Insight From Inside the Mortgage Crisis
It hadn't even hit the bookstores before this month's Color of Money Book Club selection, "Busted," set off a flurry of Internet conversations.</br></br>Sanctimonious critics have slammed this book in the blogosphere, where people can sling anonymous potshots they would never have the guts to say to someone's face.</br></br>"Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown" (W.W. Norton, $25.95) by Edmund L. Andrews is the story of how a well-educated, highly paid economics reporter for the New York Times, whose beat includes covering the Federal Reserve, ended up with almost a half-million-dollar mortgage that he and his wife, Patty, couldn't afford.</br></br>Unfortunately, a rather regrettable omission mars this intriguing personal account. Andrews failed to mention that his wife had filed for bankruptcy -- twice. She filed once to get out from under debt accumulated because of her failed first marriage and a second time to again shed debt amassed while raising four children as a single mother with little, if any, child support.</br></br>"Had I to do it again, I would have included that material," Andrews told me in a telephone interview. "I could have written a whole chapter about Patty's problems with her ex-husband and her problems with getting child support."