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
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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