A straightforward, succinct guide to financial basics.
Financial fundamentals from a self-made businessman/philanthropist.
In Building Wealth (2019), Barbera combined an account of his own real estate success story with a large dose of financial advice. This similarly titled work specifically details several key areas of personal finance in 13 informative chapters. Topic areas include budgeting, spending habits, credit card use, home ownership, money management, investment vehicles, taxes, insurance, launching a business, and retirement. The book is likely to be most appropriate for those who are just starting out in life, but the author notes that he intended it for everyone, “wherever you may be on your life’s journey.” To that end, Barbera does a fine job of imparting his considerable knowledge in a personable, conversational style. He sets the tone with an excellent discussion of how to develop the right mindset to build wealth over time and focuses on such key components as continuing one’s education, building relevant skills, networking, and finding mentors. Early on, he distills what he calls the “secret” of becoming wealthy into an utterly simple goal, designed to make the process less intimidating: “Have more money coming in than going out.” Certainly, much of the material covered here can be found elsewhere; it’s the author’s belief system, with its focus on personal care, that sets this book apart, as evidenced in statements such as “Create good habits with your health as you create good habits with your money,” and “real wealth lies in the ability to make decisions without fearing that a choice could leave you destitute.” Useful tools, such as a budget worksheet and easy-to-understand financial examples and illustrative charts as well as anecdotes from the author’s own life, round out the content. Not surprisingly, one of the most helpful sections of the book concerns starting a business; in it, Barbera discusses finding a niche, employing cost-benefit analysis, and growing an organization. Also valuable is his authoritative overview of stock-market investing.
A straightforward, succinct guide to financial basics.Pub Date: March 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-94-743133-1
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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PERSPECTIVES
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
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