Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century
This book felt a bit like someone incredibly smart sat down next to you at a party and started talking - and after an hour you realised you weren’t sure what the question was anymore.
The scope of the work is massive, filling in mounds of historical detail on 20th and 21st century geopolitics, oil economy, European Union dynamic and more.
At times I found it very difficult to piece together, and I can’t work out if that’s my fault or the point.
The book feels like a response to a debate I wasn’t part of. Almost as if simple narratives of disruption in the 21st Century were so crass they motivated Helen Thompson to clap back, filling in all the missing detail.
Were this a Wikipedia entry, every line would be littered with footnote markers and references to whole other pages of debate.
Despite feeling a bit overwhelmed, the book also helped knit together a great deal of disparate previous reading.
Particularly sections on the Eurozone crisis. Between 2009 and 2018 I determinedly listened daily to hours of current affairs and popular economics podcasts. The key plot points of the crisis, even more obscure names of finance ministers and those no longer well known remain with me.
Re-tellings like this which bind the details together likely help me see what I couldn’t distill from the firehose of news at the time. Perhaps I just understand more about bonds now, or perhaps the best time to reflect on the meaning of an event is never in its midst.
Before "Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century" I read: The Story of a New Name
After "Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century" I read: An Artist of the Floating World