A cogent, warmly written guide to beginning investing.
Sabath offers a personal finance guide for those considering investments for the first time.
The author, a small-business owner and successful personal investor, presents “an easy-to-understand guide to the basics of investing for you,” featuring 40 facts that one must know before diving in, explained in layperson’s terms. These include such basics as “Financial literacy is crucial for achieving economic stability and building wealth,” “Stock is an ownership stake in a company,” and “You’re never too old to start investing in the stock market,” among many others. Each short, easily digestible chapter starts with a relevant quote from an investment expert, businessperson, or other famous figure, and goes about explaining the fact at hand by providing context and clarifying its importance in the overall investment process. Each chapter closes with a pithy quote called an “Allanism”—advice from her own very successful “investing guru,” identified only as Allan—which reinforces the central idea in colloquial, common-sense terms: “Buy only what you understand”; “Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither will be your success in the market.” She also helpfully and authoritatively underlines certain points, especially with regard to time (or, as Sabath puts it in “Must-Know Fact 37,” “If I’ve given you one takeaway from this book, I hope it is this: Invest for the long term!”). For neophyte or casual investors, Sabath’s book could well become a primer for how to get started while minimizing risk; the information is presented in a clear, sensible order, and the prose is personable and friendly, often illuminating certain principles with accounts from her own personal experience, whether it’s good or bad. The author also includes copious references and suggested readings several paths for those interested in pursuing particular ideas further.
A cogent, warmly written guide to beginning investing.Pub Date: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 979989857418
Page Count: -
Publisher: Soncata Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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