4.5—In the postscript to my edition, the author notes that after this book came out, he started fielding calls from government officials asking him to explain what happened in the 2008 financial crisis. I understand why. This book is that essential. It is an astonishingly good read, and perhaps one of the only publicly available narratives of clarity on how it all happened and why.

Structurally and compositionally, this book does several genius things. That Lewis elected to make it character driven is its foremost asset. It's mostly a collection of character narratives, the camera behind their heads as the story of the financial crisis was told. It's a book that's only occasionally transparent about its politics (which, fortunately, is "fuck Wall Street," but in a sort of distant way), and the "characters" (the word the author uses) allow people of pretty much any political alignment to find someone in the book to root for. It's an incredibly skilled book from a "how to write a book with mass appeal" perspective. The writing voice was incredibly engaging, character-focused, and (generally) incredibly clear. I can't think of a comparable title in terms of composition in mass-market nonfiction.

Informationally, it truly is crucial... but it is best read as a narrative and less as absolutely detailed academic/historical account. To be abundantly fair, it's not trying to be academically rigorous. As far as the author is concerned, this is a character study that happens to cover a major event in financial history. As the author also notes many times—as every single character in the book points out—the facts, the systems, and the operations discussed are intentionally constructed to be opaque. That said, I am an absolute dumb fuck about the financial world, and I did an incredibly close reading of this book. The author could not have done more to explain the way systems interplay with each other, the chronology of events, or the motivations of the players involved; but on basic financial terms—despite diligence on the author and editors' parts to repeat information when it was relevant, and despite arming myself with a highlighter, pencil, and post-its—I was frequently lost, rereading, and doing side research to fully understand what the terms being used even meant.

This isn't really the author's fault, since it wasn't his goal to write a primer to Wall Street. Probably Liar's Poker, his previous book on the topic, is a better bet for that, and I plan to pick it up to start tracking these origins backward, as a former historian is wont to do. But I guess my point is that if you're reading this for pure, brass tacks information on what finance even is as I was, it's not meant to be that sort of primer, and you will need to seek other supports to provide foundation for this narrative to build on.

I picked this up oddly to better understand crypto, and I think I do. For one thing, rampant, unregulated speculation is functionally equivalent to fraud, even if it's not legally fraud. Did you know that? Now I do. 

I will read this again. I will also watch the movie for the fourth time and hopefully, this time, actually understand what it portrays. Then I'm gonna pick up Rick Perlstein. Goddamnit. Fucking America.