February 2nd, 2010 | 
Author: Maxed Out Hard Times in the Age of Easy Credit
In this shocking and illuminating road trip through an America ravaged by debt, award-winning film director James Scurlock examines our multitrillion-dollar addiction to easy credit in all of its absurdities and contradictions.
Maxed Out ventures beyond the mind-numbing statistics to expose a financial industry spinning wildly out of control. From the gilded master-planned communities of Northern Las Vegas to the shotgun shacks of the Deep South, the world’s largest financial institutions are trolling for customers, hooking the nouveau riche and the poor alike with promises of cheap and easy credit. Maxed Out exposes how Wall Street and Congress spawned the subprime mortgage crisis and reveals how credit card issuers form multimillion-dollar partnerships with universities — paying them millions for access to their students’ personal information, setting kids up for financial ruin before their first job. The industry’s final frontier, “debt buying,” is a veritable Wild West in which ambitious young men make quick fortunes off the misery and misfortune of others.
Hilarious, fascinating, and deeply disturbing, Maxed Out is one man’s answer to modern America’s most pressing question, “Why can’t we get out of debt?”
User Ratings and Reviews
1 Star MAXED OUT
I ORDERED A DVD “MAXED OUT” AND RECEIVED A BOOK “MAXED OUT”. I RETURNED IT FOR THE DVD AND WAS TOLD THAT I WOULD GET A REFUND IN ITS PLACE. I WANTED THE DVD! SO FAR I HAVE NOT RECEIVED A REFUND OR THE DVD. NOTHING TO GIVE A REVIEW ABOUT.
NOT HAPPY
4 Stars Pretty upsetting – in a good way.
((After watching this, I finally sat down and organized a budget for paying off my credit cards and I’m sticking to it very strictly!)) While the personal, anecdotal evidence causes minor weaknesses in the arguments made in this film, there is enough compelling evidence to make it quite interesting, upsetting, insightful, etc. and it was particularly intriguing to see for my first time during the economy crisis being such a decisive factor for people in the 2008 presidential election.
4 Stars Great for a road trip!!
Very entertaining and packed with good stuff. This is based off the video documentary you can catch on HBO. Great for a 4 hour car ride. Enjoy :0)
4 Stars A lot to Digest… but it sure helps a person to feel less alone!
I do recommend this book, although I agree with some of the other reviewers who found it a bit overwhelming. I had to stop reading and let my head stop swimming every now and then.
It’s astounding the number of manipulative tactics that credit card companies use to lure people into debt and keep them there, paying huge interest rates and sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire. Meanwhile, the threat of ruining their credit hangs over their heads like the legendary Sword of Damocles. It ruins lives, and the author does an excellent job of enumerating the many many ways that happens to people.
I’m happy to say that I’ve also read another book that offers us a more victorious resolution to this problem:
DEFAULT !!! Escaping the Debt Trap and Avoiding Bankruptcy
After reading all the dire warnings and horror stories in “Maxed Out”, I was ready to enjoy an entertaining and uplifting book about people who legally defeated a huge credit card company just by doing their homework, learning how to do legal research and conducting their own legal defense.
I highly recommend both books for a complete and balanced perspective on this subject.
2 Stars One Big, Long Run-on Sentence
“The Country Music…of physical violence.” Those are the first and last three words of the book, not counting the preface. Scurlock has amassed far more information than he knew how to deal with in “Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit, and the Era of Predatory Lenders.” I’m quite angry with our author because I was really hoping to find a focused, informative dissertation in the third-person about the state of lending institutions and their practices of extending credit, how they treat their customers and the actual benefits of using credit, and not this mish-mashed mangled monstrosity of stream of consciousness.
