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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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