A charming, easy-to-read fable providing useful pointers on personal finance management.
In this finance-focused tale, a South African ex-athlete is led on a journey to uncover the secrets to achieving lasting wealth.
Growing up in rural South Africa, Ash has the good fortune of being skilled at sports and securing the heart of local girl Suraya. He becomes a rugby star in the big city and lives a high-spending lifestyle, dropping his hometown sweetheart. Then disaster strikes: Ash’s hamstrings go out and he’s forced out of the game. In debt and despair on a plane returning home, he meets the mysterious TK, who tells him about the “money fountain” and how there are core principles through which one can achieve and sustain financial security. Destiny intervenes once again, however, with Ash losing TK’s contact information while leaving the plane. Ash returns home, reunites with Suraya and begins to raise a family, but he soon falls prey to debilitating financial schemes. That’s all apparently part of the plan, however, with TK eventually reappearing in Ash’s life, leading him to a series of mentors who reveal the key tips—e.g., routinely save 10 percent of your income, invest in an account that compounds and rewards you with either interest or a dividend—that put Ash on track to “conscious wealth” and help him “pay it forward” to become a successful TK-like guide himself. Authors Van Eyden, an economics professor, and Wells, a South African business entrepreneur, have written a gently humorous tale that outlines rather obvious but important aspects of fiscal responsibility. Their money examples are based on South African currency, however, which may confuse some readers. Also, some of their suggestions may cause skepticism: Surely it is not so easy, for example, to find “a stock that earns 15 percent or more.” The authors’ use of fate and “Destiny” (as an actual character) also seem at odds with their philosophy that one can and should try to control the financial forces in one’s life. Still, the smooth-flowing narrative may be an effective way to present dry economic topics to general audiences.
A charming, easy-to-read fable providing useful pointers on personal finance management.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492812098
Page Count: 160
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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