The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

How it reads

The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It is narrative nonfiction (financial nonfiction, specifically), and its dominant mood is tense. The suspense is the kind you feel in your shoulders. It moves fast: plot-driven and hard to put down, the kind of book that carries you along even when you're tired.

It's set in a big city setting, in the recent past, told in the third person across several viewpoints. Its central concerns are power and politics, class and society and survival. In weight it sits in the middle: substantial without being heavy going.

It stands alone, so there's nothing else you need to read first or after. The ending is dark — no rescue, no neat bow. At 337 pages it's an ordinary novel's length. It's well known, the kind of book most keen readers have heard of.