Exhaustive, authoritative, accurate, clear, revealing, enlightening, objective, un-ideologically biased, compelling, and presented in concise segments are just a few of the things that must be said in any responsible review of this volume. The current global economic meltdown is described in ways that reveal the who, what, and where that are accessible to any interested reader.

It is a book for all moments. Made up of selected essays by distinguished authors and organized into discrete topics, the book can be read serially from beginning to end or piecemeal. Pick an essay in a section whose title provokes your interest whenever you have a half-hour or more of time to fill. If you’re a reader like me, you may want to put the book aside then and think about what you’ve just read for a day or two. Then pick it up again and read another essay or two. Or you can just go straight from essay to essay. Either way, you will acquire an understanding of this catastrophic event in human history that few of even the major players will ever understand as well.

Made up of twenty essays organized into five topics, the book describes the genesis and development of the collapse in ways that exhibit how serious and intractable it is, and the editors have had the good sense to not indulge in any Pollyanna prescriptions of how it will all end up with the world being better off than it ever has been. They have also had the good sense not to present the crisis as a doomsday event. As such, they presents things in ways that show what went wrong and what needs to be fixed and leaves the fixing to us if we can generate the courage to fix them. This book can be likened to a treasure chest full of Spanish doubloons, wonderful to possess even if directions for spending them are absent.

The Global Economic Crisis

Michel Chossudovsky
Andrew G. Marshall (editors)