Writers, readers, fellow victims of Wall Street’s hubris:

Allow me to begin this TBM book club by not writing about the book we’re here to discuss. A few years ago I purchased a yellowed copy of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. Kennedy, McNamara, and Westmoreland stare out from my edition’s cover, arranged with six others like they’re on a Vietnam War edition of Hollywood Squares. 800 pages long, it’s more monolith than book. If I, as a novice of history and unschooled in Vietnam, wanted to learn about the war, this was the narrative. Its size and scope equated to heft and gravitas. Inside, it was clear, was something important. Something that one should know about.

While reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book Too Big To Fail—the book we’re actually here to digest—I couldn’t stop thinking about my time with The Best and the Brightest. Sorkin’s task—to document in obsessive detail the biggest financial crisis of our lifetime—is no less grand than Halberstam’s. But I bring up Best and the Brightest not to make any overwrought analogies between the Vietnam War and The Day the Markets Stood Still. That’s so facile it would prove difficult.

No, I bring up B&B because Sorkin’s approach to his subject matter is positively Halberstamian. Sorkin, a New York Times columnist and senior business writer, introduces us to his characters with long anecdotes from their pasts. Ben Bernanke waited tables at South of the Border, the best novelty tourist trap on the East Coast; Jamie Dimon’s college essay got him his first job in finance; Dick Fuld bloodied his commanding officer in his collegiate ROTC program. These are the small details about important men that permeate Sorkin’s—and Halberstam’s—book. They’re so minute, so personal, that they inform our understanding of their owners’ more important decisions later in life. Bernanke didn’t have time to foster an ego at a dump like South of the Border, Dimon didn’t stumble into banking, and he’s not going to stumble out of it, Fuld is so intensely loyal and combative that he doesn’t know how to walk away. The assumption is Freudian: Powerful men are flawed just like the rest of us; their personalities will be evident in their pasts.