(FORTUNE Magazine) – At the start of Laurence H. Meyer's book A Term at the Fed: An Insider's View (HarperCollins), he says outright that there will be no "nasty stories" or "political revelations" about Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. Meyer keeps his promise for the most part, but it is where he does give glimpses of the maestro's methods that the book is most compelling.

You needn't be a Fed watcher to find the book worthwhile. Combining his economist background and professor's narrative skills, Meyer illuminates complicated concepts (symmetric vs. asymmetric directives) and depicts a world where the parsing of abstruse Fed rhetoric is as crucial a process as policymaking itself.

Meyer characterizes Greenspan as a political animal: He would visit board members before Federal Open Markets Committee meetings to ensure majority votes. Meyer describes the meetings as a carefully orchestrated game of "musical chairs" in which only two members could sit in the imaginary dissent chairs. But the chairman hardly comes off as a warm man. When the media reported dissension inside the Fed (often with Meyer and Greenspan at odds), Greenspan coolly warned the board that there was too much "chatter." During Meyer's 52-year term, he never had a personal conversation with Greenspan.

Meyer's account of how "irrational exuberance" talk at the Fed faded by late 1999 is particularly fascinating. And his greatest criticism of the Fed is that it didn't raise rates enough during the late 1990s, leading, as we now know, to one of the U.S. economy's fastest expansions--and one of its great crashes. --Nomi Prins