To the spate of memoirs about riches gained and lost in 90’s stock market boom, add New Yorker film critic David Denby’s American Sucker. Diana B. Henriques predicts:

What will be talked about most, beyond [Denby’s] nightly doses of online porn with a NyQuil chaser, will probably be the fiercely acute portraits – more like social and moral C.T. scans, actually – of Henry Blodget, the cheerleading Internet analyst; Samuel Waksal, the disgraced founder of ImClone Systems, convicted of securities fraud; and George Gilder, the Pied Piper of telecommunications investors.

Denby says he offers the book “not as market history but as a portrait of a single American living within money obsession during the first three years of the millennium – a wild, dangerous and, finally, tragic era in which hope, folly and disenchantment came together in amazed combinations, as if none had ever been aware of the others’ existence before.”