sport

“I had always been a backstage guy,” Geithner writes by way of general explanation, but referring specifically to his first, spectacularly unsuccessful, public speech as Treasury secretary. “I had spent my career behind the scenes. Ever since high school, I had dreaded public speaking. . . . I swayed back and forth, like an unhappy passenger on an unsteady ship. I kept peering around the teleprompter to look directly at the audience, which apparently made me look shifty; one commentator said I looked like a shoplifter. My voice wavered. I tried to sound forceful, but I just sounded like someone trying to sound forceful.”

Geithner is clearly more at ease, and more himself, on the page than on the stage or the screen — which is, for an American public figure, both odd and charming. So much so that I finished his book half wishing he had just skipped all of the public performances required of him as Treasury secretary and instead written out what he had to say and handed it to an actor — say, Denzel Washington — to perform. “Stress Test” has surprising virtues — for instance, the skill with which Geithner draws his hard-to-describe main character. He thinks of himself — and on the evidence it’s hard to disagree with him — as a fairly ordinary person thrust into a great many extraordinary situations. His mother was a card-carrying liberal; his father a Republican who spent his career working in nonprofits in poor countries, and who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 while his son was still in the Obama administration. The future Treasury secretary grew up everywhere and nowhere, a bit like a military brat, and came away from his childhood with a certain detachment from the American way of life: “At a local supermarket in suburban Virginia one summer, I was stunned to see an entire aisle stocked with pet food. It seemed bizarre in a world full of starving people.”