A seasoned Wall Street investment manager gathers a collection of profiles of the influential financial luminaries of the investment world. Drawn from magazines, colleagues' accounts, newspapers, and other sources, the profiles examine the personal and professional lives of these powerful characters and how they earned their fame or notoriety.

I understoodd that it would be stupid to expect something close to the  "Market Wizard" standard from a 342 page book covering over 80 big names intriguing enough for 180 more books. However, I did expect a summary or two about the life, trading or investment methods of the people covered in the book. The passage devoted to Bernard Baruch is a rare exception to the above. A pity that it was mostly copy and paste from the work of other authors. Even worse, the content is not timely. For e.g., the article of Robertson was written nearly a decade before the Tiger Fund got drown in Russia. It would be much better if the author had written several volumes and covered more and timely of each guru.

Writing with James R. Vertin, author Charles D. Ellis presents brief profiles of 85 Wall Street leaders who contributed to the growth of the world's major financial marketplace. The authors divide these individuals - all men, which tells a tale right there - into four slightly arbitrary groups: masters of investing, movers and shakers, business builders, and wisemen and rascals. The collection is drawn from the other writers' pieces about these men, and includes occasional articles the featured financiers wrote themselves. Apart from a few brief notes about some patterns that the author observed, these excerpts from various sources stand alone, with no overarching theme or exposition. We [...] keenly feel the lack of a few analytical essays that might have pulled the collection together and integrated it thematically, but even so, this serves as a useful research tool and an interesting introduction to a unique confluence of powerful men.