Engagingly written and at times useful but comes up short in providing enough detail for readers to truly “kill the dragon.”
Intended for readers with high credit card debt, this guide lacks sufficient detail but may be motivational to some.
One of the primary culprits of consumer debt is the credit card—a not-so-innocent piece of plastic enabling spending sprees that can sometimes lead to a crushing financial burden for the cardholder. Accumulating credit card debt is the “dragon” in this colorfully written book, which uses several examples, including the author’s own, to dramatize how consumers can get into debt over their heads. The “woe is me” stories can be compelling; those with mounting credit card debt will likely relate to them. However, the author’s approach to solving one’s debt crisis relies on the conceptual rather than the pragmatic. Twelvetrees encourages readers to first “rename your credit cards,” suggesting, for example, “misery cards” or “wallet burners.” Then the author proposes a series of exercises to demonize the cards by building negative stories around them. Readers are instructed to write down a desired purchase in a notebook but not to actually buy it; “Just leave it as a thought purchase,” Twelvetrees writes. Finally, readers are told to “make a statement about a goal you want to achieve. But instead of expressing that goal in the future, you assume it’s already happened.” Toward the conclusion of the guide, the author does provide more specific detail about debt consolidation and credit reports. Still, this book comes across more as motivational cheerleading than substantive advice. While there’s nothing wrong with the visualization exercises Twelvetrees employs, they only scratch the surface instead of addressing the root cause of the problem. Absent are the step-by-step strategies one might use to remove the yoke of unchecked overspending. It seems as if a more in-depth treatment of the subject with actionable tactics would better serve the debt-burdened reader. In addition, since the author writes primarily for a U.K. audience and references U.K. sources, this guide may have less relevance outside that specific market.
Engagingly written and at times useful but comes up short in providing enough detail for readers to truly “kill the dragon.”Pub Date: April 15, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 69
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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