BoomerangTravels in the New Third World

How the 2008 global financial crisis looked in five very different places
Michael Lewis is not always a simple writer, but no matter his subject, he promises a fun, eye-opening ride in exchange for the reader’s undivided attention. The fascinating Boomerang arose out of Lewis’s previous book, The Big Short, a study of the 2008 global financial crisis. The new book picks up where the previous one left off, examining what the crisis looked like in five very different places: Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California.

Lewis likes people, and as such, Boomerang largely consists of the author’s observations and theories, generated with the help of financial experts, politicians, city workers, and even some enterprising Greek monks, on the cultural reasons behind the predicaments these countries (and a state the size of some countries) got themselves into. For instance, Lewis finds that while highly educated in fields they’re passionate about, such as fishing or literature, not many Icelanders involved in the country’s financial system at the start of this century seemed to actually know anything about finance. And in Greece, he learns that tax evasion is so rampant that tax collectors are just as likely to join the nonchalant evaders, not try to beat them.

It may sound like a cavalier American’s tour through the pile of dominoes left in 2008′s wake, but Boomerang is focused and detailed in spite of its brevity and Lewis’s frequent flashes of humor. The book is also a close look at what these four European nations thought of the U.S. crisis and how their banking systems connected to it. For his final flourish, Lewis comes home to California (he currently teaches at Berkeley). In a standout section of the book, he goes on a hair-raising bike ride through Santa Monica with former Governor Schwarzenegger to try to find out how the state wound up so spectacularly broke.

Throughout his travels, there’s one valuable conclusion Lewis keeps arriving at: that there were far too few women operating in the financial sector in the lead-up to the global financial crisis, and those who were seldom listened to. Some people seem to have learned their lesson. Lewis tells us that one women-run investment firm opened in Iceland 2006 is now one of the country’s most profitable businesses. As one of its clients put it when he came knocking on the founder’s door, fed up: “I just want some women to take care of my money.”