Rating: 4 stars (Spotlight Review)

The 2000’s were one of the worst decades ever; so bad in fact, nobody can come up with a name for them. Names such as “The Oughts” and “The Zeros” were thrown in the ring, but the name Andy Serwer settled on says it best: “The Decade From Hell”.

Although Starting Over was short, it certainly wasn’t sweet. Not exactly the trip down memory lane that I would’ve chosen, but a necessary one to remind us of the tough times we lived through and how easily things can get out of hand; changing our lives forever.

Starting with 2000 and ending in 2009, Serwer gives each year its own laundry list of debacles, tragedies and mayhem that merely scratch the surface; yet makes the point. Starting with a chaotic presidential election in 2000, which had to be ruled on by the Supreme Court (red flag), seemed to set the tone. 2001 saw the 9/11 attacks and it continued downhill from there. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the largest natural disaster in our nation’s history – they’re still rebuilding—the $57 million already sent to Haiti and the on-going requests for more would come in really handy here. In 2008 our banks put our nation’s economy on the brink of collapse and in 2009, Bernie Madoff won the grand prize for orchestrating the biggest ponzi scheme in the history of humanity; $65 billion.

Diminutive in size, Starting Over packs a big punch and should be required reading for all Americans. It’s certainly a wake-up call to remind us all that America is no longer the super-power nation that we used to be. Perhaps our greed and sense of entitlement have finally taken its toll. Whatever the cause, we are here and it’s going to take a collective effort to get us out. So, maybe our new decade can be focused on healing our own nation before we worry about fixing someone else’s.
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Hardcover: 96 pages Publisher: Time (January 26, 2010)
ISBN-13: 978-1603201605