A clear, invigorating point-by-point breakdown of how money works.
A plainspoken primer on the basics of personal finance.
This slim book from Alexander (Mozart and Great Music, 2015, etc.), a manager for a semiconductor company, asks some simple questions—What is the difference between money and wealth? What is the nature of debt? Why are con artists so common and so successful?—and provides some equally simple clarifications. Money, he maintains, is a sign of wealth, but only one of many; true wealth is the goods and services that money buys, which “frees people from drudgery. Wealth grants time to do other work, or time to play. Wealth is essentially good.” The book moves quickly via concise, clear chapters that address such concepts as paper money, banking, investment, inflation, and the Federal Reserve. Alexander has authored a series of similar instructional manuals, and that expertise is evident here on every page; he effectively breaks complex ideas into their essential elements and untangles complicated connections. For example, the author explains nuances of the United States government’s decision to move its currency away from the gold standard, the nature of credit and debt, and the darker nature of credit cards, which, he contends, “are designed to enslave you.” This final point, that debt must be avoided at all costs, is a recurring theme, and the author strikes an equally cautionary note when discussing the difference between speculating and investing. Alexander’s writing is remarkably free of the financial jargon that tends to creep into similar books on money basics, and his warnings—against con artists, pyramid schemes, and government overreach—are stark and straightforward. Newcomers and experts alike will be well-served by these basic reminders.
A clear, invigorating point-by-point breakdown of how money works.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-937597-21-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: School of Pythagoras
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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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