It is simply a required read and required for uncountable reasons. What Justin Baer has wrought in House of Fidelity is 310 pages of, yes, the wide and starry sky of five generations of Johnsons but far more the decades-arc of investment in America. It is almost all here, the paragraph-to-paragraph anecdote and sourcing is jaw dropping. The book halts on page 178 as George Vanderheiden ‘retires’ one day before the DJIA peak of 2000. There is not enough on Paul Hondros, who changed my life’s path. And, thank the lord Baer does not excavate sundry lunches at Locke-Ober and then onto the obligatory sauna at The Boston Racquet Club. His tour-de-force is a nostalgic read for those that recall a pre-May Day world. It must be devoured by the CFA set. But for those too young to have really lived Bill Buckner’s October 1986, well, cover-to-cover. On investment, House of Fidelity is the shortest path to understanding how we got to here from there across the span of Ned Johnson’s America.