Nonfiction Book Reviews

Have you ever read a book because you felt you “had to” as a part of your general education? That’s why I picked up Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan - it seemed like one of those books that I “had to” read, as a citizen of America and all that good stuff.

Despite that inauspicious beginning, I ended up loving the book. I was shocked by how readable it was, and spent the next week telling everyone that they needed to read it too.

This is a 921 (meaning it’s an autobiography) but Alan Greenspan being who he is, the majority of the book focuses on the financial system of the world. The book actually starts out on September 11th, 2001, then jumps back and focuses on his early life, and goes forward in time from there.  In the excerpt below, he’s talking about his first job out of college, where he was charged with finding data and making it accessible to businessmen and union leaders.

I think this passage really spotlights the fundamental gap between me and him, since I’d rather have my teeth extracted with no painkillers than mess with numbers on a regular basis, but that’s why he was Chairman of the Fed and I’m…well, I’m definitely not.

There was no room to work in the library’s crowded stacks, so I would lug armloads of materials to my desk. Usually I’d have to blow the dust off the books. The chief economist would assign the research projects, and in just a few months people began to tab me as a guy who knew all the data. In a sense, that was true.

It became my passion to master all of the knowledge on those shelves. I read about the robber barons; I spent hours over the census of population of 1890; I studied railroad freight-car loadings of that era, trends in short staple cotton prices for the decades after the Civil War, and myriad other details of the vast American economy.

It wasn’t drudgery - far from it. Instead of reading Gone with the Wind, I was happy to immerse myself in “Copper Ore Deposits in Chile.” ~Page 33 of Age of Turbulence

Great for him and America that he was that way, and even better for me that I don’t have to be.

Although I enjoyed reading about his background, the really interesting part for me came when he started talking about dealing with the different presidents. He’s libertarian (meaning, a capitalist first and foremost - most of his book is spent passionately defending capitalism as the best way of life) but his position was nonpolitical in nature, and he tried to stay out of the political spotlight.

His behind-the-scenes look at each of the presidents was an eye-opener for me. The president who seemed to be the most aligned with Greenspan when it came to economic policy was actually Bill Clinton, and Greenspan had heaps of praise for his policies on economic decisions.

He talks briefly about the Monica Lewinsky affair, and says how disappointed he was in that happening, but he didn’t seem to let it affect his judgment on whether or not Clinton made a good president.

Overall, the book was quite a-political, which I really liked, because I hate having one point of view or another forced down my throat when the book is supposed to be about something else entirely. Now if the book is labeled as a political book (like a book from Rush Limbaugh or something) then fine, at least I know it going into the book. When people try to slide their views in subtly, it really drives me nuts.  Greenspan doesn’t do that.

After going through the presidents up to President Bush, and then his eventual retirement from the Federal Board, Greenspan then dives into what he thinks about each region of the world: China, India, Russia, South America, and more. He talks quickly about why the country is where it is, what changes he thinks they need to make to become more prosperous in the future, and what he thinks will actually happen.

To me, this was the most fascinating part of the book. To have someone as knowledgeable as him give a broad overview of a country and its economic policies was engrossing. I was almost late to work several times, because I didn’t want to put the book down.

After all this, the book finally ends up doing what I was worried about all along: It got boring. He gets into the fine details of how the financial world hums along, and even though I know that understanding all of this would make me a much more informed person, it was just too much for my non-math brain. Here’s a quick excerpt - tell me if you understand this:

A detailed calculation by Federal Reserve Board staff employing data from more than 5,000 nonfinancial US corporations for the years 1983 - 2004 found that growth in the sum of deficits of those corporations where capital expenditures exceeded cash flow persistently outpaced the growth in corporate value-added. The sum of surpluses and deficits, disregarding sign, as a ratio to a proxy for corporate value-added exhibits an average annual increase of 3.5% per year.*

To clarify, it says in the footnotes:

*The surpluses (and deficits) are measured as income before extraordinary items, plus depreciation, minus capital expenditures. The proxy for corporate value-added is gross margin, or sales less cost of goods sold. ~ Page 356 of Age of Turbulence

So glad we cleared that up…

Unfortunately, Greenspan goes on in this fashion for several chapters. At first, I tried to understand it, and then I gave up. I am soooo not a math person. I just started skimming until things got interesting again, and they did. The book ended on a great note, and I finished in awe of the knowledge that Greenspan possesses, and also quite sad that the book was finally finished. At 531 pages, I really should have been celebrating its completion, but it was such an interesting book, I wanted to keep learning.

If you have any interest whatsoever in finances, politics, the economy, or just the world in general, you really can’t miss when it comes to this book. Everyone I’ve talked to who has read it thoroughly enjoyed it, so I know I’m not the oddball out here.

Overall, it rates 4.5 out of 5. I wish I could give it higher, but there’s just one too many dry spots.

Havs