DISCUSSION MATERIALS

A memoir offers a warts-and-all insider view of the high-stakes investment banking world.

This new book from Keenan chronicles his experiences at Deutsche Bank in Manhattan as an associate after a stint as a professional hockey player. Here readers see him apply for the job, get it, attend the long orientation sessions alongside his many fellow new hires, and begin his work as an investment banker in the cubicles, hallways, and late-night bars of the finance world. “Can you imagine if people knew what corporate finance was really like?” asks a cohort at one point in the account, to which the author replies: “I feel like only a fiction writer could show this world, what really happens here.” Some of his colleagues have on their shelves untouched copies of business classics like Den of Thieves, Liar’s Poker, and Barbarians at the Gate. Although Keenan’s memoir is every bit as informative as those earlier titles, it’s also game and accessible, coming across at all points as the most readable kind of The Firm–style fiction, complete with sharp personalities and lively dialogue. The author dramatizes his time at Deutsche Bank with colorful anecdotes but also grounds things in industry details. When mentioning something called a “football field sheet,” for instance, he footnotes: “A summary output of all valuation methods used. The name is derived from the fact that the output resembles a football field—or at least what bankers think a football field looks like” (adding, in his signature iconoclastic style, “I don’t see it”). His own experiences in the trenches are far less the shark-tank glamour of Wall Street and far more the squalid desperation of Boiler Room, and he’s always ready to offer a sardonic counterpoint. “Was I getting crushed?” he asks early in the story. “I couldn’t even tell. And if you stayed past 3:00 am one night, all that mattered was working it into every conversation you had the next day.” The result is a book that’s informative, hilarious, and dramatic, well deserving of a place on that shelf of Wall Street classics.

A gripping and revelatory behind-the-scenes look at investment banking.