Joris Luyendijk Book order

Joris Luyendijk, an investigative journalist, knew as much about banking as the average person: almost nothing. Bankers, he thought, were ruthless, competitive, bonus-obsessed sharks, irrelevant to his life. And then he was assigned to investigate the financial sector. Joris immersed himself in the City--London's equivalent of Wall Street--for several years, speaking to over 200 people--from the competitive investment bankers and elite hedge-fund managers to downtrodden back-office staff, reviled HR managers, and those made redundant in the regular 'culls'. Breaking the strictly imposed code of secrecy and silence, these insiders spoke on record about what they actually do all day, how they see the toxic environment in which they work, and how they think the uninitiated see them. They confessed to feeling overwhelmed by the intransparency of our financial systems. They admitted that when Lehman Brothers went down in 2008 they hoarded food, put their money in gold, and prepared to evacuate their children to the countryside. They agreed that nothing has changed since the crash. A strange thing happens when you spend time among the bankers . . . you start to sympathize with them. What if the bankers themselves aren't the real enemy? What if the truth about global finance is more sinister than that?

A gripping work of reportage about the financial time bomb at the heart of our society.

In Hello Everybody! a bestseller in his native Holland, Joris Luyendijk tells the story of his five yearsas a reporter in the Middle East. Young and inexperienced but fluent in Arabic, he speaks to stone throwers and soldiers, taxi drivers and professors, victims and aggressors chronicling first-hand experiences of dictatorship, occupation and war. But the more he witnesses, the less he understands and he becomes increasingly aware of the yawning gap between what he sees on the ground and what is later reported in the media. As a correspondent he is privy to the multitude of narratives with conflicting implications, yet again and again the media favours those stories that will confirm and reinforce the oversimplified beliefs of the West.Hello Everybody! Is a story of disillusionment and enlightenment, by turns hilarious and despairing, but most importantly it is a powerful wake up call to the way the media gives us a filtered and manipulated version of reality in the Middle East.

Follows the five years, Joris Luyendijik spent in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent, looking at the difference between what he saw there and what was reported by the media.