There’s no bibliography and no index. There’s no table of contents, and thus there is no structure. A table of contents also serves as an outline, and even the most basic element of a narrative essay is missing. As an editor myself, I would have redlined the book instantly and summarily returned it to the author with the query, “How do you expect your audience to take you seriously without a bibliography, let alone without structure and cohesion?!” From the beginning, Scurlock is way out in left field with his subject and he never really gains control of it. He even admits it in the beginning. “Writing a book about debt was a challenge…” Only if you don’t know what you are talking about. If you know your subject, writing about it is easy.
Scurlock trudges through page after page of shifted tenses, shifted perspectives and diatribes about persons who were affected by their use of credit, but the problems continually surface just when our author sounds like he is getting his focus and revealing how credit card companies work, he then goes out into left field again with lead-on sentences that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. Newspaper reporters do this all the time, as does Mr. Scurlock; they lead you in with irrelevancies, then give you a morsel or two of actual information, then they go off on a tangent again. But don’t just take my word for it.
Page 126: “Bob Johnson loves Minneapolis. He loves the music scene here. He loves driving around in his black BMW 540i and hanging at the hip clubs. He loves his hot fiancee, who looks like Thandie Newton. He loves the Green Bay packers and he loves sushi…” Six sentences, eight different thoughts–all irrelevant. How do they logically relate to “Hard Times, Easy Credit and The Era of Predatory Lenders”, let alone to being maxed out? It is so easy to find such irrelevant passages strewn about the few tidbits of information that remain, but the problem is that I don’t have the time or the patience to dig for them. That’s the author’s job. And not to cite the sources for the claims–personal interviews, books, magazines, newspaper reports (with exact dates and page numbers), Web pages–is inexcusable in a work about financial affairs. Therefore, the book, lacking unity, cohesion and focus, is without merit. Without cited sources, the reader is left to take the author at his word.
As for the content of “Maxed Out,” I agree with the author that some credit card companies are reluctant to reveal the fine print, such as the exact date and time at which a payment must be received in order to avoid costly late fees. The real problem is that the relevant information about fees, payment due dates and default stipulations, while varied among actual companies, is so spread out between the anecdotes and storytelling that one can easily lose patience looking for the real “meat” of the book.
Some of the stories about individuals affected by their use (or abuse) of credit, however, cannot be blamed on the companies that issued them, or the government, but on the individual’s insatiable appetites for the latest electronics, furniture and clothing that are beyond one’s financial means to acquire. A credit card is merely a tool for spending beyond one’s means, and that is nobody’s fault but the person who signs the agreement.
A trained author knows his audience, picks a perspective (e.g., first, second or third), and stays with that perspective, at least for the duration of one chapter. Here, Mr. Scurlock jumps around from “I” to “you” to “me” to “one must..” like a cursor gone awry, and nothing is more maddening to an intelligent reader than seeing a book with a wonderful subject being treated so poorly. Instead, we are dished out this ill-prepared manuscript that should have never made it past the line editor. I apologize if that is unhelpful, but often we will notice that critical reviews are much more accurate than blind, favorable reviews that appear to be friends of the author. But I will not apologize for being truthful. Basic English Composition classes teach students that whenever you make a non-generalized claim about a product, service, individual, agency or institution, that you back up that claim with a credible and verifiable reference. Why Mr. Scurlock thought he could circumvent that timeless instruction is inexcusable. As the most educated audience in the world, we would never accept any non-fiction author at his word without references. My conclusion is that the author wanted to get something in print with the least amount of work, and avoided the (often) dirty job of research and fact-finding–but that is what makes a non-fiction book credible. Not to mention, it would have probably resulted in greater sales. At least give us some end notes, a cited works section–anything–so that we can follow up and take that knowledge further.
This book needs a complete revision to be sold as a marketable, credible and substantive publication about the state of affairs with banks, lending institutions and the use of credit. I simply cannot trust a nonfiction book that does not have structure, a table of contents and an index, let alone a bibliography section. Actually, maxed out reads like a chain of magazine articles sewn together than a classical dissertation with verifiable references, which is what I was hoping to find. Although times may change, standards of writing must remain. Otherwise, look at the number of available cheap copies.
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