The main problem is that the book doesn’t know what it wants to be: a serious history; a scandalized litany of recent scandals; a practical guide for policy makers; or a sociological deconstruction of the culture that fed the boom. Although it may be possible to combine all these effectively in a single volume, in practice the attempt gives Origins of the Crash the disjointed quality of a work in progress. Rather than extend or deepen the themes raised previously in his columns, Mr. Lowenstein simply repeats them ad nauseam--then stretches to make connections where none logically exist.

Mr. Lowenstein begins by identifying the Leveraged buy-out (L.B.O.) boom of the 1980’s as the cultural moment when the concept of “shareholder value” became a pretext for enriching executives and promoters: “When an L.B.O. failed, society was poorer–jobs were lost, innovations were forgone–but the raiders simply went on to the next deal. The L.B.O. operators bore a moral hazard, for they had nothing to lose.”

This view of the world ignores the reality that the “raider” supplies the 25 to 50 percent of the capital structure that is equity, and that he has everything to lose (a number of them actually have lost everything). That’s why private equity funds that sponsor L.B.O.’s (all but a few of which are now barred from hostile “raids” under the terms of their fund agreements) also typically require their operating executives to invest equity. Also, if a good company has a bad capital structure it does not go out of business, but is instead usually restructured. Debt holders take a haircut, equity holders take a bigger haircut (or are wiped out) and life goes on; jobs and innovations are not necessarily forgone.

Never mind. Mr. Lowenstein is intent on his thesis that the fetishization of ever higher stock prices has lead to a culture in which shareholders and board members have given unwarranted and imprudent leeway to management to get share prices up. We should not be surprised, he argues, when executives who are given a “free ride” through exorbitant stock option grants increase a company’s risk profile or even fudge numbers to get a short term lift in the stock price. “The progression from L.B.O.’s to stock options to a market bubble was nurtured by a consistent ethos,” Mr. Lowenstein argues. Indeed, Mr. Lowenstein contends that absolutely everything about the boom and subsequent crash can be explained by this ethos of “shareholder value”: “Virtually every transgression flowed from this simple corruption,” he asserts.

But what should we do about this? Mr. Lowenstein doesn’t propose an alternative to the current share price as a way of calculating “value.” And rewarding managers on a different basis from shareholders raises important issues that are simply left unexamined. Saying that managers should concentrate on the long term is easier than structuring compensation systems to encourage long-term thinking. Mr. Lowenstein also fails to explore an apparent dilemma: Increased disclosure, which he lauds, is likely to aggravate the volatility of stocks, which he abhors. Beyond a very superficial discussion of the recent Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance legislation, there’s no systematic discussion here of the policy implications of his views. Mr. Lowenstein tells us time and again that rules that focus on disclosure are not enough, but never tells us what broader rules he would propose. Instead we get chapters rehashing the already well-covered ground of the Enron and WorldCom scandals.

Mr. Lowenstein has set the bar high by inviting comparisons with the classic of the genre, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash (1955), a brilliant anatomy of the 1929 debacle. Mr. Galbraith argued that the search for villains was misguided and that the 1929 crash was the “product of the free choice and decisions of thousands of individuals” who were “impelled to it by the seminal lunacy which has always seized people who are seized in turn with the notion that they can become very rich.” Of course he realized and documented with ferocious wit the extent to which “[t]here were many Wall Streeters who helped foster this insanity.”

One of the deficiencies of Mr. Lowenstein’s book is the complete absence of wit. Indeed, he has the slightly hectoring tone of someone trying to hard to make an argument he knows doesn’t quite hold together. Also missing from Mr. Lowenstein’s book is the sense of perspective that Mr. Galbraith brought to his book—which was written 25 years after the event. My guess is that the wounds from our latest bout of collective lunacy are still too raw—we may have to wait a quarter of a century for the definitive account.

Jonathan A. Knee is a Senior Managing Director at Evercore Partners and an Adjunct Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School.

This is just one of many fascinating issues raised by the recent emergence of the multibillion-dollar industry that Debora L. Spar examines in The Baby Business. A Harvard Business School professor and chair of a program called “Making Markets Work,” Ms. Spar wrote The Baby Business for the Harvard Business School Press. Unfortunately, despite its timeliness and pedigree, the book fails to provide either a thorough description of the remarkable developments in this field or a usable framework for analyzing them. Ms. Spar consistently deploys economic and business jargon in ways that are either unhelpful or inconsistent with the raw facts as she herself presents them.

Her central premise is that “infants and children are indeed being sold” and that, rather than pretend they are not, we should analyze this “market” to ensure that it operates appropriately. The “market” encompasses everything from adoption to in vitro fertilization to high-tech procedures to eliminate birth defects. As soon as she turns to the supposed characteristics of this market, however, Ms. Spar runs into trouble. Demand in the fertility market, she claims, “is nearly constant,” with “the crucial fact [being] that 10 to 15 percent of any given population” is infertile. Yet the data provided demonstrate that a woman’s age is the single biggest variable in the likelihood of a successful pregnancy. Presumably, therefore, the fact that women are systematically waiting longer and longer to have children is inconsistent with the “crucial fact” of “nearly constant” demand.

Though she includes plenty of charts and statistics, Ms. Spar’s methodology is essentially anecdotal. She describes a hypothetical situation in order to suggest that fertility clinics have an economic incentive to continue to provide expensive treatments to largely hopeless cases. Only five pages later, however, she quotes clinic directors to the effect that some service providers refuse to treat difficult cases because published “success” statistics are an important marketing tool. It’s all true, I’m sure—but Ms. Spar doesn’t even acknowledge the inconsistency of the two observations, much less make any effort to analyze whether, on a net basis, the “market” is providing too much or too little treatment.

Her essentially journalistic approach sometimes wanders into tabloid territory: “Most [sperm bank] recipients … never want their offspring to know that Daddy arrived via FedEx.”

There’s nothing wrong with an objective, journalistic approach per se, but Ms. Spar seems to strain to avoid expressing any substantive point of view on the myriad controversies touched on in her narrative. The one broad argument she does make isn’t particularly compelling: this single “market” demands a single, holistic regulatory regime.

