Yes, the geopolitical motivations were pretty obvious. Of course you were labeled a hopeless conservative or conspiracy nutjob by the europhiles if you brought it up.
As long as austerity is enforced under the eu-mark the disintegration is a certainty.
The only way it could be saved would be to jettison the euro or at least the convergence criteria. Germany doesn't seem keen on a succesful EU, perhaps there's some underlaying anger over those last couple of attemps to ruin Europe. One can only guess.
Heard a lot of good things about this book, but the writing is just atrocious, and after a couple of chapters I didn't actually learn anything new... don't get the hype.
There's also the implicit assumption of underlaying knowledge. I remember writing some graphics routines and looked at some examples, but they always seemed to consist of a mess of single variable names. After reading up on the theory it became clear that they were all the conventional mathematical constants used in the formulas to derive the algorithm. If you were intimate with the math these names would be the obvious choice, yet if you were an outsider they would seem indecypherable. I now prefer to use simple english terms and put the math terms next to them as a comment, rather than the other way around. A caveat is that actual formulas might become a bit lengthy.