A debut guide offers advice on navigating the financial complications that arise in the wake of a loved one’s death.
In her slender and powerful book, Luzzatto, an experienced financial planner, describes warily recovering from the shock of her husband’s successful leukemia treatments and planning a vacation and house renovations. Suddenly, her husband’s cancer returned more aggressively, and before she could really take her bearings, he died. In addition to the tragedy, Luzzatto was suddenly confronted with a host of financial decisions at a time when she least wanted to deal with them. Hence, this book. In clear and concise language, the author takes some of the key concepts of this kind of financial chaos and explains them with exactly the kind of calm, reassuring confidence readers in crisis will find most helpful. Luzzatto clarifies thing like the various kinds of power of attorney, the nature of an executor’s responsibilities, and what a beneficiary is. These and other subjects can be formidably complicated, but throughout the book, the author urges her readers to take things slow and parcel them into small, nonthreatening bits. Make a to-do list, block out time, take small steps, and so on, all marshaled for the task of examining bank statements, searching databases for unclaimed assets, and locating electronic accounts. She urges her readers to reach out to professional advisers whenever possible, and not to feel guilty about shifting some of the “grunt work” to people who aren’t traumatized by grief. Luzzatto takes readers inside the world of a financial adviser, fleshing out the human aspects of people facing surprising monetary problems or the unexpected emotions of a windfall. This personal element appears with wonderful consistency throughout the volume. “After trauma, we never really go back,” she writes, “but we establish how we’re going to live again.” This undercurrent of simple compassion transforms what would in any case have been a thoroughly useful guide into something more.
A heartfelt and invaluable manual on the settling of a loved one’s estate.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1313-3
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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