It’s actually impossible to judge this argument on its merits because, after 200 pages, Ms. Spar declines to say what specific regulatory regime she would propose. How can we be expected to compare the current fragmented regulatory framework with an integrated one to be named later? The justification for punting on the core thesis of the book is equally unsatisfactory: “[T]he baby business,” she offers by way of explanation, “is running so quickly and expanding so radically that time is likely to render any detail moot.”

Instead, we’re encouraged to engage in a healthy, open political dialogue to develop the best framework. To help us along, Ms. Spar mentions a variety of principles and factors that could shape the debate. These do not amount to a roadmap: Be equitable, she tells us, and take into account the cost of any proposal.

Strangely absent from Ms. Spar’s calculus of conception are the children that it produces. In all the pages describing factors and variables to be weighed, she barely mentions (and then only parenthetically) the governing principle in most family-law cases: the best interests of the child. In her description of the adoption “market,” Ms. Spar oddly describes “open” adoption (which she defines as a system in which “birth parents actually choose the adoptive parents and the child is fully informed”) as a “radical” fringe phenomenon. But some type of openness—one form or another of continuing communication between the birth parents and the child—is the general trend rather than the exception. Significantly, the regulatory movement for openness was driven by the generation of adopted children who came of age in the second half of the last century. The interests that Ms. Spar focuses on almost exclusively are those of the parties to the “transaction” in the “marketplace.” My guess is that whatever regulatory regime or mosaic of different regimes takes hold in the future will be largely driven by the children who are born thanks to the recent wave of technological innovation.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and director of the media program at Columbia Business School.

This is just one of many fascinating issues raised by the recent emergence of the multibillion-dollar industry that Debora L. Spar examines in The Baby Business. A Harvard Business School professor and chair of a program called “Making Markets Work,” Ms. Spar wrote The Baby Business for the Harvard Business School Press. Unfortunately, despite its timeliness and pedigree, the book fails to provide either a thorough description of the remarkable developments in this field or a usable framework for analyzing them. Ms. Spar consistently deploys economic and business jargon in ways that are either unhelpful or inconsistent with the raw facts as she herself presents them.

Her central premise is that “infants and children are indeed being sold” and that, rather than pretend they are not, we should analyze this “market” to ensure that it operates appropriately. The “market” encompasses everything from adoption to in vitro fertilization to high-tech procedures to eliminate birth defects. As soon as she turns to the supposed characteristics of this market, however, Ms. Spar runs into trouble. Demand in the fertility market, she claims, “is nearly constant,” with “the crucial fact [being] that 10 to 15 percent of any given population” is infertile. Yet the data provided demonstrate that a woman’s age is the single biggest variable in the likelihood of a successful pregnancy. Presumably, therefore, the fact that women are systematically waiting longer and longer to have children is inconsistent with the “crucial fact” of “nearly constant” demand.

Though she includes plenty of charts and statistics, Ms. Spar’s methodology is essentially anecdotal. She describes a hypothetical situation in order to suggest that fertility clinics have an economic incentive to continue to provide expensive treatments to largely hopeless cases. Only five pages later, however, she quotes clinic directors to the effect that some service providers refuse to treat difficult cases because published “success” statistics are an important marketing tool. It’s all true, I’m sure—but Ms. Spar doesn’t even acknowledge the inconsistency of the two observations, much less make any effort to analyze whether, on a net basis, the “market” is providing too much or too little treatment.

Her essentially journalistic approach sometimes wanders into tabloid territory: “Most [sperm bank] recipients … never want their offspring to know that Daddy arrived via FedEx.”

There’s nothing wrong with an objective, journalistic approach per se, but Ms. Spar seems to strain to avoid expressing any substantive point of view on the myriad controversies touched on in her narrative. The one broad argument she does make isn’t particularly compelling: this single “market” demands a single, holistic regulatory regime.

It’s actually impossible to judge this argument on its merits because, after 200 pages, Ms. Spar declines to say what specific regulatory regime she would propose. How can we be expected to compare the current fragmented regulatory framework with an integrated one to be named later? The justification for punting on the core thesis of the book is equally unsatisfactory: “[T]he baby business,” she offers by way of explanation, “is running so quickly and expanding so radically that time is likely to render any detail moot.”

Instead, we’re encouraged to engage in a healthy, open political dialogue to develop the best framework. To help us along, Ms. Spar mentions a variety of principles and factors that could shape the debate. These do not amount to a roadmap: Be equitable, she tells us, and take into account the cost of any proposal.

Strangely absent from Ms. Spar’s calculus of conception are the children that it produces. In all the pages describing factors and variables to be weighed, she barely mentions (and then only parenthetically) the governing principle in most family-law cases: the best interests of the child. In her description of the adoption “market,” Ms. Spar oddly describes “open” adoption (which she defines as a system in which “birth parents actually choose the adoptive parents and the child is fully informed”) as a “radical” fringe phenomenon. But some type of openness—one form or another of continuing communication between the birth parents and the child—is the general trend rather than the exception. Significantly, the regulatory movement for openness was driven by the generation of adopted children who came of age in the second half of the last century. The interests that Ms. Spar focuses on almost exclusively are those of the parties to the “transaction” in the “marketplace.” My guess is that whatever regulatory regime or mosaic of different regimes takes hold in the future will be largely driven by the children who are born thanks to the recent wave of technological innovation.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and director of the media program at Columbia Business School.

If anyone could fill this role—a living icon who embodies the best of a vocation in crisis—it would be John C. Whitehead, the 83-year-old chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Mr. Whitehead worked at Goldman Sachs from 1947 to 1984, the last eight years as co-chairman. Between his departure from Goldman Sachs and his current appointment by Governor George Pataki in 2001, Mr. Whitehead served as Deputy Secretary of State under George Shultz, as well as chairman of the New York Fed and leader of literally dozens of nonprofit boards, from the International Rescue Committee to the United Nations Association.

