Christopher Cook of the Financial Times has reviewed the Economics of Enough in this morning's FT (registration needed). The headline on the review is 'Sensible solutions with a radical ring', which seems to me a very fair summary. Meanwhile, Heffers bookshop in Cambridge is doing me proud (along with some other Princeton University Press titles).

I spent the weekend staying with friends in the countryside, one of whom is a Top Economist. We were sharing the guest room with his economics library. There's nothing as enticing as a fresh set of bookshelves to explore so I was very content – especially as he and I are the same vintage so there was just enough overlap with books I either have or am familiar with. Here's just a section of what there was to see.

 There is already a growing pile of books about the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest catastrophe to hit the banking world since the Wall Street crash. My favourites so far have been Michael Lewis's The Big Short,  a brilliant account of the traders who saw the storm coming, and Matt Taibbi's Griftopia, for sheer shock and entertainment.  But with Too Big To Fail  the New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin may have given us the definitive history that historians will turn to in years to come.

Sorkin's book is in the grand tradition of American reportage. He documents in the most meticulous fashion every twist and turn that led to that manic week in September when no bank – not even Goldman Sachs – seemed safe and every day threatened to tip us into the financial abyss.

But he also has a fine eye for the colourful detail which brings the whole story alive – Hank Paulson throwing up in the Treasury wastepaper bin as the tension gets to him, then-New York Fed chief Tim Geithner running through Manhattan streets at 6 a.m, trying to clear his mind before another day of financial fire fighting.

And the portraits of the self-regarding titans of Wall Street are fabulous. Lehman's Dick Fuld, an intimidating presence who had earned his spurs as a single-minded trader, beginning to fall apart as his bank slides towards the precipice.  Jamie Dimon of Morgan Stanley losing his cool during talks with the crumbling insurance giant AIG: “This is amateurish, it's pathetic…. you guys need to get a handle on the numbers.”

And British readers will particularly enjoy this portrait of the Barclays CEO John Varley: “…soft spoken and courteous,  he wore suspenders every day.” (NB for American readers: suspenders in British English hold up ladies' stockings rather than men's trousers.)
 
These corporate moguls had been cocooned in a private world, where flying commercial rather than climbing aboard the private jet was seen as an unimaginable hardship. Now they were being dragged blinking into the light,  summoned to the New York Federal Reserve and to Washington as the crisis engulfed them.

On the other side of the table, the regulators – Paulson, Ben Bernanke,  Geithner – are painted more sympathetically, as well-meaning but increasingly helpless lifeboatmen, struggling to keep the banks afloat, while ducking the brickbats from Capitol Hill.

So how did it happen? Sorkin is perhaps better at reportage than analysis – he seems to have been hiding under the table at every crucial meeting. But one quote from the Bank Of England Governor Mervyn King at a bankers' dinner at the US Treasury seems particularly apt: “You are all bright people but you failed,”he tells them. “So the lesson is we can't let you get as big as you were, and do the damage that you've done or get as complex as you were.”

And that was six months before the fall of Lehmans. The bright people had plenty more failures ahead of them.

Rory Cellan-Jones can be found on Twitter as @ruskin147

The in-pile has been growing again and I don't know which of the following books to choose next:

Triumph of the City by Ed Glaeser – one of the most thoughtful and creative economists around, and a terrific subject too, what it means for the world to be more than half urban now. I like the fact that it includes cities from Manchester to Lagos. I've started this so it will probably be at the head of the queue. It has already been reviewed in The Economist and New York Times.

Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding by Charles Kenny – an experienced development economist argues that there has been historically unprecedented progress and the world is a far better place than 60 years ago, even in countries where there seems to have been little economic growth.

Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price Swings, Risk and the Role of the State by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg – which argues that financial markets are neither perfectly rational nor irrational but need to be explained with reference to imperfect information. Roman Frydman is speaking soon in London and I'm excited about hearing him.

Beyond the Corporation: Humanity Working by David Erdal – looking at the benefits of shared-ownership businesses (which don't pay their CEOs silly amounts of money because they are well-governed). I'm going to be reviewing this one for The Independent.

For all those interested in current events – and who isn't? – Yale University Press is offering a free download of chapters from some of its books on the region. It covers Algeria, Egypt and Yemen.

The featured books are:
Egypt on the
Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak Tarek Osman looks at the situation of
his fellow young Egyptians – tech-savvy and full of passion, but deeply
frustrated by the corrupt, economically stagnant Egyptian state.

Algeria: Anger of the
Dispossessed Martin Evans and John Phillips ask how long Algerians
will put up with their repressive military regime, whose only opposition
consists of intermittent al-Qaeda attacks.

Yemen: Dancing on the
Heads of Snakes Victoria Clark analyses the prospects for a country
with 40% unemployment, near-exhausted water supplies, and a long-running
rebellion in the southern provinces.