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A CRISIS WASTED

Name: A CRISIS WASTED
Author: Reed Hundt
ISBN: 978-1-948122-31-3

BARACK OBAMA'S DEFINING DECISIONS

by Reed Hundt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 12, 2019

A cautionary analysis for future leaders.

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A study of how Barack Obama’s handling of the 2008 economic crisis undermined his presidency.

As a member of the transition team for the Clinton and Obama presidencies and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Hundt (In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship, 2006, etc.) was a knowledgeable observer of and participant in Obama’s economic decisions in the months before his inauguration. With no lack of histories, memoirs, and anatomies of the Great Recession, Hundt’s hard-hitting critique is distinguished by the voices of many key players—e.g., Lawrence Summers, Al Gore, Henry Paulson, Robert Reich, Peter Orszag, and David Axelrod—drawn from dozens of interviews. The author’s brisk, tense, and discomfiting history supports his contention that Obama’s policies inevitably culminated in the election of Donald Trump by an angry, disaffected populace. Hundt was an early supporter of Obama and remains a staunch admirer. Obama, he writes, “always stood for inclusion, tolerance, and unity. He worked hard, acted with integrity, stood for high-minded principles.” He was ill-served, however, by the neoliberals and Clinton advisers he chose for his transition team and powerful posts in his administration. They diverted his attention from the dramatic changes in health care, infrastructure, innovations in clean energy, and education reform that he promised during his campaign and convinced him to prop up Wall Street. They advocated bank bailouts to prevent bank runs, budget-balancing, and trust in markets to stanch a worsening economic crisis. Comparing Obama’s economic decisions with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Hundt points to “premature announcements, mistaken assumptions, misplaced fear of deficits, untoward concern for big banks, self-serving assessments, and constraints imposed by non-stimulus considerations” among reasons he deems Obama’s leadership problematic. Hundt’s proposal for infrastructure overhaul involving clean energy generation and new transmission networks was summarily rejected by Summers, Geithner, and Orszag. Obama, however, “could have achieved a robust recovery” by spurring private-sector investment in such proposals. Instead of instituting bold changes, he allowed the rich to get richer, while the economically oppressed voted for Trump.

A cautionary analysis for future leaders.

Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-948122-31-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: RosettaBooks

Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)