If you are investing in technology shares or a technology fund with your eyes to the sky, get this book. Author Charles R Morris has a fantastic, almost privileged, way with words. He describes other times in history when investors became so enthralled with the promise of new ways of doing things that they threw good money after bad. He describes how the British bank Barings largely financed the construction of the American railroad system, the Internet of the last century. And while America got a great railroad system, British investors did not do so well, as he documents in the chapter, "Fleecing the British". "The completion of the transcontinental railroad link in America in 1869 inspired financial imaginations, and London swarmed with a new breed of stock jobbers pushing American ventures of every description ... an immense variety of North American rail ventures--almost all of which came to grief", Morris says. He unearths tremendous facts and weaves them together in a magical tale that is spellbinding. "The market crash of 1892-93 was mostly about railroads, which accounted for almost 60 per cent of all stock market issues. Even the endlessly masochistic Europeans had had enough." The first third of the book recounts the building of the American system of credit and exchange, while the latter two-thirds describes the various financial collapses in the last 20 years. Morris, a financial historian, sheds new light on the LBOs, junk bonds, hedge funds and other financial rises and falls during our lives. Even though we"ve all lived through enough in the last 20 years, he explains them in a way that offers new insight into well-trodden ground. --Bruce McWilliams