User Profile

Terrifying? Sort of, yes, although in that forensic way that looking back on a human tragedy is frightening but also morbidly fascinating. In fact, I think Lewis could have done more throughout to emphasize the human disaster that was the early 2000s housing bubble and collapse. Instead, for much of the book you join Lewis in simply shaking your head at the combination of stupidity and greed that brought down a vast swathe of the global economy at the turn of the 21st century. It's easy to forget in retrospect the consequences of that greed and stupidity: so many lives ruined, while the architects of the disaster gave themselves healthy bonuses with taxpayer bailouts. A Captivating book? For me, yes, definitely: I quite literally couldn't put it down (insofar as that expression works for ebooks ... couldn't turn it off?). Lewis does an excellent job of explaining and personalizing the story of the 2008 crash. As both a political philosopher and a quantitative social scientist, I appreciated that Lewis took the high road, for the most part avoiding the (not unreasonable) temptation to bash economists and other social scientists ("no one saw it coming!!! you call that a science??" ... which makes about as much sense as berating police investigators and the justice system for not predicting the exact time and place of some ingenious heist: it's hard to do good predictive modelling and causal analysis when the key players are outright lying to you ... but I digress ...). In short, a really good read for anyone with even a passing interest in recent economic history.

I enjoyed this book. I wanted to love it, because the stories are amazing and Lynne Cox is a giant of open water and adventure swimming. All the crazy things people do now with extreme cold water swims? Lynne Cox did them first, and well before anyone even imagined they could be done, at all, let alone the way she did them: obeying traditional 'Channel rules' (i.e. no wetsuits or other aids). Some of this comes across in the book, but the writing is at times stilted and insufficiently rich in detail. For instance, there are a few points where an astounding athletic feat has been concluded, and ... well, that's about how the event concludes! It's as if Cox wants simply to rush past the event itself. Other times, there is considerable detail where a simple, elegant phrase or two would easily have sufficed. It's a fine line, writing compelling adventure narratives: sometimes the best work in the genre is done by professional writers taking part in the activity but not themselves key figures in the adventure. Cox writes with a degree of modesty and immediacy that is sometimes refreshing, but other times doesn't do justice to her extraordinary accomplishments and their significance. And, frankly, she has usually succeeded at these amazing swims, so there isn't cause for the other kind of forensic adventure writing that is so compelling (e.g. "Into Thin Air"). So, in short: a good book about an extraordinary person doing incredible things, but with prose and structure that at times threatens to sell the author short on her own importance as a visionary and inspirational adventurer.