Eisenberg's arc through life could be used to define the baby boom. In the 1970s, he coined the term power lunch
; in the 1980s, he edited Esquire
and invented rotisserie baseball. In the 1990s, he wrote books on finding the good life through golf and fishing, and at the end of the decade, he joined an Internet retailer. These days, he's thinking about retirement, particularly about his Number: the amount of money he'd need to have socked away in order to be confident that his postretirement life would meet his expectations. Everyone's Number is different, Eisenberg says, and though his book is not an especially useful financial guide, it isn't really meant as a how-to. Instead, it provides an illuminating and charmingly written consideration of an aging generation's retirement worries and of the investment business designed to profit from them. Heartfelt discussions of goals, health and health care, "downshifting" to enjoy life while spending less money and the meaning of postretirement life pepper its pages. Financial planners are interviewed, partly to get information about savings and investment, but mostly to explore the meaning of the field and the type of people who practice it. A few of Eisenberg's chapters feel scattershot, but his perceptive analyses of real and fictional people's financial hopes and strategies will inspire readers to reconsider their Numbers and their methods for investing. BOMC Alternate.
(Jan.)
