A provocative guide that could embolden those with substantial debt to pursue evasive action; some consumers may not be...
An audacious playbook focuses on absolving one’s debts.
This instructional book by Newbery (Burn Zones: Playing Life’s Bad Hands, 2015), who wangled his way out of $26 million of debt, could be a panacea for the millions of Americans owing large sums of money. The author’s “debt cleanse” plan is described in considerable detail, both as it pertains to overall strategy and to specific forms of obligations. At the heart of the proposal is a notion some consumers may find unsettling: Newbery recommends, rather bluntly, to “stop paying every debt you have.” He couples this with additional advice that could be regarded as surprising, if not financially controversial: Move assets out of one’s name, “ignore creditors,” dispute debts “even if you owe them,” and “welcome lawsuits.” The author applies this basic methodology to the most common forms of debt consumers face, devoting a chapter each to mortgages, vehicle loans, student loans, business loans, secured personal loans, credit cards and unsecured personal loans, medical bills, payday loans, and collection accounts. Every chapter is written in perky, consumer-friendly language, detailing a step-by-step approach to either settling a debt “for pennies on the dollar” or not resolving it at all. The 25 steps in the chapter on vehicle loans, for example, are characterized as “Mile One,” “Mile Two,” and so on; Mile Eleven is “Get an Attorney in Your Pit,” while Mile Twenty-One is “Try to Find the Middle Road.” Regardless of the type of debt, the overarching theme is that, rather than be intimidated by creditors, the consumer should use every means available to delay or avoid paying it off. As a testament to this approach, the author boasts “over 900 deficiencies, document requests, interrogatories, requests for admissions, deposition questions, and letter templates” in a final section of “action tools” that may have some readers playing amateur attorney. Thankfully, the book includes a levelheaded chapter that discusses how, after ridding oneself of crushing bills, to strive for a debt-free life.
A provocative guide that could embolden those with substantial debt to pursue evasive action; some consumers may not be comfortable with the volume’s unconventional, sometimes confrontational approach.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61961-322-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Community Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
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
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
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