A superb how-to manual for the motivated self-investor and an authoritative retirement handbook for anyone who wants to know...
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A comprehensive debut guide to smart, do-it-yourself investing with an emphasis on saving for retirement.
Minnucci, a former mining engineer who retired early, seems to have cracked the code of retirement investing and become his own best adviser. Thankfully, he shares his considerable knowledge in a book that’s highly readable, remarkably thorough, and filled with fact-based, sensible investment counsel in which the author serves as both educator and cheerleader. He offers a solid historical basis for having faith in stocks, replete with examples and tables, while also recognizing the value of “high-volatility hedges,” such as precious-metal equities, and “low-volatility hedges,” such as bonds. He provides a cogent, well-written overview of multiple investment vehicles, including U.S. and international large-cap stocks, small-cap stocks, value stocks, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds. But these are just building blocks; the real strength of the book is its detailed, step-by-step approach to structuring a well-diversified portfolio and understanding how to protect and preserve its value over time. Along the way, Minnucci covers such key concepts as diversification (with a stimulating discussion of “the principle of compromise” and “the principle of correlation”), portfolio optimization, dollar cost averaging, tax-loss harvesting, and, perhaps most important, portfolio rebalancing, which he calls “the secret sauce.” He targets his investment discussion specifically to those thinking of retirement, focusing heavily on reducing risk. To that end, he provides a simple formula for calculating a withdrawal rate, discusses how to reduce expenses, and considers the impact of Social Security benefits on retirement income. One of the book’s more intriguing chapters, “How to Do Nothing,” features a “Rational Decision-Making Pledge” designed to help a retired married couple ensure their commitment to a buy-and-hold investment strategy, supplemented by a “six-step process” to avoid the mistake of making emotional investment decisions. Also included is intelligent retirement investment advice for those who are still working.
A superb how-to manual for the motivated self-investor and an authoritative retirement handbook for anyone who wants to know how to put investment theory into real-world practice.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9862253-0-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Capital Strategies Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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