by Carol Realini & Karl Mehta ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 14, 2015
A provocative and heartening look at a revolution in financial services.
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A detailed account of how new technologies are helping people excluded from traditional financial services, resulting in large-scale industry disruption.
About 2.5 billion people—half the world’s adult population—are effectively excluded from financial institutions and instruments largely taken for granted by the other half. For the poorest population, this means that even the simplest tasks—cashing a paycheck, sending a remittance to a family member, applying for a small loan, etc.—are either impossible or prohibitively expensive. Oftentimes, merely opening a bank account is daunting due to the onerous deposit requirements or demands for multiple identification documents. The modern banking world is built like a pyramid: cheap and effective for those who comfortably reside at the top and predatory for those stuck at the bottom. Debut authors Mehta and Realini, both veteran entrepreneurs with backgrounds in financial-services innovation, depict the plight of these “financial nomads” addled with practical burdens, not to mention their regular indignities. The good news is that sophisticated alternatives—especially ones built on easily accessible mobile platforms—now offer much needed relief. The authors discuss several specific programs that have already become widely adopted in places like Kenya, the Philippines, and Bangladesh. Not only are these systems achieving great success, they are also compelling a sea change within the all-too-exclusionary banking sector. The book includes a discussion of practical ways to improve financial inclusiveness, like revising an antiquated system for formulating credit scores worldwide. The more sweeping argument the authors make is that these looming changes will not only benefit the poorest, but will generally stimulate economic growth and encourage increased governmental transparency. This is an impressively lucid work that necessarily engages highly technical issues in accessible prose. Underlying every analytical insight is refreshing optimism regarding the future of international financial services. While readers might not agree with the sentiment expressed in the foreword, written by Jeffrey D. Sachs, that the “end of poverty is coming our way,” it’s hard to disagree that welcome changes are here, with more on the horizon.
A provocative and heartening look at a revolution in financial services.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-6551-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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