WOLF OF WALL STREET, THE

　　By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night hespent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and internationalglobe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht,crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to thewife and kids who waited for him at home, and the fast-talking,hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did hisbidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of theill-fated genius they called…
　　In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notoriousinvestment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamousnames in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper wholed his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Streetand into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astoundingand hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story ofgreed, power, and excess no one could invent.
　　Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, StrattonOakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game asBelfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stockbuys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits–for the house.But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics,and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named SteveMadden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into aharrowing darkness all his own.
　　From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wifeas they ran a madcap household that included two young children, afull-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hiddencameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—to theunbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinarystory of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices atsixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashingdown…

　　"Belfort, who founded one of the first and largest "chop shop"brokerage firms in 1987, was banned from the securities businessfor life by 1994, and later went to jail for fraud andmoney-laundering, delivers a memoir that reads like fiction. Itcovers his decade of success with straightforward accounts of howhe worked with managers of obscure companies to acquire largeamounts of stock with minimal public disclosure, then pumped up theprice and sold it, so he and the insiders made large profits whilepublic investors usually lost. Profits were laundered throughpurchase of legitimate businesses and cash deposits in Swiss banks.There is only brief mention of Belfort's life before Wall Street orevents since 1997. The book's main topic is the vast amount of sex,drugs and risky physical behavior Belfort managed to survive. Asmight be expected in the autobiography of a veteran con man withmovie rights already sold, it's hard to know how much to believe.The story is told mostly in dialogue, with allegedlycontemporaneous mental asides by the author, reported verbatim. Butit reports only surface events, never revealing what motivatesBelfort or any of the other characters."
　　--Publishers Weekly