A highly dramatic but lucid introduction to the murky world of cryptocurrency.
In this debut memoir, Conway recounts his struggle to climb a corporate ladder and how investment in cryptocurrency gave him a way out.
Around 2010, the author scored what he calls a “golden ticket”—a blue-chip job at a major multimedia corporation with his own team, a budget, and a six-figure salary. He finally “felt dignified and gangster,” he says. However, he also notes that he was profoundly unhappy, frustrated with a “fake company culture [that] made me and most of my co-workers miserable” and unable to advance as quickly as he’d hoped. He says that his sense of self-worth was fragile and that he was perpetually unable to silence his “Flip Side, the bed-wetting, escapist gimp with bad judgment who lives in the basement of my personality.” He eventually turned to drugs as a balm for his anxiety, and he soon became addicted to Vicodin. After confessing this to his wife, he sought recovery at a rehabilitation center and became a devotee of 12-step optimism. However, he later lost his job, so he decided to bet money he really couldn’t afford to lose on “ether,” the currency of the Ethereum blockchain—one of the popular cryptocurrencies of the time. The author then thrillingly relates the consequences of this dramatic gamble, in which the stakes weren’t merely financial; he knew he would ultimately emerge as either a visionary or a reckless fool. But, he writes, he not only won, he won big—finally cashing out for millions of dollars in a life-transforming financial triumph. In this memoir, Conway skillfully combines three intersecting narratives involving his ego-driven, often self-destructive ambition; his cryptocurrency gamble; and the history of cryptocurrency in general. Along the way, the author stirringly describes how, to him, cryptocurrency investment wasn’t just a new technological innovation, but rather a way to escape the corporate world that he once set out to conquer. Indeed, his critique of corporate bureaucracy in this book is both astute and conveyed with verve. More than anything else, he asserts, the blockchain movement is about freeing oneself from the financial gatekeepers that stymie progress—and about profiting fabulously in the process: “I’m bringing this up simply as a reminder that decentralization used to be a reasonable priority for the common man and woman,” he writes. Over the course of the book, the author recounts his personal experience with admirable candor; specifically, he unflinchingly documents his foibles and reflects deeply on how his life experiences prepared him for his risk-embracing cryptocurrency adventure. The tone of the book is somewhat inconsistent, however, as it ranges from buoyantly irreverent to smugly knowing. The author also savagely caricatures his former colleagues, referring to them by nicknames, such as “Fuckface” and “Kermit,” presumably in order to protect their identities, but this also serves to deepen his condemnation of them. Overall, though, this book offers an edifying look into a mysterious world that promises momentous transformation.
A highly dramatic but lucid introduction to the murky world of cryptocurrency.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 201
Publisher: Zealot Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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