A solid argument for embracing new technological developments in the face of global economic change.
Wick, a legal consultant and the founder of the global nonprofit Association for Women in Cryptocurrency, looks at factors shaping politics, economics, and finance and offers valuable recommendations for a better future.
The author, a former federal prosecutor who served on the staff of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, presents ideas for minimizing inequality and preserving the rule of law against oligarchs and other bad actors. The book includes some references to the committee’s work but focuses largely on Wick’s area of expertise: financial crimes and cryptocurrency. The opening chapters discuss how the modern U.S. and global financial systems came into being, and the central section explores the titular “catalysts”—the political, technological, and sociocultural factors that have put vast amounts of power in the hands of large corporations. In the final section, the author sketches out a plan for combatting authoritarianism and financial upheaval through a networked economic revitalization that employs the blockchain. Although the book looks primarily at the American context for the changes discussed, its observations also address events in the rest of the world, and it embraces a global perspective when it comes to its vision for the future. The work is surprisingly accessible, considering the density of its information—a tribute to Wick’s command of the material and her skill at organizing and presenting her arguments. The prose is occasionally wearing, as Wick often returns to favorite phrases, such as “nothing if not.” However, she also includes thorough citations directing readers to an extensive and comprehensive bibliography. Cryptocurrency skeptics may remain unconvinced of the value of stablecoins or the necessity of developing central bank digital currencies, but novices are sure to walk away with a better understanding of changes due to the rise of the blockchain. Although the book doesn’t address more recent developments, including the gutting of major governmental institutions, it provides a framework for comprehending the actions of the Department of Government Efficiency and looks ahead to a functional political system and economy that values equality and humanity.
A solid argument for embracing new technological developments in the face of global economic change.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798990924208
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Racket Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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