(Business Plus, 478 pages, $28.99)
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has some explaining to do, said James Quinn in the London Daily Telegraph. The onetime Goldman Sachs CEO was a central player in the U.S. government’s late-2008 attempt to stave off a global financial calamity. “But was Paulson the savior of the world’s financial system or just an overpromoted banker in the wrong place at the wrong time?” In his new memoir, he lays bare both his strengths and his weaknesses, said The Economist. Though he provides few revelations, he offers “plenty to keep the pages turning.”
If the architect of Washington’s TARP bailouts intended to burnish his legacy, On the Brink is a flop, said Max Abelson in The New York Observer. It’s hard to embrace a hero whose distinguishing traits are exhaustion from overwork and a tendency to dry-heave when pressure spikes. The only explanation he gives for decisions to bail out some companies and not others is “the phrase ‘we had little choice.’” On the Brink leaves a reader with “the spectacularly unsettling sense that world history is decided by an assortment of guys who are improvising, and may not be particularly good at it.” Paulson also is less than honest about his most controversial choice, said Lawrence McDonald in the New York Post. He claims that the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed when Britain chickened out of helping facilitate its sale. Yet the British chancellor blames Paulson for refusing to share the risk. Lehman’s fall “obliterated the world economy.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Still, Paulson deserves credit for going on record with the rationales for the decisions he was making, said James Pressley in Bloomberg.com. “Time and again” in On the Brink, Paulson admits his own mistakes and concedes that some choices risked “distorting markets.” No reader will conclude that every decision was right, but most will recognize that Paulson’s book is “a persuasive portrait” of a man caught in an unenviable predicament.
-
Israel: Losing the American publicFeature A recent poll finds American support for Israel's military action in Gaza has fallen from 50% to 32%
-
Unmaking AmericansFeature Trump is threatening to revoke the citizenship of foreign-born Americans. Could he do that?
-
EPA: A bonfire of climate change regulationsFeature The Environmental Protection Agency wants to roll back its 'endangerment finding,' a ruling that lets the agency regulate carbon emissions
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”