In his heart, [Dick] Fuld knew that his Korean gambit was a Hail Mary pass. Lehman’s own banking operation in Seoul was effectively a mirage; it had never produced any business significant enough even to warrant Fuld’s attention. He had also been warned repeatedly by just about everyone in the office that there were some serious doubts about the players involved.

Andrew Ross Sorkin
Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis—and Themselves
Viking 2009

When the South Korean economy almost collapsed in the fall of 1997, Geithner helped shaped the U.S. response. On Thanksgiving Day, Geithner called Summers at his home and calmly laid out the reasons the United States had to help stabilize the situation. After much debate within the Clinton administration, the plan that emerged—to supply Seoul with billions of dollars on top of a $35 billion package from the International Monetary Fund and other international institutions—bore a close resemblance to Geithner’s original proposal. The following year, Geithner was promoted to Treasury under secretary for international affairs.

For much of his time at the Fed, he had detected a certain lack of respect from Wall Street. Part of the problem was that he was not out of the central banker mold with which financial types traditionally felt comfortable. In the ninety-five-year history of the Federal Reserve, eight men had served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—and every one of them had worked on Wall Street as either a banker, a lawyer, or an economist. [Timothy] Geithner, in contrast, had been a career Treasury technocrat, a protégé for former secretaries Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin. His authority was also somewhat compromised by the fact that, at forty-six, he still looked like a teenager and was known to enjoy an occasional day of snowboarding—and that he was given to punctuating his sentences with “**ck.”

Michael Brooks
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
Doubleday 2008

Europe’s oldest prejudice is that chaos comes from the East, from those “hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth,” as T. S. Eliot called them in “The Waste Land.” Perhaps Europe will need to get a fresh taste of bloody chaos before the steel returns to its spine.

Paul Starobin
After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age
Viking 2009

Frank I. Luntz
What Americans Really Want . . . Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears
Hyperion 2009

Kit Yarrow and Jayne O’Donnell
Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens, and Twenty-Somethings are Revolutionizing Retail
Jossey-Bass 2009

Christopher Hopkins
Staging Your Comeback: A Complete Beauty Revival for Women Over 45
Health Communications, Inc 2009

Jerome R. Corsi
America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty
Threshold Editions 2009

E. L. Callihan
Grammar for Journalists
Chilton Book Company 1979