A retirement manual that employs excellent examples and authoritatively covers basics.
A guide offers financial strategies for retirement packaged in an appealing narrative.
Retirement books with a financial focus tend to be straightforward, factual, and dry. Real estate investor/philanthropist Barbera, author of Building Wealth 101 (2021), changes things up with a novel, engaging approach. Instead of delivering multiple chapters of the requisite dull verbiage about strategies for retirement saving, types of investments, and the like, Barbera couches the content in creative storytelling. He takes readers on a riverboat cruise with passengers of various ages. The vessel, named The Golden Years, cruises down the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans, providing a combination of financial counsel and leisure activities. This enables the author to weave a story around five couples on the cruise, each at different pre-retirement stages of their lives. It also cleverly exposes readers to financial concepts in an entertaining fashion since the fictional passengers discuss what they learn along the way. Finance savvy crew members deliver “lectures” about relevant topics, such as inflation, recession, and investment vehicles, including annuities, stocks, and bonds. Interspersed with these serious lectures are lighter moments, such as descriptions of off-boat excursions and informal conversations among the couples, who get to know one another and compare their lives and challenges. As part of the cruise program, couples complete a “Reality Check,” answering specific questions about their finances. Throughout the volume, the Reality Check is reviewed and discussed with each couple by a crew member. This is another inventive way of involving readers, who can “overhear” the conversations and digest the details of each financial assessment. Given the range of ages and the couples’ differing situations, a reader should be able to relate to at least one of the fictional discussions. Through Barbera’s method of storytelling, he can share general financial strategies and then show how they can be applied to specific, real-life situations. Some readers may feel the river cruise is a bit contrived, but the author manages to craft a plausible scenario that facilitates comprehension and makes the book informative and enjoyable.
A retirement manual that employs excellent examples and authoritatively covers basics.Pub Date: July 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947431-49-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Mentoris Project
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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