Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by megankass
The Dumb Money: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich
3.0
One of the most amusing news stories to come out of the pandemic was when members of reddit made Wall Street piss its pants by beating them at their own game. Fans of the tv show Leverage will be familiar with Hardison's motto, "Age of the Geek, baby." In this book, Mezrich documents exactly how geeks have decided to strike back.
Considering how recent this spectacular event was, I was shocked to hear a book was coming out about it already, but I figured if anyone could write a story about genius underdogs successfully giving the finger to the system with a successful caper, it would be Ben Mezrich. However, I suspect the rush to get this book published negatively impacted the quality of Mezrich's usually solid writing. The language was overly flowery, and unsuccessfully tried to follow too many perspectives. One of Mezrich's most popular books, alluded to in the title of this book, The Social Network, worked so well because it took a history making empire and boiled it down to the story of just one man, Mark Zuckerberg. This story was too disjointed trying to follow a mix of reddit influencers, Wall Street avatars, and what appeared to be a random sampling of the subreddit group who were just along for the ride. It also seemed like Mezrich either didn't have the time to get first person accounts from the other side of the aisle, Wall Street, or he just didn't care to. If the story had been told from just one perspective, that would have been fine, but since he took more of a survey approach, that lack of contribution makes his writing more biased.
The title of this book also irritates me. It's a great play on words vs Facebook, but reddit is still a social network, and none of what happened would have been possible without it. Often the folks on reddit were depicted as losers working out of their basements, making them easy to pick on and suggesting their social skills are not as up to snuff as say, a Facebook user's might be, but that's just demeaning and small minded; something a jock would say about the nerd he'd one day be serving fries to.
Overall a very entertaining read, but a missed opportunity for something great.
Considering how recent this spectacular event was, I was shocked to hear a book was coming out about it already, but I figured if anyone could write a story about genius underdogs successfully giving the finger to the system with a successful caper, it would be Ben Mezrich. However, I suspect the rush to get this book published negatively impacted the quality of Mezrich's usually solid writing. The language was overly flowery, and unsuccessfully tried to follow too many perspectives. One of Mezrich's most popular books, alluded to in the title of this book, The Social Network, worked so well because it took a history making empire and boiled it down to the story of just one man, Mark Zuckerberg. This story was too disjointed trying to follow a mix of reddit influencers, Wall Street avatars, and what appeared to be a random sampling of the subreddit group who were just along for the ride. It also seemed like Mezrich either didn't have the time to get first person accounts from the other side of the aisle, Wall Street, or he just didn't care to. If the story had been told from just one perspective, that would have been fine, but since he took more of a survey approach, that lack of contribution makes his writing more biased.
The title of this book also irritates me. It's a great play on words vs Facebook, but reddit is still a social network, and none of what happened would have been possible without it. Often the folks on reddit were depicted as losers working out of their basements, making them easy to pick on and suggesting their social skills are not as up to snuff as say, a Facebook user's might be, but that's just demeaning and small minded; something a jock would say about the nerd he'd one day be serving fries to.
Overall a very entertaining read, but a missed opportunity for something great.