Terrifying? Sort of, yes, although in that forensic way that looking back on a human tragedy is frightening but also morbidly fascinating. In fact, I think Lewis could have done more throughout to emphasize the human disaster that was the early 2000s housing bubble and collapse. Instead, for much of the book you join Lewis in simply shaking your head at the combination of stupidity and greed that brought down a vast swathe of the global economy at the turn of the 21st century. It's easy to forget in retrospect the consequences of that greed and stupidity: so many lives ruined, while the architects of the disaster gave themselves healthy bonuses with taxpayer bailouts. A Captivating book? For me, yes, definitely: I quite literally couldn't put it down (insofar as that expression works for ebooks ... couldn't turn it off?). Lewis does an excellent job of explaining and personalizing the story of the 2008 crash. As both a political philosopher and a quantitative social scientist, I appreciated that Lewis took the high road, for the most part avoiding the (not unreasonable) temptation to bash economists and other social scientists ("no one saw it coming!!! you call that a science??" ... which makes about as much sense as berating police investigators and the justice system for not predicting the exact time and place of some ingenious heist: it's hard to do good predictive modelling and causal analysis when the key players are outright lying to you ... but I digress ...). In short, a really good read for anyone with even a passing interest in recent economic history.