"How could this happen?" Paul Blustein asked himself while dispatched to Argentina in the wake of its 2001 economic crash. Reports of shantytown residents in the street butchering Angus steers from an overturned truck and of starving children in a nation of agricultural plenty stood in stark contrast to previous impressions of the much lauded and booming Argentina—a country on its way, until late 2001, to joining the ranks of wealthy nations. Blustein explores Argentina's over-hyped rise and dramatic fall (which brought about 25% unemployment, the peso's collapse, and political and social chaos) and the role international financial institutions and market players played in both. His book reminds us that the path from developing nation to developed can be perilous, in this case yielding a Latin American Enron on the scale of the nation state.