Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780060977610
ISBN number: 0060977612
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 208
Printing Date: April 01, 1999
Publishing house: Harper Perennial
Release Date: March 24, 1999
Sale Popularity Level: 568531
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Product Description:
This is an incredible story. The author, a failed, alcoholic Wall Street trader, had retreated to a monastery. It, too, was failing. Then, one fateful day, Brother Ty decided to let God be his broker--and not only saved the monastery but discovered the 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth. Brother Ty's remarkable sucess has been studied at the nation's leading business schools and scrutinized by Wall Street's greatest minds, but until now the secret to his 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth have been available only to a select few:
- 87 percent of America's billionaires
- 28 recent Academy Award winners
- Over half the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize
- No members of the U.S. Congress
Now, for the very first time, Brother Ty reveals the secrets he has gleaned from the ancient texts of the monks, and tells how you can get God to be your broker. God Is My Broker is the very first truly great self-help business novel. Open this book and open your heart. It will change your life.
Amazon.com Review:
The whole point of a monastic existence is to put aside worldly things. Brother Ty, the narrator of God Is My Broker, has put them aside with a vengeance, and his task is all the more impressive when you consider just how many he used to possess. 'I had traded the life of a Wall Street trader,' he tells us, 'for the contemplative life, my briefcase for a rosary, the roar of the trading floor for Gregorian chant.' Hunkered down in a rural monastery, he seems finally to have escaped the iniquities of Mammon, along with rush-hour traffic and a major drinking problem.
A vow of poverty, however, isn't what it used to be. The monastery of Cana is falling to pieces. And Cana Nouveau--the wine the brothers have always produced to sustain themselves--has hit a new, undrinkable low. As the desperate abbot looks to Deepak Chopra and Anthony Robbins for advice, Brother Ty begins to get financial tips from the Supreme Insider: 'That day God had revealed Himself to be our broker.' Sometimes, of course, the Lord speaks in mysterious ways. Even a stray line from the Song of Solomon may encourage the narrator to take a flier on Apple Computer stock: 'Comfort me with apples. It sounded like a 'buy' recommendation to me.' By heeding his divine broker at every turn, however, Brother Ty manages to transform the monastery into a financial powerhouse. His story amounts to the funniest bit of ecclesiastical satire since J. F. Powers's Morte D'Urban. What's more, the authors send up the entire self-help industry with hilarious expertise, concluding God Is My Broker with what even Deepak Chopra would recognize as a home truth: 'The only way to get rich from get-rich books is to write one.'
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Rated by buyers 
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This short book was an incredible surprise. It is a true story of the age old tale that money does indeed corrupt. The delightfully funny and so believable telling of life inside a monastery was in itself appealing. The characters described and droll humour in the face of disaaster made for a wonderful light read. I'm not sure about the lessons to be learned at the end of the chapters. I almost thought that they took away from the story rather than completing it. Thought provoking fun. Eleanore Alter
Rated by buyers 
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I love Christopher Buckley so I started the book with high expectations and was not disappointed. A Wall-Street type goes to a monastery and gets a "stock tip from God" that saves the day. The book is really a send-up of self-help gurus but Buckley manages to poke fun at Catholics, the Papal Bureaucracy, Wall Street, self-help workshops, etc. etc. Plan to laugh a lot!
Rated by buyers -
Loved, Loved, Loved this book. Funny, quirky, not only read it in one day, I read it in one seating it was so entertaining. I know this isn't the most helpful review but it's one of those books were you're just going to have to read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. Actually I didn't read any reviews when I brought this book, I read the few pages Amazon allows you to read and the synopsis. I wasn't disappointed.
Rated by buyers -
This book is hilarious to read - a MUST for every broker and investor!!
Rated by buyers -
Anyone who's read Christopher Buckley's collection of essays, Wry Martinis, might expect his novels to exhibit a similar degree of hilarity. Buckley's essays often take the form of parodic fictionalizations such as memos, journals, and letters, and occasionally fictional personal anecdotes that serve to prove his larger points (Art Buchwald often employed the same technique). God Is My Broker meets, and exceeds, this expectation, being a book-length expansion of the concept that also gains something in the expansion.
This is, in part, a parody of the crop of self-help books that has sprung up over the last few decades, as typified by the works of Deepak Chopra (whom the authors confront directly in the novel, including excerpts of Chopra's work, complete with page numbers for reference). But it's important to emphasize that God Is My Broker is a great deal more than that; anybody could mimic the format and style of Chopra's (or some other guru's) works, and produce something that's funny...for a while. But who would want to read a book-length Chopra parody? All the laughs would be wrung out of it in the very first few pages (and frankly, most of the joke could probably be gleaned from the table of contents). The "7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth" of the book's title are interspersed throughout a legitimate story of a New York monastery and the monks who make its ill-tasting and unprofitable wine. Brother Ty, the ostensible "author" of this Buckley-and-Tierney-"edited" book, is a quite likeable, fully-realized character whom we follow through his skewering of Chopra's platitudes (which have become a new fad at the financially-struggling monastery) and his exploration of the Bible as a dispensary of financial advice.
I imagine this was probably shelved in the humour section of bookstores, and though it is a parody, it's labeled, quite justly, as fiction, and hilarious fiction it is. Store placement doesn't matter now, of course, since it's out of print as of this writing. Rumour has it that this has been shopped around as a potential film. I can't imagine it translating to the screen as well as Buckley's Thank You For Smoking did, but such a venture would at least get the book back in stores. In the meantime, if you see a copy, grab it. Come for the parody, stay for the plot.
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