A Life in Leadership is Mr. Whitehead’s crisp, no-nonsense autobiography. Not a particularly introspective man, he lays out his life and career, identifies what he sees as the highs and the lows, and proposes a handful of overarching principles that might be of use to the general reader. But although discretion is an admirable quality in an investment banker, diplomat and leader, it doesn’t necessarily make for a particularly revealing autobiography. There are times when this reader yearned for Mr. Whitehead to break out of character and dish a little dirt. Though he gently chides his adversaries in business and public life (for a Republican, he has surprisingly little time for either Bush père or fils), one is left to speculate on the full scope of the conflicts that led to Mr. Whitehead’s occasional, somewhat cryptic aspersions.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss this autobiography as simply an unrevealing effort by an old man to provide an official record of his accomplishments. In particular, one cannot read the 60 pages of A Life in Leadership devoted to Mr. Whitehead’s career at Goldman Sachs without being overwhelmed both by the magnitude of his contribution to the investment-banking industry and the contrast to the values that prevail there today.

Early in Mr. Whitehead’s Goldman career, he became assistant to the legendary Sidney Weinberg, who led the institution from 1930 almost until his death in 1969. In addition to working with Weinberg on a wide array of projects, including the 1956 Ford I.P.O. that represented Goldman’s arrival as a major investment-banking player, Mr. Whitehead did something quite remarkable that changed Goldman—and investment banking—forever. Against some significant internal resistance, he institutionalized the greatness of Sidney Weinberg.

Mr. Whitehead realized that with Weinberg well into his 70’s, the firm was at risk, because all of its relationships were really Weinberg’s. Mr. Whitehead accordingly established a regionally organized “New Business Department” that would not only provide institutional continuity for Weinberg’s relationships, but also actively call on a targeted list of other corporations within assigned geographies. This latter role was revolutionary at the time; it was then viewed as unseemly to actually solicit business. But by establishing the function and imbuing it with the values of Sidney Weinberg—client loyalty, integrity, first-class service—Goldman created a sales infrastructure and a network of deep corporate relationships that not only survived Weinberg, but ultimately took Goldman to the global leadership position it still holds today. (When Mr. Whitehead established the department, Goldman was ranked only 15th among investment banks.)

Mr. Whitehead notes with some pride that an early memo he produced with nine basic principles for new business bankers to follow still adorns the wall of at least one Goldman banker. I can report that the memo circulates to this day, surreptitiously faxed and e-mailed: I’ve seen photocopies of it in the offices of wise bankers at every major institution on the street. A Life in Leadership reproduces the memo in full.

Mr. Whitehead doesn’t pause to reflect on the metamorphosis of the investment-banking industry in the two decades since his retirement from Goldman. Always circumspect, he claims that his early concerns that Goldman’s “transformation to a publicly owned company” might undermine its commitment to “the emphasis on always acting in the client’s interest … the importance of teams [and] holding to high ethical standards” were overblown. Rather weakly, he asserts that the firm has maintained these values “pretty well” and, in any case, “on the whole, better than the others”—hardly a ringing endorsement of either his alma mater or the industry.

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect Mr. Whitehead to second-guess his successors in an industry whose finer qualities he helped establish. The decency and humility on display in this book provide a striking counterpoint to the attitude of most big-shot investment bankers of the current era. And if leading by example is what John Whitehead means to do, maybe his character is the most powerful lesson of A Life in Leadership. The values of today’s conglomerate investment bankers—focused on the short term, obsessed with self-promotion, heedless of apparent conflicts—are not the only values. If we hope to recapture a different industry ethos, this book should be required reading for all new hires.

Jonathan A. Knee, a Goldman Sachs investment banker in the 1990’s, is now director of the media program at Columbia Business School and a senior managing director at Evercore Partners.

If anyone could fill this role—a living icon who embodies the best of a vocation in crisis—it would be John C. Whitehead, the 83-year-old chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Mr. Whitehead worked at Goldman Sachs from 1947 to 1984, the last eight years as co-chairman. Between his departure from Goldman Sachs and his current appointment by Governor George Pataki in 2001, Mr. Whitehead served as Deputy Secretary of State under George Shultz, as well as chairman of the New York Fed and leader of literally dozens of nonprofit boards, from the International Rescue Committee to the United Nations Association.

A Life in Leadership is Mr. Whitehead’s crisp, no-nonsense autobiography. Not a particularly introspective man, he lays out his life and career, identifies what he sees as the highs and the lows, and proposes a handful of overarching principles that might be of use to the general reader. But although discretion is an admirable quality in an investment banker, diplomat and leader, it doesn’t necessarily make for a particularly revealing autobiography. There are times when this reader yearned for Mr. Whitehead to break out of character and dish a little dirt. Though he gently chides his adversaries in business and public life (for a Republican, he has surprisingly little time for either Bush père or fils), one is left to speculate on the full scope of the conflicts that led to Mr. Whitehead’s occasional, somewhat cryptic aspersions.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss this autobiography as simply an unrevealing effort by an old man to provide an official record of his accomplishments. In particular, one cannot read the 60 pages of A Life in Leadership devoted to Mr. Whitehead’s career at Goldman Sachs without being overwhelmed both by the magnitude of his contribution to the investment-banking industry and the contrast to the values that prevail there today.

Early in Mr. Whitehead’s Goldman career, he became assistant to the legendary Sidney Weinberg, who led the institution from 1930 almost until his death in 1969. In addition to working with Weinberg on a wide array of projects, including the 1956 Ford I.P.O. that represented Goldman’s arrival as a major investment-banking player, Mr. Whitehead did something quite remarkable that changed Goldman—and investment banking—forever. Against some significant internal resistance, he institutionalized the greatness of Sidney Weinberg.

Mr. Whitehead realized that with Weinberg well into his 70’s, the firm was at risk, because all of its relationships were really Weinberg’s. Mr. Whitehead accordingly established a regionally organized “New Business Department” that would not only provide institutional continuity for Weinberg’s relationships, but also actively call on a targeted list of other corporations within assigned geographies. This latter role was revolutionary at the time; it was then viewed as unseemly to actually solicit business. But by establishing the function and imbuing it with the values of Sidney Weinberg—client loyalty, integrity, first-class service—Goldman created a sales infrastructure and a network of deep corporate relationships that not only survived Weinberg, but ultimately took Goldman to the global leadership position it still holds today. (When Mr. Whitehead established the department, Goldman was ranked only 15th among investment banks.)

