A praiseworthy primer, Bonacorsi meshes personal and financial gears to get retirement wheels rolling.
Financial planner Bonacorsi squares expectations with resources to help readers shape a sensible retirement plan.
The author tenders an interactive course in individualized retirement planning by presenting concerns that must be addressed, then giving readers worksheets to fill in with honest answers. He cautions that this will not result in a detailed plan. Instead it is intended to be a critical step toward retirement understanding. In a voice that is comfortable, encouraging and direct, Bonacorsi approaches retirement the way a coach would approach a coming contest–this is what is going to be thrown at you and these are the tools you need to respond. There is much to be considered and only by taking in the factors in manageable doses will readers be able to design a plan that reflects reality. Certainly, putting dreams out on the table is a good place to start. Then comes the nit and grit of financial considerations–somehow those goals will have to be underwritten. Even before then, “first you need to see how your income and savings stack up against your bills.” This is bedrock stuff, and Bonacorsi makes it as black and white as possible, while fielding little nuances like inflation and tax rates. The worksheets alert readers to financial surprises and help locate bumps, mostly healthcare, in the road ahead. Particularly valuable is the author’s overview of Medicare, which will make a few eyes bulge. Thought it was free, did you, after paying for it all those years? “Estimates are that a retiree will need $250,000 and up to pay Medicare premiums, deductibles, copayments, and uncovered drug costs.” Don’t despair, there are alternatives. Bonacorsi closes this slim, digestible–if modestly rattling, though it’s better to know where you stand–volume with some preliminary guidance on how to go about planning your estate.
A praiseworthy primer, Bonacorsi meshes personal and financial gears to get retirement wheels rolling.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-931807-71-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Gridiron fans of all stripes will find this a fascinating exercise in the collision of money, entertainment, politics, and...
Scathing, action-packed account of the rise and fall of spring football in the 1980s, with a familiar villain to the piece.
In 1961, writes Pearlman (Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre, 2016, etc.), a New Orleans–based art dealer and entrepreneur named David Dixon wondered why it was that the National Football League was so resistant to expanding outside of its existing franchises. His solution: to build a league for play in the “vast sports wasteland” of spring in those years before March Madness. Five years later, the United States Football League was born, though it would take another decade and a half before anything substantial came of it. The newborn league had rules meant to level the field among rich and poor teams, including caps on salaries and limits on how they were distributed among star players and workhorses. Said one team owner at the time, “we had a gentleman’s agreement,” adding, “of course, that’s only OK as long as you have gentlemen agreeing.” Enter Donald Trump, owner of the New Jersey franchise, who immediately began breaking those agreements and demanding that other owners subsidize him even as he revealed the depths of his ignorance about the game. Trump also began to press for the USFL to play not in spring but in fall, going up against the NFL and prompting speculation that he was really after an NFL franchise to call his own. In the end, the USFL collapsed—though, as Pearlman notes, it lives on in unexpected ways, including Trump’s arrival in the White House. “Thirty-three years after insisting his fellow owners would pay for Doug Flutie,” writes the author, “he was insisting Mexico would pay for a border wall.” If nothing else, Pearlman’s fluently told story provides context for why the sitting president holds the NFL in such contempt—and why the sentiment should be richly returned.
Gridiron fans of all stripes will find this a fascinating exercise in the collision of money, entertainment, politics, and ego.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-45438-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
A grimly amusing, occasionally off-putting first novel set in an eating disorders clinic. At nearly five eleven and 92 pounds, 25-year-old Alice Forrester, is the thinnest of all the anorexics in the upscale eating disorders clinic of Seaview Hospital, near Boston, where she's been admitted following a near-fatal heart attack. For a woman like Alice, who views her resistance to food as a spiritual achievementa Gnostic differentiation between desire and needthis new evidence of her own self-control is intensely satisfying, and she eyes the bulimics, fitness addicts, and obese women on her floor with far more disgust than pity. Still, a girl can only survive the clinic's monotonous routine of group therapy, individual therapy, art therapy, and family therapy with friends; her uneasy alliances with Gwen, a delicate trust-fund victim whose anorexia is actually causing her bones to crumble, and Louise, a food addict, prompt Alice to examine the origins of her own asceticism in her chilly relations with her successful, narcissistic parents and in her first love, a black homosexual who introduced her to sex with disastrous results. Fortunately, Alice's morose musings are soon interrupted by a new arrival: Maeve Sullivan, a slutty, voluptuous bulimic whose desire to consume everything, including and especially life itself, horrifies yet fascinates self-denying Alice. Maeve's casual trysts, her wolfing down of sugary deserts and then nonchalantly vomiting into whatever trash can is available, and her surprising habit of baring her large breasts for Alice's admiration are just what this frightened girl needs. Alice surrenders herself utterly to Maeve, who naturally soon abandons her, but not without leaving our love- starved young heroine with just enough hunger for life to carry on. An intriguing view of the world through an anorexic's eyesand no fault of the author's if that view is often an unpleasant one. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-75518-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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