Starting off in a toxic West Palm Beach penny stock boiler room, James Patrick Rooney joins Merrill Lynch's "thundering herd" at the opening of arguably the most disruptive four decades in Wall Street history (1983 through 2017). As the nascent Information Age rapidly transforms his trade, what follows is an eye-opening, often enraging account of congressional and C-suite ineptitudes largely responsible for the decade-long "savings and loan crisis" and the irrational "new paradigm" economy, culminating in back-to-back periods of wealth destruction rivaled only by the Great Depression.

For the Love of Money-cynical at times, humorous at others-is as much a personal and spiritual growth parable as it is one man's dizzying romp on the Merrill Lynch bull, presenting aspirational tales of angels and heroes along with the wisdom of sages capable of guiding us toward an enduring sense of meaning and happiness. And it just may offer the inspirational spark so many desperately need during our precarious times.

James Patrick Rooney was born in the Bronx and, after suffering a spinal cord injury (paraplegia) at nineteen while at Providence College, migrated south to the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and earned a business management and economics degree. Settling in Jupiter, Florida, he began a career in financial services and started his exceptional family. After four decades at Merrill Lynch as first vice president and senior wealth management advisor in the Palm Beach market, Rooney published his first novel, "Sitting on a Rainbow: A 21st Century Irish American Morality Tale," a mix of memoir, fiction and blarney. In his latest, given a mandate to tell the unsparing truth, he's eliminated the fiction and blarney, making this hard-hitting Wall Street story a must read.