Monday, September 24, 2007


THE AGE OF TURBULENCE – Adventures in a New World
Alan Greenspan Allen Lane $65

Greenspan is something of a phenomenon having been born in 1926 and until his retirement last year had been Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board since Ronald Reagan appointed him to the post 20 years before.
Remarkably his working life did not start in the world of financé & economics, rather he studied the clarinet at New York’s famed Julliard School, (he had started playing the clarinet when he was 12, these were the days of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw & other great jazz musicians), and later working as a professional musician he earned his BA, MA, and PhD in Economics from New York University.

This is a huge and handsome hardback book of 530+ pages (plus another 32 pages of interesting b&w photograpahs) and I felt somewhat daunted when I picked it up. However what Greenspan has done in a most readable way is to tell the story of his life and in so doing also show how the global economy got to where it is today, (hence his book’s title, The Age of Turbulence), and where he sees the future.

Along the way of course he worked with every US president from Nixon to George W. Bush as well as British Prime Ministers Thatcher, Blair & Brown and almost every other significant political leader from around the globe

The publishers claim that The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan’s personal & intellectual legacy. I think that is a fair claim.
There is a problem with the cover colours on my blog, sorry about that.

The book has received enormous review attention worldwide and here are just a couple of those reviews:

And from The New York Times. An excellent review.

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