Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, is the ideal writer to analyze the behavior that led to the current credit crisis. The bad news is that he is only the editor of this collection of articles. The good news is that he has not been constrained by false modesty and has chosen six of his own pieces for this book. As one would expect, they are witty, incisive and original. Mr. Lewis also contributes an introduction to each of the sections dealing with the four main panics of the last 21 years; the stock market crash of 1987, the Asian crisis of 1997-98 , the bursting of the dotcom bubble after 2000 and the current housing and banking bust. It is worth remembering, as we think the gloomy economic future, how each of the previous three crises was greeted with apocalyptic (天启的) headlines. "How many times does the end of the world as we know it needs to arrive before we realize that it’s not the end of the world as we know it" Mr. Lewis writes, in perhaps the most telling sentence of the book. The compiler’s contribution apart, the selection is a mixed bag. The aim was to give readers a flavor of sentiment before the bubbles burst, as well as analysis of the result. But the result is too much flat news stories and the book only really comes to life with the last two sections ,perhaps because the follies of dotcom valuations and subprime loans(次级抵押贷款) seem so fresh in the memory. It is hard not to miss days when Computer.com( a website for new users of technology) was able to spend 60% of its seed funding on a 90-second ad during the 2000 Super Bowl. Or when the shares of Books-A-Million, a retailer, rose tenfold within three days on the back of an upgrade to its existing website. How did Books-A-Million make its profit increase ten times