Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle » (Reprint)

John Rolfe graduated from Virginia Tech, The University of Florida, and Wharton Business School. At Wharton, he was the editor of The Wharton Vulgarian. Following his sentence with DLJ, he spent several years working at a private investment fund. In 2001, he co-founded an equity-oriented money management firm, and today manages the firm from a top secret location deep in Vermont. He lives with his wife and two children, and is currently attempting to learn how to produce maple syrup.

Peter Troob graduated from Duke University and Harvard Business School. At Harvard, he was the humor editor for Harbus. After a gross error in judgment caused him to return to the investment banking world at DLJ, he left for the greener pastures of distressed debt investing at a private investment fund. In 2002 he co-founded a debt-oriented money management firm, which he continues to manage today. He lives with his wife and two children outside of New York City, where he can often be seen limping around the neighborhood and complaining about his bad knees.

They Hit "The Street." Forget what you've read, forget what you've heard, forget what you've been taught. Monkey Business pulls off Wall Street's suspenders and gives the reader the inside skinny on real life at an investment bank, where the promised land is always one more twenty-hour workday and another lap dance away. "The Street" Hit Back. Fresh out of Wharton and Harvard business schools, John Rolfe and Peter Troob ran willingly into the open arms of investment bank giant Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette. They had signed on as foot soldiers in a white-collar army of overworked and frustrated lemmings furiously trying to spin straw into gold. They escaped with the remnants of their sanity-and, ultimately, this book. Uncensored, unsanitized, and uncut, it captures the chaotic essence of the Wall Street carnival and the outlandish personalities that make it all hum...and it will become the smartest, most entertaining investment you'll make this year.

Publishers Weekly

As eager-beaver business school students, Rolfe and Troob garnered job offers as junior associates at the elite Wall Street investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, lured by dreams of wealth, glamour and power. Readers whose fascination with Wall Street shenanigans has been fueled by Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker will find this thorough rundown of an investment bank associate's daily routine sobering. By the time Rolfe and Troob were able to discern the key fact that the "investment banking community has long been an oligopoly, with only a handful of real players with the size and scale to drive through the big deals," they were already grappling with the gritty reality of performing grunt labor in an environment ruled by despotic senior partners who called innumerable meetings to set unrealistic deadlines and make superhuman demands on anybody within screaming distance. The authors' resulting disappointment and disaffection leaps off every page. Unfortunately, they take out their frustrations with indiscriminate potshots at such easy targets as word processors ("Christopher Street fairies"), copy center personnel ("a platoon of patriotic Puerto Ricans" they offhandedly refer to as "militants") and female research analysts (whom they describe as "under-sexed, eager-to-please"). Long before the hapless authors have stooped to expressing their fury at the bank by such puerile antics as urinating into a beer bottle while seated at a banquet table at the Christmas party, readers will have had enough. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|