In late 2009, during the most dizzying days of the financial crisis, Kirsten Grind—then a reporter for the Puget Sound Business Journal—wrote the first detailed stories about Washington Mutual. The bank would soon undergo the largest bank failure in American history.

     The story she tells provides a startling look at the manifold human failings that lay at the root of the Great Recession. What emerges is a tale of personalities caught up in the bubble of good times and easy money, a study of an industry deluded by seductive yet ultimately destructive financial instruments, and a history of an entire culture ultimately undone by financial collapse. Through the men and women of this drama—the bank’s executives and its customers, its shareholders and its regulators—readers come to understand how human nature and even the best of intentions led to a mighty fall.

     Written with a novelist’s feel for scene and character but rendered with a master journalist’s commitment to the truth, The Lost Bank is a compulsory and compelling book for understanding America’s recent history and its imperiled future.

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