Gwynne’s funny, often astonishing, tale of a youth spent lending American money south of the equator adds a much-needed dash of color to what is now the dreary and all-too-familiar story of how bankers led the Third World and the industrialized world alike into the sorry mess we now know as the international debt crisis. Furthermore, his experience as a former insider at Cleveland Trust, a “regional” bank, enables him to explain the perspective of banks other than the big money-center operations that dominate finance in New York, Chicago, and California. The big boys’ activities in Latin America and elsewhere are more publicized, but the smaller regional banks’ role in the lending boom and the debt crisis was in many ways just as important. Collectively, the regionals constitute a major power bloc; they hold 43 percent of the total foreign debt owed to our banks. (The top 15 banks have the rest.)