Book of the week: The Devil’s Casino by Vicky Ward

(Wiley, $27.95
)

Vicky Ward’s The Devil’s Casino isn’t just another book about the financial crisis, said Liz Raftery in The Boston Globe. Ward, a writer for Vanity Fair, dishes up a behind-the-scenes look at the top brass of doomed investment bank Lehman Brothers, including CEO Richard Fuld. This book humanizes these “titans of finance,” but The Devil’s Casino is “by no means an absolution.” To hear Ward tell it, “duplicity and betrayal” among the bankers during the 1990s set the scene for Lehman’s 2008 failure, said James Pressley in Bloomberg.com. “She presents a history spiced with shouting bankers, desperate wives, and one hurled
 adding machine.” As in any page-turner, there’s a villain—President and Chief Operating Officer Joseph M. Gregory. Ward seems to “cast in the best light those who gave her the most access,” and apparently Gregory wasn’t one of them. This may not be 
the most analytical book about the financial crisis, but it’s easily the juiciest.

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