A highly detailed collection of insider insights into a complex investment vehicle.
Debut author Campbell shares his journey as journalist and adviser covering the real estate investment trust market in this financial history and memoir.
In 1961, the author moved his wife and children from Ohio to the New York City area for the next step in his journalism career: working at House & Home, a Time Inc.–owned trade publication. His new boss directed him to “watch that rat hole”—that is, to track real estate investment trusts, a financial product that the U.S. Congress had recently approved. Campbell’s “rat hole” ended up dominating the rest of his life; he soon started a REIT-focused newsletter service and also eventually became an adviser to those seeking to invest or undertake merger and acquisition deals in this arena. Using many statistical charts, he recounts the REIT market’s fluctuating fortunes; it tanked during the OPEC oil crisis and general economic downturn, then rose from the ashes, thanks in part to financial players who were eager for tax write-offs and bargains. Campbell conveys his impressions of and encounters with an array of world financial figures, including Warren Buffett, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, and Carl Icahn, within this resurgence. He also discusses his additional work as a money manager, during which he handled assets of the World Bank. An appendix examines the short-lived New York Real Estate Securities Exchange in the 1930s, which Campbell terms “the Run-up to the REIT Revolution.” With his passion and expertise, the author will effectively capture many readers’ interest in considering REITs as an intriguing asset class. Yet he also provides a rather dizzying amount of data as well as details about lesser-known individuals in the REIT sphere, which may overwhelm more general readers. His recollections of his childhood and earlier newspaper career, while often quite colorful and charming, would perhaps fit better in a separate memoir. There’s also surprisingly little contextual discussion on how REITs fared during the most recent economic downturn. Still, Campbell clearly had a ringside seat for much of REIT history, ultimately making this compendium a valuable resource.
A highly detailed collection of insider insights into a complex investment vehicle.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4808-2314-3
Page Count: 582
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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