By Timothy Lavin, Bloomberg Businessweek
I don’t know quite how to characterize The Chickenshit Club (Simon & Schuster), by Jesse Eisinger. It’s an absorbing financial history, a monumental work of journalism, a not entirely persuasive polemic. It’s a first-rate study of the federal bureaucracy. It’s also an expansive parable: of righteousness and compromise, overreach and underreach, excess, deceit, greed—the whole American show. It’s fun to read but a real downer to think about.
The book offers an edifying tour of a century of white-collar crime — what Al Capone called “the legitimate rackets.” A recurrent theme is that the government ...
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