Up close and all in Life lessons from a Wall Street warrior

Former Morgan Stanley CEO Mack offers an spirited account of his legendary career in this brash memoir. Born in 1944, Mack grew up in a North Carolina mill town with his Lebanese Catholic parents, whose traditions formed his "core identity." After his father died while Mack was in college, he took a job at a local securities firm, and by 1968 landed on Wall Street at the Smith Barney training program making $60 a week. The early years of his finance career were thrilling if not "glamorous," and Mack describes himself as not a part of the counterculture, though sympathetic to the time's feminist and racial justice movements. He's frank about professional mistakes he's made--like a money-losing computation error after a drunken business lunch--and equally forthright about triumphs, such as a $10.2 billion merger of Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter, Discover & Co, a "jaw-dropper of a deal" that "instantly catapulted us to the top of the financial stratosphere." Now facing down Alzheimer's, Mack reflects on his career with no regrets: "I have fucking killed it," he writes. "I knocked the cover off the ball in the financial world. I ran a great company." Readers won't be able to help cheering him on. (Oct.)

The former CEO of Morgan Stanley chronicles his life in the financial trenches. Mack (b. 1944) opens on a fierce note: At a company gathering, a fellow trader made a poor fellow delivering his breakfast wait for half an hour while, presumably, he slept in. As the author writes, he "tore into him. 'Who do you think you are? This guy is trying to do exactly what you do: make a living. When you keep him waiting, you're taking money out of his pocket. Do this again and I'll fire you.' " Mack recounts plenty of hiring and firing, the latter almost always for cause but sometimes in the apparent interest of shaking things up to try something different. "Giving anyone a fiefdom is a terrible idea," he writes, sagely. Though the author admits there is inherent recklessness in the business, that's no excuse to be inhuman. "This is a real lesson: don't avoid the hard things or the difficult people," he writes, both of which will in turn teach future lessons. Hard lessons came with the financial meltdown of 2008, which found Mack resisting calls from the federal government to merge while staring down the possibility of a complete economic collapse. Instead, the author quickly recruited Japanese investors to shore up the company and avoid the chaos that killed other financial institutions, a deal that had the mixed blessing of bringing tighter federal oversight over Morgan Stanley while giving what was now a holding company "permanent access to the Fed lending window." The ideal reader for much of Mack's book will be business wonks or those pursuing an MBA, but the author's common-sensical approach to matters both financial and personal, while familiar, is worth pondering, as when he counsels, "Making the hard calls when you have no idea of the outcome--taking the risk, putting yourself out there--that's when you prove your mettle." A refreshingly straightforward, plainspoken look at what happens on the trading floor and in the boardroom. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.