On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the World Financial System by Henry M. Paulson Jr.

(Business Plus, 478 pages, $28.99)

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has some explaining to do, said James Quinn in the London Daily Telegraph. The onetime Goldman Sachs CEO was a central player in the U.S. government’s late-2008 attempt to stave off a global financial calamity. “But was Paulson the savior of the world’s financial system or just an overpromoted banker in the wrong place at the wrong time?” In his new memoir, he lays bare both his strengths and his weaknesses, said The Economist. Though he provides few revelations, he offers “plenty to keep the pages turning.”

If the architect of Washington’s TARP bailouts intended to burnish his legacy, On the Brink is a flop, said Max Abelson in The New York Observer. It’s hard to embrace a hero whose distinguishing traits are exhaustion from overwork and a tendency to dry-heave when pressure spikes. The only explanation he gives for decisions to bail out some companies and not others is “the phrase ‘we had little choice.’” On the Brink leaves a reader with “the spectacularly unsettling sense that world history is decided by an assortment of guys who are improvising, and may not be particularly good at it.” Paulson also is less than honest about his most controversial choice, said Lawrence McDonald in the New York Post. He claims that the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed when Britain chickened out of helping facilitate its sale. Yet the British chancellor blames Paulson for refusing to share the risk. Lehman’s fall “obliterated the world economy.”

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Still, Paulson deserves credit for going on record with the rationales for the decisions he was making, said James Pressley in Bloomberg.com. “Time and again” in On the Brink, Paulson admits his own mistakes and concedes that some choices risked “distorting markets.” No reader will conclude that every decision was right, but most will recognize that Paulson’s book is “a persuasive portrait” of a man caught in an unenviable predicament.