Bashing Greed for Fun and Profit

The Roaring Eighties take their lumps in a flurry of new books

Doesn't anyone have a kind word for Wall Street's gilded '80s? The new decade is only six weeks old, and already stores are piled high with books that portray the past ten years as a sink of avarice and excess. The melodramatic titles depict the American free-enterprise system as overrun by barbarians and liars, ambition and greed. And readers are lapping it all up. Just as they reveled in stories of the rich and famous during the past decade, today's inquiring minds are hungry for colorful tales about the pratfalls of the mighty.

Quite a few of these jeremiads are headed...

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