Private Equity

Carrie Sun is the kind of epic overachiever who, in a previous era, might have been tapped for a prestigious PhD program or funneled into clandestine training for the CIA. The late-stage capitalism equivalent is a position as the personal and professional assistant to the wildly successful CEO of a private equity fund, which Sun documents in her memoir, Private Equity (Penguin Press). At 29, she sees the opportunity as an even more promising path than the one she had carved out as a financial analyst, but the extreme responsibilities of the position soon took their toll. Sun writes clearly about the demands and privileges of the job, though this isn’t a tell-all about abuses in the industry but rather a more probing inquiry into what we deem success and the values underpinning it. —C.S.