A mostly cogent manual for understanding personal finance but occasionally muddied by a forced metaphor.
A credentialed financial planner offers a nuts-and-bolts guide that compares financial planning to a physical fitness program.
In the introduction to this informative debut guide to financial health, Delauney explains its enigmatic title by revealing that his inspiration was his high-achieving cousin Greg Plitt, who built a successful career in the physical fitness industry before his death in a train accident at age 37. Delauney writes that he was deeply influenced by Greg’s philosophy of taking control of the time represented by the dash between the birth and death dates on a tombstone. This proactive approach is one of the book’s major themes; another is the parallel between physical training and financial planning. Beginning with the basics, “Your Foundation: Setting Goals” and “Your Foundation: The Numbers,” the text ties the metrics of physical conditioning to formulating financial goals and constructing statements of net worth and cash flow. Later chapters continue this metaphor: “Eating Your Taxes, Paying Your Calories” suggests strategies for lowering tax payments, and “Your Home, Your Gym: What Do You Control?” meticulously explores the advantages and pitfalls of home ownership. “Your Investments, Your Muscles: Making the Most of What You Have” provides numerous charts and detailed explanations of types of investments, negating this somewhat with the caveat, “If you wait to research all of your investment options…you may very quickly discover that your search is endless.” Similarly, the penultimate chapter, “Finding the Right Financial Planner,” undermines the work’s message by suggesting that the tasks in previous chapters are likely to be overwhelming and that readers may be better served by hiring a financial planner. Still, the book’s promotional aspect isn’t prominent, and Delauney demonstrates an empathetic understanding of how intimidating financial planning can be for those uncomfortable with investments and tax structures. The work’s biggest weakness is its repetition of the physical fitness parallel, which may remind readers of another area of insecurity rather than boosting their confidence. An appendix contains useful documents for taking control of one’s financial present and future.
A mostly cogent manual for understanding personal finance but occasionally muddied by a forced metaphor.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64307-272-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Mascot Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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