A well-organized approach to achieving financial stability that’s often enhanced by conversational prose.
Allen offers a book of advice for women on establishing solid financial habits.
In this debut personal finance book, Allen, a nurse practitioner for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, often draws on her own life for inspiration and object lessons as she guides readers through a four-step plan for achieving financial stability. At its outset, for instance, she focuses on a night when she realized there wasn’t enough money in the family checking account to order a pizza, which motivated her to get her finances in order. The book is specifically aimed at women, particularly those who manage households. Her four steps consist of establishing an emergency fund, creating a budget (“essentially, just telling your money where to go”), paying down debt, and saving for retirement. She explains each in detail in its own chapter, blending suggestions for frugality, planning, and motivation with stories from individuals and couples she’s counseled about their finances; they include a notable pair who were on the verge of divorce before Allen’s budgeting lessons allowed their marriage to recover. Allen acknowledges that changing financial habits is a challenge, but by offering concrete, incremental steps and demonstrating how, for instance, paying off debt is an iterative process, she makes it seem manageable and achievable. The book covers territory that will be familiar to those who have even a passing acquaintance with the personal finance genre. However, Allen’s relaxed tone, which provides a sense of authority and, on occasion, a motivational kick in the pants, makes it an effective teaching tool for novices—and for those who appreciate an author holding them accountable. The book’s advice is also accurate and reasonable throughout. That said, some readers may prefer a more inclusive approach, as the book deals exclusively with straight couples and, at times, resorts to glib gender determinism (“men were made to go out and hunt, while women kind of did everything else”), which detracts from a largely solid message.
A well-organized approach to achieving financial stability that’s often enhanced by conversational prose.Pub Date: May 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781544535739
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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