The San Antonio Book Club April Meetup

We'll be returning to the two book format to give people some more options and to read a non-fiction book. Michael Farries recommended the timely The Origin of Financial Crises by George Cooper and we'll be reading the second place winner from the poll Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. See the Reviews below:

The Origin of Financial Crises

“A must-read on the origins of the crisis.”
—The Economist

“A well written book. . . . Cooper's most novel doctrine is that investors do not have to be irrational to generate bubbles. . . . Mr. Cooper traces present difficulties to the rapid growth of credit encouraged by the Fed's ultra-cheap money policy of a few years ago.”
—Financial Times

Revolutionary Road

Amazon.com Review
The rediscovery and rejuvenation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership. April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.

Yates's incisive, moving, and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs seem quaintly dated--the early-evening cocktails, Frank's illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn't averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn--and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did years ago. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the exacting cost of chasing the American dream.

--Jane Morris, Amazon.co.uk