May 23, 2003

 

          Our old friend and Telecosm star Andy Kessler has minced and marketed WALL STREET MEAT,  the most riotous, insightful, poignant, gossipy, and gallivanting book on Wall Street ever written.  Unlike the telepathic Michael Lewis, whose Liar's Poker was mostly written at three removes from the major players of the 1980s, Kessler was embedded big time, for both the eighties and nineties and he is still prescient in the new era. No fly or flower on the wall, Kessler was a major player on the field, a double-E from Bell Labs who actually grasped the intricacies of the technologies that he analyzed and they touted. He often told these Wall Street stars the score, or bit a bruised tongue dumbstruck when they did their daffy dunderheaded thing anyway. Then he went off and formed a hedge fund with Fred Kittler and scored on his own.
 

He was there as Bill Gates cackled at the credulity of analysts rushing to the phones to report a calculated putdown of his own stock; Kessler was at Jack Grubman's side as he honed his ax, his "A," his Ebbers and his AWE-strike, boasting three fictitious women per night, ten beers  and four uncanny earning calls. Kessler was there, carrying true believer Mary Meeker's sachel as she rushed to her limo to tout her famous "feelings" about clueless.com to clueless dotty investors; he had frank conversations with Quattrone about the "monkeys in suits" that end up as brokers, and he did analytical hanky panky side by side with Blodget.
 

But unlike most of the inebriated cast of this rollicking tale, Kessler never lost his head or sense of proportion. He got out on top, with his humor, writing flair, integrity, and portfolio intact. And he is about to get even richer on this self-published book, which has already leapt high at Amazon, where it tops the list at Morgan Stanley and Lehman Bros, is number 19 in New York and  is moving up everywhere else.
 

This book may have begun in the boutique insider cult trade but it will be a bulge bracket paperback soon and then--I have a heart-felt feeling here, a Meeker moment--it will be a major motion picture. Read it before Kessler goes Hollywood and becomes too famous to talk to you anymore.
 

--George Gilder

link to other articles by Andy Kessler