A valuable guide for exploring alternatives to divorce lawyers.
A debut manual offers advice on navigating the rocky terrain of divorce.
After her marriage of 25 years ended, Mann felt like a “puddle on the floor.” With time, her pain faded, and now, as an advanced divorce mediator in upstate New York, she has helped thousands of others through the difficult process. Divided into five parts, the author’s pragmatic handbook begins with a defense of mediation, calling it a less adversarial, less expensive alternative to hiring a lawyer. A professional mediator, writes Mann, is skilled in conflict resolution, guiding couples as they write a Memorandum of Understanding, which is a nonbinding summary of agreements concerning the division of assets, child custody, and other issues. When the MOU is processed into the legal system, it becomes a Separation and Property Settlement Agreement. Part 2 of the author’s informative read presents basics of the divorce process and the pros and cons of different filing options. For example, some “Do-It-Yourself” businesses help couples process paperwork but they don’t assist with negotiations. Laying out some cold, hard facts, Part 3 deals with financial issues, such as federal taxes during divorce. Part 4 centers on children, including custody issues and co-parenting. And Part 5 gives some upbeat ideas involving self-care and moving on with life after the breakup. Even when discussing thorny issues, Mann’s accessible prose has a calm, mature tone: “The biggest gift you can give your children is permission to have fun and love the other parent and, by extension, the parent’s partner.” Brimming with useful facts, figures, and tools—such as a calculator for determining spousal and child support—the book presents cleareyed tips. In addition, there is an abundance of gentle emotional advice, like how to tell children the marriage is over. While all of this information may seem overwhelming, Mann provides hands-on help for getting started (for example, a bullet-pointed checklist of assets). The worthy appendices include a budget template and resources for further reading.
A valuable guide for exploring alternatives to divorce lawyers.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-99456-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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