It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s: never before had so many twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time. After you learned the trick of it, all you had to do was pick up the phone and the money poured into your lap. In this shrewd and wickedly funny book, Michael Lewis describes an astonishing era and his own rake's progess through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging Dick, the most dangerous beast in the jungle, a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars worth of doubtful bonds with just one call.