Falling Off Broadway

Black’s faltering memoir of a remarkably twisty career path reads as if he accidentally stumbled into a series of jobs that he wasn’t particularly good at. Black spends his youth trying to live up to his charismatic father, feeling like he never measures up. While at Harvard, he falls in love with a wealthy heiress, but her WASP family disdains his Jewishness, while his father is not pleased with Black becoming an enthusiastic capitalist. Black tries to be an opera singer, an intelligence officer, and a mutual fund salesman. After Wall Street loses its luster, David continues to reinvent himself, this time as a Broadway producer. Though he meets a number of luminaries, he is only somewhat successful; he finally finds unexpected rewards as a painter, but without the parental approval he craved. Black often drops threads without really following up on them, like the dissolutions of his first marriages. Black’s attitude to his career-hopping is comical and light, but readers will find his story forgettable because of his unwillingness to dig deeper into his thoughts and feelings. [em](BookLife) [/em]