A practical and compassionate handbook designed to help women envision their lives after work.
Two financial planners, one of them a lawyer, draw on personal and professional experience as they offer advice to older women looking ahead to retirement.
In her role as a financial adviser, Blayney had helped other women plan for retirement, but when she stopped working at age 67, she found negotiating her own retirement plans to be unexpectedly challenging. Facing the increasing physical limitations of aging, along with numerous financial and lifestyle decisions, Blayney decided to compile the resource book that she herself needed to make the transition to retired life. She collaborated with like-minded colleague, attorney, and financial planner Fox, who had retired at age 71. Beginning with daunting statistics such as that women over the age of 65 are “80% more likely to be below the poverty line than men” and that 5,000 U.S. women turn 65 every day, Blayney and Fox assess the challenges that face a group in which “many feel alone, unseen and unheard, in a culture uncomfortable with the realities of aging.” Their topics range from identification of and protection from elder abuse to choosing the most practicable living situation and navigating the complexities of Medicare and Social Security. A deep dive into financial planning options includes chapters on annuities, reverse mortgages, strategies for spending down savings and investments, and estate planning. The authors’ perspectives as older women help to give their guidebook authority and heart. Even though they are both professionals in financial planning, they candidly admit to facing the same challenges as women far less schooled in economics, such as increasing difficulty in changing ceiling light bulbs and overcoming a reluctance to join a senior center. One notable limitation is the book’s firmly heterosexual perspective. Given the extra legal and social challenges that gay couples may face in later life, it’s surprising that the authors present aging as a “his and hers” proposition and don’t discuss the challenges of lesbians looking ahead to retirement. Nonetheless, with numerous lists, questions, and detailed explanations of complex financial and personal issues, this sincere and thorough guide would be helpful to women of all ages.
A practical and compassionate handbook designed to help women envision their lives after work.Pub Date: June 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64543-164-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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