This quirky combination of autobiography, politics, and investment advice leaves the impression that being (and becoming) wealthy is pretty interesting work. Tobias's (The Only Other Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, 1987, etc.) journey from prosperous childhood to extremely prosperous adulthood illustrates his basic financial advice: Hold sound investments for a long time and let appreciation and interest do their work; everything else is serendipity or stupidity. He is refreshingly honest about the role played by the former in the accumulation of his fortune, but the real focus of this volume is what he does with what he's accumulated. From a real-estate venture in a rundown Florida neighborhood to an anti-smoking campaign in Russia to a fight for no-fault auto insurance and tort reform in California, Tobias finds opportunities to do good with his money seemingly at random, then pursues them with abandon. The no-fault discussion (some would say obsession) cuts to the heart of his political message: Liberals should proudly embrace their bleeding hearts without developing jerking knees. In an ongoing battle with Ralph Nader and others, Tobias insists that the unlimited right to sue, adamantly defended by Naderites as the little man's ultimate protection against the powerful, actually benefits trial lawyers far more than the victims of accidents. Indeed, Tobias argues that removing exorbitant legal costs from the present system would allow more money to go to accident victims while also reducing insurance premiums. According to Tobias, Nader's opposition to tort reform doomed the no-fault initiative, for once the saint of consumerism pronounced it flawed, rational discussion among liberals was over. Although Tobias does maintain his considerable sense of humor throughout this section, the battle has obviously left a bitter taste in his mouth. Rarely is the adjective ``hilarious'' used to modify the noun ``capitalist,'' but here it is appropriate. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45618-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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