Halberstam? Sure, Chad. But, really, Sorkin is the would-be Woodward of Wall Street. This book is a remarkable achievement that puts him well down that path. Sorkin clearly has mastered some of Woodward’s best tricks. Chief among them is amassing so much detail on an event that anyone who was a part of it is forced to cooperate just to be sure his version is heard. (A fun parlor game to play while you read along is imagining who was the source for which anecdote. It’s not always the obvious one, as Sorkin points out. Though it seems pretty clear that at least one CEO jumped at the chance to put himself in the best possible light.)

In the span of a year, Sorkin has reported and written a dramatic story involving dozens of figures. Their accounts have been collated, cross-referenced, and triangulated to create an air-tight narrative. Yes, there are sometimes bizarre insertions of detail—we learn at which hole Fuld was golfing when he received an important call (par 5, dogleg left); at a meeting with bankers we get the exact vintage and name of the wine that was opened (Really? Who remembers that?)—but those somewhat distracting factoids are intended to give the account verisimilitude and authority.

Sorkin needs that authority because the book itself tries to answer some big questions—and raise some little ones. The first question is: Whose fault was the collapse? Or, to put it your way, Chad, was Fuld the villain or victim? (I’ll get to that below.) The second, which maybe we can discuss later, is to explain the eternal question: Why was Lehman allowed to fail? (And here is where the book may be most successful.) Third, Sorkin provides answers to some important and lingering mysteries: Did JPMorgan (JPM) push Lehman into bankruptcy? Why did the Barclay’s deal fall apart over the final weekend? Where did the TARP plan come from and why did it focus on buying assets?

Finally, Sorkin has done an immeasurable service by bringing the lives and worldviews of this small coterie of banking executives and government overseers. The cars and airplanes, the phone calls, the shouting matches and expletives, the lingering resentments and oddball behavior, it’s all catalogued here. The small question he raises is: Who the hell are these people? And how did they get entrusted with the lifeblood of the world economy?

Seriously, to answer your question about Fuld, no one could put this book down with a favorable opinion of him. Indeed, when you consider the sequence of events, Sorkin is leading you to the conclusion that Lehman’s fate was sealed long before the action in the book takes place. In other words, even though the book opens in the days after the Bear Stearns collapse, it’s already too late to save Lehman. The long slide of deleveraging is already accelerating and no one is in a position to seriously consider buying or saving a cavalier investment bank. Which raises an interesting question, was there ever a time in the last two years that another bank would have bought Lehman without a Bear Stearns-like goverment backstop? Or were their books just too opaque?

Contrary to received wisdom on Wall Street (that no one could have forseen these events), Sorkin demonstrates that Fuld and his lieutenants were well aware of their precarious position. But pride and greed would not allow them to capitulate too easily.