What’s it about?
The Great Crash of 2008 inspired a glut of books aiming to demystify the credit crunch for the financially illiterate. Michael Lewis’ Boomerang attempts to do the same for this new Eurozone crisis. Based on articles he wrote for Vanity Fair, the book is a whistlestop tour through Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California.
Who is Michael Lewis?
A former bond trader turned financial journalist, Michael Lewis specialises in explaining complex financial matters in an accessible and funny way. The American author’s last book was credit crunch primer The Big Short.
Does he have any insights?
This is more a collage of colourful reportage than a book with an overriding thesis; however, Lewis does make some forthright, sometimes eccentric, observations:
On Greece: ‘The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible.’
On Ireland: ‘They’d gone from being abnormally poor to being abnormally rich without pausing to experience normality.’
On Germany [which he says has a national obsession with excrement]: ‘Germans longed to be near the shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.’
What are people saying about it?
Robert Harris, Sunday Times: ‘Most people who write well don’t understand money, while most people who understand money can’t write. Lewis … is that rare combination: a fellow who can not only tell you what a collateralised debt obligation actually is, but make it sound amusing into the bargain.’
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times: ‘At times Mr. Lewis can sound a lot like Evelyn Waugh: shrewd, observant and savagely judgmental, dispensing crude generalizations about other countries, even as he pokes fun at himself as a disaster tourist.’
Tony Barber, Financial Times, ‘… the book cries out for an organising theme … one has the impression that the publishers rushed the book into print — so quickly, in fact, that it lacks an index. A pity, because Lewis is undoubtedly a writer more skilled than most at providing lucid, entertaining expositions of complicated financial subjects.’
The verdict:
Save yourself twenty quid by printing off his articles from vanityfair.com and stapling them together.
Where can I find out more?
Listen to Michael Lewis being interviewed about the book on National Public Radio.
Or, alternatively, you could try one of the books on the Eurozone listed here.
Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour (US title: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World) is published by Allen Lane at £20.
Anna Baddeley is editor of The Omnivore, which rounds up press reviews of books, films and plays.
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