A compact and multidimensional financial manual for kids that should profit many adults as well.
A debut guide offers advice on training children in fiscal responsibility.
Gina and George Plytas begin their concise manual with some general philosophical principles about wealth and finance. “Money doesn’t bring happiness,” the husband-and-wife team asserts, “but personal wealth is the catalyst that allows one to explore their gifts, inspire their talents, seek their interests, and contribute to this world in a unique and satisfying way.” There’s nothing sordid, they imply, in concentrating on the skills and mindsets necessary to create financial competence. They suggest that children should focus on such things very early in life while receiving training in how to think about money with responsibility and foresight. The authors break down their approach into six general strategies: “The Spirit of Advancement,” “Pay Yourself First,” “Pay for Performance,” “Save for a Rainy Day,” “Invest in Your Future,” and finally, “Give Back,” all designed to “develop a success mindset, to demonstrate personal resiliency, and to practice effective money management in a way that children can understand and apply.” The method for implementing these strategies largely boils down to setting a superb fiscal example for kids and teaching them good habits while they’re young and have no bad ones to forget. To a surprising and refreshing extent, the authors look to the broader philosophies of self-help books like Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and even Watty Piper’s popular children’s book The Little Engine That Could. The authors make money matters a reflection of personal attitudes toward life in general: “Focus on filling your subconscious mind with uplifting and motivational thoughts. Think positively about what you can accomplish.” In clear and concise chapters, the authors dissect basic financial ideas like “Show your kids how to set and achieve personal goals” and “Teach persistence to overcome failure.” This general tactic effectively counteracts the negative reaction to the whole idea of getting children to care about money.
A compact and multidimensional financial manual for kids that should profit many adults as well.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1782-2
Page Count: 156
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 8, 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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