Today we start a 4-week series for the holidays, where we will be reviewing, recommending and giving away four great audiobooks.We believe these audiobooks are great to listen to all year round, but we know this is the time of the year when people look for unique and meaningful gifts, so this is certainly the right time to introduce you with these audiobooks, all published by Simon and Simon Audio.
Our first audiobook on this series is Boomerang by Michael Lewis, read by Dylan Baker.
Just like his last book, the Big Short, Michael Lewis takes the role here of a tour guide. This time he's leading a guided tour through some of the disparate places hard hit by the financial tsunami of 2008, like Greece, Iceland and Ireland. His role is almost Sisyphean as this is incredibly difficult to understand these events, not to mention putting them in some sort of coherent and clear context and even making you laugh once in a while when listening to it. Yet, Michael Lewis succeed to do it. Just like he did in the Big Short, he takes big global events and present them through small personal stories that helps us to understand how the hell these countries got to this situation.
What amazes me every time I listen to his audiobooks is how easily misconceptions are becoming common due to the belief that the people that are making the decisions are reasonable people and know what they do. Even though we get to learn time after time this is not the case we keep believe in it. This is why I won't be surprised if one of the next audiobooks of Michael Lewis will be on another crisis that follows the same patterns of the financial crisis he describes in the Big Short and Boomerang, this time environmental one. Actually, it might be that he's working on it as we speak..
Bottom line: If you want to understand the news coming from Europe and what's really going on there, listen to Boomerang!
Here are more details on Boomerang (From its Amazon page):
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Big Short, Liar’s Poker and The Blind Side!
The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.
The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a piÑata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.
The trademark of Michael Lewis's bestsellers is to tell an important and complex story through characters so outsized and outrageously weird that you'd think they have to be invented. (You'd be wrong.) In Boomerang, we meet a brilliant monk who has figured out how to game Greek capitalism to save his failing monastery; a cod fisherman who, with three days' training, becomes a currency trader for an Icelandic bank; and an Irish real estate developer so outraged by the collapse of his business that he drives across the country to attack the Irish Parliament with his earth-moving equipment.
Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American listener to a comfortable complacency: Oh, those foolish foreigners. But when Lewis turns a merciless eye on California and Washington DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.
"No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Lewis."
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Disclosure: We received a copy of this audiobook from the publisher (Simon and Simon Audio).
Here's an excerpt from the audiobook:
We're giving away two copies of this audiobook, courtesy of the publisher, Simon & Simon audio!
Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris
Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!
