A Life Spent Reading

I like Elvis Cole a lot, and I like Joe Pike even more, and this book doesn’t have either of them in it. Nevertheless, Robert Crais serves up his usual nice helping of believable street talk and suspense, topped off with a generous dollop of Inside the Police Force. I liked the book, and thought that it was significantly better than Hostage (about the only Crais book that didn’t really grab me – and no, I don’t care if Bruce Willis is starring in the movie adaptation).

Max Holman is a former carjacker and bank robber, and he’s served out his ten-year sentence. On the day he gets out he learns that his son – an LAPD patrolman – has been killed. Holman investigates, finds that there are some questions that he can’t get good answers for, and starts to look for his son’s killer himself. Along the way he enlists the help of an ex-FBI agent, Katherine Pollard, because the police aren’t giving him as much information as he wants. A lot of investigation and some mild (as measured on the Elvis Cole scale) adventures ensue.

Crais is very good at making his characters seem flawed and human, and this novel has more of this sort of emphasis than his previous books. It’s interesting to watch Holman adjust back to the real world, and come to terms with himself in it, and to watch the interplay between him and Pollard evolve from distrust to partnership and more.

Bottom line: I still prefer Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, but if you’ve read all of that series this book is worth the money.

In an odd way, Linda Howard reminds me of another prolific and highly successful author: Louis L’Amour. It might seem strange to compare a romance writer to the King of the Westerns, but there are definite similarities. Neither has what would be considered great writing style, but both can tell a heck of a story. Both work almost exclusively within a single genre (although Howard has stretched herself a bit more within hers, writing romance-suspense, romance-SF and so on), but both seem to be able to wring more out of “the same thing, only different” than almost anyone else. Both, at the end of the day, are entertaining.

In Killing Time, Howard combines romance with suspense and science-fiction. Without giving away the plot, the romance and suspense portions make a lot more sense than the SF. But that’s okay. Howard tells her usual good story, and you’ll find yourself wanting to know what happens to the characters very early on. Unlike some other very famous romance authors, Howard seems to be getting better with age. Killing Time isn’t necessarily her absolute best work, but it’s well worth the cover price, especially if you’ve got a long rainy day ahead of you.

I had two very different reactions to this book. One was good, the other not so good.

The good reaction was about some of the comments that author Robert Kiyosaki made concerning the lack of financial education in America. His point, which I absolutely agree with, is that there isn’t any. Nowhere in school do you learn how to balance a checkbook, understand financial concepts like compound interest, talk about housing loans, etc. In fact, there is really is NO financial education at all, unless you go to college and enter a finance-related field.

Kiyosaki’s stance is that traditional education has more or less become obsolete – if not useless – in today’s world. While I believe that traditional education is still a good thing, there is no question that some very important areas are being been left out. How much do you learn about nutrition in school? How much is taught regarding a critical stance toward advertising? Nothing at all. Areas of knowledge like these are unfortunately becoming more and more necessary, and it seems that very little is being done about them.

I also like Kiyosaki’s ideas on changing one’s mindset to make more money. Many people seem to want to make money, but they have no idea how to go about doing so. While part of the blame rests with the lack of pertinent financial education mentioned above, it is also true that more people need to think outside of the “get another part-time job” box. Save, invest, and you should see your money start to work for you instead of the other way around.

All that said, it appears the man is a charlatan. There have been several very detailed inquiries into just how successful Kiyosaki has been at anything other than selling motivational books, and more or less nothing has been found to substantiate his claims. Nor is there much detail in Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Also, some of the things he says in the book are just not factually correct. Corporations don’t get taxed? Please. If you form a corporation you will be taxed twice, not just once as you would as a private citizen. Furthermore, all of the tax deductions and write-offs that you can take as a corporation can be had without the corporate shell if you designate your profession in a smart way. List yourself as a “writer” and you can write off pretty much anything as an expense. I would imagine that calling yourself an “entrepreneur” would – within reason – accomplish the same thing.

It also seems that the “rich dad” of the title never really existed, which makes one wonder whether the whole thing is just one huge sales scam. Again, I like the motivational aspects of a lot of what Kiyosaki writes in the book…just take everything with a grain of salt. If it were that easy to make millions, many more people would be doing it.