An elucidating take on alternative investing and wealth preservation.
Arizona-based financial adviser Annable offers a debut guide to alternative investment strategies.
The author cites unpleasant memories of the dot-com bubble and the 2008 financial crisis as his reasons for pivoting to alternative methods of investment. While searching for ways to avoid rapid asset loss, Annable encountered the Endowment Model, designed by David F. Swensen, Yale University’s chief investment officer. After Congress passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act in 2012 and expanded the legislation in 2017, Annable began to apply Swensen’s diversification model to counsel “affluent, high-net-worth families and individuals.” Specifically, he advises his clients to forego the “traditional 60/40 stocks/bonds portfolio” and increase their commitments to illiquid private investments, such as venture-capital endeavors, and stable assets, such as oil, natural gas, timber, and real estate. In each explanatory section, Annable keeps the tone casual and the content within reach of laypeople. Whenever the concepts become too complicated, he directs readers to seek out the advice of wealth-asset managers—such as those in Annable’s network; indeed, the book concludes with a soft pitch for his own firm, complete with contact information. The book is a bold promotion of an endowment investment model when rich people, and their wealth preservation strategies, are under intense scrutiny by the public. However, some readers who aren’t in Annable’s client class may look askance at substantial descriptions of how the affluent can avoid taxes, limit public awareness of their financial positions, and use charitable-giving strategies that preserve their total wealth. There are also several instances when the author feels the need to qualify the legality of his strategies: “this isn’t illegal. It’s perfectly legal and very smart.”
An elucidating take on alternative investing and wealth preservation.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0235-9
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Wealth Strategies Advisory Group
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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