Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written – an achievement that outweighs his desire for self-justification during the Greek crisis. He explains, with a weariness born of nights in soulless hotels and harsh-lit briefing rooms, how the modern power network is built ... Varoufakis built a reputation, but not a party. Indeed the world of parties – of activists huddled against the rainy windows of suburban cafes, of leaflet drops, of strikes and anti-fascist demos – is absent from this memoir. If the global left – which was on a roll during 2011-2013 – is to regain momentum, it needs leaders like Tsipras to find thinkers and doers like Varoufakis, and to nurture them. But above all it needs to talk to the mass of people in language born out of the years of toil it takes to build a party and a movement.
...a tremendously indiscreet account by Varoufakis as he draws upon his own audio recordings and diaries of top-level meetings. It is deeply personal and very well written, with an impressive array of literary allusions ... Varoufakis has had a favourable press in the anglophone world. In this book he outlines a cogent case against the austerity heaped on Greece. Eurosceptics endorsed his critique of the debt-inducing structures of the eurozone and leftists his attacks on the myopia of German ordoliberal economic philosophy in sustaining them. Less prominent in Varoufakis’s thinking, though, is the need for serious supply-side adaptation — institutional and product-market reform — in Greece to increase efficiency and competitiveness.
The problem, at bottom, is that having lost the material battle for the future of Greece, Varoufakis can only tell a story. For all his 'revelations' about the working of the IMF here, his book reveals very little that was not already known. Showing how a system fails people is not the same as acquiring the power to change that system and bring about a better world ... Adults in the Room is an essential book and it is vital that books like it be written about each one of the injustices inflicted on the vulnerable by the present masters of the world. But this effort, in particular, is clumsy and these efforts, in general, are a stopgap at best. In 500 pages, you don’t learn much from Varoufakis about what he might have done differently, or how the Greek people could have won. I suspect that’s because he doesn’t know. That’s why he’s left banging on the ramparts with an uneven book. But more than a better book, I’d like a better leader, one who wins.
I needn’t recount each and every meeting or cliff-hanger moment in the ensuing fiscal negotiations. Anyway, Varoufakis himself does a surprisingly entertaining job of telling the story of the next six months of polite confrontation. Usually, books that are this heavily invested in financial minutiae don’t exactly keep you up at night, but Varoufakis’s account has the narrative drive of a rollicking detective novel ... One of the principal virtues of Varoufakis’s book is that it takes us behind those doors and tells us exactly what was said and done there ... Varoufakis’s book is very good, very readable, and ought to be on all the important 'notable books of the year' lists.
Adults in the Room is several things: a gripping tale of an outspoken intellectual’s sudden immersion in high-stakes politics, an at times overwrought riposte to the many people in and outside Greece who derided his efforts and a solid work of explanatory economics. Most of all, though, it is an attempt to divine why smart, seemingly decent politicians and bureaucrats would continue pushing a pointlessly cruel approach long after its pointlessness had become clear ... Varoufakis does a magnificent job of evoking the absurdities and frustrations of his tenure. This is what it’s like to go from meeting to interminable meeting for six months, trying and failing to negotiate your country’s way out of a terrible impasse. At least, this is what Varoufakis says it was like. I did wonder on occasion how much I could trust his play-by-play. I’m reviewing this book, not fact-checking it, but I couldn’t resist asking Summers for his assessment of the opening scene in the hotel bar. 'Somewhat embellished,' was the verdict. Leaving aside whether Varoufakis’s recollections might be more accurate than those of a man who has met with so many embattled finance ministers over the past quarter century that he has probably lost count, I’m good with that. A truth somewhat embellished is still pretty much the truth.
