An enlightening, scary journey.
A world tour of nations that have collapsed financially or that played a role in the collapse of others.
In his previous book, The Big Short (2010), Lewis dug deep into the housing-market failure that precipitated the economic collapse of 2007-08. Here the author tours Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California to compose a broader picture of what went wrong. Like Lewis’ other bestsellers, this book is alternately wry, snarky, laugh-out-loud humorous, serious and, most importantly, filled with insights. The author is a master at explaining financially complex realms by casting them as narratives of individuals. In each place, he finds people famous, infamous and nearly anonymous who can fairly be rendered as villains or heroes. Each chapter started as an article for Vanity Fair, yet the seemingly disparate features coalesce nicely in the book. Lewis is willing to court danger by generalizing about the characteristics within each nation that led to unexpected consequences. As usual, the author delivers a nice balance of trenchant analysis and lucid writing. In regards to Greece, the most distressed nation of all, "it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it."
An enlightening, scary journey.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-08181-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
Poignant and funny.
A middle-class couple in “car-honking, no-YOU-shut-up Brooklyn” embarks on a three-year mission to seek the permanence of home ownership.
Journalist Williams loved her Carroll Gardens rental, but felt pressured as homeowning friends with appreciating equity ridiculed those who didn’t invest in real estate, asking, “What will it cost six months from now?” With limited savings for a down payment, the author and her husband desperately started looking for houses in Brooklyn, but in their price range found only dilapidated, termite-ridden buildings near highways and unsafe neighborhoods. Williams bitingly describes the search, reliving the hysteria at the height of the 2003–06 real-estate bubble: “Open houses are crowded and competitive, with brokers entertaining multiple suitors like Scarlett O’Hara at a party.” Without much of a plot engine to propel a repetitive, mostly unfulfilling search, the author opts for plumbing the psychological depths of her emotional history, explaining her tenacious need for a house and security in confessional, tell-all prose. Abandoned by her husband when she was six-months pregnant, Williams’ reluctant mother is a chronic worrier and inappropriate confider who says things like, “You have no idea how incredible it is to have grandchildren…It’s so different than what you feel for your own child.” The author shows New York rapidly becoming affordable only for the extremely rich, while the middle-class gets squeezed out to the suburbs. Along the way, she patiently explains such real-estate idioms as staging, no-doc mortgages (“a lending version of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ ”) and interest-only loans. Although the author’s mantra was to go for what you want, no matter how unobtainable it seemed, eventually she compromised and settled for a lower-priced home in Inwood, on the northern tip of Manhattan, close to the Cloisters and a beautiful park.
Poignant and funny.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5708-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
The occasional distractions of pop-business cheerleading notwithstanding, if the book evokes a few creative ideas, it will...
Why think outside the box? Write business consultants Coyne and Coyne, “the key is to find just the right box in which to think.”
Readers may not have known that a famed Broadway producer, responsible for such hits as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, was also the father of the corn maze, an idea whose time, it seems, had come when he hit on it back in the ’90s. Corn mazes are now a big draw in some parts of the country, though the authors must be using faulty stats to set the number of visitors at twice that of the Grand Canyon. Why couldn’t we think of that contribution to American civilization? We can, write the authors—it’s mostly a matter of learning how to ask lots of questions that might generate the desired answer, which presumably is to hit it rich, in the manner of the “Z-1-4” (“zero to $1 billion within 4 years”) businesses they profile here. Enter “Brainsteering,” a gimmicky but, at least on the face, effective method for “consistently generating breakthrough ideas.” It would steal the authors’ thunder to describe this method too closely, but let’s take, for instance, their thoroughly useful series of questions meant to help pick out a welcome gift for the person who may have everything: “What was their favorite toy, hobby, or activity during the period of their life on which they look back most fondly?” “What event or accomplishment in their life are they most proud of”? The authors pepper their narrative with such idea-sparkers, with an appendix that is worth the cover price, and introduce acronym-tagged concepts that seem as if they ought to bear fruit, as with the notion of a “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive” system of investigation.
The occasional distractions of pop-business cheerleading notwithstanding, if the book evokes a few creative ideas, it will have done good service.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-200619-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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