(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.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”