Why we want you to be rich Two Men • One Message

With this new book, the age-old saying of: "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime," is explored as Trump and Kiyosaki teach you what they believe you need to know to be rich.

They each could have written a book on the subject, but they chose instead to write a book together because of their shared passion for education and their desire to bring emphasis to the importance of strong financial skills and understanding.

Money alone won't solve the problems we face. In referencing the need to "teach people to fish" and preparing them to create solutions to the challenges we face as a nation, versus simply giving people fish and keeping them dependant upon others for their sustenance – Donald and Robert focus on why and how people can take action in their lives and contribute to solutions as opposed to magnifying the problems.







Article source : www.whywewantyoutoberich.com

The Gathering

Anne Enright cares about being right with words. To tell the story is not enough - it has to be well told. Not that you'll necessarily find her work eager to please - nothing so easy or fawning: it's more the end result of what I'd guess is an almost involuntary drive to do justice to both the work and the reader. Whatever she'd list as her motivations, Enright has thus far produced essays, short stories and three novels, all alive with that lovely thing - a fully realised voice: muscular, agile, sometimes witty, sometimes hallucinogenic, often dark and lyrical in a quiet and horribly skilful way.

The Gathering, her fourth novel, is ostensibly a simple thing. The plot, shaped around a protagonist who undergoes a shock, is knocked back physically and psychologically into past times and past places. Then comes the conclusion, where present and future are reformed in the light of histories that are suddenly newly perceived. Here Veronica Hegarty loses her already lost, lovely alcoholic brother Liam. His funeral sinks her back into the gathered ranks of her rambling Irish family - the dysfunctional, drinking, blue-eyed Hegartys. Meanwhile, Liam's ghost hounds her out through memories and fantasies: her apparently tidy existence, her husband and children seeming more distant with each thought.

And, of course, The Gathering isn't a simple thing at all - it's a genuine attempt to stare down both

love and death, to anatomise their pains and fears and peculiar pleasures. At which point I ought to talk about the sheer physicality of Enright's writing. The one word roar recurs though the text, as if to remind us of the din within each of her characters: strangers meet in a hotel and share the presence of potential nakedness without a touch; Liam's thirst for alcohol rages while Veronica's pads along behind her through insomniac nights; a moustache can barely be noticed before its description moves on to the idea of tickled thighs. Sex - for Enright, as for John Banville - is a kind of gleefully appalling slapstick that dogs humanity and leaves it betrayed. This is a world where fidelity is impossible and sex is absurd, but love is forever, like a scar. And it isn't only sex that works on the body - death is both a comfort and a rapist. The fear and bewilderment it brings the living echo through flesh, and Enright is unflinching as she documents all the physical symptoms of emotion and memory. Bones and words always lurk under the skin, equally stark and disturbing.

All of which might become overwhelming were it not for the lightness and beauty of the prose. Veronica reminds us that she is named for the saint who wiped Christ's face on his way to the cross, producing his image "on her tea towel", a nun tells her - this was "the first ever photograph". Veronica mentions, characteristically deadpan, that she still thinks of the saint whenever she's given a moist towel after a Chinese meal. It's a joy to be with a book that combines the exalted and the profane so handily, that crafts compulsive disclosure until it can dart from tenderness to anger, to dry humour, to the anguish that drums through the narrative. Like many good protagonists, Veronica notices things, maybe notices too much: makes pictures helplessly as she stops sleeping with her husband, fails to love her daughters and her mother as she should, resents her family and grieves for her unforgivable brother.

Although Liam appears relatively seldom, his portrayal is pitch-perfect. The beautiful boy who destroys himself, the huge eyes begging impossible love, the hearts of his women rifled and then broken before the final act of liquid self-destruction, a march into the sea, pockets full of stones. He becomes the ultimate definition of love's stupidity - an outpouring of energy towards people who are always destined to disappoint, to be disappointed and, above all, who are compelled to leave us in the most devastating way, by dying. The horror and wonder of love, we are shown, is that it outlives its object. Enright's deft handling of time slowly layers up possibilities and errors for her characters, time spent and time ahead cocooning them. The effect gives the narrative a satisfying depth - the author's continued revelations of mortality, even pointlessness, are cold, if not cruel, and yet the telling out of individual lives, the unblinking attention, is rooted in compassion.

For some, this kind of narrative will always be uncomfortable - too many feelings and not enough action. The little world of lit crit can seem a
bloodless place, populated by those whose stomachs never lurch when they're nervous, whose pupils never dilate when they see someone they love, whose hearts beat with utter regularity, far from the ignorant and animal.

