In 10th century Japan a ‘pillow book” was a form of diary, a place to gather notes, lists and other scraps of paper and reflect upon them before retiring to bed. A ‘court lady” to the Empress used hers to depict life in the royal household, and today ‘The Pillow Book of Sei ShÅnagon” is considered an invaluable record of a pampered and long-vanished Imperial court’s customs and beliefs.
Someday we may look at former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s memoir ‘Stress Test” the same way.
Imagine for a moment you’re Tim Geithner. You’re intelligent, competent, and hard-working. Your friends like you. Your bosses appreciate you. You’re a good family man. You worked under extraordinary pressure to save the financial system. And all you get for it is grief. Naturally you want to write a book to set the record straight.
It’s all perfectly understandable, at least from Geithner’s point of view.
Now imagine that you’re a middle-class wage earner who’s worked hard all your life. You bought a house, perhaps sometime in the 1990s. The talking heads on TV said it was a great investment, your bank’s assessor said the house was valuable, and politicians from both parties had been telling you for decades […]
