The Widow of Wall Street

The Widow of Wall Street
Author: Randy Susan Meyers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1501131370

The seemingly blind love of a wife for her husband as he conquers Wall Street, and her extraordinary, perhaps foolish, loyalty during his precipitous fall, is expertly explored in this “ripped-from-the-headlines story about love, ambition, and forgiveness” (PopSugar)—perfect for fans of the TV show Billions. Phoebe recognizes fire in Jake Pierce’s belly from the moment they meet as teenagers. After they marry and he creates a financial dynasty, she trusts him without hesitation—unaware his hunger for success hides a dark talent for deception. But when Phoebe learns her husband’s triumph and vast reach rests on an elaborate Ponzi scheme, her world unravels. While Jake is trapped in the web of his deceit, Phoebe is caught facing an unbearable choice. Her children refuse to see her if she remains at their father’s side, but abandoning him feels cruel and impossible. From penthouse to prison, with tragic consequences rippling well beyond Wall Street, Randy Susan Meyers’s latest novel exposes a woman struggling to survive and then redefine her life as her world crumbles. “An engrossing emotional journey” (Kirkus Reviews) and USA TODAY bestselling author Diane Chamberlain raves, “With all the suspense of a thriller, The Widow of Wall Street quickly pulled me into the story and didn’t let me go until the last page.”

Something Wild

Something Wild
Author: Hanna Halperin
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-06-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1984882066

"Propulsive . . . . Good books sometimes cut to the bone, and this one feels like a scythe." —The New York Times Book Review "This wise, brilliant novel is so special, so overflowing with honesty and love—about motherhood, sisterhood, what it’s like to be a woman—that every paragraph feels like an epiphany. Hanna Halperin knows the fierce love that can exist especially among broken things. Something Wild moved me deeply." —Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed A searing novel about the love and contradictions of sisterhood, the intoxicating desires of adolescence, and the traumas that trap mothers and daughters in cycles of violence One weekend, sisters Tanya and Nessa Bloom pause their respective adult lives and travel to the Boston suburbs to help their mother pack up and move out of their childhood home. For the first time since they were teenagers sharing a bunk bed over a decade ago, they find themselves in the place where long-kept secrets were born, where jealousy, comfort, anger, forgiveness, and repulsion coexist with the fiercest love and loyalty. What they don't expect is for their visit to expose a new, horrifying truth: their mother, Lorraine, is in a violent relationship. As Tanya urges Lorraine to get a restraining order, Nessa struggles to reconcile her fondness for their stepfather with his capacity for brutality. Their differing responses to the abuse bring up the sisters' shared secret—a traumatic, unspoken experience from their adolescence has shaped their lives, their sense of selves, and their relationship with each other and the men in their life. In the midst of this family crisis, they have no choice but to reckon with the past and face each other in the present, in the hope that there's a way out of the violence so deeply ingrained in the Bloom family. Told in alternating perspectives that deftly interweave past and present, Something Wild is a magnetic, unflinching portrait of the bond between sisters, as well as a psychologically acute exploration of the legacy of divorce, the ways trauma reverberates over generations, and how it might be possible to overcome the past.

The Widow of Wall Street

The Widow of Wall Street
Author: Randy Susan Meyers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1501131346

A provocative new novel by bestselling author Randy Susan Meyers about the seemingly blind love of a wife for her husband as he conquers Wall Street, and her extraordinary, perhaps foolish, loyalty during his precipitous fall. Phoebe recognizes fire in Jake Pierce's belly from the moment they meet as teenagers. As he creates a financial dynasty, she trusts him without hesitation--unaware his hunger for success hides a dark talent for deception. When Phoebe learns her husband's triumph and vast reach rests on an elaborate Ponzi scheme her world unravels. As Jake's crime is uncovered, the world obsesses about Phoebe. Did she know her life was fabricated by fraud? Was she his accomplice? While Jake is trapped in the web of his deceit, Phoebe is caught in an unbearable choice. Her children refuse to see her if she remains at their father's side, but abandoning him feels cruel and impossible. From penthouse to prison, with tragic consequences rippling well beyond Wall Street, Randy Susan Meyers's latest novel exposes a woman struggling to survive and then redefine her life as her world crumbles.

