A useful, no-nonsense, and detailed blueprint for rescuing your personal finances.
A debut guide focuses on getting out of debt and increasing personal net worth.
“If you carry consumer debt and you feel trapped in the cycle of minimum payments and maxed out accounts,” writes Kelly in her book, “you are right where the system wants you to be.” Setting aside the old advice of always having six months of rent and expenses in a savings account (and noting how inadequate the pandemic showed that counsel to be), the author seeks in these pages to show her readers some new ways to think about personal finance and the elimination of debt. The recurrent theme running through all her recommendations is the value of knowledge: Readers are urged to review their financial numbers until those figures are familiar rather than intimidating or depressing. “I want you to have comfort and ease with your numbers,” she writes. “But that comes from first getting acquainted with them, and then getting intimate.” Throughout the book, she’s unflinchingly realistic, acknowledging that once her readers have totaled up their entire net worth, they may likely realize they are very, very broke. To address these and other cold realities, Kelly provides a recovery strategy in three phases: planning, paying off consumer debt, and, most importantly, following up these two by investing and building wealth, so as not to fall back into the debt cycle again. The author has been on both sides of the problem she’s describing, having once been over $2 million in debt and having also taught budgeting for many years to clients whose personal finances were a mess. This depth of experience, combined with her friendly, completely encouraging tone, gives her manual an approachability often missing from books of this kind. Readers in all states of financial disrepair will find sound, helpful, and illuminating advice in these pages.
A useful, no-nonsense, and detailed blueprint for rescuing your personal finances.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-293955-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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