A touch long and wobbly but just the thing for alt-finance geeks with background in trading language and practice.
Mezrich delivers a knotty tale of the futures market and its discontents.
At the heart of the story are two characters whom we meet early on: “Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt weren’t household names,” writes Mezrich in prose that harkens to the new journalism of old, “but their product was spreading through households and dorm rooms at an exponential rate, like a phone-born virus powered by pixie dust, exceptional design, and more than a little triggered greed.” The product, arrived at after the two experienced pangs of remorse for “helping rich people get richer,” was an app, Robinhood, that allowed ordinary people to trade on the stock market without brokerage fees (and not much regulatory oversight, as it turns out). One stock that took Robinhood’s interest was coincidentally attracting the attention of hedge fund managers: GameStop, a company that seemed to lack much vision of how to position itself in a video game market that, while its products were digital, required physical players to interpret the software. The managers were betting against it, shorting the stock. The investors who came to the game—Tenev and Bhatt would later be damned for the “gamification of trading”—through the app drove it up to improbable heights, costing Wall Street billions. Mezrich’s story is a tangle, necessarily, since the author has to sort out many threads: the drive to “democratize” Wall Street on one hand, the opposite drive to keep trading out of the hands of amateurs on the other, and more. In the hands of Michael Lewis, the narrative might have been neater, and Mezrich lets a few key terms go by without adequate explication—for example, readers new to the notion of order flow trading may get lost. The takeaway, though, is that life is short and Wall Street complicated. In that world, the winners are few and the losers, legion.
A touch long and wobbly but just the thing for alt-finance geeks with background in trading language and practice.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-0755-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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