Yet Enright's work is neither mindless nor inhuman; it is clearly the product of a remarkable intelligence, combined with a gift for observation and deduction. She has uncovered the truth that sometimes our great adventures are interior. When someone we love dies, leaves, the action is elsewhere. That battle with cancer, that dramatic crash, that bolt from the blue - it's all scripted for someone else. And yet still we insist on being changed, moved, reshaped. It is our nature, the nature Enright charts. Because narratives run on all kinds of levels. To misunderstand this is to reduce our stories to a kind of dull pornography - actions performed without emotion, without depth, by people we will never know and for whom we feel nothing. For Enright, the body, the mind, the will, the world, the heart - all work upon each other in a terrible, wonderful roar of life.

Article source : http://books.guardian.co.uk/

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

The surrealist stunners in Haruki Murakami's new story collection take you to the creepy, sublime places that no author does better.
By Laura Miller

Sept. 14, 2006 | Haruki Murakami's short stories are a hit and miss proposition. In this aspect, they're not unlike his novels, in which mysterious and evocative developments swell and shrink, drifting through the narrative like strange, pulsing sea creatures whose course eventually gets lost in the dim distance. Murakami's fiction is full of perplexed women, aimless men, subterranean corridors, objects with minds of their own, wayward cats and old men with very odd stories to tell. Not all of these elements find resolution, but in the context of the author's longer narratives, the occasional lack of closure and explanation isn't a problem; the whole thing somehow feels satisfying -- and how Murakami pulls that off (I couldn't hope to explain it) is the secret to what makes him a great novelist.

His short stories, however, don't always achieve this satisfaction. In his new collection, "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman," there are indeed some genuine stunners, stories that distill the Murakami essence, that addictive combination of the banal and the archetypal. Take "Where I'm Likely to Find It," which is narrated by a private detective who only works on a particular kind of case and refuses to accept any payment for his services. His most recent client is a woman whose husband inexplicably disappeared somewhere on the stairway between the 24th and the

26th floors of their high-rise condominium apartment building. The man is unlikely to have run out on his wife; he didn't have his money and credit cards and had just asked her to whiphim up a batch of pancakes. So the detective takes to hanging out on the stairway, chatting with the handful of residents who use it instead of the elevator. He meets a philosophical old man who tells him, "sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. ... They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that are never spoken are no longer words."

In a way, Murakami is just like this detective. He likes to linger in the dullest of functional, in-between places, like stairwells and bus stops, waiting for a door to show up. In his fiction, these spots are transformed, made uncanny -- or maybe it's just that their underlying uncanniness is revealed.

Atmosphere is so important to Murakami's work that he's at an inherent disadvantage writing short stories, where there isn't much time to conjure it. Some of the pieces in "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" feel too formless or, conversely, a little pat, like a ghost story in which a night watchman doing the rounds confronts a reflection of himself whose expression conveys an implacable hatred; needless to say, the next morning he discovers that there is no mirror on that wall.

What rarely fails this writer, though, is his knack for images. Sometimes delivering one of these is all the story really needs to do. It might be a little boy, suspended between life and death for a few moments in the hovering wall of an enormous wave. Or, more humbly, a smooth, kidney-shaped stone that is in a different spot in a doctor's office every morning despite the fact that no human hand could have moved it. Or it might be the unearthly music a man vacationing on a Greek island hears on the moonlit night when his lover vanishes impossibly and forever.

About half of the stories here have enough of Murakami's signature strengths to make them unmissable -- the rest will appeal mostly to completists. Unlike his masterly 2002 collection, "After the Quake" (which the author likens to a "concept album" in his introduction to this book), "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" is miscellaneous, a roundup of early and late works. Some of them have been substantially revised since their first publication, a reflection on the provisional nature of Japanese publishing; Murakami's novels are also often significantly revised or cut -- by the author himself, I might add -- in later editions and translations. Chances are the versions of the tales you'll find in "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" are better than those you may have read elsewhere.

As a writer, Murakami seems to take his cue more from the jazz musicians who played in the nightclub he once managed than from some of the pristine, controlled American writers he has translated -- Raymond Carver, for example. Murakami's fiction is improvisational, welling up from his unconscious, and he has told interviewers that he never knows where it's going when he starts. As a result, unless he's got plenty of room to chase impulses and circle back from sidetracks, it doesn't always arrive where it needs to. Still, no one else can take us to the wondrous, creepy, sublime places that Murakami can when he's in top form, and that's why it's always worth coming along for the ride.

Article source : http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/09/14/murakami/