Book Review- Boomerang

If you've been following my blog for the past 2 months, you'll know that my friend Piyali and I have been doing a sort of "book club" of sorts where the both of us get together and read a book a week. Piyali's husband, Brij Singh, is extremely well known in the finance field in the UAE having been CEO and MD of Julius Baer Middle East, only to leave to leave to be founder and CEO of Baer Capital Partners ltd... and in fact is also the author of the next book on our reading list. On my flight back from my Harvard course last year I'd bumped into Brij as he was returning from the same program (albeit in the week after me) and we had talked pretty much non stop about various subjects, especially my inability to understand anything finance related. We'd discussed a lot of books too when we realized we both loved reading, and he had advised me to read Boomerang by Michael Lewis, which he had said was one of his most favourite books, by one of his most favourite authors. He promised it would, in very simple uncomplicated English with no finance jargon, explain to me the global financial crisis that we were experiencing and the why and how of it all. He'd praised the book so much that I'd gone out and bought it a few days later with full intent of reading it immediately.
As I'd dug into the book my brain had started to spin and my eyes got a bit fuzzy as they're wont to do when faced with numbers or finance related big-wordery. Credit swaps whaaa?? Hmm ok, I thought to myself, clearly Brij must have misunderstood when I said NO CLUE ABOUT FINANCE and I put the book away only to collect dust in a corner of my shelf. Recently one evening I was out to dinner with the couple and we were discussing what books we should do next when advised us to go through Boomerang, again promising a great and very educational read. We agreed but when we finally got to the time we were supposed to start on the book, I took ill and refused to touch it. It was only when Piyali finished the entire book and promised it was very easy to grasp once to get past the first few pages, is when I actually decided to get into it. "Read the first three chapters and if you don't like it you can quit then," she advised. What she never told me was that the book was only 5 chapters, but by the time the first 3 were done I was hooked and that was that.
Yes you could watch CNBC or read some complicated book or the Economist to try to understand about the global crisis, or really you could read Boomerang to not only give you a very accurate and detailed view about what went wrong, but also make you laugh out loud every few pages while doing so. Lewis takes a chapter each to talk about the meltdowns that took place in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and then the current state of the US. To give you a summation of what went wrong? "Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. 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." What on earth does that mean? Read Boomerang and find out.  The book is uncomplicated, very well researched, and gives you a sense of the people and culture in each of these countries, and then a detailed idea as to what went wrong and where it stands now. Being a very famous author I guess also has its perks and Lewis was about to in his travels to these places, meet the people who matter to get a real behind the scenes look into the disaster zones- in fact the part where he interviews Schwarzenegger while biking around LA was in equal parts insightful and hilarious.
Piyali too was also so impressed with not only the material of the book but also his style of writing, that she googled some of his interviews and had posted this on her Facebook wall. This is him speaking at Princeton (his alma mater) in 2012 and I was pleasantly surprised to hear how well spoken he was. Again, his sense of humor shines through brilliantly even here-

Incidentally, when reading other reviews on Amazon I realized that Boomerang is actually a collection of essays Lewis had written for the magazine Vanity Fair. You may be hence actually able to find the chapters on the Vanity Fair website although I haven't tried doing that myself as I already had the book. Could I suggest that you read the first 3 chapters and see whether you like it? I think you'll be surprised at how much you enjoy it. I know I was!
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