A coherent and informative explanation of investing and saving, targeting young female readers with a casual voice and an...
A debut financial guide speaks to an audience of young women.
In this manual, Hung maintains a chatty and upbeat tone while providing accurate and easy-to-follow information about the basics of setting a budget, planning for retirement, and understanding investment options. The book follows the standard format of the genre, addressing ways to cut expenses and earn additional income before moving into a more detailed explanation of retirement, stocks, and bonds. Debut illustrator Lu’s engaging, cartoon-style images appear throughout the volume, and add visual interest and humor (like the drawing of “my face when I hear about a 22 year old investing in bonds”) as well as an effective depiction of financial concepts. Creative metaphors, like the comparison of investing routines to gym habits, provide effective methods of making memorable points about personal finance. Hung, a Canadian, also addresses some of the differences in terminology and tax law between America and Canada, making the book more useful for non-U.S. readers. Further information, including videos, is available on the work’s website (thesassyinvestor.ca), as readers are reminded by callouts through the text. The guide provides solid and actionable advice on saving and investing, on par with most other titles in the genre, and focuses on the options available to average readers, not financial savants. The breezy tone of the writing (“Unless there is a zombie apocalypse, the stock markets will not go to zero”) may not appeal to all readers, but the suggestion to “have a mani/pedi party at someone’s house” as a money-saving technique takes nothing away from the well-organized and thoughtful explanations of bond yields and P/E ratios. Although it is instructive, the manual contains relatively little text for its length; in addition to the graphics-heavy format, several pages are set aside for readers’ notes. For readers who find the tone and format useful, this guide is a solid introduction to the mechanics of personal finance.
A coherent and informative explanation of investing and saving, targeting young female readers with a casual voice and an attractive presentation.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-0901-8
Page Count: 180
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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