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Book Review - Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street

Monday 29 March 2010 - by Ben Collins

Too Big to Fail is an account of the credit crisis of 2008 written by Andrew Ross Sorkin, a reporter from the New York Times.

It is the story of the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, which threatened the stability of the whole financial system until the US Treasury stepped in to bail the banks out with taxpayers’ money.

In the author’s note, Sorkin states that his account is based on over 500 hours of interviews with more than 200 individuals.

This access to many of the major figures involved in the crisis, and to a large number of personal emails and confidential emails, means that Sorkin is able to create an engaging picture of the crisis which enables the reader to feel like a fly on the wall for much of the account as he introduces us to the personalities and events that shaped the response to the threat to the financial system.

The product of all of these hours of interviews is a vivid and entertaining book, which brings the characters behind this crisis to life and offers a more humanised view of them than many readers might be accustomed to.


The penalty to pay for this is a perhaps over-dramatised approach to many of the scenes and characters in the book. But this is an acceptable loss as Sorkin has managed to create a rich and engaging narrative that should be read by anyone interested in the events which nearly brought down the world’s financial system.


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