A detailed analysis of the tumultuous past decade for CDFIs, aimed at a narrow audience.
Rosenthal and Archer-Rosenthal highlight the unique circumstances faced by community development institutions over the past decade.
The authors have many years of experience in community development financial institutions—organizations such as community banks and credit unions that offer financial services to underprivileged and underserved communities. Rosenthal established the Office of Financial Empowerment at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2012, and consultant Archer-Rosenthal has worked with numerous CDFIs. The pair highlight the unique challenges faced by these organizations in recent years. President Donald Trump’s administrations, they point out, have been inhospitable toward such organizations, even pushing for their dissolution. The Covid-19 pandemic created a set of overlapping crises, they write, that deeply affected the CDFI industry. Simultaneously, they note, the killing of George Floyd in 2020 led to a cultural social-justice awakening that highlighted the significance of CDFIs, thus increasing the flow of private resources to these institutions. Moreover, they say, Covid-era resources led to an influx of $12 billion, with most coming from the Paycheck Protection Program, which provided massive federal subsidies to institutions in need. The authors describe CDFIs as financial “first responders” who helped secure communities’ financial stability during the pandemic. The authors also describe how CDFIs have weathered the storm of President Trump’s latest administration, which has worked to divest federal money from CDFIs as well as stop diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Overall, this book will be a useful and tangible resource for readers heavily involved in the world of nonprofits, credit unions, and the like, featuring such elements as a history of the CDFI certification process and an exploration of CDFIs with environmentalist goals; it may also appeal to aficionados of financial-sector histories. Its usefulness to those outside these groups, however, will likely be limited. At its core, the work feels more like a long position paper than a book for a general readership; as such, the prose tends to be repetitive, with the same key concepts highlighted to the point of exhaustion for casual readers.
A detailed analysis of the tumultuous past decade for CDFIs, aimed at a narrow audience.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781038357243
Page Count: 462
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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