And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

The financial catastrophe that nearly undid the euro, the flawed, fragile currency of most of Europe, is placed under a microscope by Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur), an economics professor whose seven-month tenure as Greece's finance minister in early 2015 was marked by debt crisis and bitter disputes with more powerful Eurozone members, particularly Germany. To tell this story, he delves back into economic history, starting with the "Nixon Shock" of 1971, which unraveled the Bretton Woods global monetary system installed at the end of WWII. Economists will debate the rightness of Varoufakis's convictions, summed up by a quote from ancient Greek historian Thucycdides that "rights are only pertinent between equals" and that strong powers "actually do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." He sees this principle in the decades-long development of the euro, a process marked by fractious debates between France and Germany. At his pithiest, Varoufakis is a trenchant critic%E2%80%94he observes that the bridges and arches decorating euro banknotes are as fictitious as the political unity they represent%E2%80%94but the density and jumpiness of the book makes it difficult to understand how his proposed solutions to Greece's, and the Eurozone's, problems might be achieved. Agent: Wendy Strothman, Strothman Agency. (Apr.)