FIVE BEST Bank Books Blue-chip tales of life on Wall Street.

1. "The Predators' Ball" by Connie Bruck (Simon & Schuster, 1988). Connie Bruck does an excellent job of explaining how the small investment-banking firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert came from off the radar screen in the late 1970s to the pinnacle of Wall Street power in a few short years. How Drexel basically created an entire market of junk-bond-fueled leveraged buyouts and how its senior executives made more in annual income than the GDP of some countries. And how they assembled a core group of investors (insurance companies and funds, primarily) who were willing to buy long-term debt obligations of below-investment-grade companies--and became so addicted to high returns that they were oblivious to looming debt disasters. The book's title comes from the all-too-evocative nickname for Drexel's annual junk-bond conference.
2. "Barbarians at the Gate" by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar (Harper & Row, 1990). This is the story of the biggest leveraged buyout of them all: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.'s $25 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco in 1988. Huge money, huge egos, billion-dollar mistakes and, in the end, not a great return for the people who bought RJR. "Barbarians at the Gate" reads like a novel. Its array of characters--including KKR's Henry Kravis, RJR chairman F. Ross Johnson and Shearson Lehman Hutton chairman Peter Cohen--can become a bit confusing, but the story is thoroughly entertaining. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, who were Journal reporters at the time, are superb in their detailing of the frenzied bidding war touched off by Johnson's surprise move to take RJR private by paying $75 a share (the price was $109 by the time KKR won out). Leveraged buyouts are still a common financial strategy, but the era of mega-leverage and of guppies swallowing whales ended with this deal.
3. "Bonfire of the Vanities" by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987). A fateful wrong turn taken by bond salesman Sherman McCoy in his Mercedes-Benz begins a cascade of errors in "Bonfire of the Vanities," but Tom Wolfe himself never puts a foot wrong in his wonderfully satirical first novel. Countless woes are visited upon McCoy after he blunders into the Bronx and accidentally touches off a racial incident that soon has New York City in an uproar and his life in epic turmoil. Though Wolfe skewers the "Masters of the Universe" culture of Wall Street in the 1980s, his true target is the city itself during a decade of big money, big crime and big-mouths like the Rev. Al Sharpton and Mayor Ed Koch. Sherman McCoy's life, chronicled with Wolfe's acid wit, comes undone speedily--exactly what happened to several top financial executives in that era.
4. "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis (Norton, 1989). Michael Lewis went on to write other best sellers, such as "Next" and "Moneyball," but "Liar's Poker" remains his most personal work--and his funniest. He labored for Salomon Brothers as a bond trader for four years, from 1984 through the crash of October 1987, apparently taking copious notes along the way. The result is a first-rate account of how the bond-trading side of the investment-banking business works, but the reporting is spiked with wicked asides and telling observations. The book's title comes from a game that Salomon traders played involving the serial numbers of dollar bills instead of playing cards. A story that helped make "Liar's Poker" so memorable recounted how Salomon chairman John Gutfreund once challenged the company's top trader to one hand for $1 million--and then backed down when the trader upped the stakes to $10 million.
5. "Anatomy of Greed" by Bryan Cruver (Carroll & Graf, 2002). Bryan Cruver was a 30-year-old MBA when he arrived at Enron in March 2001; nine months later, he and thousands of other Enron employees were out of work as the energy giant imploded. "Anatomy of Greed" is a prime lesson in the ways that even the best and the brightest can be fooled. Accountants, lawyers, rating-agency analysts and investment bankers who are constantly on the lookout for financial shenanigans sometimes don't see them until it's too late. The story of the "crooked E"--as Enron came to be known, thanks to its logo and its infamous shell-game business practices--is one more reminder to investors of why it's so, so good to diversify. Mr. Frey, the managing director of a private equity fund, is the author of several novels, including "The Power Broker" and "The Protégé." His latest, "The Successor," has just been published by Ballantine.