An intelligently organized and optimistic guide to repairing one’s credit.
A comprehensive guide to understanding your personal credit score and improving it.
This latest from professional financial advisor Dinkins, the author of One Bucket at a Time (2015), concentrates on the core element of personal finance: the individual credit score. Right from the start of this book, the author stresses its overwhelming importance: The score “not only determine[s] the type of mail that comes to our boxes, but it also determines the price we pay for our homes and cars, and even whether we receive a loan if we want to start a business,” she writes. She points out that some people are so desperate to clean up their score that they’re willing to pay exorbitant fees at credit-renovation seminars to do so, but she assures her readers that this isn’t strictly necessary (“Credit repair companies do not have a magic bullet”); instead, she shows, in this book, how people can do a lot to help fix their credit scores themselves. Dinkins writes about all of this with simple, encouraging clarity and inviting notes of humor (at one point noting “I think I’ve stressed this point ad nauseam, don’t you think?”). A great amount of valuable information is compressed into fewer than 130fast-moving pages. In that small space, the author explains to readers what credit is, how it works, why it’s important, and how to establish it at the beginning of one’s financial life; she also informatively reveals the natures of scams that guarantee quick credit renovation. In addition, she earnestly tells readers that there’s little room for compromise when a credit score decreases: “If you have an 800+ credit score, your score can drop fifty points and you will still receive great rates on credit,” she writes. “If you have a 750 credit score and your score drops 50 points, you are no longer considered an excellent borrower.”
An intelligently organized and optimistic guide to repairing one’s credit.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63183-877-4
Page Count: 150
Publisher: One Bucket Nation
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's...
A fresh, provocative analysis of the debate on education and employment.
Up-and-coming economist Moretti (Economics/Univ. of California, Berkeley) takes issue with the “[w]idespread misconception…that the problem of inequality in the United States is all about the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99 percent.” The most important aspect of inequality today, he writes, is the widening gap between the 45 million workers with college degrees and the 80 million without—a difference he claims affects every area of peoples' lives. The college-educated part of the population underpins the growth of America's economy of innovation in life sciences, information technology, media and other areas of globally leading research work. Moretti studies the relationship among geographic concentration, innovation and workplace education levels to identify the direct and indirect benefits. He shows that this clustering favors the promotion of self-feeding processes of growth, directly affecting wage levels, both in the innovative industries as well as the sectors that service them. Indirect benefits also accrue from knowledge and other spillovers, which accompany clustering in innovation hubs. Moretti presents research-based evidence supporting his view that the public and private economic benefits of education and research are such that increased federal subsidies would more than pay for themselves. The author fears the development of geographic segregation and Balkanization along education lines if these issues of long-term economic benefits are left inadequately addressed.
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's more profound problems.Pub Date: May 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-75011-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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