Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: wolf of wall street

Showing posts with label wolf of wall street. Show all posts

Read It Before It Hits the Silver Screen!

In The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, an arrogant bad boy of finance, shares his story as a master of his own universe. By day he made more money than he could count, and by night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting.

This is a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent - the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all fell apart.

Movie Release Date: December 25, 2013

Who’s starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, and Matthew McConaughey

Click here to visit the official movie site and view the trailer.

'The Wolf of Wall Street' Book to Movie Alert

Jordan Belfort's 2007 memoir The Wolf of Wall Street is being turned into a movie directed by Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, Shelf Awareness reports. Scorsese and DiCaprio have teamed up on a number of films in the past, including Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and Shutter Island, and now look forward to telling the story of the man who describes himself as a "stock market multimillionare at 26 [and] federal convict at 36" who "barely survived [his] rise and fall as an American entrepreneurial icon." Terence Winter, the executive producer of The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, is the scriptwriter. Beat the rush to the library - check out this book before the movie version hits theaters!

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5

"Being Mortal is about the limitations of what modern medicine can provide for people as their lives draw to a close. Gawande argues that the objective of medicine should not merely be treatment and survival; medical care should also ensure dignity in death and having control over one's final moments. He argues that instead of aggressively fighting the inescapable realities of aging, we should ask the hard questions of ourselves and our loved ones -- What makes life worth living? When should we try to extend our lives, and when should we choose a better quality of our remaining days over extending their quantity?

This book is difficult to read. Not because of the way Gawande writes -- his style is highly engaging, and he never lapses into excessively scientific jargon or overly simplistic explanations -- but because of the tough subject matter. Gawande draws on his own experiences as a doctor and peppers his book with honest and humane stories of his patients, friends, and family; the stories he tells make the book more accessible, and also more heartbreaking. (And that's not a bad thing.)

No one likes to think about their loved ones', or their own, impending mortality. But it's important to have these hard conversations, because as Gawande says, "endings matter." - Amanda