Weekend Reading

“How to Become a Millionaire” by Mark L. Alch ($20, Longstreet Press). This book tries to ride on the coattails of the seminal work “Millionaire Next Door,” by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, but lacks its predecessor’s careful scholarship and often surprising conclusions. Instead, author Mark L. Alch relies heavily on anecdotes, restatements of Stanley and Danko research and sometimes questionable statements. He denies, for example, that there is a link between education and wealth, even though Federal Reserve studies of consumer finances consistently have found that education is a good predictor of both income and net worth. Alch does make the important point that even families with modest incomes can build a million-dollar fortune.