Audiobook for the holidays - part 1: Boomerang by Michael Lewis (and a giveaway!)

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:

on Amazon: http://amzn.to/qj7fyn

on iTunes: http://bit.ly/tRZwhq

GIVEAWAY ALERT!!

We're giving away two copies of this audiobook, courtesy of the publisher, Simon & Simon audio!

How you can win? Very simple. All you have to do is to retweet this post on twitter with the hashtag #boomerang at the end of your tweet. We will have a raffle on Friday, December 14, 5:00PM EST between all the readers that will retweet by then. The winners will be announced the following day.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Tomorrow: A giveaway of 2 copies of Boomerang by Michael Lewis (audiobook)

I wanted to update you that tomorrow we'll be reviewing a great audiobook - Boomerang by Michael Lewis, read by Dylan Baker.

And we're also be having a giveaway! We'll be giving away 2 copies of this invaluable and interesting audiobook, courtesy of the publisher - Simon & Schuster Audio.

So check out our blog tomorrow and don't miss the opportunity to win a copy of Boomerang.

Just to warm you up, here's a reminder of six great audiobooks we gave away on our blog in the past:

1. Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell



2. My Footprint: Carrying the Weight of the World by Jeff Garlin

3. American Assassin by Chris Flynn

4. Gideon's War by Howard Gordon



5. The Essence of Happiness: A Guidebook for Living by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler M.D.

6. The Big Short by Michael Lewis

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Check our special holiday offer!

We have a winner on our giveaway of 'The Big Short'!

We had a giveaway following our review of Michael Lewis' new audiobook 'The Big Short' last week.

And we have a winner!

David Lawrence (@dlawrence0425 on twitter) is our winner! Congrats, David! You just won a great audiobook by Michael Lewis who was described by Malcolm Gladwell as "the finest storyteller of our generation." This audiobook is a gift of the publisher, Simon & Schuster Audio.

As we wrote last week, "The Big Short" is full of lessons. Not just for Wal-Street, but also for everyone occupied with global warming, as unfortunately the days of subprime planet are not over as Thomas Friedman predicted in 2008. The mix of short-term thinking, greed, herd mentality and avoiding critical thinking can be catastrophic and of course the question we all ask is how to avoid it. This audiobook is a good place to begin the search for answers.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

The green (audio) book of the week: 'The Big Short' by Michael Lewis (and there's a giveaway!)

Some of you might wonder how "The Big Short", an audiobook about the downfall of the financial markets, as good as it is (and it is!) can be considered a green book. Well, the reason is very simple - there's a disturbing resemblance between the way the markets operated before the crash of 2007 and our present behavior from an environmental point of view. Al Gore and David Blood made this point back in 2009:

"Just as widespread assumptions about the value of bundled and securitised subprime mortgages collapsed when tested by reality (thereby detonating the first stage of the financial crisis), the current widespread assumption in markets that it is perfectly fine to dump 90m tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet every 24 hours—as if it is an open sewer—is also now colliding with reality."

Gore and Blood explain that "the global financial crisis had its origins in short-term, unsustainable strategies and actions" and there is no better place to get a better understanding of these strategies and actions than Michael Lewis new audiobook "The Big Short" (or in it's full name:The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine).

This is not an easy one. It is full of financial terms and explanations and sometimes you might want to hear a part or two again to make sure you got it right. Still, Lewis does the best he can to simplify it as much as possible so everyone will get it eventually. The story itself, full of interesting characters, Wal-Street outsiders who try to figure out the subprime madness and how to make a buck or two out of it.

Their fascinating journey, narrated by Jesse Boggs, a veteran narrator of business titles, is eye-opening and keeps you wondering again and again how come only a handful of people could see what looks so obvious. I'm not sure I still get it, but with Michael Lewis' help the picture is much clearer.

"The Big Short" is full of lessons. Not just for Wal-Street, but also for everyone occupied with global warming, as unfortunately the days of subprime planet are not over as Thomas Friedman predicted in 2008. The mix of short-term thinking, greed, herd mentality and avoiding critical thinking can be catastrophic and of course the question we all ask is how to avoid it. This audiobook is a good place to begin the search for answers.

Here's a description of the new audiobook (from the publisher's website):

When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine, and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower and middle-class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking. The crucial question is this: Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages?

Michael Lewis turns the inquiry on its head to create a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 bestselling Liar’s Poker. Who got it right? he asks. Who saw the ever-rising real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception? And what qualities of character made those few persist when their peers and colleagues dismissed them as Chicken Littles? Out of this handful of unlikely—really unlikely—heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times. Hear an excerpt from the audiobook:

Disclosure: We received a copy of this audiobook from the publisher (Simon and Simon Audio).

Here's an excerpt from the audiobook:

GIVEAWAY ALERT!!

We're giving away a copy of this audiobook, courtesy of the publisher, Simon & Simon audio!

How you can win? Very simple. All you have to do is to retweet this post on twitter with the hashtag #thebigshort at the end of your tweet. We will have a raffle on Friday, June 4, 5:00PM EST between all the readers that will retweet by then. The winner will be announced the following day.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!