Mr. Whitehead notes with some pride that an early memo he produced with nine basic principles for new business bankers to follow still adorns the wall of at least one Goldman banker. I can report that the memo circulates to this day, surreptitiously faxed and e-mailed: I’ve seen photocopies of it in the offices of wise bankers at every major institution on the street. A Life in Leadership reproduces the memo in full.

Mr. Whitehead doesn’t pause to reflect on the metamorphosis of the investment-banking industry in the two decades since his retirement from Goldman. Always circumspect, he claims that his early concerns that Goldman’s “transformation to a publicly owned company” might undermine its commitment to “the emphasis on always acting in the client’s interest … the importance of teams [and] holding to high ethical standards” were overblown. Rather weakly, he asserts that the firm has maintained these values “pretty well” and, in any case, “on the whole, better than the others”—hardly a ringing endorsement of either his alma mater or the industry.

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect Mr. Whitehead to second-guess his successors in an industry whose finer qualities he helped establish. The decency and humility on display in this book provide a striking counterpoint to the attitude of most big-shot investment bankers of the current era. And if leading by example is what John Whitehead means to do, maybe his character is the most powerful lesson of A Life in Leadership. The values of today’s conglomerate investment bankers—focused on the short term, obsessed with self-promotion, heedless of apparent conflicts—are not the only values. If we hope to recapture a different industry ethos, this book should be required reading for all new hires.

Jonathan A. Knee, a Goldman Sachs investment banker in the 1990’s, is now director of the media program at Columbia Business School and a senior managing director at Evercore Partners.

It's hard to think of a practicing attorney more consistently associated with any single area of litigation than Floyd Abrams and the First Amendment. Since successfully representing The New York Times over 30 years ago in the Pentagon Papers case, he's been the go-to guy for media companies seeking either to defend free-speech principles or to avoid paying huge sums to unhappy news subjects.

In Speaking Freely, Mr. Abrams seems to have two related objectives. First, and primarily, he means to provide an engaging account of certain cases he has tried since 1971. Second, he wants to provide an explanation and justification of his philosophical transformation during this period.

When he began practicing law, Mr. Abrams' views were "greatly influenced" by Justice Felix Frankfurter, who "often treated the press more as an irresponsible and even dangerous nuisance than as an institution that could legitimately benefit society." Today, within a constitutional framework that provides many protections to the individual citizen, Mr. Abrams' views are closely aligned with those of the ACLU, which treats speech not as an important freedom but as the freedom that "should outweigh all but the most vital competing societal interests, and even then only in the narrowest of circumstances."

Mr. Abrams is quite successful at chronicling his career. It may help that I'm a bit of a trial junkie, but he paints a vivid portrait of the players, the strategies and the drama underlying a handful of well-chosen cases. Even where the trial has no significant jurisprudential import, Mr. Abrams manages to hold our interest and our sympathy. This is certainly true when investigator Jules Kroll manages to dig up a credible witness to a 20-year-old drug deal in the midst of a long-delayed libel trial initiated by a supposedly innocent Turkish businessman who had been described as a heroin trafficker in a Pulitzer Prize–winning Newsday series. It's equally true when we watch famous red-baiter Victor Lasky self-immolate on the stand in his disastrous libel suit against ABC.

Although he bends over backwards, as any good free-speech defender must, to commend those who thoughtfully articulate views different from his own, Mr. Abrams doesn't sugarcoat his opinion of the litigants, counsel or judges with whom he has tangled. Characters as diverse as Wayne Newton and Rudolph Giuliani come in for fairly devastating-and compelling-criticism. Even the much-beloved Senator John McCain is deliciously skewered as basically unfit for high public office.

Significantly less successful are Mr. Abrams' efforts to convince us that his conversion to absolutist defender of First Amendment rights is rooted in more than the tendency shared by many lawyers "to persuade themselves of their clients' virtues." A number of Mr. Abrams' own observations seem to undercut his position that this Constitutional right is worthy of some special status relative to others. For instance, he notes that much of what we take for granted as settled First Amendment law only came about as a result of Supreme Court cases decided since the 1960's. Furthermore, he grants that the framers had no very clear idea of what they meant by the broad requirement that Congress enact "no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." Mr. Abrams points out that in the early days of the republic, both Congress and the courts assumed they had the power to restrict all sorts of speech that today would be protected. None of this seems to support a Constitutional jurisprudence that puts the First Amendment first not only chronologically but in all other respects as well.

Giving Mr. Abrams the benefit of the doubt, one might interpret his argument as being based on policy considerations rather than constitutional law. He ends his book with some observations comparing speech protections in the U.S. to those of other democracies such as Canada, England, France, Germany and Israel. If the cases discussed here had been brought in those other nations, Mr. Abrams concedes, he might not have won any of them. This admission undercuts the so-called "slippery slope" argument that free-speech advocates trot out to justify the broadest possible scope of protection: Curtail free speech, we're told, and we'll be on a "slippery slope" to fascism. There are plenty of reasons why I'm happy not to be Canadian, but this isn't one of them.

Mr. Abrams makes the comparison with other democratic nations in order to highlight the single arena in which the U.S. seems to offer less speech protection: journalists seeking to protect confidential sources. This issue is of particular interest to Mr. Abrams because he's currently representing The New York Times' Judith Miller and Time's Matt Cooper, who face possible jail time for failing to reveal their sources in connection with an investigation into the "outing" of undercover C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame. Mr. Abrams cites a European Court of Human Rights ruling for the proposition that protecting sources is important-otherwise they might be "deterred from assisting the press in informing the public on matters of the public interest."

The ruling cited by Mr. Abrams won't be of much help to his clients. The European Court also noted that revealing sources could be "justified by an overriding requirement in the public interest." In the Valerie Plame case, the reporters were not uncovering government wrongdoing-the leak itself was the wrongdoing. Congress passed a law that made it illegal to disclose the names of undercover agents. Enforcing that law sounds to me like a "requirement in the public interest."

