A useful primer on the benefits of homeownership to low-income communities.
In this guide, a financial adviser points to homeownership as the key to increasing generational wealth in Black and brown communities.
With a Ph.D. in psychology, Brown is well aware of the motivations behind how people spend or save their money. In addition to this academic background, this work draws on her own personal and family experiences with homeownership, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy as an African American woman. Too many individuals, she argues, are plagued with “acid reflux” in their pockets. As the adage goes, most of what they earn burns a hole in their pockets. If people want to live the “Post Pandemic American Dream” of “Credit Cards, Cash, and Cadillacs,” the author emphasizes they must become financially savvy in researching investment trends such as cryptocurrency, attending college, and, most importantly, buying a house, which would “impact the generations to come.” Brown is the founder and owner of Fresh Community Development Inc., an organization devoted to providing affordable financial literature and services to low-income families; this guide is an important addition to her reference materials. At just over 100 pages, this concise volume provides practical advice on the benefits of property ownership versus rent as well as sensible, if basic, tips on how to save, spend, and invest, irrespective of one’s economic class. Though there is certainly a racial component to the narrative that emphasizes ownership as a key to assuaging generational poverty, the book does not dwell on the historical contexts or systemic barriers to the purchase of a home. While it offers crucial information to understanding American residential history, this volume is not intended as an indictment of capitalism or racism. Instead, the author is laser focused on individual responsibility and actions where “we all have a role to play” in alleviating poverty. Brown’s conversational prose style borrows heavily from the inspirational lingo of self-help books. In addition, the manual delivers ample references to pop culture, zodiac signs, and Christianity designed to motivate and educate readers to reconsider their spending habits and financial goals.
A useful primer on the benefits of homeownership to low-income communities.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73513-323-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Success Lockdown Group LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
