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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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