Brennan’s tell-it-like-it-is approach and unique perspective turn this financial book into an engaging read.
A seasoned financial journalist offers easy-to-follow tips for building wealth in his debut.
Brennan, a longtime business reporter for outlets such as Bloomberg News, offers down-to-earth financial advice that aims to help the average Joe become and stay rich. He begins with a simple assumption: “Everyone does want your money.” The best way for innocent, hardworking Americans to protect themselves from ruthless financial sharks, he says, is to be aware of his book’s eight Cs: counsel, commentary, career, costs, crooks, castles (real estate), currency and the investment choices of a family called the Coads. Keeping these in mind, he argues, will help one think like a successful executive and build wealth. Each chapter of this slim volume delves into a different area, such as whom to turn to for financial advice or the pleasures and perils of investing in real estate. The author’s tone is no-nonsense, and he doesn’t pull punches; among his words of wisdom: “Don’t ever take advice from someone wearing a Che Guevara shirt” and “You can find…houses in Detroit now for only a few thousand dollars. Don’t buy one.” That said, the blunt, straight talk sometimes veers into curmudgeonly territory, as when the author lambasts his friend’s decision to become a massage therapist or dismisses Occupy Wall Street as a “crowd of youngsters.” Still, Brennan is well-informed and often persuasive, even when his advice runs counter to conventional wisdom; at one point, for example, he offers a detailed argument for buying new, rather than used, cars. Also helpful are his many detailed illustrations of financial concepts, including a chart that shows why investors are better off buying a bond than a boat. His section on investment scams is particularly enlightening; he offers telling anecdotes about the behavior of con artists, drawn from his own time as a reporter. Sometimes, however, Brennan’s media background gets in the way, particularly in the chapter on “commentary,” which he takes as an opportunity to discuss the implosion of the daily-newspaper business, the rise of social media and the importance of fact checking. It’s engaging material on its own, but it reads like a chapter from another book.
Brennan’s tell-it-like-it-is approach and unique perspective turn this financial book into an engaging read.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990792505
Page Count: 170
Publisher: EIJ Publshing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2014
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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