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The more I read of Crashed the less I liked it. Not because it is a bad book per se. But because it wasn't the book I thought it was going to be. It wasn't the book it *could* have been.

The book is divided into three sections: a history of the 2008 crash with a focus on the US; a history of the 2010 Eurocrisis with a focus on Europe; and a third chapter that is a smattering of quasi-related "other stuff that has happened since 2010".

It was while reading this third section that my disappointment crystalized. Each of these chapters is almost entirely standalone and reads like a run-of-the-mill, not very spectacular The Atlantic article on the subject. (The section on Trump's election is probably the worst example of this.) Ukraine, Brexit, Trump's election, further European developments (particularly in Greece), even China's 2015 stock market slump. But there's very little tying these together and usually only very slight ties to earlier 2008 & 2010 crises.

In a book that is both a 10-year retrospective and carries the subtitle "how a decade of financial crises changed the world" it actually spends most of its time in "at the moment" journalistic re-telling rather than looking back historical analysis. What I mean is: you'll get lots of "and then Merkel had a meeting and said X; and then Geitner had a meeting and said Y". You get far less of "and now that 8 years have passed we can see that Merkel's statement X was totally off base because of A, B, C".

The first time I really noticed this was in a passage on the 2008 crisis when bankers & regulators were arguing about capital increases and whether X% would destroy the banks or whether Y% would leave the system disastrously risky. Well, they eventually settled on a number and 10 years have passed. Surely there's been some research? Or at least some anecdotes & case studies? Were the bankers completely wrong? Were the regulators? Instead of clarity brought to us by the passing of time we are just left with a "he said, she said" argument.

Ultimately, that's the why I felt disappointment as I read more & more. Much of this book could have been written shortly after the respective events; you'll notice, for instance, that when discussing 2008 most of the references are to things published in the 2009-2012 period. For the Eurocrisis, most of the references are to things published in 2010-2012. And the situation is even worse for the more recent events, simply because very little time has passed since most of them have occurred.

There are times where it feels like Tooze is trying to show us major recurring themes or make explicit the linkages between all of these events. But it happens pretty rarely in the 700+ pages and often takes a backseat to more detailed day-by-day journalistic reporting. I would have liked to see that priority inverted -- bring those themes to the forefront and just put in the details as needed to support the themes.

For instance, one of the themes running throughout the book is the tension between decision-making in a crisis, which doesn't exactly have time for parliamentary/Congressional discussions that can takes days or weeks, and democracy -- and the eventual backlash, especially in the US and parts of Eastern Europe, against loss of autonomy to regional/global institutions.

There's another thread about the surprising solidification of US supremacy via dollar-denominated debt but it only comes up occasionally and the consequences of it aren't explored in much detail.

Don't let my low review make you think this is a bad book. If you've never read anything else on the 2008 crisis or the Eurocrisis, this is a pretty good place to start. But I feel like this book missed an opportunity to really tie all these things together and advance a strong thesis, instead of spending so much times just being a retelling of what happened & when.