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Title: The Courage to Act

Subtitle: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath

Author: Ben S. Bernanke

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Format: Unabridged

Length: 22 hrs and 36 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-05-15

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 501 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Personal Memoirs

Publisher's Summary:

In 2006, Ben S. Bernanke was appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, capping a meteoric trajectory from a rural South Carolina childhood to professorships at Stanford and Princeton, to public service in Washington's halls of power. There would be no time to celebrate, however - the burst of the housing bubble in 2007 set off a domino effect that would bring the global financial system to the brink of meltdown. In The Courage to Act, Bernanke pulls back the curtain on his efforts to prevent a mass economic failure, working with two US presidents and using every Fed capability, no matter how arcane, to keep the US economy afloat. His experiences during the initial crisis and the Great Recession that followed give listeners an unequaled perspective on the American economy since 2006, and his narrative will reveal for the first time how the creativity and decisiveness of a few key leaders prevented an economic collapse of unimaginable scale.

Members Reviews:

Way, way deep into the weeds...

Would you consider the audio edition of The Courage to Act to be better than the print version?

I have no way of comparing. This question needs to be dispensed with as I do not believe the overwhelming majority of audiobook partakers make it a habit to also read the print version of each audiobook. It makes no sense to me that they would do both.

What was your reaction to the ending? (No spoilers please!)

Interesting.

What does Grover Gardner bring to the story that you wouldnt experience if you just read the book?

To me, the narrator seemed like the nearly ideal person to give voice to this entire book, with his uniformly even, dispassionate tone, considering what most people might regard as very dry material. I will even admit to nodding off a time or two. But I saw no way the narrator could have jazzed up his delivery of what mostly sounded like right out of a textbook, at least until near the end.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

No, I don't feel an extreme reaction is possible. Not that the financial crisis itself was not an extreme thing, impacting gazillions of citizens in a horrible way. But in this book, we are in an academic world, a world of graphs and rules, of historical precedents and, it seemed, every type of consideration other than the real-world, intimate effects felt by the victims. This would be my main criticism of the work.

Not that the harm to the victims was skipped or its importance denied. It was all there, but it was given as numbers on charts. There was not a single personal story given of a victim's life being ruined by the irresponsible acts of others.

Another factor that was not elucidated in my opinion had to do with the criminality of the perpetrators of the crisis. Totally lacking was any blaming or emphasis on the right/wrong aspect. All the factors that actually coalesced to cause the collapse were listed as in a textbook, but in a setting of a financial environment, not human nor even very much political. The political aspect was lightly touched upon.

Even the situatiion with the robo-signers, which at the time quite shocked and alarmed me, was flatly explained in terms of numbers of documents, etc., and the amount of fines eventually paid.