Editor’s note:  Lewis has made our library again. Wall Street misbehavior, specifically in this instance high frequency trading is his topic and as with his best books Mr. Lewis is able to make a complicated real life story both interesting and simpler. (Warning to my fellow creatives: The numerical detail necessary to establish the scam’s techniques were at times a workout for my non-numerical brain.) Like Billy Beane in “Moneyball,” Lewis builds a hero to tell this tale, this time Brad Katsuyama. Like Beane, Katsuyama fights the system by creating new rules. Our hero creates a chance to end to a real life scam being perpetrated in recent years in our financial markets. Shortly after the book’s publication, our government began looking into changes needed in the system. Will new scams come up? Of course, but thankfully there will always be a guy like Lewis with the brains, balls and creativity to bring them to light.

Excerpt: “The US stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world’s most public, most democratic financial market had become, in spirit, something more like a private viewing of a stolen work of art.”