If Congress had wanted to make exceptions, it certainly could have-but any loophole that allowed this situation would have gutted the law. And Congress never provided a blanket exemption shielding reporters from the obligation we all share to assist in grand-jury investigations. If these conditions "deter" someone from illegally disclosing the name of an undercover agent to a reporter, there's no great loss to society. Mr. Abrams position here is weak-in fact, it was sweepingly rejected by a Feb. 15 federal appeals court decision. Even the avowed "First Amendment extremists" at Slate.com have urged Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper to fire Mr. Abrams and hire instead someone who will quietly cut a deal with the prosecutors.

Floyd Abrams is a litigator, not a politician, historian or philosopher. And if his book is any indication, he's remarkably effective: The best litigators are great storytellers, and the stories this litigator tells here are intrinsically interesting and provide the framework for understanding how the U.S. came to have the broadest free-speech protections of any democracy in the world. And yet one closes the book with the sense that it easily could have turned out differently-and that the story is not quite over. How the press and others use our unprecedented level of freedom in the future will undoubtedly determine how the courts and Congress change the contours of what we're at liberty to say.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and the director of the media program at Columbia Business School.

Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story, by Kurt Eichenwald. Broadway Books, 742 pages, $26.

The spectacular disintegration of Enron in 2001 left many shattered lives in its wake, both low-level workers whose pensions became worthless, and-at the other end of the culpability spectrum-executives, bankers and accountants who are now awaiting trial, sentencing or release. In between is a vast gray area filled with employees, advisors, regulators and politicians who have spent many of the intervening years providing depositions, justifying their choices and trying to reclaim their reputations.

One of the silent victims of Enron has been the book-publishing industry. Each year after 2001 brought forth a new batch of books on the subject, and these tomes all had one thing in common: They didn't sell well. The injury to the publishers, however, was largely self-inflicted. Most of the books were just plain bad or at least misguided. Many of the authors suffered from a disorder not dissimilar to that which animated the Enron scandal in the first place-a delusional sense both of their own importance and their ability to produce superior results simply by virtue of who they were. This is certainly true of Power Failure by Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins, a marginal player in the overall story who won 15 minutes of fame after Congressional staffers turned her into a highly unlikely Joan of Arc. The same goes for 24 Days by two Wall Street Journal staffers who seemed to believe that the details of their intrepid reporting in the days leading up to the bankruptcy was the most thrilling aspect of the whole episode.

Yet even the best of the books produced during this period have failed to generate any excitement among bookstore customers. The Smartest Guys in the Room (2003), by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, is still the definitive book on the subject. Ms. McLean and Mr. Elkind effectively detail the culture, characters and context that created Enron. The book's failure to capture the public imagination could reflect our apparent preference for morality tales with a single villain who's vanquished at the last moment so that we can all go back to what we were doing before. In The Smartest Guys, however, everyone and every institution is guilty of something, and there's enough ethical and legal ambiguity to ensure that no one has to take any responsibility.

Just when it looked like the publishing industry had finally given up on the subject, here comes New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald with Conspiracy of Fools. Weighing in at 742 pages, it's almost as big as any two of the previous major contributions to this genre put together. Mr. Eichenwald appears to have talked to everyone more extensively and scoured the documents more exhaustively than anyone else. The book is organized chronologically in a sequence of short but powerfully vivid scenes, complete with dramatic dialogue and detailed descriptions covering everything from what people were wearing or eating to the décor. And the book even has a clear villain: Enron's chief financial officer, Andy Fastow, whose crimes-engineered for personal financial gain-ultimately caused the company's collapse. The result is that Conspiracy of Fools, despite its length, is an irresistible read and will no doubt one day make a highly entertaining film.

Yet there are aspects of Conspiracy of Fools that make one pause before declaring it an unqualified success. Some of it feels almost too good to be true. Although the extensive notes and sources look solid, there are moments when the quotes and descriptions of what a character is thinking at a given moment seem, well, a little too pat, even puzzling. For instance, why would Dick Cheney describe himself as from Texas when he's famously from Wyoming?

The entire subtext relating to Enron's broader political and business connections never has the payoff that the internal corporate intrigue does. A number of brief vignettes involving everyone fromRupertMurdochtoArnold Schwarzenegger come across as gratuitous name-dropping. There are multiple scenes at fund-raisers and Washington parties at which small talk is exchanged, but it never seems to go anywhere. Mr. Eichenwald makes much of the fact that President George W. Bush unsurprisingly tried to distance himself from Enron chairman and C.E.O. Ken Lay after the scandal broke, but he never convincingly makes the case that the two were particularly close. Mr. Lay was clearly on intimate terms with Bush père, but Mr. Eichenwald is reduced to citing Ann Richards' comments on Larry King Live as evidence that he was close to the son as well.

Finally, for all of the new texture provided, when I finished Conspiracy of Fools, I didn't feel as though I'd gained any fundamentally new perspective on the Enron fiasco-nothing I couldn't have gathered almost two years ago from The Smartest Guys. Some of the detail in the new book, particularly with respect to Jeff Skilling-who's remained something of an enigma until now-is genuinely riveting. But I don't know that it adds much to our understanding of the big picture.

By casting Mr. Fastow as the unambiguous old-fashioned scoundrel at the center of the disaster, Conspiracy of Fools may unintentionally give readers a false sense of security about the likelihood of so spectacular a meltdown ever occurring again. I'm not suggesting, by the way, that Mr. Eichenwald whitewashes the behavior of Messrs. Skilling and Lay, or indeed of others. But the extraordinary access to them enjoyed by the author allowed him to paint a more nuanced picture of their behavior and motivation. As the stock market and merger activity begin to approach pre-meltdown levels, we can take some comfort in the structural protections that have been put in place since Enron. But it would be a mistake to presume that these are enough to combat the underlying hubris, greed and ambition that still lurk in the financial, corporate and governmental sectors. Continued vigilance is needed to ensure that this combustible mixture doesn't explode again and precipitate the next market meltdown.

