Book Report: 'The Antisocial Network'

 

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rather than taking the simplistic, reductionist route and tell the tale of the GameStop short squeeze as an underdog tale, Ben Mezrich does an admirable job of taking the perspective of each side. What emerges is a complex, open-ended case study of what happens when social media, memes, nostalgia and hedge funds intersect in a tangled web.

Mezrich is a little too in love with fifth grade assignment-style descriptive paragraph writing, in which he lingers on insignificant details in an overeffort to paint an overly detailed portrait of each scene. Once he gets rolling with the narrative, though, he's a pro. His ability to recreate key moments in the saga shines through. His book amounts to a chain of interconnected short stories, tugged along by the ongoing thread of GameStop's bizarre, sudden, meteoric stock price rise.

I learned a lot about the inner workings of the market, as well as the powers that be and their efforts to manipulate stock prices for short-term gain. Although somewhat choppy, "The Antisocial Network" is a potboiling yarn that may go down as one of the wildest rags-to-riches tales of our time.

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