A well-executed, clear, and highly informative retirement manual, if a bit overwhelming at times.
Unlike general retirement guides, this book focuses on decisions related to housing.
Recognizing that one’s living situation is a crucial retirement issue, financial planner Tzougros (Long Term Care Insurance, 2016, etc.) raises key housing-related questions and offers factual answers without overlooking the emotional decisions related to staying put or relocating. Obviously, housing is a complex problem, and where to live in retirement is a very personal choice, so this manual neither simplifies nor minimizes the various aspects of this matter. It covers the financial side of determining if a house is a retirement asset, provides ways to assess one’s current residence as a place to grow older, surveys numerous options (with an especially helpful comparison chart), and ponders the physical, emotional, and monetary implications of moving. Part of the strength of the book is its heavy reliance on numerous stories of retirees facing and making different decisions about housing based on their own unique circumstances. In a nice touch of personalization, for example, one chapter chronicles an evening party in which retirees chat about housing; recipes for food served at the soirée are even included in an appendix. These vignettes, often told from the perspective of each retiree, make it clear to readers that there is no single solution to what can become an emotional, if not financial, dilemma. Perhaps most helpful is the manual’s “Decision Guide” that effectively summarizes the content and facilitates objective verdicts about housing. Tzougros cleverly structures the volume in two versions. One, a narrative version, encourages written answers to specific questions; the other, a chart, distills the account into suggested answers and allows readers to simply circle the right ones to make a “Stay” versus “Move” decision. Throughout the authoritative book, and in the appendices, the author includes questionnaires and additional charts to be completed with various information, such as costs associated with the current residence versus potential new housing. Some of the charts in particular may seem intimidating, but they should prove valuable in making a more lucid decision about retirement housing.
A well-executed, clear, and highly informative retirement manual, if a bit overwhelming at times.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9709870-3-7
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Wealthy Choices
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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