An accessible and thorough story of a nation’s financial collapse.
Debut author Bibler offers an insider’s account of a banking scandal that roiled the Icelandic economy.
In 2004, the author moved from New York City to Iceland inan attempt to “escape the increasingly oppressive world of mortgage-boom Wall Street.” He found a job at Landsbanki, the country’s oldest financial institution, in portfolio management. Before long, he says, he discovered disturbing trading irregularities that compelled him, as a matter of conscience, to resign from the firm. In 2008, a major Icelandic banking crisis occurred—a catastrophic “earthquake that leveled the financial fortunes of a whole country,” as Bibler puts it. The country’s three major banks collapsed, the national currency followed suit, and many people’s savings were wiped out. After some lean times, Bibler was hired as an investigator by Iceland’s FME, the “financial regulator of the land,” and he writes of how he and his colleagues discovered an astonishing scandal—the three major banks, including his former employer, were buying up their own shares in order to artificially generate demand for them, effectively manipulating their prices. They then used shell companies both to conceal those shares and dispense loans made against their value. In the case of Landsbanki, he says, this unscrupulous practice dated back to 1998. The author captures the unseemliness and audacity of the gambit in memorable, vivid prose: “It would be something like as bad as if a supermarket owner, seeing that nobody is buying his well-rotted tomatoes, hired dozens of actors to queue outside his store, buying up his produce with the store’s own cash.”
Bibler is uniquely positioned to explain the scandal, as he assumes a dual perch as both an insider and an outsider. He not only captures the financial skulduggery in precise detail, moving seamlessly from nuts and bolts to big-picture analysis, but also depicts it as a cautionary tale—a case of “unregulated Wild West capitalism.” In this way, the book goes beyond a mere portrayal of a specific crime and its far-reaching ramifications and becomes a moral tale about the depths of human greed. It shows how, even in a nation as thoroughly egalitarian as Iceland, crimes of avarice are possible—especially when regulatory agencies are less than vigilant. Furthermore, he provides engaging insights into Iceland’s unique culture, including the difficulty of precisely assigning responsibility for wrongdoing: “the Icelandic language offers up a third, middle way of describing the making of a mistake as if it took place in a vacuum and never involved a living soul, the way electrons magically pop into and out of existence in the vastness of space….With it, Icelandic politics and business can seem magical worlds, bereft of human influence.” That said, Bibler’s account isn’t without its longueurs; his descriptions can be redundant, and the pace of the book, as a mixture of financial commentary and personal remembrance, is often languid. Nonetheless, it’s an admirably rigorous account of a complex event of great contemporary importance.
An accessible and thorough story of a nation’s financial collapse.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-85-719899-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harriman House
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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