A New York Times Bestseller
One of Entertainment Weekly ’s 10 Must-Reads of Summer
A Time magazine Ultimate Summer Reads Pick
An Amazon Best Book of the Month in Business/Leadership & Humor/Entertainment
A Publishers Weekly Notable Debut and Bestseller (#18)
“Shocking and sordid—and so much fun.” — New York Daily News
“Shots are drunk, nether parts are exposed and rubbed against food, bread rolls are hurled, drugs are inhaled and prostitutes paid. It’s Bertie Wooster’s Drones Club via the darker corners of Edward St. Aubyn and Bret Easton Ellis.” — Wall Street Journal
“LeFevre . . . sharply observes the lives of globe-trotting, overindulging, investment bankers.” — Entertainment Weekly
“If you thought the Wall Street culture portrayed in his tweets was bad, the one in LeFevre’s new book Straight to Hell is worse.” — CNN Money
“LeFevre’s workplace anecdotes include tales of nastiness, sabotage, favoritism, sexism, racism, expense-account padding, and legally questionable collusion.” — New Yorker
“Don't mistake this book for something it doesn't strive to be. The core themes of Straight to Hell survive attacks on its claims to credibility, and the book is not about boasting so much as entertainment. So should you read it? Maybe. It depends on your appetite for debauchery . . . Straight to Hell. . . offers a window into a deviant culture, and suggests the mechanisms by which it perpetuates itself, even in today’s climate.” — Newsweek
“There's no question that [LeFevre] knows his way around the business, and it's a dirty one. There's collusion, competition, nepotism, and a whole lot of reprehensible stuff going on in the business side, and it's fascinating. . . . A great read.” — Business Insider
“LeFevre’s stories are eye-opening. Also I’m pretty sure he confesses to several felonies, and there’s a price-fixing conference in a Hong Kong hotel room that I hope he ran by his lawyer. But you don’t want to read about bond deals. You want drugs and hookers. LeFevre delivers them with overwhelming force . . . Teenage boys at Choate will want to be investment bankers after reading Straight to Hell.” — Bloomberg Businessweek
“LeFevre . . . has a clear talent for storytelling and writing.” — Global Capital
“In some memoirs, the author tries to pull back the curtain to provide a glimpse into a particular time and place, but LeFevre attempts to rip the drapes right off. He gives a naked look at how business in the world of finance is conducted. LeFevre . . . doesn’t shy away from witnessing and partaking in some of the seedier antics . . . You may not like LeFevre's tact, but he knows what he's talking about.” —CNBC
“Informative and . . . highly entertaining . . . After all the wheeling and dealing, the drinking and snorting, the cheating and fucking, there is only John LeFevre, gleefully riding to hell and taking as many other sinners down with him as he can . . . LeFevre’s contributed a classic to the genre. Anyone interested in global finance, credit markets or cocaine-fueled debauchery should give it a read.” —Reformed Broker
“The Wall Street tell-all tome has been done before, but never quite like this. Straight to Hell is career suicide as literature; an interlude at a Filipino house of ill repute, all on its own, would be enough to render the author unemployable by any bank . . . If there were such a thing as witness protection for former bankers, John LeFevre would be eminently eligible.” — Barron’s
“Reads like a frat boy’s fever dream of the highflying life: morning drinking, late-night drinking, and drinking all the hours in between; pranks, bar fights, cheating, travel, and prostitutes. . . . Equal parts fun and train wreck, this is a tale engineered to astonish.” — Publishers Weekly
“Bad Behavior 101 . . . No, it’s not a day at Hunter S. Thompson’s ranch but . . . a day at an ordinary big ticket investment bank. . . . You’d be forgiven for keeping your money under the mattress henceforth.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Stories . . . that entertainingly and unapologetically flesh out the excesses of the banking industry.” — Library Journal
“Full of shocking lawlessness, boyish antics, and win-at-all-costs schemes, this is the definitive take on the excessive world of finance.” —IndieBound
“Shocking.” — Times (UK)
“Beyond the shock factor, it’s the humour in the book that stands out. . . . [LeFevre] flinches from nothing: the Herculean inappropriateness of trading-floor antics, the hookers, the cocaine. . . . This book is going to annoy and offend a lot of people, with good reason. It is a vicious, vacuous, caustic world he illuminates. But it would be a shameful waste if we didn’t have LeFevre to find the humour in it all.” — Euromoney
2015-04-29
A scattershot syllabus for billionaire boys-club bankers in Bad Behavior 101. "As we see it," writes LeFevre, "if you're dumb enough to get caught cheating, you probably don't belong on Wall Street." Cocaine, bloody marys, more cocaine—and that's before breakfast. No, it's not a day at Hunter S. Thompson's ranch but rather a training day at an ordinary big-ticket investment bank, a place full of starry-eyed Ivy Leaguers and a few Oxbridge types looking to score big. Cheating, to hear the author—famed for his tell-all tweets before this book deal—tell it, is ordinary behavior, hardly worth pausing to ponder except to figure out ways around the traps laid by fellow cadets. LeFevre is the real-world embodiment of Patrick Bateman, coming off as soulless, unapologetic, and full of overweening pride—the very stuff of which successful Wall Street honchos are made. But he is also strangely unreflective. Where readers might want to know a bit about, say, why supposedly heavily regulated institutions are so open to corruption and system-gaming, LeFevre brags about the fact that his "garbage disposal eats better than 99% of the world" and insists that "morality and deviance are relative." (Yes, readers may be thinking, but if it's my money at stake, some absolutes are in order.) What we learn instead is that it's easy to chalk up a $2,700 bar bill in an evening, that drugs are as easy to come by as potato chips in communist China, and that part of the job description at any brokerage worth its salt is "to proactively throw my competitors under the bus at every possible opportunity." Reading this book-length swagger, you'd be forgiven for keeping your money under the mattress henceforth. But if LeFevre is truly hell-bound, as his title suggests, then it's for indifferent writing as much as for any fiscal peccadilloes.
