I thoroughly enjoyed /The Physics of Wall Street/, but I found that it was heavier on the "physics" than on the "Wall Street". It depends on what you're looking

I thoroughly enjoyed /The Physics of Wall Street/, but I found that it was heavier on the "physics" than on the "Wall Street". It depends on what you're looking for. If you want accessible, non-mathematical descriptions of the analytical tools that have been imported into finance from physics, or even an insightful look at the culture of physics and how how physicists tend to approach problems, Weatherall's your man---though I wonder how intelligible those descriptions really would be to someone who hasn't already seen the material in a more formal way. (I'm reminded of the description of the Feynman lectures from the introduction to that big red boxed set, IIRC: "Rereading the books, one sometimes seems to catch Feynman looking over his shoulder, not at his young audience, but directly at his colleagues, saying 'Look at that! Look how I finessed that point! Wasn’t that clever?'".) Thing is, my background is in physics, so I'm more interested in what physicists call "sociology": how institutions are put together, what the incentive structures are, how individual personalities affect outcomes, etc., and I found Weatherall's descriptions of such things lacking. His analysis tends towards hagiography of individual scientists, with less attention for context. This intensely biographical approach to the history of science is a common-enough failing in books that focus on the science, not the history---it reminded me a bit of those boxes about the lives of prominent scientists that dot some introductory textbooks---but it's still frustrating. I actually found Roger Lowenstein's /When Genius Failed/ much more illuminating---he gives more attention to institutions, incentives, and personalities, and how they interact. Edit: missing word, style