There’s good how-to stuff here, but Sullivan’s added value is his gentle insistence that wealth and money aren’t synonyms.
Want to get rich? Stay in school and save your money.
New York Times financial columnist Sullivan (Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Other Don't, 2010) has a deeper, more sophisticated take on money management than all that, but the point remains: Most wealthy people place a premium on education, have voted on that with their wallets, and have learned the fine art of deferring gratification with an eye to building a portfolio. Writing sometimes too breezily but always engagingly, Sullivan distinguishes between “rich,” meaning simply having a lot of money, and “wealthy,” meaning “having more money than you needed to do all the things you wanted to do.” That distinction—the thin green line of the title—is important, since it gauges financial well-being on one’s tastes and requirements. In that sense, a person without encumbrances who has $100,000 can be wealthier than one leveraged to the hilt and worth 10 times that on paper. So being rich does not translate to being financially secure. Nor does it necessarily mean having successfully captured huge swaths of the market; by Sullivan’s account, the top 1 percent of earners in this country had “just about the same percentage they had in 1936.” Of course, since that time, the 1 percent has become adept at rent-seeking. All the same, they distinguish themselves in other ways, including spending less money eating out and putting more into retirement accounts. “Over years,” Sullivan notes, “those differences become enormous.” Other subtle differences come into play, as well. There’s a reason employers are reluctant to hire workers with GEDs, for instance, and why being rich doesn’t always equate to having good taste. Still, as one of Sullivan’s chapter titles puts it by way of summary and slogan, “It’s better to be wealthy than rich, even if you’re poor.” Therein lies the secret to security.
There’s good how-to stuff here, but Sullivan’s added value is his gentle insistence that wealth and money aren’t synonyms.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8724-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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