The Widow Washington

The Widow Washington
Author: Martha Saxton
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0374721335

An insightful biography of Mary Ball Washington, the mother of our nation's father The Widow Washington is the first life of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother, based on archival sources. Her son’s biographers have, for the most part, painted her as self-centered and crude, a trial and an obstacle to her oldest child. But the records tell a very different story. Mary Ball, the daughter of a wealthy planter and a formerly indentured servant, was orphaned young and grew up working hard, practicing frugality and piety. Stepping into Virginia’s upper class, she married an older man, the planter Augustine Washington, with whom she had five children before his death eleven years later. As a widow deprived of most of her late husband’s properties, Mary struggled to raise her children, but managed to secure them places among Virginia’s elite. In her later years, she and her wealthy son George had a contentious relationship, often disagreeing over money, with George dismissing as imaginary her fears of poverty and helplessness. Yet Mary Ball Washington had a greater impact on George than mothers of that time and place usually had on their sons. George did not have the wealth or freedom to enjoy the indulged adolescence typical of young men among the planter class. Mary’s demanding mothering imbued him with many of the moral and religious principles by which he lived. The two were strikingly similar, though the commanding demeanor, persistence, athleticism, penny-pinching, and irascibility that they shared have served the memory of the country’s father immeasurably better than that of his mother. Martha Saxton’s The Widow Washington is a necessary and deeply insightful corrective, telling the story of Mary’s long, arduous life on its own terms, and not treating her as her son’s satellite.

Accidents of Marriage

Accidents of Marriage
Author: Randy Susan Meyers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2014-09-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 145167306X

“A complex and captivating tale” (The Boston Globe) which takes an engrossing look at the darker side of a marriage—and at how an ordinary family responds to an extraordinary crisis, forcing a couple to decide when a marriage is too broken to fix. Maddy, a social worker, is trying to balance her career and three children, but her husband’s verbal furies have made the family wary and frightened. Where once his fiery passion had been reserved for defending his clients, now he’s lashing out at all of them. She vacillates between tiptoeing around him and asserting herself for the sake of their kids—keeping a fragile peace—until the rainy day when they’re together in the car and Ben’s volatile temper gets the best of him, leaving Maddy in the hospital fighting for her life. Randy Susan Meyers takes us inside the hearts and minds of her characters, alternating among the perspectives of Maddy, Ben, and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Emma. A People magazine Book Pick, Accidents of Marriage is a “beautifully written, poignant, and thought-provoking novel” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) that will resonate deeply with women from all walks of life, ultimately revealing the challenges of family, faith, and forgiveness.

The Murderer's Daughters

The Murderer's Daughters
Author: Randy Susan Meyers
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2010-01-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429987367

Lulu and Merry's childhood was never ideal, but on the day before Lulu's tenth birthday their father propels them into a nightmare. He's always hungered for the love of the girls' self-obsessed mother; after she throws him out, their troubles turn deadly. Lulu had been warned not let her father in, but when he shows up drunk, he's impossible to ignore. He bullies his way past Lulu, who then listens in horror as her parents struggle. She runs for help, but discovers upon her return that he's murdered her mother, stabbed her five-year-old sister, Merry, and tried, unsuccessfully, to kill himself. Lulu and Merry are effectively orphaned by their mother's death and father's imprisonment. The girls' relatives refuse to care for them and abandon them to a terrifying group home. Even as they plot to be taken in by a well-to-do family, they come to learn they'll never really belong anywhere or to anyone—that all they have to hold onto is each other. For thirty years, the sisters try to make sense of what happened. Their imprisoned father is a specter in both their lives, shadowing every choice they make. One spends her life pretending he's dead, while the other feels compelled--by fear, by duty--to keep him close. Both dread the day his attempts to win parole may meet with success. A beautifully written, compulsively readable debut, Randy Susan Meyers's The Murderer's Daughters is a testament to the power of family and the ties that bind us together and tear us apart.

