NONFICTION - April 28, 1991

PLAY MONEY: My Brief but Brilliant Career on Wall Street by Laura Pedersen with F. Peter Model (Crown: $20; 288 pp.) The opposite of alienated, most Wall Street traders delight in letting their own identities be quashed by those of the herd: Fixing their eyes on computerized number boards and headline news screens, they react in milliseconds to society’s slightest twitch, whether in alarm at a falling stock or anxiety about the President’s upcoming physical. There is something a bit disingenuous, then, about traders such as Laura Pedersen, who cashed in on the “Decade of Greed” (quitting college at 20, Pedersen became a millionaire by age 22) and then wrote “wryly sardonic” memoirs claiming they had never seriously shared in the manic cunning, cynicism and compulsion that led the herd off a cliff in the ’87 stock-market crash. But Pedersen charms us nevertheless because she seems genuinely oblivious to this bit of self-deception. Thus we are free to enjoy her innocent and ebullient accounts of Wonder Bread-swallowing contests and pie-throwing fights on the trading floor, forgetting for the moment that it was our money, not play money, that funded the party.