The Go-Go Years : The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street's Bullish 60s

Praise for The Go-Go Years

Those for whom the stock market is mostly a spectator sport will relish the book's verve, color, and memorable one-liners.
--New York Review of Books

Please don't take The Go-Go Years too much for granted: as effortlessly as it seems to fly, it is nonetheless an unusually complex and thoughtful work of social history.
--New York Times

Brooks's great contribution is his synthesis of all the elements that made the 1960s the most volatile in Wall Street history . . . and making so much material easily digestible for the uninitiated.
--Publishers Weekly

Brooks . . . is about the only writer around who combines a thorough knowledge of finance with the ability to perceive behind the dance of numbers 'high, pure, moral melodrama on the themes of possession, domination, and belonging.'
--Time
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The Go-Go Years is not to be read in the usual manner of Wall Street classics. You do not read this book to see our present situation reenacted in the past, with only the names changed. You read it because it is a wonderful description of the way things were in a different time and place.
--From the Foreword by Michael Lewis

The 1960s bull market was a wild time of unbridled growth and stellar performance. It remains a pivotal era in American financial history, a time of corporate gunslingers, mutual funds, new-issue stocks, Chinese money, and the conglomerates. But it is also a cautionary tale of Wall Street for today's investor, chronicling the personalities, markets, events, and trends that drove stocks up throughout the 1960s and made millionaires of many--until the inevitable crashes in the 1970s.

Considered a classic among finance classics, The Go-Go Years is the harrowing and humorous story of the go-go growth stocks of the 1960s. Their meteoric rise caused a multitude of small investors to thrive for nearly a decade. John Brooks's award-winning and inimitable style brings to life the people, places, and extraordinary circumstances that changed the course of the stock market forever. It was a time when greed drove the market and fast money was being made and lost in the surge and plunge of growth and performance stocks. Included are the dramatic stories of such high-profile personalities as H. Ross Perot who lost $450 million in one day, Saul Steinberg's grandiose attempt to take over Chemical Bank, and the self-destructive fall of America's Last Gatsby, Eddie Gilbert.

Yale Law Journal said of him that John Brooks...may well be the best historian of high and low finance since...Charles Francis Adams and his brother Henry chronicled the rascalities of Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, and Cornelius Vanderbilt more than a century ago.
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Climax: The Day Henry Ross Perot Lost $450 Million; Fair Exchange: The Year the Amex Delisted the Old Guard Romans; The Last Gatsby: Recessional for Edward M. Gilbert; Palmy Days and Low Rumblings: Early Warnings Along Wall Street; Northern Exposure: Early Warnings Along Bay Street; The Birth of Go-Go: The Rise of a Proper Chinese Bostonian; The Conglomerateurs: Corporate Chutzpah and Creative Accounting; The Enormous Back Room: Drugs, Fails, and Chaos Among the Clerks; Go-Go at High Noon: The View from Trinity Church; Confrontation: Steinberg/Leasco vs. Renchard/Chemical Bank; Revelry Before Waterloo: The Time of the Great Garbage Market; The 1970 Crash: To the Edge of the Abyss; Saving Graces: The Invisible Samaritans of Wall Street; The Go-Go Years; Notes on Sources; Index.
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JOHN BROOKS was an award-winning New Yorker staff writer and author of several critically acclaimed explorations of business and Wall Street, including Once in Golconda (a Wiley Investment Classic), The Games Players, Business Adventures, and The Fate of the Edsel.
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