Fear and loathing in Athens: the corruption and incompetence of Greece is real. So is the crushing indifference of its European overlords.

• Author: Galbraith, James K.
• Position: The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins - Book review

The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins

by James Angelos

Crown Publishers, 294 pp.

Journalist James Angelos's The Full Catastrophe, a book of seven vignettes, recounts the author's experiences as a visitor to Greece from 2011 through 2014, the years of economic collapse. They sketch, as vignettes do, a portrait of the country; the picture is not pretty.

Angelos, a Greek American, traveled first to Zakynthos, an Ionian island, to report on the sale, by an ophthalmologist and island prefect, of blindness benefits to hundreds of sighted residents. He went on to explore tax evasion ("a national preoccupation") and corruption in military procurement; a village mayor's murder by two local treasurers who continued, even in prison, to receive salaries; the zealots of the Orthodox Church; the plight of immigrants; and the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn party. Apart from the story of Manolis Glezos, the nonagenarian Syriza member of the European Parliament (MEP) who as a boy in 1941 scaled the Acropolis to pull down the Nazi flag, there is little to admire here, and even in the case of Glezos, Angelos is scathing: "I found Glezos's energy and passion admirable, and I wanted to admire him.... But this desire ran up against the reality that I often found Glezos to be wrong, if not actively misleading, and populist."

The mayor of Thessaloniki, Yiannis Boutaris, comes off well here for rejecting antiTurk xenophobia and for facing the reality of that city's ambivalence toward its lost Jews, 50,000 of whom were deported by the occupying German army to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943-44. So does one Father Prokopios, the former pastor in an Athens neighborhood torn by battles over immigration and infested by right-wing thugs. But these are the exceptions. Angelos's Greece is populated, for the most part, by petty, ignorant, corrupt, and brutal types, by bullies, perps, and frauds. They are caught up in a national mythos, a self-pitying and self-serving view of themselves constructed from a mishmash of classical heritage, nineteenth-century revolutionary romance, religious claptrap, and resistance propaganda.

It makes for great reading. Angelos has the advantage of the Greek language, an eye for colorful detail, and the patience to draw out his interviewees. Thus, a conversation with a grandmother who took the blindness benefit:

"Few people are honest, neither your mother, nor your child. But me, there's nobody like me. Because I'm honest. You...