On Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail” (2009).
[Crossposted from a one-star review on Goodreads.]
I always used to say that life was too short for bad movies or cheap beer, but with books I had an ironclad and perhaps foolish rule: you make a commitment to read it all the way to the end. Not so with Too Big to Fail; for once (okay, twice), I broke that promise.
I’ve been working in financial services for over two years now, and was then employed for a company that went down spectacularly in flames during the crash. It was important for me to read something that tried to make sense of the Wall Street chaos.
This isn’t that book. There’s only the most cursory discussion of credit-default swaps, for instance — for explanations, NPR’s Planet Money, or The New Yorker‘s James Surowiecki, does a far better job — and for all of Sorkin’s attention to detail throughout, one doesn’t get a good sense of how everything is connected.
The book is also terribly formulaic. By the third chapter or so the schema is set: introduce yet another person, describe their backgrounds (disappointingly uniform, I must say), add some detail about their culinary habits or the car they drive or The Moment They Received the Fateful Phone call, then move on to the next COO (either the one about to be replaced, or the replacement). With a cast of characters as long as a business account’s legal disclosure, it isn’t immediately clear why each one is relevant other than the fact that they spoke to Sorkin for the record.
Sorkin has a good handle on what creates tension within a scene, but there’s no disguising the fact that most of the action takes place in boardrooms and offices. (If this were a film, we’d at least get an unconvincing montage of people staring at computer screens to gussy up the action, but there’s no opportunity for that here.)
What kept me doggedly reading the next few chapters after that wasn’t some narrative hook, ultimately, but the nagging, guilty, post-crash feeling of frugality that I spent good money on this, and that I could at least squeeze a few more minutes of entertainment out of it. But “life is short” won the day.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Right on! I bought it after hearing that it was the book to read on the banking crisis. Three pages in to chapter 1 Sorkin tells us that “Wall St. had a fighting chance” after Bernanke made the Fed’s discount window open to them. A little farther down the page we learn that one of Fuld’s C-Suite buddies at Lehmann had to miss his son’s lacrosse game to attend to some pressing work. Sorkin writes without sarcasm, without anger, without refering to the real losers. I put it down for a couple of months and went back to it thinking that maybe there was something I had missed, but after reading again far too many names and about hurried hushed conversations in the ante-room at the NY Fed, I got to pg 416:
“Wachovia had one of the biggest, most solid deposit bases in the country, an extremely attractive feature as Morgan Stanley was watching its cahs fly out the door.”
Sorking writes this without thinking of reminding readers that investment banks and commercial banks were separated after the Depression and that there were and are good reasons to separate them.