An intelligent handbook to divorce for the abundantly rich that also contains some useful information for the rest of us.
An experienced divorce attorney thoroughly explains the issues that arise when ultrawealthy marriages dissolve.
Divorce is never an uncomplicated affair, but according to lawyer Bikel, it poses “unique challenges” for rich couples. Such parties may be acrimonious, and they must have all of their considerable assets valued and divided equitably—an astonishingly complicated process that can take years and, in itself, come at an extraordinary cost. The author, a veteran divorce attorney based in New York City, takes his readers on an expert tour of the myriad issues that can arise in such situations, including property division, conflict over the custody of children, the difficulty of maintaining privacy, and revelations of infidelity, among many others: “there are countless things that can go wrong with a high-stakes divorce. Affluence can make life easy, but it can also make it infinitely complicated unless experienced counsel is at hand.” He illustrates the lessons of this instructional primer with a series of high-profile cases involving the marital woes of actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie; Donald Trump and both of his former wives; and Amazon.com founder, CEO, and president Jeff Bezos and his spouse, MacKenzie Tuttle, among others. The overarching lesson of Bikel’s lucid, comprehensive guidebook is that one should prepare for every eventuality and hire the finest legal and financial experts that one’s money can buy: “a legal team with a panel of expert forensic accountants, valuators, art appraisers, real estate appraisers, and other specialists who understand the appropriate appraisal methodologies to use for each specific asset type.” Although much of the author’s counsel in this book will be of practical interest to anyone who may be facing the end of a marriage, it does specifically focus on the wildly financially fortunate. As a result, many less-wealthy readers will find the text to be more entertaining than edifying. Relatively few people, for example, will be able to relate to such questions as “Did you use your income as a gallerist in Soho to improve your condo in Belize?” However, even for those readers who don’t have billions of dollars at stake, the book will offer a prudent cautionary tale about the costs of being unprepared for a marital catastrophe. In addition, the book looks at divorce not only as a division of wealth, but also as a bitter contest between relentlessly competitive Type A personalities. For the most part, Bikel largely sticks to his own areas of expertise—this is a legal guidebook, after all, and not a self-help manual—but he does offer a wellspring of prudent counsel on the equitable mediation of conflict. Along the way, he also discusses, at great length and with impressive authority, the messiness of child-custody negotiations. These sections will be of value to many readers, including those who are less well-heeled. Overall, this is an impressively comprehensive survey of its subject conveyed in flawlessly clear language.
An intelligent handbook to divorce for the abundantly rich that also contains some useful information for the rest of us.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-947779-17-4
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Sutton Hart Press, llc
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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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