A cleareyed and narrative-driven approach to rethinking one’s financial story.
A guidebook that aims to help women revamp their relationship with money.
Financial coach Holland notes at the beginning of her nonfiction debut that most women, according to a 2018 survey by Merrill Lynch, would rather talk about death than money and that this silence can have many real-world consequences. Not only does it prevent women from sharing information with one another, she says, but it also helps to keep structural inequalities, such as pay gaps, from being addressed. Holland draws on her history as a Wall Street securities analyst and financial journalist for the New York Times and other major venues, as well as her psychological expertise as a coach, to encourage her readers to change the stories they tell themselves about money: “Money is a constant in our lives, like it or not,” Holland writes. “We need to stay on top of our finances, even if we are not the primary financial decision-maker or bill payer.” Holland lays out a series of encouragements for her readers to help them reach the financial future they want, including many quotes from various women she interviewed over a two-year period about their experiences with money as well as quotes from a wide array of authors, including Annie Dillard as well as several finance writers. These encouragements are accompanied by practical advice about creating personal balance sheets, analyzing business expenses, dealing with the financial demands of divorce, and much more; all are phrased with a common-sense tone and with an approachability that makes the sometimes-intimidating subject easier for laypeople to grasp. Throughout, Holland takes the tone of a calm, knowledgeable expert, which will appeal to many people struggling with money issues. “You will know that you have landed on your accurate money story when you read it and think YES,” she writes, and many of her readers will have that same reaction to the advice in this book.
A cleareyed and narrative-driven approach to rethinking one’s financial story.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-239-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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
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