Essential reading for anyone playing—or thinking of playing—in the crypto sandbox.
A cautionary tale about the (frequent) pitfalls and (infrequent) profits in the cryptocurrency game.
Borrowing a page and title from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, Austin-based “crypto insider” Eliason delivers the same sort of behind-closed-doors exposé of how things really work, in this case the shadowy world of cryptocurrency. He opens with a personal tale, chronicling how he watched aghast as the trading operation he’d put into place was hacked by a potential blackmailer. The hacker had something to work with, a nice pot of digital money that Eliason had assembled, and which represented early success: “A year earlier, I never could have dreamed of making this kind of money.” Blame it all on his desire to learn how to code and then realizing that other coders weren’t slogging at 9-to-5 jobs but instead gambling on crypto and making considerable, if often evanescent, fortunes. As Eliason and many other tech writers have shown, crypto is a gamble, one based on riding a boom until just before it busts and then selling while the selling is good. There’s plenty of potential left in crypto, argues the author, especially given the inherently liberating possibilities of blockchain technology. There’s also all the risk inherent in praying that the “greater fool theory” will hold long enough for the investor to make a few bucks—or a few million bucks—in the crypto marketplace. Eliason’s anecdotes are both entertaining and instructive, and unlike many books on Bitcoin et al., this one doesn’t require background in either computers or economics. More useful, and worth the price of admission, are his notes on the warning signs of disaster, one in particular being “when you think you’ve figured out the game and you’re about to get insanely rich.”
Essential reading for anyone playing—or thinking of playing—in the crypto sandbox.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593714041
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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