Effective-debt Books

This is a must read for anyone - rich or poor - young or old. I was intrigued by the simplicity of the 13 principles - yet energized by their importance. I think this is exactly the book every parent should give their children.

As a parent, I sat down with my 12 year old and we read it together. I was chagrined by some of his questions as he started to understand the principles and wanted to know what I had done.

This is a great book for teenagers who need to learn to budget and for adults who are ready to start planning for retirement. The discussion of compound interest taught me concepts I had never understood, let alone applied.

BRAVO! This book should be included as part of the school curriculum in High Schools everywhere.

Wow! This book is full of information I have wanted to learn. They don't teach this in school. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn the basics of money.

Where was this book when I was a kid? If I had read this book and known the truths conveyed here, I would be like Warren Buffet,today. Seriously, this book is full of helpful wisdom that everyone, young and old should know and use.

I think this book should be mandatory reading before a child graduates from HS. It could be a text book for an economics class. It's too bad so few people know about it. Get this book for your HS graduate and you won't have to support them the rest of their life. They will learn good habits and avoid making serious mistakes.

My hat off to the author for his insight and wisdom.

EXCELLENT! It should be mandatory reading for all school kids.

Well I have had a very rude awakening! I am nowhere near ready to retire...how sad for me. However, I have learned so great tools to get back on the path. I should be able to follow these simple principles, but only time will tell how effective they really are. Judging from Guy's experience he seems to know a heck of a lot more then I do about managing finances.

I only wish I had the information in this book for myself and the first of our children we sent off to college. We would be way ahead by now. This is a God-send, and I highly recommend it!

I only wish I had the information in this book for myself and the first of our children we sent off to college. We would be way ahead by now. This is a God-send, and I highly recommend it!

This work's subtitle (`A View of the American Revolution') is accurate: it's one vista rather than a comprehensive history. Like much of Tuchman's work, it's an accessible and interesting account with fresh insight on the rebels and their European enemy and allies in the late war years.

The episodic text sometimes seems to wander (the longest of the twelve chapters deals with British Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney), but ultimately rewards the reader with a coherent message: the American Revolution wasn't simply a domestic divorce - it benefited from (and largely succeeded because of) continental rivalries.

Poignant accounts of rebel leaders (Washington, Franklin, Morris, etc) are matched to their perilous links with their allies in the Netherlands and France. One learns French regular troops at Yorktown outnumbered American colonial regulars (without including troops on de Grasse's 31 ship fleet); French funds paid for rebel wages, supplies, and arms; and that Bourbon France incurred a 1.5 billion livre ($375 million) debt for the pleasure of helping defeat rival Britain (it led to the bankruptcy and fall of the ancien régime in 1789).

Tuchman could have embellished her case with Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (watchmaker, inventor, playwright of `The Marriage of Figaro' and `The Barber of Seville') who served as clandestine French conduit for rebel funds and arms before Saratoga in 1777 (and narrowly escaped execution in the French Revolution). The ultimate destiny of de Grasse, Rochambeau, and Lafayette would also have been interesting (for Lafayette's later history read Simon Shama's `Citizens').

Nonetheless, `The First Salute' is worth reading (I first read it in hardcover in 1988 and still admire it).

I'm a little baffled by the review from "Chris" that says this book is tight. Tight?? In the first chapter alone, she repeats vital stats on the Andrew Doria in three separate spots. She meanders, she returns to her subject to state something she should have mentioned earlier and then digresses again. I hate to say it, but in one of her final works, she comes across very much like a dotty old lady rambling on and on. This book needed an editor badly.

I loved such works as The Guns of August and The March of Folly. (Haven't gotten to the Zimmermann Telegram yet but am looking forward to it.) But here I feel as though she was just pressured to write another book, so she merely took all sorts of info she'd unearthed over the years for more focused projects and poured it into this work. She's all over the place, and aside from the fact that after the U.S. was recognized as an independent nation the balance of power shifted throughout the world, and other monarchical leaders suddenly felt less secure (duh!), I couldn't find a theme, a purpose. Nonetheless, she takes hundreds of pages not to make it, whatever it was. The writing is bland and lacks much insight; instead Tuchman substitutes speculation backed up by nothing but her hunches apparently. Some sections are just laundry lists of facts and information--about the Dutch rise to power, about follies that led to the loss of the U.S. by Britain, about the "unimpeachable" character of George Washington. She's dealt with all of it better elsewhere. She discusses, for pages and pages, the vagaries of rigging and directing a square-rigger--to what point I can't imagine. (If I want to know about the fine points of sailing I'll read a book on sailing.) On a personal note, I also find her deification of Washington to be a big naive and one-sided. Not trying to trash him; he was great, but she has always been rather blind to his notable flaws, and that prevents her from writing a well-rounded depiction of events.

I wish I could recommend this one, but I can't. There are better histories of the Revolution, better bios of GW, better discussions of the balance of power among nations, better books by Barbara Tuchman. This one won't be going back onto my shelf...

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (1912-89) was an American self-trained historian and author, whose works touched the American reading public, resulting in the sale of millions of her books. In this wonderful book, the author examines why the British lost the American Revolution. Starting with the salute offered to an American ship by the Dutch fortress on the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius, she shows how the British combined a lethargic management of the war in North America with a high-handed approach towards other European powers that succeeded in bringing Britain into conflict with far too many opponents.

