Greenspan: The Man Behind Money.

• Author: TEMPLE-RASTON, DINA S.

Justin Martin, Greenspan: The Man Behind Money, Perseus Publishing, 2000.

Up Close and Personal

It could be every writer's nightmare to publish a book at the very same time, on the very same subject, as super-reporter Bob Woodward. Such was Justin Martin s fate when his publisher released his book, Greenspan: The Man Behind Money (Perseus Publishing, 2000), and watched it be eclipsed by Woodward's hagiographic Maestro.

Too bad, because for Fed aficionados, Martin's immensely readable biography offers the closest thing to a full color portrait of Greenspan. Unlike the Woodward effort, this is not a book for casual readers trying to make sense of the Fed. Martin's work is more suited to close watchers of the Fed--people who get a kick out learning that at the age of five, Greenspan added three-digit figures in his head or that he played on Ayn Rand's softball team.

Until now, most authors (Woodward included) have focused on Greenspan's work at the Fed. Two-thirds of Martin's book is devoted to Greenspan's life before he even went to the Fed. Martin, a former staffer at Fortune magazine, conducted exhaustive interviews with people who knew Greenspan before he was the icon he is today.

The book is as striking for the luminaries included as sources as it is for the multitude of childhood friends Martin managed to unearth. The list runs from Henry Kissinger, who was two years ahead of Greenspan in high school, to Greenspan's cousin, Wesley Halpert, and junior high school crush Corinne Eskris.

Using the Internet to look up former Greenspan intimates, Martin managed to interview four surviving members of a jazz band in which Greenspan played in 1944, half a dozen friends from his Ayn Rand days, his ex-wife, Joan Mitchell, and his current wife, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

All the stories are painstakingly sourced and, unlike Woodward's Maestro, the readers aren't left to wonder about agendas and selective memories.

Martin provides all the basics: Greenspan's childhood in Manhattan's Washington Heights section in a neighborhood heavily populated by Jewish immigrants, the separation of his parents, his aloofness as a child. Greenspan's friends say he was a good dancer, wasn't bar-mitzvahed, and flirted with a career in music until he decided that bebop wasn't for him and economics just might be.

After dropping out of Juilliard and traveling with Henry Jerome and His Orchestra (pulling down $62 a week playing dance halls), Greenspan decided to...