It is a chronicle of elite pacting far removed from the lives being impacted by the deliberations of these elites. Varoufakis never seems to grasp how elitist his own modus operandi is ... This book tells many truths that need to be told. Varoufakis lucidly explains the 'extend and pretend' dynamic, in which Greece was never 'bailed out' but forced, through many layers of subterfuge, to bear the burden of bailing out German and French banks, while plundering wages, pensions, municipalities, hospitals, schools, and public property to do so ... This book does a service in bearing witness to that essential dynamic. However, Varoufakis’s book conceals as much as it reveals. Most importantly, it does not clearly conceptualize the sociohistorical forces at play, both because of an overbearing egocentrism and a lack of systemic analysis. Capitalism disappears in the play of elite personalities, primarily his own ... he constructs a narrative that selects some facts and omits others in a way that is blatantly self-justifying and distorts the history of this conjuncture ... I do think this is an important book. It is a long read — 560 pages — but worth the time and effort.
Ostensibly it is a nonfiction account by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis of his negotiations with the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) over the Greek debt crisis ...reads like a novel centered on a globetrotting, motorcycle-riding hero fighting the forces of darkness and ignorance ...story of an academic idealist who became involved in deep political battles for which he had little understanding or sympathy ... Much of Adults in the Room is taken up with Varoufakis’s explanation of this failure. Convinced of his plan’s economic and moral superiority, Varoufakis emphasizes his opponents’ stupidity and immorality ...approached negotiations as an academic, convinced that with facts and decency on his side, any argument could be won; he was unaware of and uninterested in the political calculations guiding his opponents ...hard to read this book and not feel immensely worried about Europe.
...Adults in the Room, the lengthy memoir by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, is boisterously, engrossingly enjoyable from start to finish, despite often needing to unburden itself to its readers on the arcana of international finance and the fine-grain details of Greek governmental meetings ...after only a dozen pages or so, every reader will have realized that there’s a third possible description of the book: a Hero’s Tale, told by Himself ...his descriptions of the fascinating folk – among whom certainly count all the big names and national leaders who populate his pages – are equally energetic, especially the not-exactly-rare intervals in which he’s discussing himself...it’s just about the last thing you’d expect when you open a lengthy memoir by a former finance minister: a cracking good adventure story.
He offers a gripping account of those chaotic days, when the eurozone appeared as if it might shatter. But there’s less 'deep establishment' here than meets the eye. What emerges instead is a story of miscalculations, many of them the author’s own ... for all his financial acumen, Mr. Varoufakis was—and, to judge by his memoir, remains—a political naif. Not even the threat of Grexit could have upset the creditors’ consensus. And as much as the Greeks hated the bailouts, they, too, concluded that they would be worse off leaving the euro ... A better deal for Greece may exist, but Mr. Varoufakis was never the one to propose it. Even in his own book he appears as a hapless academic cursed by prodigious knowledge and limited wisdom. No wonder it all went so terribly wrong.
In this 500-odd page personal account of his journey as Finance Minister of the Syriza/ANEL coalition government, Varoufakis focuses on (and claims to reveal in 'whistle-blower' fashion) the inside story of the negotiations between Greece and the Troika (European Commission, IMF, and European Central Bank) between January 2015 and his resignation in July of the same year ... it reveals an awful lot about the political bankruptcy of the Left today — of which Varoufakis is part ...offers a decent presentation of the workings of the Greek banking system and its role in the Greek economy and crisis, though his explication of the crucial issue of credit expansion after the creation of the Eurozone is somewhat lacking ...a classic example of an academic, and therefore minimal, viewpoint –– the drastic reduction of the field of vision to those aspects that one has been professionally trained to deal with. Thus, despite his sporadic identification of certain partial truths, he misses the overall truth.
The story is a tangled one full of many threads both political and economic—and even historical, since Varoufakis traces some contemporary domestic issues to the dawn of the Cold War and a Greece torn between East and West. It helps to have both a scorecard and an economics degree to follow some of the thornier arguments on debt structure and liability management, but this is an eye-opening look at the recent economic crisis in the eurozone.
His subtitle is misleading, as there’s little here about America’s leaders and nothing about its 'deep establishment' (a term Varoufakis leaves unexplained); this is a book about intra-European economic battles. Unfortunately, Varoufakis sometimes doesn’t explain arcane terms—how many readers will know what 'EFSF debt' refers to? He is also prone to providing excessive detail, making this otherwise illuminating account far too long for all but those with a passionate interest in EU economic affairs in general and the seemingly interminable Greek debt crisis in particular.
