Book of the week: The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein

(The Penguin Press, $27.95)

Roger Lowenstein’s The End of Wall Street is “an especially useful piece of the jigsaw puzzle that current Wall Street books are busy creating,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. This isn’t a story of bankers’ “blowhard personalities” or a told-you-so tale reiterating errors that, in hindsight, seem obvious. Rather, it’s an “issue-oriented book” that deconstructs the financial crisis, explains derivatives and other “creative instruments of financial destruction” in delightfully direct terms, and “tries to envision new, improved business models” for Wall Street. The title is a bit of an exaggeration, though, said Carl Hartman in the Associated Press. “‘End’ is an awfully final word,” and one need only look at the stock market’s rebound to see that Wall Street is still surviving as of this moment. Nevertheless, Lowenstein does a stellar job of explaining how the financial crisis and subsequent government bailouts mark, in his words, “the eclipse of Wall Street’s golden age.”

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