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"FORTUNE &amp;#8212; If you live in New York City, you know the young Wall Street type: dark suit, wide-knot tie, meticulous hair, and an all-business demeanor that contradicts the baby face. Oh, and they\u2019re making a ton of money.\nBut it turns out that wealth isn\u2019t free. The job is their life. The hours are excessive &amp;#8212; and not limited to the workweek. Their superiors own them. One iPhone ping on a Saturday and your friend must leave the movie theatre and head to her office.\nAt one point in Young Money, the well-written new book by Kevin Roose, a senior associate at a Wall Street firm lectures a young go-getter: \u201CHelping the world is great and all, but you need to be motivated by money.\u201D We\u2019re meant to find such a quote shocking. But most who follow the world of finance will see it as confirming what they already thought.\nThus, it\u2019s unclear who the audience really is for Young Money. The New York media world is buzzing about it, but the revelation that young bankers are unhappy does not constitute news for that world &amp;#8212; neither for financial journalists, nor for the bankers themselves, nor for any person working in business in Manhattan, San Francisco, or Boston. The picture Roose paints may indeed shock and enlighten the legions of people in America who live away from the power centers and are thus not already acquainted with young bankers or aware of the less glamorous, day-to-day demands of the job. But how much do those readers really care?\nNevertheless, Young Money is a fun and fast read that will make you laugh out loud, or perhaps scoff instead. Chelsea isn\u2019t satisfied with her $25,000 bonus. Derrick entered finance because, \u201CI want all those people in high school who thought I was stupid to fucking suck it.\u201D He cherishes his \u201Cdeal toys\u201D (\u201Cclear, Lucite hunks\u201D commemorating big deals) and likes to look at them before bed. J.P. plays the rap song \u201CLive Fast, Die Young\u201D for inspiration &amp;#8212; but he\u2019s listening on headphones, at his desk, where he\u2019s crunching numbers into the night, alone, tired.\nMORE: Masters of the Universe in the age of self-doubt\nIf Roose has a mission, it\u2019s to inform America that until they hit a certain job level, Wall Street\u2019s ladder-climbers are in fact harried, frustrated, lonely, and above all, dead tired. They lead an unhealthy lifestyle, physically and emotionally. One of Roose\u2019s subjects develops a brutal disease, perhaps not unrelated to his work stress. Many of their relationships collapse under the weight of their work; dinners out with girlfriends are cancelled night after night.\nYour reaction to all of this may be \u201Cboo-hoo\u201D and an eye-roll. Pity the poor, overworked 22-year-old making $150,000 in her first year out of college. Roose acknowledges that these people have chosen this path, and that the sums they find disappointing are staggering to most of their non-banking peers. (\u201CJ.P. knew he wouldn\u2019t find much sympathy on Main Street, where being paid $90,000 as a twenty-four-year-old was still a tremendous accomplishment.\u201D) But in general, he resists from commentary.\nOne highlight is the discussion of Soo-jin Park, a risk analyst at Deutsche Bank \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tDB\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t and one of only two women among Roose\u2019s eight subjects. An optimistic Wellesley College grad, Soo-jin \u201Cquickly discovered that her risk management group was still a man\u2019s world.\u201D She is the only female in her division who is not an administrative assistant. Her experience affords Roose the opportunity to discuss the important issue of women on Wall Street. \u201CWomen\u2019s progress in finance has been somewhat shallower than it appears,\u201D he explains, backing it up with numbers.\nRoose\u2019s style is even more \u201Cjust the facts, ma\u2019am\u201D than the magazine-feature formula of quote plus commentary. At times, that can be disappointing. When we learn that Bank of America \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tBAC\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t recruit Chelsea \u201Cfought back tears\u201D after learning she\u2019d be placed in public finance (\u201Cshe would be doing something she barely understood yet again &amp;#8230; she went out to a bar with friends and drank until the world blurred\u201D), we crave some analysis from our guide: Is this the case with all Wall Street recruits &amp;#8212; they have no clue what they\u2019re doing at first, and pick it up as they go? But Roose doesn\u2019t pursue it. Instead, he follows her quote up with a line that you could imagine is written with a wink: \u201CThree days later, things were looking a little brighter. A boozy corporate field day was hardly the worst way to start a job.\u201D\nMORE: Goldman&amp;#8217;s New York Times Wall Street whitewash\nWell, yes. Watch Chelsea play flip-cup with her bosses at the annual Bank of America Merrill Lynch field day, \u201Cheld at a posh New Jersey country club\u201D with \u201Ca keg of beer at each activity station,\u201D and you\u2019ll have trouble sympathizing with her. Roose never overtly pities nor mocks his subjects. He is mostly absent from the narrative &amp;#8212; a Michael Lewis romp, this is not &amp;#8212; which can be a positive or negative, depending on how you like your nonfiction.\nOne notable exception is the book\u2019s finest scene, a thrilling undercover operation in which Roose sneaks into a bizarre, closed-door affair: the annual dinner of Wall Street society Kappa Beta Phi. (New York magazine wisely chose this as its excerpt\u00A0of the book, headlining it \u201CWhat I saw when I crashed a Wall Street secret society,\u201D and has reaped the resulting clicks. There is also some must-hear audio.)\nMORE: Wall Street&amp;#8217;s secret society is more secretive than ever\nThe highlights of the event are so ludicrous that Roose finally just rattles them off as bullet points: a man singing about money while clad in a Confederate flag hat; a joke about Hillary Clinton (she \u201Chas whiskers and stinks\u201D); a group performing a song from\u00A0The Book of Mormon\u00A0with the lyrics rewritten (\u201CI believe that the Lord God created Wall Street\u201D). Inevitably, someone picks up on Roose\u2019s presence: Billionaire investor Michael Novogratz asks Roose to identify himself, then demands his cell phone. \u201CHis eyes were bloodshot, and his neck veins were bulging,\u201D we learn &amp;#8212; some of the most vivid writing in the book, at last, perhaps because it happened to the author himself. Our fearless guide narrowly escapes to the lobby, where two of the group\u2019s members try to convince him \u201Cthat what I\u2019d just seen wasn\u2019t\u00A0really\u00A0a group of wealthy and powerful financiers making homophobic jokes, mocking poor people, and bragging about their business conquests.\u201D\nThe scene feels a bit out of place, delightful though it is, because the naughty KBP revelers are top dogs: They are the old guard, now swimming in money. The focus of Roose\u2019s book is the newest generation of Wall Street strivers. But you get the sinking feeling that many of the naive young bucks he focuses on are the aspiring KBP members of tomorrow &amp;#8212; that once they\u2019re billionaires in their fifties, their days on the bottom will be distant memories, and the cycle will continue."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2014/02/20/book-review-bright-lights-big-money-lost-souls/>