And, as if to compound the process of delegitimization, in August 2008 American democracy made a mockery of itself too. In the space of only five years, both the foreign policy and the economic policy elite of the United States, the most powerful state on earth, had suffered humiliating failure. The financial crisis, writes Tooze, “clinched” that impression of disaster: The credibility of that administration was already reeling from the debacle of the Iraq War. Bush administration, on whose watch the crisis first exploded. It makes for thrilling reading, not only about the economic crash at the center of the book but also with some of its deep roots in the George W. In this book as in his earlier books, Tooze combines a sweeping historical breadth with an unfailingly powerful compression of focus. It's a strange – and, it must be admitted, not entirely pleasant – feeling to read a scholar as powerfully insightful as Tooze writing about events through which his readers have all lived Crashed is a reminder to those readers that the times are epochal and that epochal times are inherently dangerous. In his new book, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, he looks at far more recent history: the world-wide financial crisis that erupted into public awareness exactly a decade ago, when the Lehman Brothers investment bank collapsed under the weight of rampant junk-trading and filed for bankruptcy, very nearly taking the entire world's economy with it.

It's a set of skills he's used to explore the complexities of international finance in the wake of the First World War and also to lay out in great detail the workings of the Nazi economy. This is an author who can steep his books in charts, graphs, and statistical analysis without losing the comprehension or interest of the non-specialist reader, thanks in main part to his sharp, clear prose style. Readers of historian Adam Tooze, the author of fantastic books like The Deluge and Wages of Destruction, know to expect from him a very rare combination of technical wonkery and narrative skill.

Adam tooze the deluge review