Overall, I found the book to be very interesting, and very informative. I liked how the author put the Revolution within the context of the greater world happenings, showing how they affected the war, and vice versa. So, if you are interested in reading a rather different history book on the American Revolution, and want to really understand why Britain lost the war, then I highly recommend that you get this book.

The United States declared independence in July, 1776, but it wasn't until the following November that anyone recognized the new country. That was when the Dutch governor of St. Eustatius, Johannes de Graaff, allowed soldiers to fire a celebratory cannonade for the incoming American vessel Andrew Doria.

It was the opening blast in gathering allies for the war against Great Britain. It's also the opening incident in Barbara Tuchman's "The First Salute", a historical analysis of the American Revolution and its larger place in the rise of Western Civilization. Sprawling, ill-focused, often annoying in the way it passes off punditry as scholarship, Tuchman's last book gets by thanks largely to her storytelling skills.

As other reviewers here note, it's hard picking out the thesis of Tuchman's book. The American Revolution doesn't even come into view here until the last half of the book, by which time we have spent more time dealing with the liberation of Holland and the career of British Admiral George Rodney, who effected the course of the Revolutionary War more by his absence than his presence.

Tuchman died within a year of this book's 1988 publication, and as she mentions "failing eyesight" in her acknowledgments, perhaps the celebrated history writer was struggling with health issues that clouded her once-piercing focus. Also, her previous two books, "Practicing History" and "The March Of Folly", were essay collections on the theme of the wrongs men do, and she seems in the same sermonizing mode here, likening the Revolution to the Vietnam War and dovetailing a discussion of ancient Chinese court practices into her account of blinkered British attitudes regarding the rest of the world.

Even good Brits had a bad habit of selling individualism short, Tuchman notes. "The painful task of thinking belongs to me," Rodney declared to his subordinates. "You need only obey orders implicitly without question."

It's only when you get to the second half of the book, a solid if not special recap of the last years of the American Revolution, and of the final campaign that led to the French and American victory at Yorktown, that the point of Tuchman's earlier discursions becomes (somewhat) clear. The creation of America had roots extending much farther than the borders of the original 13 Colonies, stretching under the Atlantic to the Dutch war against the Spanish tyrant Philip. Tuchman offers color and detail, and an engaging vibrancy, in explaining everything from the creativity of Dutch art to the successful defense of the Netherlands against the attacking Spaniards.

But Tuchman doesn't bring these points together, or give the kind of context to help you better appreciate them on an initial reading. Her chronology is all over the place, and she repeats herself several times, occasionally in the same chapter. "The First Salute" would have benefited from more polishing. Alas, it was time Tuchman did not have to give.

Tuchman's book is perhaps best as a decent complement to David McCullough's "1776" and David Hackett Fischer's Revolution histories, books that cover the early years of the war and that from an almost wholly American context. But as a stand-alone, it's not anything close to Tuchman's great books of the 1950s and 1960s.

Barbara Tuchman subtitles this well-written book as "A View of the American Revolution," which seems applicable enough. It is the view from the European side, at least at first. Although it seems to revolve around the issue of the Revolutionary War, the book spends a great deal of time on Eurocentric issues of the centuries building up to the main event; so much so that the Revolution almost seems subsumed by an entirely different, and not unpleasant, topic of Dutch independence from Catholic Spain. If Dutch civil government doesn't seem directly pertinent to the original idea, at least it is made to seem interesting.

Fortunately, the author is actually moving forward with such seeming digressions in her own arcane fashion. The book builds much along the lines of the Revolutionary War itself: a bit of glory to start with, then a slowdown with key triumphs to keep the reader involved, growing increasingly political, and then emerging from all the murk to a glorious, desperate triumph. The final chapter, giving us the battle of Yorktown, seems to leap from the page, and all of the seemingly disparate stokes of earlier chapters show just how each event came into place at precisely the right moment in precisely the right way for great men to launch a nation from. Somehow, Yorktown seems miraculous and innevitable at the same time. If a history book can be said to have a surprising and shattering ending, this book does it.

I learned more about British, French, Dutch, and even Russian involvement in the birth of the USA than I even knew existed. Although I brought some basic knowledge to the table, this book painted the arch of the war in a way I never completely understood, and I will never view the early history of my country in the same way. An erudite, entertaining, and educational novel.

The Christensen husband-wife writing duet is most needed among the typical American trying to successfully tackle the uninformed-stigmatization when it comes to understanding the US government, credit, and loan systems. Again, it exemplifies the saying that goes something like, Male-female collaborations make the best projects as this book has a very well-rounded presentation of material in easy-to-read organized sections. Thank you!!

Bobbie & Eric Christensen's book Building your debt-free life is simple and straightforward. Most of the information on good and bad debt, creating a budget, and strategies for either making more money, or scaling down your living expenses are not new. However, their down to earth, easy to read style, may just motivate you to try them and finally get out of debt! I especially liked their advice of putting the debt reduction plan into action for 1 year to 18 months. Having a deadline and sticking to it, and knowing that you are not going to be in debt reduction hell for years makes it achievable. Also, having a goal (a trip, investments, home remodel, no creditors hounding you, etc.)to look forward to when you are debt free is critical. Overall, this book is a common sense guide that gives you the building blocks for getting out of debt. The rest is up to you.