The Revolution That Wasn’t. By Spencer Jakab. Portfolio; 300 pages; $28. Penguin Business; £20

A YEAR AGO, on January 28th 2021, the price of a single share in GameStop, a struggling purveyor of video games, climbed to an all-time high of $483. That was nearly 200 times the low it had hit ten months previously, and almost 30 times its price at the start of the year. GameStop was the most-traded stock in America on one of its busiest-ever trading days. The surge in activity left retail brokers unable to meet capital calls from the settlement system, forcing them to suspend buying in a handful of stocks. A congressional hearing was held to investigate. How did this happen?

Spencer Jakab, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal, unknots the threads of this complex financial tale. His is a pacey and comprehensive account that takes in the structural changes in finance and the media that made the turmoil possible. The ingredients included the prominence of a chatboard on the Reddit website called r/wallstreetbets; the rise of Keith Gill (pictured), a buccaneering investor; a “Gamestonk!!”