A refreshingly lighthearted, youthful approach to an oft-dreaded financial topic.
A guerrilla guide focuses on money management for young adults.
Financial consultant–turned-entrepreneur Amin has crafted a debut that adopts just the right tone for the intended primary audience of college students. Rather than convey fundamental information about personal finances in a typically dry fashion, the author injects the would-be boring topic with breezy, wisecracking prose. This immediately signals to youthful readers that Amin can relate to them—and she does so in a noncondescending yet very basic way. The objective of the book is to help a young adult develop a “30-day plan” for financial enlightenment. The work starts out with wonderfully chatty definitions of 10 key financial terms (principal, interest, down payment, etc.) followed by the useful “9 Golden Rules of Personal Finance.” These two chapters lay the groundwork for the more substantive discussions to come, including such things as conducting a “personal spending analysis,” creating a budget, devising saving strategies, dealing with debt, understanding insurance, and examining the basics of investing. In each chapter, Amin makes no assumptions, clearly explaining financial terms and concepts using simple language. She often employs relevant, amusing analogies, such as “Budgeting is the ‘eat your veggies’ of the personal finance world.” Her use of colloquialisms is appropriate and engaging as well; for example, “Damn, youngster! I know you’re thinking, Retirement? Are you kidding me? That’s for old people.” Hidden beneath the informal language and humorous wink-winks is solid financial advice about important issues such as the risks and rewards of debt, the meaning of credit scores, the psychology of spending, and a lucid explanation of paying taxes. A particularly helpful chapter addresses “multiple income streams,” providing numerous creative ideas for generating secondary sources of revenue. Also useful is the book’s bulleted lists of pros and cons for a variety of investment vehicles. While Amin writes from Britain, she does an excellent job of dividing portions of the guide into sections specifically targeting United States versus British readers, right down to suggested American and British financial apps. Each chapter ends with day-by-day action plan reminders.
A refreshingly lighthearted, youthful approach to an oft-dreaded financial topic.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-71-157873-4
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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