Bold investment strategies that aren’t for the risk-averse.
This stock-oriented financial guide features unconventional investment advice based on a traditional mathematical principle.
Debut author Hawkins first learned about investing in stocks that paid dividends from his mailman father, who studied copies of the Wall Street Journal—hence the book’s title. Setting a goal of 15 percent return on investment, Hawkins later chose to take part in high-yield stock investing, which is the focus of this short book. Anchored in the sound principle of compound interest, the author’s investment strategy sometimes flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Examples of his contrarian advice include borrowing from a bank’s line of credit to invest in stocks; using a short-term, adjustable-rate mortgage to refinance for stock-investment purposes; and using a stock-trading account instead of a traditional IRA to fund retirement savings. Hawkins begins with an informative overview of the workings of compound interest, demonstrating its power through relevant examples, all of which assume reinvestment of interest over time: “Using the principle of having your money earn interest on the interest is the greatest force you can put into play to make your investments grow exponentially,” he writes. He encourages investors to open a brokerage account, create an investment plan, and buy high-yielding stocks. However, he’s not a fan of investing in real estate because it reduces investing agility: “Selling real estate is like turning an ocean liner, and selling stocks is like turning a jet ski.” One of the more illuminating parts of the book concerns buying a home, as Hawkins relates his own experience of starting on the road to home ownership with a land contract—an unusual first step that avoided the need for a conventional mortgage. He also engagingly discusses construction loans, the difference between a fixed-rate and an adjustable-rate mortgage, the pros and cons of owning versus renting, and whether to consider a vacation home. Equally intriguing is the author’s unconventional view of drawing Social Security benefits; he explains his rationale for taking monthly payments earlier rather than later “to add to my compound interest generating model.” Throughout, the author’s writing is lucid, and the excellent illustrations enhance the content.
Bold investment strategies that aren’t for the risk-averse.Pub Date: June 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-973660-90-3
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
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. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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