of masters-of-the-universe realism, Heyborne captures the novel's mixture of high-stakes capital and comic psychological insight. Heyborne's voice, soft and often pleading, is the precise opposite of the rapacious hypercapitalists the book drizzles across its pages, but the juxtaposition works for the most part. Vachon documents, rather than celebrates, the world of finance his book inhabits, and Heyborne's reading further dilutes any sense of romance that might still cling to its Gordon Gekko manqués, chasing after that ever-elusive dollar.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Tommy Quinn is out of place. He is a young, not so ambitious man starting out in the financial world who is surrounded by wealthy and oblivious people, from his bosses to his circle of acquaintances. He tells his story through a wonderfully written first-person account in this debut novel. It succeeds as a poignant, often hilarious coming-of-age story. Narrator Kirby Heyborne crafts perfectly appropriate voices for the characters, including a benevolent and gregarious Indian man, a Latin boss, air-headed men and women, and a sad girlfriend. The best characterization, though, is given to an especially shallow friend, whose dialogue keeps the reader chuckling. Long live hedonism and laugh-out-loud writing. Vachon is here to stay. Lets hope he and Heyborne team up again. M.B. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

A fizzy first novel of investment banker high jinks. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney meet Scott Fitzgerald and P.J. O'Rourke... [in this] coruscating, veil-piercing portrait of the American ruling class. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

A funny romp. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Like Bright Lights, Big City and The Devil Wears Prada, M&A is a fictionalized account of the moral hazards of high-status Manhattan professional life. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Mergers & Acquisitions deserves to be a hit...nobody involved in finance should miss it. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

[A] smart, satisfying roman ˆ clef ...The story is fast-paced, and his overblown characters are wildly engaging. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

A stylish and hilarious novel about the lives and loves of well-to-do young Manhattanites in their first year on Wall Street, destined to become one of the year's most buzzed-about debuts.

Mergers & Acquisitions is the story of Tommy Quinn, a recent Georgetown grad who has just landed the job of his dreams as an investment banker at J. S. Spenser, and the perfect girl, Frances Sloan, the daughter of one of New York's oldest moneyed families. As he travels from the most exclusive ball rooms of the Racquet and Tennis Club to the stuffiest boardrooms of J. S. Spenser, from the golf links of Piping Rock to the bedrooms of Park Avenue, and from the debauched yacht of a Mexican billionaire to the Ritalin-strewn prep-school dorm room of his younger brother, he finds that the job and the girl are not what they once seemed.

Sharply written, fast-paced, and bitingly witty, Mergers & acquisitions is a compulsively readable story of Manhattan's young, ambitious, and wealthy. Set against the backdrop of money, lust, power, corruption, cynicism, energy, and excitement that is Wall Street, it is suffused with an authenticity that only an author who lives in that world can provide. A former investment banker at J. P. Morgan, Vachon offers an insider's point of view on the financial scene, and he knows the moneyed turf of Manhattan inside out. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

A stylish and hilarious novel about the lives and loves of well-to-do young Manhattanites in their first year on Wall Street - destined to become one of the year's most talked-about debuts.

Dana Vachon was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, raised in Chappaqua, New York, and graduated from Duke University - as he claims, 'cum nihil' - in 2002. After graduation, he worked as an analyst at JPMorgan. His writing has appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Men's Vogue, the New York Times and Salon. He lives in New York City. --Ce texte fait référence à lédition Broché .