Bernard Baruch

The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend

Author: James Grant

ISBN: 978-1-60419-066-3

James Grant’s research uncovered a wealth of previously untapped material on this fascinating self-made millionaire, legendary stock trader, and venture investor, uncovering the reality of the man behind the myth.

Available From:

Bernard Baruch was a self-made millionaire, legendary stock trader, and venture investor. For most of the first half of the 20th century, he epitomized Wall Street in the public mind, or at least the acceptable side of Wall Street.

Celebrated as “Adviser to Presidents” and “The Park Bench Statesman,” he also became known as “The Man Who Sold out before the Crash.”

James Grant’s research uncovered a wealth of previously untapped material on this fascinating figure. We read startling details of Baruch’s controversial career in Washington in 1918 and at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919; his behind-the-scenes role in the politics of the 1920s; his often-embittered relations with the New Deal and Fair Deal; and his service as American ambassador in the postwar negotiations to control the atomic bomb.

Overview

Preface
Preface to the Earlier Edition
1: A Doctor’s Son
2: Three Dollars a Week
3: Baruch’s Wall Street
4: “Wealth Commenced to Pour In on Me”
5: His Own Man
6: The Baron of Hobcaw
7: Striking It Rich Reluctantly
8: Poison-Pen Letter
9: Captain of Industry
10: Plainspoken Diplomat
11: Farming, Money, McAdoo
12: “I Would Stand Pat”
13: Suffering Roosevelt
14: “His Metier Was Peril”
15: The Atom and All
Notes
Index
About the Author
ISBN-13: 9781604190663
Publication date: 09/16/2012
Pages: 475
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)
Selections From Bernard Baruch

“At last—a book about Baruch that transforms the myth into reality.”

E. J. Kahn, Jr., The New Yorker

Reviews

“A demystifying voyage down the stream of modern US financial life. You shouldn’t miss it.”

The Washington Post

“Engagingly and intelligently recounted. . . . Those who aspire either to riches or to political influence should read this book.”

The Wall Street Journal

“Anyone who reads Bernard Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend will discover why James Grant has become our finest narrative historian of money. No one dissects the idiosyncrasies of supply and demand with greater wit and intelligence. While Baruch has had many biographers, none of them have attained Grant’s aesthetic sensibility, understanding of finance, or his inability to be more respecting than respectable.”

Matthew Winkler, Editor in Chief, Bloomberg Business News

“Grant paints a wonderfully evocative social, geographical, and financial portrait of Wall Street during those early rough and tumble years.”
Nancy Boardman, Barron’s
——
“This is a book for anyone who enjoys a good read in biography, in history, in finance, or in politics—or, even better, in all of them combined.”
Peter L. Bernstein, author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
——
“Fortunately, the fallible, erratic Baruch of fact that emerges from Grant’s book turns out to be more fascinating than the blander one of legend.”
Tony Bianco, Business Week
——
“Similar to Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, only all fact, is James Grant’s excellent biography, Bernard Baruch. Not only does it cover such great moments as when Baruch visited the Tacoma suburb of Boston to acquire the copper mill for American Smelting, but all sorts of sophisticated dealings on Wall Street. It also contains Baruch’s set of trading tips.”
Greg Heberlein, The Seattle Times

James Grant

James Grant, the founder and editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, was born in 1946, a year of baby-size interest rates. He pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies—at Indiana University and Columbia University, respectively—as the gold-backed dollar gave way to today’s paper model, and he served his journalistic apprenticeship at the Baltimore Sun and Barron’s during the 1970s great inflation. Author of five books (four on finance and financial history, a fifth a biography of John Adams), he is the father of four grown children and lives with his wife in Brooklyn.