Book of the week: Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown by Edmund L. Andrews

(Norton, 240 pages, $25.95)

New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews was hoping for sympathy when he confessed his personal financial woes to then–Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Instead, Greenspan seemed appalled. “Why did you do it?” he asked. By “it,” the esteemed central banker meant Andrews’ decision to take out a $400,000 mortgage loan at a time when, due to alimony payments, his take-home pay was below $3,000 a month. Andrews was floundering. It was December 2007. The 52-year-old business journalist and his new wife, Patty, were running up their credit card balances again just to meet their monthly mortgage payments, and still there wasn’t enough money to keep the lights on in their suburban Washington home. And it only got worse. Just eight months ago, says Andrews, he and Patty started forgoing mortgage ­payments entirely.

There’s no happy ending in Busted, said Andrew Leonard in Salon.com. Andrews and his wife still are holding onto their home because the bank that holds the mortgage is too busy negotiating­ with other defaulters. But whether their ­marriage can even last is an open question after we’ve read Andrews’ “fearless” accounts of the serial arguments triggered by the couple’s admittedly foolish decisions. Busted combines “one of the clearest explanations” you’ll find of “how the mortgage lending market got out of control” with a juicy, almost “trashy” mea culpa.

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So it’s more than disappointing to learn that the book withholds an important fact, said Megan McArdle in TheAtlantic.com. Patty, it turns out, has filed for personal bankruptcy twice in the past decade. That’s “highly unusual,” and it suggests that Andrews isn’t the financial Everyman he portrays himself to be. Rather than an innocent victim of wildcat banking, he’s simply a guy who attached himself to a woman with serious “debt and spending problems.” Even that explanation lets Andrews off too easily, said Steven Malanga in Realclearmarkets.com. The author admits that, on his broker’s advice, he purposefully withheld important information required on his initial application for the loan that sunk him. When such “outright deviousness” is rewarded with a book contract, society clearly has “lost the mechanism that restrains its citizens from widespread cheating.”