Ben Bernanke’s new book is a must-read, which is to say it will be read only by those of us who must, of whom there are more than a few, which is the only possible explanation for our friends at Norton’s having had the chutzpah to hang a $35 price tag on it.
It is called The Courage to Act, and it follows Scott Walker’s Unintimidated and Robert Gates’s Duty in the unseemly tradition of self-important (and important) men writing books more or less titled Me and My Virtue. Ulysses S. Grant killed more men than cancer and saved the Republic from internal treachery while on a 40-year whiskey bender, and he called his personal memoirs “The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.” That was a work of art. The text of Mr. Bernanke’s memoir consists of 579 pages of score-settling and occasionally insipid self-justification featuring sentences such as “The OTS, AIG’s nominal regulator, showed little concern about the riskiness or opacity of AIG FP.” It is dreadful stuff, and you really should not read it unless you are somehow obliged to or are being paid.
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