Cramer vs. Cramer: critics say Wall Street's favorite talking head is obnoxious, abusive, and crooked. Jim Cramer takes issue with "crooked.".

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: 'Confessions of a Street Addict' and 'Trading with the Enemy: Seduction and Betrayal on Jim Cramer's Wall Street'

CONFESSIONS OF A STREET ADDICT by James J. Crmer Simon & Schuster, $26.00

TRADING WITH THE ENEMY: Seduction and Betrayal on Jim Cramer's Wall Street by Nicholas W. Maier HarperCollins, $22.95

JAMES J. CRAMER IS SO THOROUGHLY A MAN of his age that the Museum of the City of New York ought to stuff him now for future exhibition. The bedrock of the Bozo-haired, gruff-talking, Harvard-educated Cramer's reputation is the highly profitable Wall Street hedge fund he ran from 1987 to 2000, but he is much more: investor, gambler, tout, journalist, celebrity. Just as Edith Wharton's characters perfectly exemplify the Gilded Age, Cramer will represent to future generations all our splendid contradictions: brilliant and short-sighted, vain and confessional, mean and sentimental, likable and frightening.

Like Bill Clinton, Cramer characterizes the Baby Boomer wait of wanting to prove to everyone that he's smarter than they are, and at the same time be loved for it. It is an elusive objective. Cramer, who on tumultuous trading days has been known to post his pensees on his Web site up to 12 times a day, is clearly a man who values his own opinions (as, obviously, do his investors, subscribers, bookers, and various television executives, most recently CNBC, where he co-hosts the program America Now with Lawrence Kudlow).

Now, presumably at mid-career, he has given us a memoir, Confessions of a Street Addict. It's an entertaining book, as far as it goes. Cramer has had many adventures and triumphs, and he is a considerate and often amusing guide to what the Wall Street game looks like from perches high and inside. At the same time, the book often feels like an iceberg: It still seems like the bigger chunk of the story, whether about the man or the arena, remains beneath the surface.

Cramer's first claim to fame, his hedge fund, is essentially a legally sanctioned stock gambling club. Because the law considers hedge funds to be high-risk propositions, they are set up so only the very rich can play. Some number of them form a limited partnership under the leadership of a sharpie like Cramer, who invests funds on their behalf, not by identifying and backing good, well-managed companies, but by finding out information, from sources far and wide, published and whispered. It doesn't matter to hedge fund managers whether the news is good or bad; they just as happily bet against companies as for them, hoping to wring a profit from the short-term ups and downs...