"I.O.U." -- Reviews on Amazon

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle drabelled@washpost.com British journalist and novelist John Lanchester's gift is to see the big picture in new ways. Much of our current plight, he argues, comes from lack of competition in the broadest possible sense. The end of the Cold War left the United States, in his view, with no countervailing ideological force to worry about. "One of the most vivid consequences was the abolition of the ban on torture, which had previously been a defining characteristic of the democratic world's self-definition." But with no conflicting worldview to which the United States needed to feel superior, a big reason not to torture was swept off the board. "The same goes for the way in which the financial sector was allowed to run out of control," Lanchester adds. With capitalism "unchallenged as the world's dominant political-economic system . . . it could have been predicted that the financial sector . . . was in a position to reward itself with a disproportionate piece of the economic pie. There was no global antagonist to point at and jeer at the rise in the number and size of the fat cats; there was no embarrassment about allowing the rich to get so much richer so very quickly." As for the bust-bailout syndrome that has afflicted the United States and other economies, Lanchester sums it up in a phrase that could almost be a poetic couplet: "a huge, unregulated boom in which almost all the upside went directly into private hands, followed by a gigantic bust in which the losses were socialized." Copyright 2010, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Review
"Warning to bankers everywhere in the world. You better buy every single copy of I.O.U. because Lanchester's painted the target on you that the rest of us so desperately wanted to see. My prediction: bankers may be an endangered species once I.O.U. gets out, and from this read, I can tell you, while I hate to rush Darwin, it can't happen fast enough." -- James J. Cramer, host of CNBC's Mad Money and author of Jim Cramer's Getting Back to Even"I.O.U. is the map to the crazed world of contemporary finance we have all been waiting for. John Lanchester's superb book is everything its subject, the 2008 crash, was not: namely lucid, beautifully contrived, comprehensible to the reader with no specialist knowledge -- and most of all devastatingly funny. I urge you to read it." -- Will Self, author of Liver
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