A long, encouraging discussion about laying the groundwork early for a triumphant retirement.
A book offers a point-by-point, step-by-step blueprint for long-term financial security.
In giving readers a guide to planning for their retirements, Suleiman Mnim (Investment Success, 2015) concentrates on long-term preparation rather than specific financial strategies. There’s very little actual discussion of money matters in these pages; rather, the author spends most of his time aiming arguments at readers who are perusing the book well before their retirement years, urging them to adopt the frame of mind and personal practices that will guarantee their comfort and security years and even decades down the line. Suleiman Mnim urges those readers to take serious, clear-eyed stock of their financial situations: view their incomes as the valuable commodities they are, save large portions of them in sensible retirement accounts, avoid extravagances, and learn from their mistakes. They should also be wary of the “comfort zone,” the pattern of familiar thinking and safe expectations that can tempt people in their prime working years into thinking they have all the time in the world to start planning for their retirements. The author consistently rails against such feelings of complacency, stressing throughout the book that entrepreneurial optimism in the prime of life is the key to security later on; readers are encouraged to pattern their paths to success after magnates who’ve achieved great wealth while still young, famous figures like Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google. (A second edition of the volume should update this section: Brin and Page are now in their early 40s, not their early 30s.) The work’s writing can be a bit on the pompous side at times (lines like there is no point “in the lives of most men wherein they dislike the need to have additional money” crop up often), and some of the author’s points share the same kind of bloated generality common to self-help business books (“Every failure comes with hidden opportunities that only the persistent soul could unveil,” etc.). But the larger arguments—that healthy young employees should be responsible for carefully preparing for their own distant retirements—are well targeted to today’s overworked middle class.
A long, encouraging discussion about laying the groundwork early for a triumphant retirement.Pub Date: July 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4828-0876-6
Page Count: 166
Publisher: PartridgeAfrica
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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