American Psycho

American Psycho is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, and it falls under the category of Transgressional Fiction. The book is written in first person, and narrarated by the main character, Patrick Bateman. Patrick is an exorbantly wealthy wall-street broker, who has a near obsession for everything materialistic. Patrick's running monologue often includes detailed descriptions of people's outfits and items, including their price and brand. Patrick finds him self disgusted by people who are dressed poorly, as well as jealous of those who are dressed better than he is. There is one scene in the book that is a particularly good example of this trait; Patrick is out to dinner at an exclusive resteraunt with his co-worker's when he decides to show them his new business cards so they can admire them. However, another collegue of Patrick also reveals his new business cards, which everyone at the table, including Bateman, agree is nicer. Patrick is almost unable to control his rage over having been shown-up.

It is not until late in the book that Patrick reveals that he is isn't just a self-absorbed yuppie, but also a serial killer. Throughout the book Patrick commits a series of horrific murders involving torture, sexual abuse, and sometimes cannabalism. Patrick killings seem to be purely random; co-workers, hookers, lovers, a child at the zoo. Patrick describes each one of these murders with the same detail as he does armani suits and crystal ash trays, as well as the same emotionless separation. The detailed and horrifying nature of the violence made this book difficult to read at many points. I chose to skip over many of the more graphic scenes because I found them so disturbing. Although American Psycho carries a clear and very important message about greed and depravity in our consumer driven and materialistic society, I find that the shocking, gruesome, and gratuitous violence detracted from the message instead of adding to it. Ellis went so far to try and shock the reader and evoke a response, that it actually took away from his point and made me focus instead on how throughly sick and disgusting this book itself was instead of the character. Ellis could have toned down dramatically the violence in this book and it still would've conveyed the same message.

The Smartest Guys in the Room

The Smartest Guys in the Room is a non-fiction work by Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean. In this book they explore the corruption in Enron which lead to both its grand rise, and equally grand fall. The book centers around three Enron employees: Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron whose role in this scandal is still ambiguous as to whether he was involved or just oblivious. Jeffrey Skilling, who was the main figure in orchestrating the fraud which took place. And finally, Andy Fastow, a math genius who developed many of the financial tricks that were used at Enron. The book does a great job of telling the events as a story rather than just a really long news article. This allows for the 400+ page book to be more easily readable than most non-fiction works because it reads much like a novel. The thing I enjoyed most about reading this book was learning about the different complex and creative economic tricks of Enron. For example, Enron needed someone to absorb their losses in order to keep stocks up, but obviously they couldn't trade with themselves. They then figured out that for a company to be considered an independent company it only has to have 3% unique stock. This means that 97% of the company could be Enron, and even better, the 3% could be made up of another smaller company which is also 97% Enron and 3 percent a smaller company which is also 97% Enron and so on. This meant that on paper Enron could dump their losses on a company that was essentially themselves except for a minute percent. The reason I enjoyed reading about these things is because in a weird way, I kind of admired some of these guys. I am aware that they did some very illegal things and destroyed the life savings of massive numbers of people. However they were also a viciously intelligent group, who came up with incredibly innovative and complex ideas, some of which(the legal ones anyway) are still used by many companies today.

Saving Henry

Saving Henry is a memoir written by Laurie Strongin Goldberg. In it, Laurie details her and her husband Alan's struggle to care for, and try to save, their son Henry, who has been diagnosed with an extremely rare genetic disease know as Fanconi Anemia. It seems at first that there is hope for Henry, thanks to a cutting edge medical procedure, PGD(preimplantation genetic diagnosis). this procedure would allow Laurie and Alan to give birth to a child without Fanconi who would also be a genetic match for Henry, and transplant stem cells from its umbilical cord to Henry. However, Dr.Hughes, the doctor working with Laurie and Alan, is brought up on federal charges for violating a ban on stem cell research. I must admit at this point, in full disclosure, that my opinion of this book is about as biased as an opinion can be; I know Laurie Strongin and her family well, my mom wrote an article about Henry, and was on the board for the charity founded in his memory(the Hope for Henry foundation) , which was the focus of my mitzvah project of my bar mitzvah. The most interesting thing to me about this book is that Laurie is an incredibly optimistic and cheery person. She has a smile which is as infectious as it is ever-present, and talks with a sort of "bouncy" and cheery tone. Laurie was able to use this positive outlook in dealing with the tragic situation she and Alan found themselves in the center of. Laurie and Alan made sure that although Fanconi Anemia could strip Henry of his health, it could never take away love and joy from his life.