An imperfectly constructed but knowledgeable personal-finance book.
Newbery (Punk Rocker, 2016, etc.) shares stories of cleverly settled debt in this memoir.
During his career as a property owner in the early 2000s, the author accrued his fair share of debt; at one time, he writes, he owned more than 4,000 apartments across the United States. By dealing with his creditors and attempting to negotiate his way back into the black, he says that he learned how the American financial system is stacked against borrowers. Luckily, he also learned ways that borrowers can use that system to their advantage to escape huge amounts of debt without bankrupting themselves or losing their homes: “every debt has a unique set of circumstances,” Newbery explains, “and creditors are constantly making errors. You just need to find the errors and exploit them.” The best thing to do, he warns, is to not go into debt, but for those who already have, he offers some advice. He walks readers through a series of chapters that each deal with a peculiar debt scenario, and he shows how informed and assiduous debtors (real people, with names changed) extricated themselves with minimal damage. In one chapter, for instance, he recounts how he settled a $5.8 million debt for only $225,000. In another, he tells how he helped a friend avoid a foreclosure on her home with a passive-aggressive strategy of inaction. In a third, he reveals how a tumultuous breakup with his beloved Southwest credit card led to embarrassment while trying to pay a bill at an Olive Garden restaurant. Newbery clearly knows his stuff: the scenarios he describes are highly particular, and he spends time going into great detail, weighing the various options available to the person in question. However, his decision to offer lightly fictionalized anecdotes, rather than essays, is curious; they read like Socratic dialogues, and the artifice of the form is somewhat distracting. Even so, readers will be able to glean a great deal of helpful information from Newbery’s experiences, and they’ll walk away with a firmer understanding of the intricacies of his subject.
An imperfectly constructed but knowledgeable personal-finance book.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61961-491-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Community Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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