Book Review - Boomerang: the Meltdown Tour by Michael Lewis

 Boomerang: the Meltdown Tour by Michael Lewis

London: Allen Lane, 2011                                                   ISBN 9781846144844

A bit of fluff. Probably the best description of this book. Topical airport non-fiction might be another way to describe this fairly breathless wise-guy description of the aftermath of the GFC of 2008.

In a lightning tour of Iceland, Ireland, Germany and his home country the USA, Michael Lewis attempts to show us why those countries reacted in the way they did to the easy credit of the early 2000s, and how they were (in 2011 when this book came out) dealing with the consequences.

This is exactly the sort of book that really annoys me: shallow while seeming smart, full of pointless "colour", and leaving the reader none the wiser in any real sense when they finish. I guess one thing it does do is point the reader in the general direction of where they might look to find out the real story.

Lewis starts in Iceland, where he spends more time describing the social activities of Icelandic men and women than going into the details of exactly how the country effectively became bankrupt. He moves on to Greece, where he has fun describing their breakdown, and Ireland, where he does spend more time on the ins-and-outs of their banking problem, and on to Germany, where he marvels that a country so "smart" lent so much money on "dumb" schemes, and on the way buys into pretty much every German stereotype.

When he returns to the US, he shows how the financial crisis was hitting hardest at the smallest governmental units, using the examples of San Jose (which was going bankrupt) and Vallego (which had). He leaves the reader with the warning that what had happened overseas was coming for America.

It's such a shame that books like these get written for the lowest common denominator. I found myself wishing for less personal stuff (why did he interview Arnold Schwarznegger while riding a bike? I didn't pick up this book to learn about the Governator's riding style), and more in-depth analysis of what went wrong and why.

This was written to sell heaps of copies when it came out - it was not a book written with the future in mind, so I imagine only fools like me would be reading it ten years later. Needless to say, I'm not recommending it.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell