Steve Fraser. Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. xxiii + 721 pp. ISBN 0-06-662048-1, $29.95 (cloth).

Steve Fraser has undertaken the daunting task of a culturalhistory of Wall Street. The result is a book that is at onceintriguing and exasperating, insightful and overstated, comprehensiveand flawed. The research is broad and imaginative but not deepin key areas and marred by small but silly errors. The writingis often lucid and sprightly but also strains too hard to beclever. Fraser organizes his narrative around four broad eras. Duringthe first one, the "Financial Frontier,"