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A review by rickwren
Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis
3.0
Sure it was simplistic and even childish to boil down complete economies into sustained book sections and given character, attitudes, and attributes. To make an entire country behave as an individual really does cheat the system. But the measure of a book is how much it makes you think about the topic and how much more you understand it after you've read it then you understood it before. Doesn't provoke conversation? Does it make you research? Do you spend time trying to find out more?
If he would have put everything there was to know about Iceland, Greece, Germany, and the United States financial systems into a single volume it would have been too big to pick up. So Michael Lewis is a commercial writer. So what?
Iceland is a very small country and those people who were in charge were naïve. Their naïveté was exploited by the big bankers from New York and London as they attempted, mostly successfully, to a great and pillage these descendents of the Vikings. Iceland turned it around, and eventually they punished some of the bankers and through the entire system out of the country and are quite well on the road to recovery. The national character is what Michael Lewis presents a and his presentation makes sense.
Greece is a country filled with corruption, incompetence and laziness. Is this true? Michael Lewis made it sound believable as he described both the before and after of the the financial meltdown. The kleptocracy is amazing. Even after everything that happened they have no interest in changing. I especially loved his time in the monastery. That whole story kept me enthralled.
Germany, as a nation to rigid to understand what was changing about the markets, kept thinking that everyone else was going to play by the rules. They kept buying up the debt and didn't see that the debt was going bad because that was what was in the manuals. It's funny to think about and very simplistic to assume that an entire country's culture can be boiled down to simple actions, but it does work as a metaphor for what happened and how Germany was left holding the bag.
The United States, of course in this tale of woe, comes off as the conmen – the swindlers of the world's money. I just wish I had some of it. It's not a flattering portrayal, but it again works for the metaphor.
That's what this book was. It was metaphors that worked to describe what happened in as simple terms as the general public understand.
If he would have put everything there was to know about Iceland, Greece, Germany, and the United States financial systems into a single volume it would have been too big to pick up. So Michael Lewis is a commercial writer. So what?
Iceland is a very small country and those people who were in charge were naïve. Their naïveté was exploited by the big bankers from New York and London as they attempted, mostly successfully, to a great and pillage these descendents of the Vikings. Iceland turned it around, and eventually they punished some of the bankers and through the entire system out of the country and are quite well on the road to recovery. The national character is what Michael Lewis presents a and his presentation makes sense.
Greece is a country filled with corruption, incompetence and laziness. Is this true? Michael Lewis made it sound believable as he described both the before and after of the the financial meltdown. The kleptocracy is amazing. Even after everything that happened they have no interest in changing. I especially loved his time in the monastery. That whole story kept me enthralled.
Germany, as a nation to rigid to understand what was changing about the markets, kept thinking that everyone else was going to play by the rules. They kept buying up the debt and didn't see that the debt was going bad because that was what was in the manuals. It's funny to think about and very simplistic to assume that an entire country's culture can be boiled down to simple actions, but it does work as a metaphor for what happened and how Germany was left holding the bag.
The United States, of course in this tale of woe, comes off as the conmen – the swindlers of the world's money. I just wish I had some of it. It's not a flattering portrayal, but it again works for the metaphor.
That's what this book was. It was metaphors that worked to describe what happened in as simple terms as the general public understand.