A retirement manual that employs excellent examples and authoritatively covers basics.
A guide offers financial strategies for retirement packaged in an appealing narrative.
Retirement books with a financial focus tend to be straightforward, factual, and dry. Real estate investor/philanthropist Barbera, author of Building Wealth 101 (2021), changes things up with a novel, engaging approach. Instead of delivering multiple chapters of the requisite dull verbiage about strategies for retirement saving, types of investments, and the like, Barbera couches the content in creative storytelling. He takes readers on a riverboat cruise with passengers of various ages. The vessel, named The Golden Years, cruises down the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans, providing a combination of financial counsel and leisure activities. This enables the author to weave a story around five couples on the cruise, each at different pre-retirement stages of their lives. It also cleverly exposes readers to financial concepts in an entertaining fashion since the fictional passengers discuss what they learn along the way. Finance savvy crew members deliver “lectures” about relevant topics, such as inflation, recession, and investment vehicles, including annuities, stocks, and bonds. Interspersed with these serious lectures are lighter moments, such as descriptions of off-boat excursions and informal conversations among the couples, who get to know one another and compare their lives and challenges. As part of the cruise program, couples complete a “Reality Check,” answering specific questions about their finances. Throughout the volume, the Reality Check is reviewed and discussed with each couple by a crew member. This is another inventive way of involving readers, who can “overhear” the conversations and digest the details of each financial assessment. Given the range of ages and the couples’ differing situations, a reader should be able to relate to at least one of the fictional discussions. Through Barbera’s method of storytelling, he can share general financial strategies and then show how they can be applied to specific, real-life situations. Some readers may feel the river cruise is a bit contrived, but the author manages to craft a plausible scenario that facilitates comprehension and makes the book informative and enjoyable.
A retirement manual that employs excellent examples and authoritatively covers basics.Pub Date: July 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947431-49-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Mentoris Project
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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