PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewTeachout, a dogged scholar, lays out a comprehensive list of damage done to American consumers by monopolized industries like Big Pharma, fossil fuels, Silicon Valley, health insurance, banking and communications giants from Verizon to Facebook and Google ... Teachout should temper [her] anticorporate zeal, at least to a degree. Big companies have often done good while also doing bad ... Still, [she is] mostly right ... [a] valuable [book], and the anger [it] will generate may prove politically energizing.
Michael Lewis
RaveNew York Review of Books...excellent ... Lewis, whose first book, Liar’s Poker, was a revealing insider’s account of the beginnings of the new mortgage markets, decided to find out what the handful of people who did \'stand apart from mass hysteria\' understood that others didn’t. Through these contrarians, he untangles in depth the sources of the crisis in ways that none of the recent literature on the subject has matched ... Lewis’s deep burrowing gets to the essence of Wall Street companies blinded by easy, short-term profit and uninhibited by any moral scruples or external government watchdog ... So powerful is the tale Lewis tells of self-interest run amok that perhaps it will help awaken the nation to the basic truth that some individuals were indeed responsible for what happened, and had they been stopped by adequate regulation and enforcement, the speculative fires could have been brought under control. Lewis has written the best book I know of about the financial catastrophe by bringing us close to the deluded and duplicitous minds that caused it.
Sebastian Mallaby
PanThe NationDespite Mallaby’s best efforts to show otherwise, much of Greenspan’s career as a public figure was defined by the individualistic fantasies and persistent biases against government spending and regulation that he shared with Ayn Rand ... But his new biography does offer some useful insight into how Greenspan’s libertarian ideals often came into conflict with his persistent ambition to rise to the top of Washington’s policy-making establishment ... From time to time, the book takes on the breathless sensibility of a movie-star biography, or just bad pulp fiction ... Mallaby’s casual treatment of major economic ideas can be frustrating. Even more so are some of the strange conclusions he makes ... Mallaby ignores most of the disturbing outcomes of Greenspan’s major decisions.
