PositiveColumbia Magazine... a courageous attempt to explain one of the most important and complicated of human inventions. And while Goldstein often does an admirable job in clarifying complex, abstract ideas, his book ultimately misses the mark. He’s a fluid and clear stylist, but I got the sense that he was a little too enamored of his own voice. Money has far too many parenthetical asides ... Goldstein also overuses exclamation points, undercutting his own efforts at emphasis. And sometimes both Goldstein’s writing and thinking get a little muddied. At the end of an eminently readable chapter on the invention of probability theory, which was critical to the development of modern finance, Goldstein adds a totally irrelevant retelling of Pascal’s wager ... The problems with this book are truly unfortunate—because at times, Money is quite good. Goldstein’s chapter on Bitcoin is the clearest explanation of the digital currency that I’ve ever read. And his account of the Great Recession’s effects on the European Union perfectly pinpoints the inherent problems of the Eurozone for its poorer members. Goldstein also writes about historical figures who deserve to be better known ... Sadly, the excellent passages in Money don’t quite make up for its defects.