In the meantime, enjoy the book-the movie will be coming soon to a theater near you.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and director of the media program at Columbia Business School.

In a profession dominated by nerds, intellectual property (I.P.) lawyers have long served the useful role of letting other lawyers feel that at least they're not the nerdiest. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that in recent years we've seen a number of prominent I.P. scholars aggressively reinvent themselves as more accessible public intellectuals. The most notable example of this is Stephen Carter, who went from soft-spoken I.P. professor to Presidential adviser (on bioethics), then on to highly paid best-selling novelist.

The Internet boom has provided a more obvious and systematic path for scholars to pull themselves out of the I.P. ghetto and contribute to a debate of interest and relevance to a broad audience: one day cocooned in the dry arcana of copyright, trademark and patent law, the next spreading your wings as a new breed of legal superhero, the cyber-lawyer. Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and chair of something called the Creative Commons project, is probably the most prolific and influential of the I.P. scholars newly blessed with Internet street cred. Free Culture, Mr. Lessig's latest book, is a provocative and engaging polemic against The Man for trying to keep down his peeps hanging on the Net.

Free Culture comes in two distinct parts. I will focus here on the longer first part, which is a highly entertaining but utterly unconvincing argument for a fundamental rethinking of how we regulate creative content in the Internet era. The second part, which seems like an afterthought, is a poignant chronicle of Mr. Lessig's unsuccessful effort to have the latest legislative extension of copyright protections declared unconstitutional.

Mr. Lessig weaves together a tapestry of charming anecdote, history, and economic and legal theory to lead us to his conclusion that copyright regulation must be scaled back dramatically. His core argument is that the combined impact of three factors-"changing law, concentrated markets, and changing technology"-cries out for what he euphemistically refers to as certain "adjustments" to the law that would, in his view, "restore the balance that has traditionally defined" the relationship between the legal protections of creative property and the ability of anyone to engage in unfettered creativity.

Mr. Lessig is on firmest ground with respect to the "changing law" element of his thesis. During the first 150 years of our history, the maximum copyright term was extended only twice (from 28 years to 42 to 56); since 1962, however, Congress has extended the terms of existing copyrights 11 times to the current 95 years-which does seem like an awfully long time. Particularly compelling is Mr. Lessig's argument that any retroactive extension of copyrights-as many of the recent extensions have been-serves no useful social purpose.

Mr. Lessig is on shakiest ground when he tries to demonstrate that element of his argument which he concedes is most critical to his overall thesis: "In my view, all of these [other] changes would not matter much if it weren't for … [t]he change in the concentration and integration of media [over] the past twenty years." Here, instead of any kind of systematic argument, Mr. Lessig offers random anecdotes and statistics, some of which actually undercut his position: "There are twenty major newspaper publishers in the United States. The top ten film studios receive 99 percent of all film revenue. The ten largest cable companies account for 85 percent of all cable revenues. This is a market far from the free press the framers sought to protect." That adds up to 40 major media voices (actually 38, since one studio is also a newspaper publisher and another studio is also a cable company), and that doesn't include radio (satellite and terrestrial) and television broadcasters, cable programmers, multichannel satellite services or Internet content providers. Ironically, Mr. Lessig repeatedly cites Intel, a company with a greater than 80 percent market share in its industry, as the paradigm of a forward-looking company sympathetic to "free culture."

Of course there's been consolidation. But fragmentation of media has occurred significantly faster, resulting in less market power, not more. The same is true with respect to copyright law and changes in technology: New technologies mean I.P. regulation covers things it did not before, but the realm of the free and unregulated-as Mr. Lessig himself documents well when he describes the explosion of "blogs"-has grown much more quickly.

Mr. Lessig ends his argument with this "astonishing conclusion": "Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now. Never." If you think this statement accurately describes the world in which we now live, I'm not likely to change your mind. But if, like me, you think that we're living in a world where the barriers to "cultural" entry have never been lower, then you'll be curious to see how Mr. Lessig managed to end up somewhere so far from reality.

You'll have to read closely: His accessible style gives his polemic an air of reasonableness even when it is at its thinnest.

Extremists on the other side make Mr. Lessig seem downright sensible. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, claims that intellectual property should be treated like any other property under the law, whereas, in fact, the Constitution has a specific provision that allows Congress to secure intellectual property rights of "Author and Inventors" only for "limited Times." But Mr. Lessig's own arguments are similarly flawed: He suggests that the Constitution's free-speech provisions should somehow be read to require that the "limited Times" be very limited indeed. Again and again, Mr. Lessig subtly overstates his historic, practical or legal case-and, in the end, his credibility is undermined. To claim that Mr. Valenti's admittedly extreme position has "no reasonable connection to our actual legal tradition," for instance, ignores that the British common-law rule (which is arguably close to Mr. Valenti's position) was the law in this country until the first federal copyright statute was enacted in 1790.

At times, it seems that Mr. Lessig is using the advent of the Internet as a pretext to pursue a radical copyright-policy agenda. Many of the points he makes about the impact of new technology could have been made with the advent of the Xerox machine. Creativity survived the Xerox machine and will survive the Internet without the need for a fundamentally different legal regime. Indeed, the essential impact of the Internet is that it has dramatically lowered the barriers to both accessing and sharing all forms of creative output. That's why many of the examples Mr. Lessig cites to justify his proposals-restrictions on e-books or barriers to the creation of a digital archive-seem trivial in comparison with the explosion of new creative output that we experience all around us.

To be fair, some of Lawrence Lessig's policy proposals seem sensible, and might even be helpful at the margins. But the idea that they could have a meaningful impact on the ability of "Big Media" to "lock down culture and control creativity" is something only a nerdy I.P. lawyer would believe.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and an adjunct professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School.

A Sad, True Novel About Haiti

The Dew Breaker , by Edwidge Danticat. Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $22.

Only a few hours away by luxury jet lies an island paradise of palm trees and warm sand where the air itself feels forgiving. Lovely chocolate-skinned women wear pink nightgowns, jacarandas grow wild and the customary old-fashioned way to say "You're welcome" is to say "You're deserving." It's a charmed place where "the rain is sweeter, the dust is lighter," and the clouds in the sky are said to be caused by dear, departed relatives eating coconuts with God. Eating Coconuts with God , in fact, wouldn't be a bad title for a lighthearted book about such a quaintly blessed place. Except there's a hitch: Bloodshed is rampant.

