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Straight to Hell

True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-dollar Deals
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Feb 19, 2018SkokieStaff_Steven rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
In the run up to the penitential season of Lent, I decided to engage in a little vicarious wickedness. To this end I turned to John LeFevre’s “Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals.” The book is aptly named as LeFevre gleefully recounts how he and his colleagues worked their way through the seven deadly sins while trading bonds in London and Hong Kong. Surprisingly, he doesn’t demonstrate much greed, apparently seeing the accumulation of heaps of money more as a means to other forms of bad behavior than as an end in itself. LeFevre makes ample use of the satirist’s license to exaggerate, describing a regrettably timed bowel movement aboard a small plane as if it were the explosion of Krakatoa. (See, I’m doing the same thing myself.) All of this is amusing provided your standards for basic human decency are low—I couldn’t imagine Elizabeth Warren, for one, chuckling over LeFevre’s antics—although there were times I wished I were reading a satiric novel rather than a nonfiction work.