5. Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze
This book by Adam Tooze is a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything. The book deftly weaves finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative.
The author provides a panoramic and synthetic overview of the current crisis by focusing on finance and business and sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are.
Tooze’s special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from local hospitals to the World Bank.
He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics, what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic.
