A clear, concise account illustrating why financial fires must be anticipated if they’re to be controlled.
Three principal policymakers and “firefighters” during the 2008 financial crash describe the crisis and suggest policies to prepare for an inevitable return.
The fire metaphors flare brightly in the first half of this brief, cogent account of the near collapse of the American economy near the end of the presidency of George W. Bush and the beginning of Barack Obama’s. Bernanke (The Courage to Act, 2015, etc.), Geithner (Stress Test, 2014), and Paulson Jr. (Dealing with China, 2015, etc.) mention themselves by first name throughout (Ben, Tim, Hank) and are occasionally heavy on self-congratulation, but they also express humility. For example, they note how a Geithner speech, intended to calm markets and investors, had the opposite effect. The authors are also generally nonpartisan, though several times they allude to the dangers of today’s “bitterly polarized politics,” and they praise Obama more than those on the right will probably enjoy. They also respond several times to critics from a decade ago who assailed them for saving Wall Street and largely ignoring Main Street. The authors’ approach is straightforward and easy to digest: Describe what caused the collapse; tell about the measures the government took to contain it; comment on what worked and what didn’t; discuss the fallout; speculate about what needs to be done now. They take care to clarify such terms as “derivatives” and “leverage” so that readers unclear about them (and numerous others) can easily follow the text. They are admonitory toward the end, reminding us of a truth that applies not just in the financial-crisis world: “The enemy is forgetting.” The authors—each of whom has published a memoir about the crisis—are not especially memorable stylists, too often relying on clichés—e.g., “fallen through the cracks,” “get ahead of the curve.”
A clear, concise account illustrating why financial fires must be anticipated if they’re to be controlled.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313448-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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