After his wife ended their marriage, New Yorker film critic and amateur investor David Denby hatched a quixotic plan to make a million dollars off the stock market so he could afford to buy out his soon-to-be-ex's half of their comfy but unremarkable Manhattan condo. Denby invested heavily in tech stocks because he wanted to make money, but also because he was spiritually adrift and looking desperately for something to believe in. In the days of the New Deal, good liberals like Denby invested that faith and belief into a kindly, paternalistic big government that cared for the sick, employed the jobless, and looked after the aged. Around the dot-com- and IPO-crazed turn of the millennium, Denby, like a lot of other seekers, transferred that faith into the concept of the stock market as a benevolent entity that rewarded hard-working Americans, kept the economy surging ahead, and showed the way toward a glorious cyber-future in which the rules had changed and everything worth doing could be done online. In American Sucker, Denby writes about his doomed quick-wealth scheme with candor and acute sensitivity, tracing his hopes and aspirations from the high-flying days of the New Economy bubble to the inevitable crash that sent the economy reeling even before Sept. 11, 2001. In his quest to become a pioneer in the ill-fated cyber-revolution prophesied by techno-futurist gurus like George Gilder, Denby chose two mentors: disgraced superstar stock analyst Henry Blodget and super-disgraced medical honcho Sam Waksal, of Martha Stewart infamy. Needless to say, it's good for New Yorker readers that Denby has better taste in films than in mentors. Denby writes earnestly and searchingly about money as both a practical necessity and as an entity with almost boundless symbolic value in American society. He eloquently ponders the things money-lust does to a person's soul, the way it distorts and filters and drowns everything else out. It's striking to note, for example, that American Sucker is a memoir by a prominent film critic that has next to nothing to say about film. In the end, the book serves as an urgent cautionary tale about the corrupting and insidious nature of greed. With the Dow Jones racing upward of 10,000 again, Denby's almost painfully earnest, intimate tome feels particularly relevant.