The education of Rick Green, Esq

Harvey Sawikin, a former lawyer himself, enters into the world of arbitrage and corporate takeover with a chilling eye for the ironic and an all-too-real portrait of the players in this world, where it seems that too few win and too many lose. But this novel never strays far from the comic, and from its keenly drawn and memorable characters.

Rick Green is twenty-five years old, long on education but very short on life experience. Since graduating from Harvard Law, he has already found, in the course of a clerkship with the irascible Judge Fineman (and his Caligulan mood swings), that law school idealism has little relevance to the working world. Now, giving in to the lure of big money, Green joins one of New York's top firms at the peak of the 1980s leveraged buyout craze.

He quickly finds himself overburdened with responsibility, doing battle with his conscience over matters he can barely understand.