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Bottom of the pile
11
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
12/100Critics
10/100Scholars
Author:
Carrie Sun
Publisher:
Penguin Press
Date:
February 13, 2024
When we meet Carrie Sun, she can't shake the feeling that she's wasting her life. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Carrie excelled in school, graduated early from MIT, and climbed up the corporate ladder, all in pursuit of the American dream. But at twenty-nine, she's left her analyst job, dropped out of an MBA program, and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the rare opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, she knows she can't say no. Carrie is the sole assistant to the firm's billionaire founder. Playing the game at the highest levels, amid the ultimate winners in our winner-take-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole by work. With her physical and mental health deteriorating, she begins to rethink what it actually means to waste one's life.
What The Reviewers Say
Emphatically not polemical. In its 352 pages, inequality comes up about a quarter of the way through and passingly thereafter. Marx gets a nod in the final chapter. Its primer on investment banking is lucid, but what Sun knows best are the caprices of the overclass.
It takes some mental gymnastics to buy that Sun, an otherwise smart and competent individual, could be so guileless that she earnestly believed at one point that working at Fidelity would allow her to find fulfillment.
White-collar workplaces are not inherently high-drama. As an employee, this is ideal. For a nonfiction writer, it’s a challenge.
Those in high-pressure careers or in the financial industry will find this book insightful..
