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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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