Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and its Lessons, by Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson

The overriding problem with Firefighting is firefighting — to be specific, firefighting as a metaphor. The three people most responsible for saving the global financial system in the 2008 crisis —Ben Bernanke, US Federal Reserve chairman throughout the crisis; Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary under George W Bush; and Tim Geithner, New York Fed president and Treasury secretary under Barack Obama — are smarter and braver than I will ever be. But after the fifteenth or sixteenth reference to towering infernos, fire chiefs, kindling, dry brush, et cetera, I still wanted to break all 30 of their fingers so they could never torture the printed page again.