All are welcome to attend the Reading on the Avenue Book Club, which meets in the Community Room of Willow Glen Library. On Wednesday, August 28, we'll be discussing Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis.

The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet 2002-2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.