Hank Paulson Is Far From a Hero

I agree with Marion that Sorkin is more Woodward than Halberstam. But I'm not sure that's what Sorkin necessarily intended. Here's the end of his introductory author's note:

Galileo Galilei said, "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." I hope I have discovered at least some of them, and that in doing so I have made the often bewildering financial events of the past few years a little easier to understand.

And here's the first paragraph of the book proper:

Standing in the kitchen of his Park Avenue apartment, Jamie Dimon poured himself a cup of coffee, hoping it might ease his headache. He was recovering from a slight hangover, but his head really hurt for a different reason: He knew too much.

One of my commenters, Dave, aptly describes this kind of prose as "accidental mock-epic", and it can make for heavy going if you're trying to slog through 600 pages of it. The epic part creates more than a few longueurs in the early chapters when he is introducing his cast of characters and you feel like telling him to get on with it already. Chapter 1, for instance, starts on Page 9 in March 2008; by Page 21 we're learning about Emanuel, Henry, and Meyer Lehman (the eponymous Brothers) trading cotton in Alabama in the 1850s. Or on Page 83, Hank Paulson and his team are rushing to a meeting at the Fed "in the secretary's black Suburban;" they're finally greeted by Ben Bernanke on Page 90.

Because the events being described are so momentous, and the prose picks everything out with such exacting detail, you wonder sometimes whether you're being told things for a reason. Even Jim Cramer's arrival at Lehman Bros.: