TOPGUN on Wall Street

February 27, 2012
Merging memoir with business advice, Lay, a former fighter pilot who worked for a Lehman Brothers subsidiary after retiring from active duty, offers an implausible, military solution to corporate greed and mismanagement. Were the Navy to run corporate America, argues Lay, market failures would never occur, because the Navy understands and prevents undue risk. However, this book focuses much more on Lay’s life than on TOPGUN or Wall Street. As Lay chronicles his career in Navy aviation, from Annapolis plebe to TOPGUN graduate, his commitment to naval service is such that, upon learning he has lymphoma, he is more concerned about being barred from flight than he is about dying. (Not only does the invincible Lay beat cancer, he does so by surfing the Internet and devising his own cure.) Because of his illness, Lay is reluctantly thrust into civilian life, something for which he harbors great suspicion. Civilian life is the real villain throughout Lay’s narrative, whether in the form of political restraints that prevent him and his team from decimating Saddam Hussein’s underground bunker, military cutbacks that threaten his fighting unit, or the financial mismanagement that caused Lehman Brothers to fail. Lay’s narrow worldview is extreme; his zealotry, if anything, works as an argument for civilian control of the armed forces. Agent: Ed Victor, Ed Victor Literary Agency.