Book Review

I recently finished Atul Gawande’s “Better” and found it interesting and relevant to the personal finance world.
Dr. Gawande is a practising surgeon and in this book discusses how to improve (get “better”) as an individual, organization and industry.  He uses medicine as the domain of discussion, but manages to generalize his insights to universal ideas [...]

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“Sway” by the brothers Ori and Rom Brafman is about “the irresistible pull of irrational behavior”.  It was passed along to me after a friend enjoyed it and thought I would as well (which I did).  It’s a fast, easy read in the style of a Malcolm Gladwell book or Freakonomics.  The authors talk about [...]

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“Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert provides an accessible overview of Dr. Gilbert’s work at Harvard in the field of psychology. It is written in a style similar to that of Malcolm Gladwell or Steven Levitt, taking interesting concepts and playfully exploring the consequences and justifications of them.
Gilbert’s central idea in the book is [...]

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In John Reed’s “How to Write, Publish & Sell Your Own How-To Book” he refers to Dan Poynter’s work repeatedly. In my review of that book, Tim from Canadian Dream also directed me to Poynter, so when my local library had a copy of his “Writing Nonfiction: Turning Thoughts into Books” I had [...]

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“Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” is far and away the best sales / marketing book I’ve ever read. Truth be told, it’s close to the only sales / marketing book I’ve found to have been worth my time to read (off the top of my head the only other two I could name [...]

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The Canadian financial press has been very kind to Four Pillars, so I was excited when Power Publishers offered us a review copy of Jonathan Chevreau’s new book “Findependence Day”.
Most Canadians interested in personal finance already know Jonathan Chevreau from his column in the Financial Post.  While Mr. Chevreau has written previous books on finances, [...]

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“Die Broke” by Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine has been on my “to read” list for a while, and I finally got around to checking it out from the library.  It was published in 1997, so it should be easy to find a copy at the library or a used copy.  I was impressed [...]

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Today is Remembrance Day.  Regardless of what you think of the military, foreign policy, and violence in general, I think its a wonderful chance to reflect on the young men (and women) who have risked, and sometimes lost, their lives in service to their countries.

There are a few books on finance that are must reads.  [...]

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Derek Foster is the author of “STOP WORKING: Here’s How You Can!”, “The Lazy Investor”, and most recently “Money for Nothing:  And Your Stocks for FREE”.  When I happened to stop by his website recently, I was surprised that there was a new book posted there (I enjoyed both his previous books but I hadn’t [...]

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I’d come across a few references to Phil Town’s “Rule #1″ and finally decided to pull it out of the library and give it a read. The rule #1 referred to in the title is Warren Buffett’s idea that the most important rule of investing is “never lose money”. Mr. Town promises a [...]

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Yesterday Mike posted his review of “Your Money and Your Brain”.  Coincidentally I took the same book out of the library a while ago and had been meaning to write up my impressions about it, so now seems like the perfect time for us to have a “virtual book club”.  Canadian Capitalist also wrote up [...]

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I finally got around to reading Jason Zweig’s widely acclaimed book “Your Money and Your Brain” last week while on holiday up north. The book is mainly about human psychology and how it affects your emotions when it comes to money. We have a lot of instincts and emotions which helped us survive when we [...]

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A while back I watched the documentary “Maxed Out”, and recently finished reading the book by the same name. James Scurlock developed both at the same time, and its interesting to see people profiled in one medium, then learn more about them in the other.
Both works put a personal face on America’s debt crisis [...]

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People have sometimes commented being impressed (or horrified) at how little I live off of. While I’m flattered, I’m often somewhat confused as I know there are people who live on WAY less than I do. One such person is Charles Long, author of “How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning How to [...]

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After reading the reviews on Million Dollar Journey and Thicken My Wallet of “Retire Rich from Real Estate” by Marc Andersen, I contacted the good people at Sphinx Publishing and asked for a review copy (I didn’t win either of the give-away contests, so it was that or buy one).
I was particularly excited by MDJ’s [...]

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After spending another afternoon at Indigo, I read “A Million Bucks by 30″ by Alan Corey. This book has been previous reviewed by Million Dollar Journey and Thicken My Wallet (who were sent review copies – humph!).
The format of the book is “slices of life” from when Alan graduates and starts job hunting (he [...]

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Mike won “The Little Book of Value Investing” (2006), by Chris Browne and a couple of visits ago I borrowed it from him. The author is a managing director of investment firm Tweedy, Browne who were the legendary Ben Graham’s brokers apparently. What Has Worked In Investing: A Tweedy Browne Case Study made [...]

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In case you are wondering why I’m reviewing Barbarians At The Gate which was written in from 1990 when all the other bloggers are reviewing new books – there are two reasons
1) I read in the Globe and Mail that it was the best business book ever and I have to agree that it’s [...]

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This post is part of my review of Smart Couples Finish Rich by David Bach. I had planned to go through the whole book and talk about the main points of each chapter in a separate in depth post – however I’ve pretty much lost interest in that idea so I’m going to review chapter [...]

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This post is part of my review of Smart Couples Finish Rich by David Bach. The chapter 1 review can be found here.
This chapter is about your values and what you want to do with your life. I found it quite interesting because a lot of personal finance books focus on trying to [...]

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I recently read the book Smart Couple Finish Rich and really enjoyed it. Since there were so many interesting ideas in the book that I agreed & disagreed with, I thought I would cover the book one chapter at a time (yeah, I like stretching things out).
The basic premise of the first chapter is [...]

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This is another book in the Bernstein recommended list and the second book I’ve read and reviewed by James Grant. The other review was Money of the Mind.
Along with being an author, Grant is also the founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, an investment newsletter based in New York City. As one might [...]

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This book is written by John Rothchild who took a year off in order to learn how to make lots of money through investments and then write a book about it. He did learn a lot about investments and the various financial institutions that deal with them, but he ended up losing most of [...]

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In Chapter 3, “The Market Is Smarter Than You Are” Bernstein lays out the case for the Efficient Market Hypothesis and that stock picking is impossible. He details how its somewhat possible to beat market returns by becoming active in the management of the companies you buy (ala Warren Buffet) or by managing small [...]

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Based on Mike’s Four Pillars blog, I decided I should grab a copy of Bernstein’s 4 Pillars and read through it (he named his blog after it, so how bad can it be? ). There seems to be ton’s of good stuff in it already (I’m on chapter 2), that I decided [...]

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I’m off on holiday for the next week so there will be no posts until Monday, July 23.
On with the review…
This rather long book by James Grant is another in Bernstein’s recommended reading list which I am determined to work through.
Basically this book is about the history of American banking from around 1850 to the [...]

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I think I heard about and read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” right when it hit the tipping point and everyone was talking about it (I’d guess around 2004 maybe?). My aunt and uncle had read it, and I wanted to borrow another book from them and they forced this one on me. They [...]

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Winning the Loser’s Game is written by Charles D. Ellis and is based on a ground breaking 1975 article he wrote for the Financial Analyst’s Journal on passive investing.
This book is similar to Bernstein’s Four Pillars of Investing and Malkiel’s Random Walk Down Wall Street in that the main theme is active investing can’t beat [...]

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I had been coming across references to Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-hour Workweek” when a friend was good enough to send me a copy. Its a very quick read, and I tore through it over the last week’s commute.
There were parts of this book I really liked, parts I didn’t buy, and parts I found [...]

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I decided to read this book because I’ve seen it referenced in numerous finance books, one of which is the Four Pillars of Investing by William Bernstein. Canadian Capitalist has posted a list of the recommended readings from Bernstein.

This book written by Fred Schwed is a fairly light-hearted look at the investing game. [...]

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