Robert T. Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Where do Americans get financial advice? Merrill Lynch? CNBC? Or Robert T. Kiyosaki? If you don't know who Robert T. Kiyosaki is, well, you can find him at the top of many a best-seller list. His, is currently No. 1 on the New York Times paperback "advice" chart—a list that it's been on for an astonishing 98 weeks. Spinoffs, including Rich Dad's Guide to Investing and Rich Kid, Smart Kid, also seem to be selling. Obviously there are many, many advice books on the market, financially focused and otherwise, but only a handful turn into franchises. So, why this one?

Interestingly, Rich Dad, Poor Dad was originally self-published in 1997. As Kiyosaki worked the seminar circuit, he sold enough books to get the attention of Warner Business Books,

Growing up in Hawaii in the 1950s, he writes, he had "two fathers," each with a very different attitude about money. (The book was written "with" Sharon L. Lechter, but is told entirely from Kiyosaki's first-person point of view.) Eventually he makes it clear that "Poor Dad" is his actual father, an educator who worked like a dog all his life and basically ended up broke. Then there was his buddy Mike's father: a shrewd entrepreneurial sort who eventually built an "empire" and became "one of the richest men in Hawaii" (no further details are offered) via his keen understanding of money. This is "Rich Dad," the man Kiyosaki says he decided, at age 9, to emulate. And it worked! Today Kiyosaki says he's a rich man himself, all because of the wisdom of Rich Dad, here boiled down to six easy lessons. Kiyosaki periodically interrupts his disjointed narrative to complain that American schools do a bad job of teaching elementary personal finance, and positions himself as "a socially responsible teacher who is deeply concerned with the widening gap between the haves and

and Fish. The twist in this case is the blurring of parable and what appears to be autobiography. It's Kiyosaki's accessible, unpretentious storytelling, spiked with mind-over-money tips about avoiding credit-card debt and the like, that makes people buzz about the book—the no-nonsense pose is apparently convincing enough to blot out the