Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough

 

I’ve read Barbarians at the Gate before. Or I thought I had. I have an entry here, from five or six years ago, but when I started rereading the book, I barely remembered a thing. Thinking back, I might have skipped or skimmed at least some parts, which partly explains why the material seemed so new. Another reason is that Barbarians at the Gate is so teeming with side characters, sub plots and detours that it’s difficult to retain all of the information in one go. My Kindle version didn’t warn me that there are more than 500 dense pages in this opus. No wonder that Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big to Fail, aspires to write something as thorough.

Barbarians at the Gate is the story of RJR Nabisco, famed producer (at the time) of Oreo’s, Nutter Butters and Winston cigarettes. At the height of the wheeling dealing Wall Street 80’s, it tried to take itself private only to be bought by KKR, a private equity behemoth. Its CEO, Ross Johnson made a fool of himself by very publicly bumbling his way into a takeover battle, making very questionnable statements about his motives for doing so and then spectacularly failing to retain the company that he had personally put in play. The RJR Nabisco debacle came to symbolize different things for different people. For Wall Street, it was the apex of an explosion of new financial instruments, bigger and bigger acquisitions and increasing returns for bankers. For Main Street, it showed that greed had run amok and that bankers had lost touch with what actually created wealth in the country: the real economy.

Burrough and Helyar approach the topic as if it was a sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses (disclaimer: I haven’t actually read Ulysses and don’t know anyone who has). Each individual negotiation, every meeting and every twist in the unlikely story is recounted in painstaking detail. I applaude their effort and tenacity, and appreciate their commitment to high quality journalism, but I can’t help feel out of breath every time I open my Kindle and see the cover. It’s so amazingly detailed that every time you think that the story is converging into its final act, a new player appears on the scene and the story resets. The most obvious example is First Boston’s desperate last-minute bid. The First Boston detour did happen in real life, so some may argue it should be included in the book too, but here it dissipates any sense of momentum.

It’s easy to fault Barbarians at the Gate for being so exhaustive. However, that may be a distraction from its true value. It’s a portrait of a time more than almost any book on finance. Most non-fiction finance sagas (Liar’s Poker, The Smartest Guys in the Room and the like) adjust and omit - as good books do - to a degree that those who disagree with their world view can relatively easily dismiss them. Its love of the finer points of finance make it almost unassailable.

This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay

 

I have a bunch of books that I’ve read but haven’t had the time to review yet. The reasons for this are twofold. First, I’ve read several relatively short novels that I’ve breezed through in a few weeks. Second, I’ve had essentially no time to myself in the past month. I guess that’s what happens when you have kids. It’s easy enough to find time for reading, I suppose. Even after a long day of work and taking care of the kid, I can usually slip in 20 minutes of reading right before I go to bed. Writing is different. If I’m drained after a rough day at work, and trying to make do with less sleep than I would prefer, it’s hard to find the energy to sit down and focus long enough to put something on paper.

I read This is Going to Hurt during a week-long winter holiday. My sister’s boyfriend is a medical student and he had received it as a Christmas present the week before. It was highly recommended by both him and her. This is Going to Hurt doesn’t try to hide what it is; the concept is very straightforward. It follows the career of a graduate doctor from his first year in medicine to his eventual departure from the field (he went into standup comedy, of all things). He works his way up the hierarchy, specializing in caesarean sections and other challenging births. The chapters are brief looks into the average and unusual days of a doctor’s life.

The style, though, is by and large tongue-in-cheek. Adam Kay follows in the footseps of Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential) and Geraint Anderson (Cityboy) by describing the inner workings of a career by exposing its absurdities, intricacies and personalities. Bourdain did an excellent job showing the world what happens in the kitchens of the world’s best restaurants. Anderson didn’t fare as well with bankers. Kay slots somewhere between the two in terms of quality of writing and presentation. This is Going to Hurt is viscerally funny, however, and often had me chuckling alone.

There’s a method to the comedy. Humor is a great way to show how the clumsiness of bureaucracy wheighs down the healthcare industry. Computers are ancient, unattainable or out of order. Yet, doctors spend the majority of their time writing notes about patients and entering information on forms. Just like bankers and chefs, doctors are subjected to absurd work hours only to be told off by politicians or management. Working for the NHS, the British national healthcare provider, is great on paper, but doctors would be much better off going into private practice. There’s an air of sadness hidden in the humor. After all, these are serious issues - both those that happen in the operating room and those that emerge from the policitical process - and that’s what’s left once the jokes subside.