Suddenly the shelves of the nation's bookstores are filled with hastily-printed volumes purporting to tell the inside story of the credit crisis. If you want to read salacious and superficial stories of how a couple of big investment banks blew themselves up with greed, stupidity and the lifestyles of rich and famous executives, you have quite a few choices. But if you want to really understand what happened, there's only one book -- "In Fed We Trust" by David Wessel.

Wessel, a seasoned columnist for The Wall Street Journal, tells the story of the crisis from a uniquely valuable perspective -- that of the Federal Reserve. The Fed stood at the center of the fire-fighting response to a global conflagration, coordinating efforts by all the governments of the world. Wessel's book is a day-by-day diary of the disaster, told from right inside the firehouse.

And I'm quite convinced that it's completely accurate. I know lots of the firefighters at the Fed, the Treasury, and the White House. Wessel's account perfectly matches what they were telling me in real-time. One very highly-placed contact at the Fed told me three weeks ago that he had read Wessel's book, and that every detail was exactly right. So if you want to know what really happened -- not just some reporter's sensationalistic interpretation -- then this is the book for you.

In a nutshell, according to Wessel, what happened is that a group of well-meaning and intelligent men had to improvise a response to circumstances that were utterly without precedent. There were bound to be major mistakes. All the more so as the crisis relentlessly unfolded last summer, leaving them mentally and physically exhausted.

For example, over that horrible weekend when they made the horrible decision to not rescue Lehman Brothers, they failed to anticipate what seems now to be a terribly obvious way in which that failure would accelerate the panic to the breaking point.

As you might remember, the day after Lehman went under, a money-market fund that held positions in Lehman's defaulted commercial paper "broke the buck." That triggered a stampede out of money-market funds by millions of ordinary individual investors, and for the first time the crisis spilled over from Wall Street to Main Street. Faced with billions in redemptions, money-market funds had to stop buying anybody's commercial paper, and so the short-term funding market for every major business in the world suddenly dried up.

Yet, by Wessel's account, when the Fed and other regulators were weighing the "what-ifs" for letting Lehman fail, they simply never even considered the ripple effect on money-market funds. It's so obvious in retrospect. But in the heat of the moment when it really counted, it just never occurred to any of them. It's the biggest "oops" in financial history.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson does not fare well in Wessel's account. In a situation where you not only have to do the right thing, but also instill public confidence while doing it -- what Wessel calls getting the "theatre" right -- Paulson almost always screwed up. So no matter how much government money he threw at the problem, it never got better. That's because at base, it was always a matter of confidence as much as it was a matter of money.

Wessel told me the problem was that the "inability to explain what they were doing confused people, and contributed to the problem. They didn't take the time. Maybe they didn't have the time."

Remember how horrifyingly confidence-shattering it was last October, when Paulson stampeded Congress into approving his Troubled Asset Relief Program -- TARP -- by saying that if the Treasury didn't buy the banks' toxic assets from them, we'd have another Great Depression? And then remember how, as soon as Congress agreed, Paulson completely dropped that plan and, seemingly out of the blue, used the TARP money to make capital injections in banks instead?

Turns out it was even worse than it looked. According to Wessel, Paulson knew all along that he wanted to use the money for capital injections -- but that's not what he told Congress or the American people until after a law more than 500 pages long was enacted that empowered him to do something else entirely.

Wessel portrays Paulson as a bull in a china shop -- a hard-charging Wall Street investment banker who never made the mental transition to the subtler world of politics and policy. By contrast, Ben Bernanke is portrayed as a man who rose to the occasion -- who shouldered the mantle of greatness when events thrust it upon him.

But he wasn't born to it. Wessel tells the story of his rural childhood in the South, and his brilliant academic record -- and his utter lack of preparation for the running what Wessel calls "the fourth branch of government" in the midst of a crisis that would produce political pressures never faced by any other Fed chairman.

And yet Bernanke's lack of political experience may have been an advantage. According to Wessel, Bernanke consistently stayed above politics -- simply sticking to what he believed was right, no matter who in the Treasury, the White House or the Congress wanted to hear otherwise. And by a remarkable bit of good luck, he had a special advantage to understand what was right. But his academic career has focused on the monetary causes and cures of the Great Depression, so he was uniquely qualified to know that he had to pull out all the stops to prevent another one.

Over and over, Wessel emphasizes that Bernanke's quiet yet emphatic mantra was "whatever it takes." He identified the best and the brightest within the Fed -- vice chair Donald Kohn, governor Kevin Warsh, and New York Fed president Tim Geithner -- and these "four musketeers" saved the world. It took working seven-day weeks, Bernanke often sleeping on his office couch and subsisting on his secretary's trail mix. It took lots of mistakes -- very expensive ones. But as Wessel told me, "they got the big things right." The "four musketeers" ultimately did it -- they restored the credit system, and he restored confidence.

So should we have confidence that Humpty Dumpty has been put back together again? Hardly. Wessel told me that while the system "clearly has been brought back from the abyss, it's better but it's not yet healthy."

Wessel is especially worried the Congress seems uninterested in acting to clarify the legal authorities that would make it easier to respond to crises in the future. "We had a big fire," he told me. "There are some simple prevention steps we could be taking now." And we're not taking them.

You should read this book. And so should President Obama, especially now as he considers whether to reappoint Ben Bernanke to another four-year term as Fed chair. God only knows why Bernanke would want to put himself through that. But apparently he does. And he certainly deserves it.