The Economist reviewed Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves in this week’s edition, calling it “too good to put down….It is the story of the actors in the most extraordinary financial spectacle in 80 years, and it is told brilliantly. Other blow-by-blow accounts are in the works. It is hard to imagine them being this riveting.” Here is the full review.

It is meticulously researched, drawing on interviews with more than 200 of those who participated directly in the events it covers, including their handwritten notes and tape-recordings of critical meetings. The result is a compelling reconstruction of the drama surrounding the government seizure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman’s collapse, the rescue of American International Group (AIG), the subsequent market pandemonium and the shoring-up of big banks’ capital with public funds.

The Financial Times’ John Gapper calls Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves an “astonishing narrative of the epic financial crisis of 2008…an extraordinary achievement that will be hard to surpass as the definitive account.” Read the full review here.

Andrew Ross Sorkin has broken the Barbarians curse….Sorkin’s strength is that he knows Wall Street intimately and he brings to life its biggest domestic crisis with immense reporting zeal and narrative skill. Others will tell the story with more distance and perspective but, as a dramatic close-up, his book is hard to beat.

Bloomberg News’ James Pressley reviewed Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves on Thursday October 22, 2009.

Sorkin has pulled off a rare feat. He has turned more than 500 hours of interviews and documentary evidence ranging from e-mails to call logs into an engrossing fly-on-the-wall account of one of the most tumultuous years in U.S. history….What sets this account apart is its smooth synthesis of telling details, conversations and multiple story lines into a seamless narrative written in lean, unembroidered sentences. It reads like a thriller without the hype.

Read the full review here>>

Felix Salmon, writing on his Reuters blog following the publication of an excerpt of Too Big to Fail in Vanity Fair wrote:

If the excerpt gives any indication of the quality of the book as a whole, Sorkin has succeeded in writing the book of the crisis, with amazing levels of detail and access. Many books end up having much less detail than the day-to-day journalism in the papers, choosing instead to concentrate on the bigger picture. This one, by contrast, has a lot of detail….I’m looking forward to reading the book… This excerpt, more than anything else I’ve read in the orgy of one-year-later reminiscing, shows just how close the entire financial world came to collapse. It should be required reading for anybody in Congress who is breathing easily again and thinks that the worst is over and we don’t need to do too much in the way of regulatory reform.

Zach Carter of SNL Financial, writing about the excerpt of Too Big to Fail in Vanity Fair says:

Sorkin can write. His storytelling makes “Liar’s Poker” look like a children’s book….There are dozens of revelations in the piece…