God in the Pits The Enron-Jihad Edition

Mark Andrew Ritchie (featured in Schwager’s best-selling Market Wizards II) grew up in the poverty and strangeness of Afghanistan, the deep south of Texas, and an Oregon-coast logging town. The Vietnam War crystallized his love of rebellion. He became an occupational vagabond--funeral home operative, Chicago Transit bus driver, long-haul trucker, jail guard, and more--an unlikely backdrop for launching a career in the take-no-prisoners financial markets of Chicago. But as a backdrop for a writer? Perfect. Ritchie has been quoted, “Islamic people are the kindest, most loving, most hospitable people in the world.” Then he claims that when he saw the second plane hit tower one, he knew that the Islamic people he played with as a child had finally brought their jihad to America. Is he credible? Ritchie theorizes that America has a blind spot--spiritual engagement. Nineteen hijackers traveled spiritual roads that caused that fateful day. We avoid this discussion; it’s too personal. God in the Pits is Ritchie’s personal jihad. One event forced the questions—the sudden death of Mark's father in faraway Afghanistan, where the elder Ritchie was constructing a provincial hospital for the treatment of blindness. To Mark, the contrast between his life and that of his father was brutal: "His goal was to do God's will by serving the Afghan poor; mine was to buy low and sell high." As Mark travels back to his boyhood in Afghanistan to settle his father's affairs and see to his mother's hospital care, he casts back over his early experiences with death, with a life too full of the unexpected, and with nagging inner questions over things that matter most.