Posts Tagged ‘greece’

With a name like The Real Greek, you would expect Tonia Buxton’s cookbook to offer authentic recipes. Does it?

Well, that depends on how accurate greek stereotypes are. Everything had feta cheese in it. So, if that is genuinely all Greek people eat, then yes.

It’s a book of simple recipes. If you want to know how to make a beautiful Greek salad or marinate some spicy kebabs, it is full of that stuff. And often, you do just want to make something simple and delicious, so it works well.

The number of actionable recipes was mixed. I’ve made a bunch of skewers and stuffed some burgers with feta cheese. But, despite a range of other dishes, not much else took my fancy. At first, it felt there was very little, although, on going back through them, I have enjoyed several other recipes, too. It doesn’t match up to the likes of Hugh or Mary Berry, but I have added a handful of recipes to my repertoire.

Boomerang is almost a follow-up book to Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, looking at the fall out of the global recession across the rest of the world. And by the “rest of the world”, it is basically Europe.

He first looks at Iceland in which he talks to a fisherman that became an investment banker. The whole financial crises can be summed up in the following conversation.

“You spend seven years learning to be a fisherman?” “Yes.” “And after that, you spent months training at the feet of a master before you felt you were capable?” “Yes.” “So why did you think you could be an investment banker without any training?”

He then moves on to Greece and talks about how they got into their financial mess. He claims that almost nobody on Greece pays their taxes, every government official takes bribes and that public employees have completely overrun the government to the point where they now get paid two or three times what any sensible country would pay them. I do not know how true all of that is. He finishes up by discussing Ireland.

It is an interesting, and quite a concise book which made it pleasurable to read. Some of it seems rather shallow though. How much can you rely on the stereotypes of Icelandic and Greek people that are put forward in the book? Probably less than our narrative-over-statistics obsessed minds would allow by default. Especially when he begins to talk about the German’s apparent love of shit. I even read what I would interpret as a Holocaust joke. Several times.

Further, he seems to contradict his earlier writing. The final part of the book talks about how much Germany lost in the sub-prime mortgage collapse. In The Big Short he talks about how American banks created credit default swaps that they did not really understand and how one of the people who saw it coming was Greg Lippmann from Deutsche Bank. In Boomerang he proposes the exact opposite – that the American banks knew exactly what they were doing in selling worthless assets to German banks.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that what Michael Lewis has written in this book is actually complete bollocks. The collective lesson I took from Silver, Watts, Kahneman and Taleb is that the financial crisis was too complicated to predict, but humans have a tendency to add a narrative after to try and explain it to themselves in simple terms. Then Lewis comes along and says the financial crisis happens because the Greeks are lazy, the Irish are stupid and the Germans have a shit-fetish.