An essential read for those looking to buy a home.
A guide to buying a first property from a real estate broker and HGTV Canada host.
Rinomato offers personal-development advice that draws on her many years of real estate broker wisdom, along with frequent references to Napoleon Hill’s 1937 self-help classic Think and Grow Rich. She says that single women—who, she says, comprise 1 in 4 home buyers—are her favorite demographic to work with, though her book will be readily useful to any person hunting for their first property. The author’s approach is right on the money, as one’s living space is a deeply emotional topic, and naturally, purchasing your first involves more than budgets and spreadsheets. Buyers are juggling personal agendas, parents, societal expectations, potential partners, and lifestyle changes. As a result, Rinomato advises readers to ask themselves what they really want. The book alternates among three main sources: the author’s own life, case studies of her clients, and the self-improvement genre. What makes this book worth a read is its delightfully dressed-down style; the voice is forthright, plain, no-nonsense, with a touch of self-admitted snark. What comes through again and again are Rinomato’s profound empathy and fierce advocacy for people wanting to build wealth and independence through real estate. The self-help–speak becomes a bit repetitive, but readers will forgive this foible, as goal setting, focused visualization, and positive thinking are genuinely indispensable when undertaking such a monumental and personal project. Dipping into psychology and sociology, Rinomato shows how often people create their own obstacles, and she offers practical strategies and suggestions for overcoming and bypassing fears and hang-ups. The handy final chapter provides a useful summary of pointers, fine-tuned to each step in the property-buying process.
An essential read for those looking to buy a home.Pub Date: May 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5255-5532-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Pie-in-the-sky visions meet gritty practicality in a book of interest to all environmentally minded readers.
Along with a host of researchers, scholars, and other contributors, Hawken assesses our “dying planet—a phrase that may have sounded inflated or over the top not long ago.”
In order to mitigate the disastrous effects of climate change, we must figure out ways to contain carbon and reduce the surface temperature of a rapidly overheating globe. It also requires rethinking how we make our livings in an extractive economy governed by short-term thinking. “Regeneration,” as Hawken conceives it, is a project that restores every corner of the world to health. The process involves replanting overlogged forests, cleaning up the oceans, bringing sustainable power to consumers, and inculcating a new attitude of respect for all forms of life on the planet, among other goals. Hawken and a phalanx of contributors—including novelists Richard Powers and Jonathan Safran Foer and ecologists Carl Safina and Isabella Tree—examine carefully pinpointed strategies. One is to develop marine preserves around the world that are “absolute no-take zones,” forbidding fishing in large swaths of what is essentially a “lawless commons.” These marine preserves and other areas would be subject to “marine reforestation,” building kelp forests that have been depleted by chemical pollution and shifting oceanic currents. Another is to build sustainable food chains. A Japanese farmer, for instance, raises ducks that eat invasive snails and fertilize paddies of a plant called azolla, which, in maturity, becomes a wonderfully productive “green manure” for other plants. If you haven’t heard of azolla, you’re to be forgiven: As Hawken observes, we consume only a small fraction of the edible plants available to us, and we can be weaned from large-scale industrial agriculture in order to make use of the plants that “grow best where people live and help meet their nutritional needs.” The prescriptions are attainable and clearly stated, without jargon or hectoring.
Pie-in-the-sky visions meet gritty practicality in a book of interest to all environmentally minded readers.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-14-313697-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Combining brilliant scholarship with a novelist’s feel for human drama, Orey recounts how a determined group of lawyers and whistle-blowers brought the tobacco industry to its knees. Wall Street Journal editor Orey opens his odyssey in rural Mississippi, where in 1986 attorney Don Barrett began a decade-long holy war against Big Tobacco. Confronting an undefeated foe with seemingly limitless resources, Barrett was in for a long but ultimately successful struggle. He faced two major obstacles: first, the delaying, war-of-attrition tactics used by the tobacco companies to wear down plaintiffs, and, second, the tendency of juries to blame smokers for their own predicaments. Orey lucidly explains the complex legal and medical issues involved in tobacco litigation, but he’s even better at describing the maddeningly complex personalities involved. Barrett, a former segregationist, built his reputation representing African-Americans in front of Mississippi juries. Like Captain Ahab, the Bible-pounding Barrett viewed his foes as “truly forces of evil to be vanquished.” Merrell Williams, an ex-actor who stole documents proving that the tobacco industry had systematically deceived the public about smoking, is a fascinating blend of hippie idealism and self-promoting opportunism. Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore is a smart politician who knows a good issue when he sees one. Just as public sentiment was turning against Big Tobacco in the early 1990s, Moore (and other state attorneys general) decided to sue the industry to recoup Medicaid funds spent on smokers. In 1996, Moore, Barrett, and other antitobacco advocates won a historic victory when Liggett became the first cigarette maker to settle a smoking-related lawsuit. Within a year, the whole industry had cut a deal, agreeing to pay $368.5 billion to smokers and their lawyers. Unfortunately, Congress rejected the settlement, and the tobacco wars continue. A tale of breathtaking, even Homeric, scope, filled with greed, good intentions, and a collection of deeply flawed “heroes”; scholars and the general reader will find ample reasons to rejoice.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-66489-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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