House of Cards

House of Cards
Author: William D. Cohan
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 610
Release: 2010-02-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0767930894

A blistering narrative account of the negligence and greed that pushed all of Wall Street into chaos and the country into a financial crisis. At the beginning of March 2008, the monetary fabric of Bear Stearns, one of the world’s oldest and largest investment banks, began unraveling. After ten days, the bank no longer existed, its assets sold under duress to rival JPMorgan Chase. The effects would be felt nationwide, as the country suddenly found itself in the grip of the worst financial mess since the Great Depression. William Cohan exposes the corporate arrogance, power struggles, and deadly combination of greed and inattention, which led to the collapse of not only Bear Stearns but the very foundations of Wall Street.

Wall Street Stories

Wall Street Stories
Author: Edwin Lefèvre
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2020-09-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1465614583

It seemed to Fullerton F. Colwell, of the famous Stock-Exchange house of Wilson & Graves, that he had done his full duty by his friend Harry Hunt. He was a director in a half score of companies—financial débutantes which his firm had “brought out” and over whose stock-market destinies he presided. His partners left a great deal to him, and even the clerks in the office ungrudgingly acknowledged that Mr. Colwell was “the hardest worked man in the place, barring none”—an admission that means much to those who know it is always the downtrodden clerks who do all the work and their employers who take all the profit and credit. Possibly the important young men who did all the work in Wilson & Graves’ office bore witness to Mr. Colwell’s industry so cheerfully, because Mr. Colwell was ever inquiring, very courteously, and, above all, sympathetically, into the amount of work each man had to perform, and suggesting, the next moment, that the laborious amount in question was indisputably excessive. Also, it was he who raised salaries; wherefore he was the most charming as well as the busiest man there. Of his partners, John G. Wilson was a consumptive, forever going from one health resort to another, devoting his millions to the purchase of railroad tickets in the hope of out-racing Death. George B. Graves was a dyspeptic, nervous, irritable, and, to boot, penurious; a man whose chief recommendation at the time Wilson formed the firm had been his cheerful willingness to do all the dirty work. Frederick R. Denton was busy in the “Board Room”—the Stock Exchange—all day, executing orders, keeping watch over the market behavior of the stocks with which the firm was identified, and from time to time hearing things not meant for his ears, being the truth regarding Wilson & Graves. But Fullerton F. Colwell had to do everything—in the stock market and in the office. He conducted the manipulation of the Wilson & Graves stocks, took charge of the un-nefarious part of the numerous pools formed by the firm’s customers—Mr. Graves attending to the other details—and had a hand in the actual management of various corporations. Also, he conferred with a dozen people daily—chiefly “big people,” in Wall Street parlance—who were about to “put through” stock-market “deals.” He had devoted his time, which was worth thousands, and his brain, which was worth millions, to disentangling his careless friend’s affairs, and when it was all over and every claim adjusted, and he had refused the executor’s fees to which he was entitled, it was found that poor Harry Hunt’s estate not only was free from debt, but consisted of $38,000 in cash, deposited in the Trolleyman’s Trust Company, subject to Mrs. Hunt’s order, and drawing interest at the rate of 2½ per cent per annum. He had done his work wonderfully well, and, in addition to the cash, the widow owned an unencumbered house Harry had given her in his lifetime.

The Richest Woman in America

The Richest Woman in America
Author: Janet Wallach
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2013-06-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307474577

No woman in the Gilded Age made as much money as Hetty Green, America’s first female tycoon. A strong woman who forged her own path, she was worth at least $100 million by the end of her life in 1916—equal to about $2.5 billion today. Green was mocked for her simple Quaker ways and her unfashionable frugality in an era of opulence and excess; the press even nicknamed her “The Witch of Wall Street.” But those who knew her admired her wit and wisdom, and while financiers around her rose and fell as financial bubbles burst, she steadily amassed a fortune that supported businesses, churches, municipalities, and even the city of New York. Janet Wallach’s engrossing biography reveals striking parallels between past financial crises and current recession woes, and speaks not only to history buffs but to today’s investors, who just might learn a thing or two from Hetty Green.