All-inclusive yet jargon-free and easy-to-navigate investment advice.
An encyclopedic financial reference offers tips for the common investor.
Authoritative information about stocks, bonds, and other investments is not necessarily hard to come by. But it is challenging to find in-depth details about virtually every investment vehicle in one place. This third paperback edition is exhaustive, containing current material about stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other investments, including life insurance, annuities, unit trusts, and commodities. That is merely the contents of Section I; Section II covers IRAs, 401(k)s, employee stock options, rental real estate, and more, including a review of such areas as gift and estate taxes, living trusts, and wills. There are several aspects of the book that make it valuable, not the least of which is the credentialed author. As an “Enrolled Agent,” a designation licensed directly by the Internal Revenue Service, and someone who has 40 years of experience with tax returns and audits, Chute is uniquely qualified. The 400-plus pages are intelligently organized into two sections (“Investments” and “Life Planning”) and seven parts (“Equities,” “Bonds,” “Mutual Funds,” “Other Investments,” “Financial Planning,” “Death & Taxes,” and “Other Important Financial Considerations”). Just as helpful is the organizational scheme employed for investments; for each type, the author includes a clear, nontechnical description followed by short but illuminating discussions of specific areas: Planning Tips, Taxes, Legal Compliance, Successful Strategies, and Pros and Cons. To these, he adds a section that may represent what sets this book apart from similar reference works: “Horror Stories.” These anecdotes, mostly of a buyer beware nature, are sometimes sad, sometimes amusing, and always engaging. Whether it’s about a “Reckless Internet Trader,” a fraudulent real estate deal, the hidden risks of high-yield mutual funds, or securities fraud, Chute’s tales are cautionary, enlightening, and entertaining. In addition, he provides helpful information, such as bond ratings, and financial examples along the way. The book’s material has been updated to account for the most recent tax act, which went into effect in 2018. While the appendices of stock and bond certificate photographs are only mildly intriguing, a “Glossary of Investment Terms” is quite useful.
All-inclusive yet jargon-free and easy-to-navigate investment advice. (appendices, glossary)Pub Date: June 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73288-553-0
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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