A brisk and authoritative financial blueprint for beginners.
Financial adviser Panik offers a comprehensive action plan for gaining financial literacy.
When it comes to making personal-finance plans, simply “hoping for the best won’t work,” the author says early on in this guide. What’s required, he says, is a clear blueprint for building a solid financial foundation. Panik aims much of his advice about planning a financial future at readers who are on the younger side, like he was when he entered the military as a method for student-loan forgiveness and received a crash course in financial responsibility. Over the course of this book, Panik breaks down what he’s learned about the basics of money management, from sensible budgeting and managing debt to the elements of banking and taxation. In short chapters, broken into many segments with numbered lists, he goes into detail about all kinds of financial subjects that younger readers need to know—especially those who may be encountering all these things for the first time. He discusses the arcana of loan repayment, for instance (including income-contingent repayment plans), and home loans, always stressing the need to deal with the details—even when they’re boring: “We may not always see it as a fun part of the process,” Panik writes, “but taking the time to understand the details is key to success.” In scenario after scenario, he illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of basic approaches to monetary challenges, as when he advises younger readers to build their credit rating by acquiring a secured credit card.
Panik’s tone throughout is both encouraging and firmly realistic. He resolutely maintains that his readers can take advantage of even highly complicated financial options, and while he lays out their possibilities, he also lays out their realities, such as that it’s “unrealistic to think that managing current credit card debt, buying a car and buying a home can happen at the same time.” His hypothetical situations, which feature fictional characters, help to illuminate such topics as improving a personal credit score or safeguarding financial information from identity theft. The sheer amount of information that the author manages to fit comfortably into this brief work—just over 200 pages—is nothing short of amazing; he even manages to work in miniature history lessons on things such as the United States’ tax system. Readers who are just starting to grapple with life's financial realities will find his explanations helpful. In his practical advice on buying a first car, for example, he once again strikes a pragmatic note, stressing the importance of understanding the buying process and providing 10 steps in extensive detail. (It starts with “The Most Fundamental Step and Tip is to Understand Your Budget First” and concludes with advice to avoid being “blindsided by any surprise transfer costs or other issues” when signing a contract.) Panik avoids doublespeak, and he takes the mystery out of various money matters in ways that even older readers, with some experience in these matters, are sure to find helpful.
A brisk and authoritative financial blueprint for beginners.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798891380394
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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