''The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World'' is a 2007
memoir
A memoir (; , ) is any nonfiction narrative writing based in the author's personal memories. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual. While memoir has historically been defined as a subcategory of biography or autobi ...
of former
Chairman of the Federal Reserve
The chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is the head of the Federal Reserve, and is the active executive officer of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The chair shal ...
Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan (born March 6, 1926) is an American economist who served as the 13th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. He works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. ...
, co-authored by Peter Petre, a former executive editor at Fortune magazine. Published on September 17, 2007, the book debuted at the top of the
''New York Times'' Bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction.
Penguin Press
Penguin Group is a British trade book publisher and part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. The new company was created by a merger that was finalised on 1 July 2013, with Bertelsmann initial ...
reportedly paid him an $8 million
advance
Advance commonly refers to:
*Advance, an offensive push in sports, games, thoughts, military combat, or sexual or romantic pursuits
*Advance payment for goods or services
*Advance against royalties, a payment to be offset against future royalty pa ...
.
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Overview
The first half of ''The Age of Turbulence'' is an autobiographical
An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life.
It is a form of biography.
Definition
The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English peri ...
chronology of Greenspan's life that shows readers the people and circumstances that helped shape and guide Greenspan—from hours of clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument in the woodwind family. The instrument has a nearly cylindrical bore and a flared bell, and uses a single reed to produce sound.
Clarinets comprise a family of instruments of differing sizes and pitches ...
and saxophone
The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to pr ...
practice to living-room philosophy with Ayn Rand
Alice O'Connor (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum;, . Most sources transliterate her given name as either ''Alisa'' or ''Alissa''. , 1905 – March 6, 1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand (), was a Russian-born American writer and p ...
.
The second half of the book retells several major economic events (primarily within the United States) that have occurred over the past half century. It details his economic endeavors and personal observations while serving under various U.S. presidents and are often intermingled with the economic events. The latter half of the book also includes an analysis and brief history of major global economic constructs—Marxist
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
communism
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...
, populism
Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against " the elite". It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment. The term developed ...
, and various mutations of market capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private pr ...
—along with Greenspan's opinions about their relative merits and shortcomings.
Greenspan said that he wrote the book in