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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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