James deBoer

Complete trash. He makes no attempt to draw people who don't completely agree with his worldview into the book (pro-American, popular-atheist centric).

Very dense and poorly written. Worse, the author presents his ideas as fundamental laws, but failed to make the argument why. Skip this one.

Decent. Some nice pictures, but left me wanting more information on the subject.

Wow. This book started slow, but by the time I finished I was so engaged with the book that I sat in stunned silence for at least 10 minutes.

This is a very detailed play-by-play account of Buffett's life. Relatively interesting at times but often tedious. Fans of Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers' will eat the overall plot up: Buffett is obsessed with making money from a very young age neglecting the other parts of his life. He get lucky with favourable market conditions and becomes very successful.

This is simply a sales pitch by somebody inside the REIT industry. Remember that! -- the author's purpose is to get you excited about REITs.

Overall, it was a fine introduction, but didn't really teach me more than what I already know based on 5 minutes with Google. Block claims a lot of industry experience, and at some points he came off as a little out-of-touch with industry outsiders. He spends a lot of time comparing REITs to other forms of real estate investing -- for the common investor, other ways of investing in real estate aren't feasible. Therefore, much of his 'history' section was lost on me.

And of course, this was written several years ago and is already fairly dated. His examples and expected rates of return are a little out of whack after we have watched Kimco, a "blue chip REIT" lose more than 80% of its value over the last year.

In the end it wasn't terrible. The author made two critical mistakes in his introduction. First, he failed to sell himself and convince me that he knew what he was talking about. Second, he assumed a US-centric point-of-view -- no apologies, just alienate 90% of the world. In fact, I would guess his target audience are people like the author but not as smart.

I resisted the urge to drop the book after page two. The rest was a cutesy survey of the human brain with a lot of antidotical stories along with plenty of jabs at the American school system. Since I wasn't part of the target audience (white baby boomer who has raised a few kids) a lot of the book was lost on me.

Well written, although dense at times. It helps to realize this book was adapted from a series of lectures -- the chapters are loosely related and not entirely dependent. Atwood had some interesting insights on debt pulled from literature and religion; something to chew on. However, at times it felt like I was reading a university research paper.

A well-written book of antidotes. It makes sense, but nothing the author is claiming has been rigorously verified.

Vowell took history and turned it into a preachy rant. It *is* possible to do that well, but she never sold her point-of-view.