A clear, invigorating point-by-point breakdown of how money works.
A plainspoken primer on the basics of personal finance.
This slim book from Alexander (Mozart and Great Music, 2015, etc.), a manager for a semiconductor company, asks some simple questions—What is the difference between money and wealth? What is the nature of debt? Why are con artists so common and so successful?—and provides some equally simple clarifications. Money, he maintains, is a sign of wealth, but only one of many; true wealth is the goods and services that money buys, which “frees people from drudgery. Wealth grants time to do other work, or time to play. Wealth is essentially good.” The book moves quickly via concise, clear chapters that address such concepts as paper money, banking, investment, inflation, and the Federal Reserve. Alexander has authored a series of similar instructional manuals, and that expertise is evident here on every page; he effectively breaks complex ideas into their essential elements and untangles complicated connections. For example, the author explains nuances of the United States government’s decision to move its currency away from the gold standard, the nature of credit and debt, and the darker nature of credit cards, which, he contends, “are designed to enslave you.” This final point, that debt must be avoided at all costs, is a recurring theme, and the author strikes an equally cautionary note when discussing the difference between speculating and investing. Alexander’s writing is remarkably free of the financial jargon that tends to creep into similar books on money basics, and his warnings—against con artists, pyramid schemes, and government overreach—are stark and straightforward. Newcomers and experts alike will be well-served by these basic reminders.
A clear, invigorating point-by-point breakdown of how money works.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-937597-21-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: School of Pythagoras
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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