A solid starting point for building a better divorce, but not a comprehensive resource.
In this slim debut, financial planner Sewell puts forth a new way of negotiating divorce.
According to Sewell, divorce is a game, but its players shouldn’t be spouses opposing one another; rather, the author contends, divorcing couples must view themselves as a team taking on the costly and soulless divorce industry. The book begins with an outline of current divorce models, from those negotiated entirely without lawyers to those dragged through the overburdened family law courts. Sewell outlines the basic structures and drawbacks of each, and she’s particularly against taking divorce to court, telling court-bound couples to “open your wallet, hug your kids, and hold on. You’re about to enter one of the worst legal processes we’ve created.” Though the author acknowledges that court or other standard methods of divorce may be the best choices for some couples, her central argument is that, for most people, there’s a better way: fair negotiation through financial planning. Of the financial counseling business she runs, Sewell writes: “We strongly encourage you to do something radical and get your complete financial analysis and several scenarios before going to see an attorney.” Through a series of examples and anecdotes, she builds a convincing case for making professional financial planning the centerpiece of a successful divorce. However, the book does little beyond persuading readers to hire a financial professional, and much of it feels like an extended advertisement for the author’s profession. The book includes some outlines of the financial documents and variables that divorcing couples need to consider, but these concrete details are too briefly discussed and too haphazardly organized to be of much use. Additionally, short sections on forming co-parenting plans and healing after divorce feel rushed and out of place, as if only serving as reminders that these issues are important. Though Sewell’s arguments are uniformly rational and persuasive, the book itself doesn’t provide all the tools and information necessary to put her conclusions into practice.
A solid starting point for building a better divorce, but not a comprehensive resource.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615637099
Page Count: 130
Publisher: wedlock-divorce.com
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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