Ben Bernanke is exceptionally polite. In “The Courage to Act,” a 624-page memoir released this week, Mr. Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman, describes the presidents and Treasury secretaries he worked with in deeply respectful, not-particularly-revealing terms. It’s hardly the gossipy, blunt assessments that can turn a high official’s memoir into juicy reading.

But precisely because of this fact, Mr. Bernanke’s occasional tough criticisms — of people like his hawkish Fed colleague Thomas Hoenig and the senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — stand out as revelatory about the man who guided the United States economy through its most perilous period in modern times. He shows impatience with the messy maw of democracy, implicitly contrasting the bombast of many politicians with the orderly, thoughtful decision-making that was taking place inside the Bernanke Fed.

The broad themes and many factual details in Mr. Bernanke’s book have been told before. His book comes out well after the memoirs of two close partners in the era of crisis-fighting, Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, and the narrative of the 2007 to 2009 crisis has been told in multiple journalistic accounts and an HBO movie. In terms of economic philosophy and rationale for his actions, Mr. Bernanke presented those in a series of lectures in 2013 that were themselves collected in a short book.

But even as someone who covered intensively the events Mr. Bernanke retells and who has read all those previous books (and wrote one of them), I found the book to be worthwhile reading. It’s just not for the usual reasons one reads a senior government official’s memoir. If the basic narrative of what happened during the crisis and what the Bernanke Fed was thinking is already well established, the book sheds light on many of the smaller dramas that hang over this crucial period of world economic history.