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THE JOURNEY TO WEALTH

SMART INVESTMENT STRATEGIES TO STAY AHEAD OF THE CURVE

A comprehensive and accessible guide to understanding financial options and the stock market by an author who describes...

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

In this debut investment manual, an experienced financial planner offers practical strategies for negotiating the stock market and building wealth.

Novice investors are frequently intimidated by the confusing world of stocks and bonds. This fear comes partly from a lack of familiarity with complex financial processes and institutions and partly from the fact that the stakes are so high for investors risking their hard-earned savings in a market that seems precarious and unpredictable. Demmert attempts to unravel this intricate web in a methodical and well-organized narrative that looks almost like a textbook for Stock Market 101. Beginning with “Fundamentals of Investing,” he defines basic terms, provides a brief and intriguing history of domestic and international financial crises, and supplies insights into “investor psychology.” In the hands of a less engaging narrator, this all might be pretty dull and overwhelming stuff, but the author uses a number of devices to effectively enliven his presentation. Interspersed among instructive sections—such as “How Money Grows,” “Investing Is a Competitive Sport,” and “Using Charts, Beta, and Science to Figure Out the Stop Loss Price”—are evocative graphics and informative charts and tables. He also sprinkles in provocative quotes from such diverse (and sometimes unlikely) experts on financial values as Gandhi, Ronald Reagan, and Yogi Berra. Throughout this detailed and instructive book, Demmert crystallizes his advice into 18 principles, clearly set off in boxes for easy reference. At the end, he delivers a seven-part recap of his investment tactics. In places, the book feels overformatted, and all the inserts make some pages confusing to follow. But the narrative is generally remarkably compelling. It is not a work for readers looking for a quick “idiot’s” guide but should be perfect for those seeking a more in-depth understanding of global financial forces and practical investment choices and strategies.

A comprehensive and accessible guide to understanding financial options and the stock market by an author who describes himself as “passionate about successful investing."

Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-9973357-1-2

Page Count: 280

Publisher: New Insights Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017

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IN MY PLACE

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 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

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

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