Portfolio manager Creatura, a 20-year investment veteran who has been widely quoted in the financial media, serves up 86...
A debut book offers a professional’s personal perspective on stock market investing.
Portfolio manager Creatura, a 20-year investment veteran who has been widely quoted in the financial media, serves up 86 microchapters of wit, wisdom, and Wall Street observations. This is not a prescriptive plan or distinct method for stock market investing. With no overarching theme other than sharing the author’s “expensive lessons,” the book bluntly and at times amusingly skewers commonly held beliefs about investing while offering just enough considered counsel to tantalize the would-be dabbler. “When participating in risky activities such as walking a tightrope, swinging on the trapeze, or buying stocks,” writes Creatura, “it is important to have a safety net.” According to the author, that safety net is a company’s balance sheet: “When you’re purchasing a stock, this is what you’re buying…what you will own.” Such common-sense wisdom permeates a volume filled with pithy statements that hold relevance for novice and experienced investors alike. Each of the book’s terse chapters is a stand-alone snippet with a well-defined point. It might be efficiency: “Reduce the number of stocks you consider while increasing the quality of ideas you look at.” It might be investment advice: “Recognizing a 60/40 proposition and investing accordingly is what you need to be successful in this business. That is all.” Or it might be a paradoxical pronouncement: “Consistency is an admirable personal attribute. It can also be a dangerous curse for an investor.” The author has a knack for educating as well as entertaining, with a writing style that ranges from factual to funny. Several full-page cartoons, including the illustration of “An Unbalanced Investor” with callouts such as “Seat of Pants for Flying,” hit just the right note. Chances are the serious investor will have to read and perhaps reread the pages with a highlighter in hand to glean Creatura’s more earnest embedded advice scattered throughout the book, but even the casual investor will find this volume enjoyable, if not illuminating.Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63413-485-9
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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