In the beginning of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer draws a line of causality between Germany’s hardscrabble origins to the stereotypically stoic, severe German character, setting the tone for the rise of Fascism. In Boomerang, Michael Lewis examines how the character of the Irish drove their response to the global monetary crisis. While the global economy was undergoing seismic upsets the Irish government made the decision to insure not only the depositors, the people with money in checking and savings accounts, but the bond holders as well. These were people who knew that investing was a risk and chose to gamble big anyway. Lewis paints a picture of an Ireland willing to make little more than symbolic protests before settling in to pay the crushing burden incurred by high stakes players.
This section is very dense. The section on Greece had geography and cultural analysis to aerate it; the chapter on Ireland is chewy and fibrous. Because I read in canon, I don’t permit myself to advance to the next round until I’ve finished the small meal I’ve laid out for myself, and this segment kept putting me to sleep. I rapidly cycled through font sizes on my reading app, finished each rectangle of text in agony, and scrolled through other nonsense rather than do the work.
Boomerang is a book in length only, it feels like a magazine piece that ballooned too quickly for its chosen medium. The sections on how Iceland’s masculine culture turned the economy into a billion-dollar pissing contest and Greece’s society of grift and tax evasion were meaty and fun to read, but this bit I am finishing up today is pure slog.
This weekend I bought the first book in Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, Larrson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a collection of essays by E. B. White, and two other books that seemed very important and vital at the time but which I cannot remember. I suppose if I bought books primarily to read them and not to try out alternate versions of myself or as cheap retail therapy then the titles would matter more.
W♥YCG 