Book Review for May, 2010
On the Brink, by Henry Paulson
Former Treasury Secretary, Hank’s Paulson’s book, On the Brink, is subtitled: “Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System.” This is no exaggeration. We were truly on the brink of a catastrophe comparable only to Black Friday in October, 1929. By comparison, 1987’s crash was only a blip on the radar screen. Who better to tell this story than Hank Paulson? And what a story he tells. The book reads like one of those heart pounding Harrison Ford movies of a Tom Clancy novel, or TV’s 24. But this is fact, not fiction.
I was surprised to discover, among many fascinating tidbits, that Paulson majored in English in college before entering Harvard Business School’s MBA program in 1968. This numbers cruncher knows how to write. He needs no co-author or ghost writer to tell a story he knows intimately. There will be a rash of books on the 2007-2009 near financial meltdown, mostly by academics and business journalists. But none will match this book by one of the key participants who helped save America’s economic bacon. This is a must read by anyone who is considering starting a business in 2010.
