It helps to have both a scorecard and an economics degree to follow some of the thornier arguments on debt structure and...
A Greek economist-turned-politician looks at the neoliberal forces arrayed against the developing world, from the central banks to the European Union.
“Greeks did splendidly when we lived austere lives, when we spent less than we earned, when we channeled [sic] our savings to the education of our children,” said incoming finance minister Varoufakis (Economics/Univ. of Athens; And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future, 2016, etc.) on the surprise victory of the leftist Syriza Party in the spring of 2015, in a time when it seemed that Greece was on the verge of leaving the EU. The sentiments were conservative—until, that is, the author went on to say that austerity is one thing, while “Ponzi austerity” is quite another, and that his government had no intention of giving the country’s oligarchs and wealthy tax evaders a free ride on the backs of the Greek people. Public austerity imposed by the World Bank and other outside institutions in order to prevent the Greek economy from failing, he argued, was destroying private parsimony, and off he went to Brussels and Berlin to argue a kind of neo-Keynesian case before the country’s key creditors. He received little sympathy from the likes of Merkel, Macron, and America, though privately, officials told him that the demands for austerity were unreasonable and doomed to fail. Indeed, although President Barack Obama had said “you cannot keep on squeezing countries that are in the midst of depression,” U.S. Treasury actively opposed Greek efforts to set their own house in order. The story is a tangled one full of many threads both political and economic—and even historical, since Varoufakis traces some contemporary domestic issues to the dawn of the Cold War and a Greece torn between East and West.
It helps to have both a scorecard and an economics degree to follow some of the thornier arguments on debt structure and liability management, but this is an eye-opening look at the recent economic crisis in the eurozone.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-10100-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
