Review by Booklist Review
Janet Yellen is the first woman to run the big economic institutions fashioned by Alexander Hamilton. Currently the U.S. secretary of the Treasury, Yellen has also served as the chair of the Federal Reserve. Tracing her life and career, Hilsenrath, senior writer for the Wall Street Journal, has written a book that is part biography and part historical view of decades of economic history, turmoil, and reform in which Yellen has played an integral part. In addition, he explores how she was inspired by her husband, George Akerlof, a Nobel prize--winning economist. Hilsenrath highlights Yellen's notable achievements, such as having to "fix the economy on the fly as it cracked" during the tech bubble, terror attacks, and other turmoil around 2000. By focusing on people, she tackled the unemployment crisis during the 2008 financial downturn, helping drive the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. Well educated and in a male-dominated field, Yellen made her mark on numerous economic policies and has worked with a troupe of modern characters, including Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, Al Gore, and many congresspeople, governors, and academics in the field. This well-researched portrait of a talented woman unfolds into a slice of American economic history.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Wall Street Journal reporter Hilsenrath debuts with a mostly strong biography of Janet Yellen, the first woman to lead the Federal Reserve. Hilsenrath covers Yellen's youth in Brooklyn in a family that "wasn't rich but lived well," and her time at Yale, where she studied under influential economist (and later Nobel laureate) James Tobin. He also highlights Yellen's her advocacy for low interest rates and her "mantra" that there were human lives behind the high unemployment numbers during the Great Recession--"These are fucking people," she yelled in one meeting. Hilsenrath devotes almost equivalent space to the life and work of Yellen's husband, economist George Akerlof. Their marriage, unconventional for the time (he frequently assumed household duties), was one of the rare impulsive decisions the deliberative Yellen ever made, and the author writes that it was their shared philosophy that they were the "lighthouse keepers" for something larger that informed Yellen's views on economic policy. The authors wanders off on a fair share of digressions on the political and economic contours of Yellen's years in Washington, and though Hilsenrath never quite gets at what makes his subject tick as a person, his meticulous account of her career leave no stone unturned. The result is an oft-powerful study of a key player in American economics. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A thriving marriage buoys two impressive careers. Financial journalist Hilsenrath, senior writer for the Wall Street Journal, makes his book debut with a perceptive dual biography of Janet Yellen (b. 1946) and her husband, Nobel laureate George Akerlof (b. 1940). By the time they met in 1977, Yellen had earned a doctorate at Yale, where she was inspired by the "moral passion" of her mentor, James Tobin, and had just left a teaching job at Harvard. Akerlof, coming out of MIT, had taught at Berkeley, was divorced, and, in 1970, had written a transformative 13-page paper, "The Market for 'Lemons,' " which, Hilsenrath notes, "helped open the door for a new branch of research called behavioral economics." In many ways, the two were opposites: "Janet was disciplined, grounded, sensible, orderly; George was creative, contrarian, and unorthodox." Soon after meeting, they married and went off to teach at the London School of Economics. Though their personalities differed, their views on their field concurred. Both were critics of the efficient-market theory of economics, which held that individuals always act in their own best interests. Yellen and Akerlof believed that a person's financial decisions are not always rational nor predictable. Similarly, they opposed the stance of economists such as Milton Friedman, who saw individual liberty to be "both a virtue in its own right and the central mechanism for economic good." In 2001, Akerlof shared a Nobel Prize; his continued research in behavior and social psychology led to his creating the field of identity economics. Yellen attained ever higher political appointments as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, chair of the Federal Reserve, and secretary of the treasury. Hilsenrath draws on personal interviews and abundant published material to clearly elucidate economic theories, recount Yellen's challenges in steering the nation through economic upheaval, and convey the warmth of the family's life. A lucid, informative portrait. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
