Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Book review

Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. By Peter Elkind. Portfolio, 304 pages. $26.95.

The timing of Peter Elkind's book, released in April, was a vivid reminder of not having Eliot Spitzer riding herd on Wall Street. That's when the chieftains of Goldman, Sachs & Co. were hauled before Congress for a public tongue-lashing, with the issue at hand betting against clients by shorting the securitized mortgage market--exactly the kind of populist fodder that went into Spitzer's broadsides against the Street when he was New York's attorney general.

Two years after he abruptly resigned as New York's governor, Spitzer himself is again beginning to be heard publicly following his rapid ascent, and fall on the heels of a scandal involving a prostitution ring he frequented.

Elkind, an editor at-large at Fortune and co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room (about Enron), has fashioned a wide-ranging and carefully researched biography that touches the high (and low) points of Spitzer's career. It's a tale of hubris, temperament and how a very smart man rode his own belief system and behavior to great glory and then ignominy. It starts with Spitzer's childhood and his schooling in New York, then at Princeton and Harvard Law School. In 1998, he was elected as New York's AG (after a failed bid in 1994) and, in 2006, as governor. There was talk of his becoming U.S. AG and perhaps even the first Jewish president. Then came the stunning revelations of spitzer as "Client 9" of a call-girl ring.

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Elkind, who interviewed Spitzer at length, devotes considerable space to examining Spitzer's childhood among a family of overachievers, where dinnertime discussions were intellectually rigorous. While the family was wealthy, Spitzer and his siblings were expected to earn their way in the world. Vulnerability was equated with weakness--a notion that would shape...