• Getting Rich and Leaving Lots
  
  
• Books Received

Getting Rich and Leaving Lots

Advice on investing, and the wit and wisdom of making wills

How to Make Money Investing Abroad
Nancy Dunnan and Douglas Schaff '74
HarperCollins Publishers, $23

The Rich Die Richer and You Can Too
William D. Zabel '58
William Morrow and Company, $25
Most of us probably would like to make money investing abroad, and for many of us dying richer is no doubt important, too. Thus, How to Make Money Investing Abroad, by Nancy Dunnan and Douglas Schaff '74, and The Rich Die Richer and You Can Too, by William D. Zabel '58, should have wide appeal. Both are competent, wellresearched, practical books with long titles stressing their potential readers' self-interest. There, the similarities end.
How to Make Money Investing Abroad is a typical business primer. It begins by answering the question, why invest abroad (because two-thirds of the world's money is there, for starters), and proceeds through the opportunities and risks of foreign markets. It also includes a countryby country analysis of potential profit and peril. Along the way, readers get a minicourse in mutual funds, foreign-currency speculation, and a host of investing dos and don'ts that help fulfill Schaff's promising title.
The book certainly convinced me. I put it down about halfway through and picked up the phone to call Vanguard for more information on its foreign mutual funds. Now that I've got the information, all I need is the money . . .
Investing Abroad is simply and breezily written. In its passion for clarity and crispness, however, it perhaps goes a little too far. It offers one or twoword recommendations on foreign countries' markets and business climates (in the context of twopage analyses) which seem almost cavalier at times. To be instructed to "hold" Brazil while "buy[ing]" Argentina and "stay[ing] away" from Italy seems simplistic at best. And, as the authors themselves point out, these up or down judgments can easily be overturned by political events or business developments.
In order to continue to have value, the book needs to be regularly updated. My recommendation? "Buy" Investing Abroad, but don't "hold" it for long. While whole sections will remain current, the analyses of individual countries are too brief and time dependent to keep their value. Still, as a way for the relatively inexperienced investor to get involved in a large and hugely profitable market area, Investing Abroad can't be beat.
By contrast, The Rich Die Richer and You Can Too should have a longer shelf life. It represents one extraordinary lawyer's distillation of a lifetime of learning about the arcana of wills, estates, trusts, and the perfidy of ungrateful beneficiaries. If this marvelous book is any indication, those who can afford Zabel's services have indeed been fortunate; in addition to highly learned and (no doubt) excellent legal advice, they also received the benefit of two highly valuable and perennially scarce qualities: wit and wisdom.
Zabel doesn't merely give us a primer on the subtleties of maximizing our estates while minimizing the government's interference in them, he also regales us with a stream of cautionary tales about the rich, famous, and apocryphal, who have all too often failed to act on the best legal advice available at the time. The Rich Die Richer is a book to be savored, shared, and memorized for the benefit of your cocktail hour and dining companions forthwith.
Have you heard the one about "the jetset couple whose yacht runs amok in the Pacific? They leave their yacht and take their small boat to a nearby isolated island, where they appear to be totally stranded. The wife asks her husband: 'Darling, did you pay our pledge to Federation this year?' 'No,' he answers. 'Thank God,' she says, 'they'll find us!' " (Princetonians will only wonder in passing why Zabel didn't substitute "Annual Giving" for Federation in the anecdote.)
I've gone through five full stages of reaction to The Rich Die Richer. The first was denial that I would ever have to worry about estate planning. The second was anger, when Zabel showed me to be wrong. Even middleclass people can benefit from certain basic legal taxavoidance devices, and indeed, they owe to their survivors the careful preparation of their own wills. The alternative, dying intestate, causes pain and suffering to family members and other interested parties, as Zabel shows in anecdote after anecdote. The third stage I went through was bargaining: I promised to get to work on my estate just as soon as I was done reading this entertaining book. Then came depression, and finally acceptance, as I first contemplated and then courageously dealt with the prospect of one day putting Zabel's book down, and getting on with my life.
Readers need not fully grasp all the details of CRUTs, NIMCRUTs, and CRATs (kinds of trusts) or have immediate interest in the tax advantages of moving to Belize to benefit from Zabel's straightforward advice on compensation for fiduciaries and lawyers, wise estate planning, living wills, pre and postnuptial agreements, and the like. As Zabel points out more than once, we live in a litigious society, and it's best to be prepared when the bad guy's lawyer calls. The Rich Die Richer probably contains a certain amount of legal lore that Zabel simply couldn't resist including for its sensational rather than its utilitarian qualities. But what readers lose in concision they more than gain in entertainment value. This is a business book that actually charms and shocks as it instructs-a rare item.
My favorite Zabel anecdote is a cautionary one about the perils of dying intestate: The actor James Dean died in a car crash at age 24 without a will and before his reputationmaking movie Rebel Without a Cause had been released, notes Zabel. "He had virtually no assets, but what he had (primarily a $100,000 insurance policy) and the legal right to licensing fees of his likeness went by intestate law to his father, Winston Dean, who had abandoned him early in his life after his mother died. These licensing fees reportedly generate $1 to $3 million per year for the undeserving father."
Read the book. Plan your estate. Make a will. I rest my case.
-Nicholas H. Morgan '75
Nicholas Morgan is a writer living in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

Books Received

The Symphony: A Listener's Guide
Michael Steinberg '49 *51
Oxford University Press, $30

Post-Soviet Perspectives on
Russian Psychology
Albert R. Gilgen '52, et al., eds.
Greenwood Publishing Group, $75

The FDR Way
Jeffrey Morris '62
Lerner Publications, $22.95

The Lincoln Way
Jeffrey Morris '62
Lerner Publications, $22.95

Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir
Bill Bradley '65
Alfred A. Knopf, $26

Bereft of Reason: On the Decline of Social Thought and Prospects for Its Renewal
Eugene Halton '72
University of Chicago Press, $31.50

Free Public Reason:
Making It Up As We Go
Fred D'Agostino *73
Oxford University Press, $45

"Read My Lips": Classic
Texas Political Quotes
Kirk Dooley and Eben Price '76
Texas Tech University Press,
$12.95 paper

Tracks
David Galef '81
Morrow Junior Books, $16

Internet Business Manual
(available in Japanese only)
Ken McCarthy '81
Bunkasha, 1900 yen paper

Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty *83, ed.
University of California Press,
$50 cloth, $19.95 paper

Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After Identity Politics
Jodi Dean '84
University of California Press,
$40 cloth, $16 paper

Relics, Apocalypse and the
Deceits of History: Ademar
of Chabannes, 989-1034
Richard Landes *84
Harvard University Press, $55

Shakespeare, The King's
Playwright: Theater in
the Stuart Court, 1603-1613
Alvin Kernan
(humanities professor, emeritus)
Yale University Press, $27.50

The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France
Philip Nord (history professor)
Harvard University Press, $49.95

Politics as Leadershiip, Revised Edition
Robert C. Tucker (politics professor, emeritus)
University of Missouri Press, $15.95 paper

Universe Down to Earth
Neil de Grasse Tyson (lecturer in astrophysical sciences)
Columbia University Press,
$14.95 paper