Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

Overview

The text focuses on the themes discussed in his previous book, The Big Short, and is based on the articles that Lewis wrote for Vanity Fair magazine.

Reception

In his new book on the seemingly permanent financial crisis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, Lewis shows again why he is the leading journalist of his generation. He writes about important matters — the most important matters — and he writes about them so amusingly that he can permanently change your point of view, even of things you already had a settled opinion about. Who sees baseball the same way after his Moneyball? Football announcers seldom talked about the immense importance of the left tackle before The Blind Side.

And, thanks to “Boomerang,” a collection of financial-disaster reports from Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Germany and California, few will be able to think of Germans without recalling what Lewis memorably describes as a national obsession with excrement. In typical Lewis fashion, a bodily aperture becomes a lens for seeing Germany’s role in the global debt calamity.

—Review by Forbes

Michael Lewis possesses the rare storyteller’s ability to make virtually any subject both lucid and compelling. In his new book, “Boomerang,” he actually makes topics like European sovereign debt, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank not only comprehensible but also fascinating — even, or especially, to readers who rarely open the business pages or watch CNBC. The book could not be more timely given the worries about Europe’s deepening debt crisis and the recent warning issued by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the I.M.F, that “the current economic situation is entering a dangerous phase.”

—Review by The New York Times