And so the title of Edwidge Danticat's new novel about Haiti is not Eating Coconuts with God , but rather The Dew Breaker ; it's named for the central character, a professional government torturer whose M.O. was to "break into your house … before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves." He'd break the dew, then systematically break your bones.

Recent news photos from this island are notable mostly for the numbing sense of déjà vu they engender in the viewer. Chrome guns gleam in black hands, frenzied crowds jubilate in the streets by stomping the heads of political opponents, an air of grim festivity pervades, like a World Series victory celebration gone mad. Haiti is again aswirl with wide-smiling violence; the air that should reek of bougainvillea is once more perfumed with gunpowder.

In prose as supple and deadpan as the tropical landscape she describes, Ms. Danticat colors in the blanks behind the headlines. A pot-bellied police officer smells "like fried eggs and gasoline, like breakfast at the Amoco." Traumatized victims gibber in their sleep, wetting their beds "not with urine but with words." Innocent bystanders tend "to be silent a moment too long during an important conversation and then say too much." Others simply go bananas, like the father who manifests his insanity by "walking naked to the marketplace twice a week, clutching a rock in each fist." Yet life, perforce, goes on. Here's ordinary daily sexual yearning, as felt by a husband for a wife who has finally come from Haiti to join him in his rented American basement room after a separation of years: "She smelled good, a mixture of lavender and lime. He simply wanted to get her home, if home it was … and to reduce the space between them until there was no air for her to breathe that he was not breathing too."

Ms. Danticat has set herself a sacred mission: to give weight and dignity to those whose grainy faces we glimpse between sips of our morning coffee, "men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives." She writes about them in a voice that's so surprisingly flat as to be almost inert, as though run through a wringer.

Each chapter features a different character, nearer to or farther from the heart of darkness-violence engulfs even those distant from the epicenter. The reader needs to be something of a locksmith to fit the pieces together. "It's like a puzzle, a weird-ass kind of puzzle, man," one of the characters remarks, and you won't master all the connections until the closing pages, when it clicks into place with the aha of satisfaction. But the satisfaction is a hurtful one, radiating as it does from the central character, the eponymous dew breaker, who claims the final chapter for himself.

"One of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again," this torturer is not a nice fellow. "He liked questioning the prisoners, teaching them to play zo and bezik, stapling clothespins to their ears as they lost and removing them as he let them win, convincing them that their false victories would save their lives. He liked to paddle them with braided cowhide, stand on their cracking backs and jump up and down like a drunk on a trampoline, pound a rock on the protruding bone behind their earlobes until they couldn't hear the orders he was shouting at them, tie blocks of concrete to the end of sisal ropes and balance them off their testicles if they were men or their breasts if they were women." Perhaps the ultimate unforgivable injustice he commits is this: "He'd wound you, then try to soothe you with words, then he'd wound you again. He thought he was God."

Yet it's the singular achievement of this novel to make us feel bad for the bad guy. Who can be privy to his rationalizations and guilt, his familial love and childhood dreams, without acknowledging that even he-especially he-has within him the seeds of redemption? "You and me, we save him," his wife tells his daughter, when she learns the truth. "When I meet him, it made him stop hurt the people. This how I see it. He a seed thrown in rock. You, me, we make him take root."

The wistful contends with the brutish. The ghastliest atrocities-facial scalping "where skin was removed from dead victims' faces to render them unidentifiable," whipping the soles of the feet till they bleed, making casual foes drink a gallon of gas and then lighting a match-are counterbalanced by paeans to human beauty: eyes that are "chartreuse" or "velvet-brown," skin that is "the color of sorrel" or "silken and very black, her few wrinkles … more like beauty marks than signs of old age." Or this: "Beatrice threw her head back and let out an earsplitting laugh, contorting her face in such a way that her skin, had it been cloth, would have taken hours to iron out."

These details are delivered languidly, leaf by leaf, as it were, like the leaves falling from the green ash trees, "shaking ever so slightly in the afternoon breeze … seemingly suspended in the air, then falling ever so slowly as if cushioned by air bubbles." As they accumulate-the details of beauty no less inexorably than the details of torture-they acquire the specific gravity of truth.

Here we learn exactly what it feels like to inhabit a body that is no longer your own: "The preacher was thrown in the back of a truck. A group of Miliciens piled on top of him. He raised his feet close to his chest as they shoved him from side to side, pounding rifle butts on random parts of his body. His face was now pressed against the metal undulations of the truck bed, boot soles and heels raining down on him, cigarette butts being put out in his hair, which sizzled and popped like tiny grains of rock salt in an open fire …. Someone dragged him by the legs, pulled him forward, removing his jacket, and then he felt himself falling from the back of the truck onto the concrete. He fell on his face, crushing his forehead. His blood quickly soaked the blindfold, a warm veil of red covering the darkness over his eyes. He was being dragged by the legs over the rise of a curb. With each yank forward, a little bit of him was bruised, peeled away. He felt as though he was shedding skin, shedding voice, shedding sight, shedding everything he'd tried so hard to make himself into, a well-dressed man, a well-spoken man, a well-read man. He was leaving all that behind now with bits of his flesh in the ground, morsel by morsel being scraped off by pebbles, rocks, tiny bottle shards and cracks in the concrete."

In one of those odd quirks of human convergence, Jackie Onassis, diminutively disembarking a queen-sized yacht one day back in the 1970's, apparently made a vivid impression on the natives of Haiti. They liked her style. They liked her pink Bermuda shorts and her wide-rimmed sunglasses. Most of all, they liked her grace: "She lost her husband and two babies, yet she remained so beautiful. She made sadness beautiful."

With her grace and her imperishable humanity, her devotion to lives lived like "a pendulum between forgiveness and regret," Edwidge Danticat is every bit Jackie's equal. About her, too, it can be said: She makes sadness beautiful.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer .

Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner, by Nina Munk. HarperBusiness, 352 pages, $26.95.

Writing a satisfying book about the AOL–Time Warner merger and its aftermath is like getting a laugh from a joke when everybody knows the punch line-and yet the challenge of making this familiar territory seem worth going over again is taken up with gusto in two new books by talented journalists. Though neither author makes a serious effort to tell the broader story about the state of the media industry, the Internet boom and bust, or even why seemingly sensible mergers go horribly wrong, they provide such compelling detail about the train wreck that was AOL Time Warner that you can't turn away.

The title of Kara Swisher's book, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere , actually is the punch line of an old joke: It's what the enthusiastic youth answers when asked why he's digging in an enormous pile of manure. As Ms. Swisher demonstrates, the sentiment became an unofficial corporate mantra at AOL.

Ms. Swisher's extraordinary knowledge of AOL (she previously published a well-received history of the company, AOL.com ), accounts for her new book's strengths and its weakness. Her story about the T-shirts AOL's business-development team made up is alone worth the price of admission: After the Time Warner team complained during the rushed due diligence that the AOLers were "making it sound as if you're buying us," AOL produced shirts emblazoned with the concise reply, "Putz, we are."

But the AOL-centric nature of both the specific anecdotes and the overall perspective lead Ms. Swisher to miss several key aspects of the transaction's dynamics. She ends her book awkwardly with a discussion of 13 steps she believes would "fix" the AOL service itself-as if this were the most significant issue raised by the failed deal.

In Fools Rush In , Nina Munk provides more balance and even more juicy detail. Both books do a remarkable job of documenting the fact that the people at the top of AOL knew the jig was up: Their stock price had gotten way ahead of the growth the business had left to deliver. Steve Case and his bankers then undertook a systematic review of how to get out while the going was good. Mr. Case settled on Time Warner as the perfect asset.

Fools Rush In really delivers in its vivid portrait of Jerry Levin, the perfect mark for the con of the century. Brilliant, isolated, arrogant and emotionally fragile after the death of his son, Mr. Levin had become increasingly frustrated with his inability to bring Time Warner into the digital age. Mr. Case drew Mr. Levin in first by feigning a lack of interest in running the combined company himself and then by convincing him (over lots of wine) that "[b]y using the new technology to give people access to news and information, and to one another, Time Warner could reduce ignorance, intolerance, and injustice." So confident was Mr. Case of Mr. Levin's commitment to this messianic vision that he felt free to pull the ultimate bait-and-switch minutes before the hastily convened Time Warner board meeting to approve the deal. Not only was he not willing to be a non-executive chairman, Mr. Case told Mr. Levin, but he also wanted a number of the company's top executives to report directly to him. Mr. Levin relented. During the intervening year before the transaction closed, Mr. Levin pointedly refused to engage with his Time Warner colleagues, who had taken note of the obvious warning signs-the weakness of AOL's business, the aggressiveness of its accounting-andwere seeking ways to get out of the deal.

The guilty pleasure of watching so many powerful, intelligent people make fools of themselves during the era of Internet euphoria more than compensates for any weakness in either book. Still, it would have been nice if the authors had tried to address directly the basic question of whether this transaction ever made any sense at any price. To be sure, both authors point out that the promised $1 billion in cost synergies was a fantasy figure. But Ms. Swisher, for one, seems to suggest that the merger might have worked if it hadn't been for certain Time Warner executives-lacking the necessary Internet "DNA or … passion"-who were trying to sabotage the deal. If she really believes this, Ms. Swisher has missed one of the most important lessons of the AOL–Time Warner transaction.

Treating the AOL–Time Warner deal as an anachronism of the boom minimizes the strong similarities between it and bad media deals struck before and since. Ms. Munk correctly highlights the close parallels between this transaction and the earlier merger of Time and Warner. One of the most important similarities is that both destroyed shareholder value: She reminds us that it took Time Warner shares the better part of a decade to achieve the level of the rejected 1989 cash offer of $200 per share made by Gulf and Western (now called Paramount). But there's a parallel that Ms. Munk neglects to mention: The strategic justifications for both deals were largely spurious.

In addition to the supposed cost synergies, the AOL–Time Warner combination was meant to accelerate AOL's transition to broadband, to secure significant new cross-media advertising deals and to magically monetize "an awesome 130 million 'subscription relationships' in total." None of this was credible. Time Warner already had a thriving broadband service called Road Runner. If this service had been "blow[n] up," as Mr. Case wanted, that would have represented a dis- synergy of the deal. SBC Communications very successfully uses Yahoo to market its broadband service-but it doesn't need to merge with Yahoo to do so. Ms. Munk and Ms. Swisher both effectively highlight how the much-vaunted cross-media deals were few or fraudulent. And given that Time Warner never found much incremental benefit from having both magazine subscribers and cable subscribers, it was always unclear how adding I.S.P. subscribers to its revenue stream would jump-start the business.

Strangely, although the AOL–Time Warner deal has been repudiated, these kinds of "strategic" justifications for media deals in general have not. The recent investor presentation outlining the rationale for the NBC-Universal combination-entitled "Imagine the Possibilities"-was eerily familiar in this regard. Complete with up to $500 million in promised synergies (at least $100 million of which would be "revenue-related") and the promise that "Content Origination Drives Platforms," one slide showed a mosaic of the various brands of the combined entity and summed up the strategic rationale in a single word: "Wow!"

One media mogul was recently asked at the "off-the-record" Foursquare Conference why media companies have such a seemingly insatiable desire to make acquisitions. "Bigness sucks less than being small," he replied.

Media moguls are not alone in making foolish acquisitions or overpaying for sensible ones-but the fact that the media industry has consistently underperformed the market as a whole suggests an unhealthy propensity in this regard. It's not altogether surprising that businesses predicated on the notion that there's no such thing as bad publicity rarely see an acquisition that doesn't seem like a good idea. If AOL Time Warner doesn't teach media moguls to be more selective in defining the scope of potential "strategic acquisitions," media investors will continue to hear that giant sucking sound: It comes from their shrinking portfolios.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and an adjunct professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School.