...OK, three days, and cold only if you consider 45º cold (just how wimpy are you, anyway?) but definitely windy, windy enough to knock all the dead twigs out of the trees hereabouts, and so a perfect week to spend lots of time indoors reading a book.
The book is Andrew Sorkin's "Too Big to Fail," and I'm getting close to being halfway through it now. "Too Big" is not an easy read. It's technical in places - over my head in places - but Sorkin does a good job of handling the technicalities in a way that lets laymen like myself stay with the story anyway. It's a fine piece of journalism, obviously thoroughly researched and clearly, if somewhat adoringly, written, and the overall effect is that of watching a massive train wreck occur in slo-mo right before your eyes.
The book's about a bunch or arrogant, self-absorbed, curiously clueless men (and one or two women) doing stuff to the financial markets that, if done between sheets, could surely get you tossed in jail for the rest of your life or maybe longer, and all the while paid millions to do it - and, if you pick up a newspaper you will find that they're still doing it to this day and it's all, indeed, grim.
And nowhere, in the first half of the book at least (or in the second half either, based on a handful of search words I ran it past) is an attention paid to the carnage on that street called Main, but surely that part of the story will be the subject of another book, somewhere, some time.
This book will wind up on the reading list in time, the list over in the sidebar there, but if you want to get it read before the weather gets all warm and beachworthy (yeah, I know, some of you are already in that climate but I'm taking about the rest of us now) it would be a good idea to start reading now.
No comments:
Post a Comment