If you're enjoying reading
The Big Short
, check out these books for further reading:
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Too Big to Fail: The inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System --- and Themselves (2009), by Andrew Ross Sorkin.
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The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History (2010), by Gregory Zuckerman
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Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (2011), by Michael Lewis
All The Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis(2011), by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
Book Reviews
Book reviews can provide a variety of useful insights to consider when reading. Here are some reviews of The Big Short that present differing perspectives on the story of the credit and housing crisis, on Lewis’ method of delivering that story, and on the larger philosophical ideas contained in the story.
Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times (2010) - No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis, the author of “Liar’s Poker,” that now classic portrait of 1980s Wall Street. His entertaining new book does not attempt a macro view of the financial crisis, but instead proposes to open a small window on the calamities by recounting the stories of some savvy renegades who cashed in on their conviction that the system was rotten. To read the full review click here.
George Anders' review for Forbes.com (2010) posits that Lewis' book The Big Short is unique from the hundreds of non-fiction titles published in the past 18 months about the credit and housing crisis, because it focuses on a handful of wall street characters who saw the proverbial writing on the wall and placed bets that bucked conventional wisdom. "Fundamentally, The Big Short is about a few seemingly hopeless crusaders embarking on the journey of their lives." To read the full review click here.
Deal Journal, a Wall Street Journal blog, highlights A.K. Barnett-Hart, an undergraduate student at Harvard University who wrote a thesis about the market for subprime mortgage-backed CDOs, which Lewis' acknowledgments praise her work as "more interesting than any single piece of Wall Street research on the subject." To read the full article click here.