Book of the week: The Hellhound of Wall Street by Michael Perino

(Penguin, $27.95)

Michael Perino’s new look at a bygone scourge of Wall Street offers a timely refresher on how smart regulation happens, said Steve Weinberg in USA Today. The book tells the story of Ferdinand Pecora, a New York attorney who “took Washington by storm in 1933” when he led an inquisition of Wall Street bankers whose short selling was thought to have fueled the 1929 stock market crash. “Pecora showed what a well-run and well-researched Washington investigation could accomplish,” Perino writes.

It didn’t matter that most of what Pecora knew about finance he “gleaned from prosecuting low-level frauds,” said James Grant in The Wall Street Journal. He was “a master cross-examiner, a quick study, and a tireless worker.” Those qualities served him well during 10 days of Senate hearings that Perino credits with paving the way for nearly every major financial-regulatory apparatus in place today—from the SEC to the publication of corporate prospectuses.

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