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Blaming earnings-per-share for the round of corporate scandals over the past year is like blaming the existence of cork bats for Sammy Sosa's swift swing, or Howell Raines' management style for Jayson Blair's pathological dateline-faking.

But in The Number, released earlier this year, New York Times reporter Alex Berenson does just that. The book, subtitled ""How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America," pegs the problems at companies like Enron, Tyco, Worldcom and Global Crossing to companies' practice of forecasting, then trying to beat earnings per share numbers.

» July 25 discussion on earnings and estimates

Thankfully, Berenson's book isn't a revisionist tale used to hammer out the theory broached by its subtitle. The book is an accurate, well-written account of characters and events, and its only other shortcoming is that most of his information is culled from Wall Street Journal articles. A little more of the investigative work that got the reporter shadowed by a private investigator when he was writing about the CEO of Tel-Save -- who Berenson describes in the book as a former cocaine dealer who drove a red Porsche with a license plate that read CRACK -- would have made for livelier reading, and a more original book.

The gist of the book is that certain changes in the way banks and companies interacted resulted in a dangerous obsession with earnings per share: in the late 70s, firms began averaging analysts' earnings estimates. By the 80s, the widespread use of computers allowed them to see changes in real time and services like Thomson Financial's First Call became the first thing investors consulted when a company reported its quarterly results.

The quarterly "number" thus became the benchmark of a company's success, and an analysts' ability to predict that number became a measure of his or her success. Analysts cozied up to companies to get good information, and companies tinkered with balance sheets if things didn't add up at the end of the quarter. Though a recent $1.4 billion Wall Street settlement aims to change that, Berenson points out that it won't do a hoot to improve the accountability of CEOs.

So seedy and myopically-enmeshed in the earnings cycle are the players in Berenson's tale that "in Wall Street's version of heaven, the strip clubs don't have covers and every month is January."

Such light-hearted vitriol makes the book an effortless read, and it's a good glossary of basic accounting tricks and a well-researched history of Wall Street scandals. The Number also does a good job of dissecting the game that goes on between companies, investment banks, accountants, investors and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Berenson admits that the main fault lies with corporate executives, but doesn't get into the circumstances that had not just Wall Street's usual smattering of grifters, but even its "most solid citizens…running red lights and breaking windows."

The mob mentality this trope evokes is what the book is really missing. Mania was as much at play in the 90s as it was in the tulip or the railway booms the book glosses over. As more nuanced books like Edward Chancellor's Devil Take the Hindmost and Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like It in The World point out, bubbles are always accompanied by two things: a belief that some new technology has changed the rules of the game and, you guessed it, corruption. From Jim Fisk, a railway tycoon who manipulated stocks in the railroad boom, to characters like Ivar Kreuger, the "Swedish Match King" who created fictitious business in an attempt to corner the match business in the 1920s, corruption has always run rampant when times are good.

The only thing different about the 1990s was stock options. Executives could benefit more than ever from boosting their company's stock price because they had millions of options. And companies were doling out options by the bucket-full to keep talent from being spirited away by profitless tech start-ups. In that sense, tech mania was at the root of most of the 90's scandals.

It also worked its insidious magic with investors, who saw the promise of new business models as a reason to overlook short-term losses and value things like "stickiness" and "eyeballs" on a company's Web site rather than its earnings-per-share. In that sense, The Number got it backwards -- the '90s bubble was precipitated by an overlooking of earnings, rather than an overemphasis on them.

And Berenson fails to note that technology was a wild card this round and lays all the blame on the rules of that game, rather than the mass hysteria and exceptional circumstances that caused an aberration from them.

Tech mania was the reason well-meaning corporate citizens -- not just crooks -- initiated fly-by-night accounting schemes. Lucent ex-CEOs Rich McGinn and Henry Schacht have readily admitted they were "intoxicated with expectations" and legitimately overestimated demand. So optimistic were executives about new Internet-based businesses, productivity gains from faster computers and new software, that they really believed little lags in revenue could be made up for later. Many of the accounting fiascoes arose from companies booking sales to customers before they ever paid, because they believed the money would eventually come in.

The "irrational exuberance" from Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's oft-cited speech thus has a lot more to do with the '90s corruption than the tricks of earnings-per-share. The urge to overreach -- be it a heavy hitter reaching for his corked practice bat or a lauded intern trying to climb the ladder -- almost always exists at the apex of a steep climb. But you can't blame the temptation, or the pressure.