An authoritative, useful overview of making final arrangements.
Barnsdale offers a brief but useful discussion about planning for death in this nonfiction work.
With his combined expertise as a licensed funeral director and a certified financial planner, the author is uniquely qualified to discuss both the temporal and financial aspects of dying. Five short but informative chapters cover communicating end-of-life wishes, creating a will, funeral planning, estate planning, and powers of attorney and health care directives. Recognizing the difficulty of the subject for many people, he offers a helpful list of five “icebreakers,” questions designed to prompt further discussion, such as, “I’ve been thinking more about my life and how I want to be remembered. How will you remember me?” The book goes on to present basic information about preparing a will, including a discussion of the executor’s role and using a lawyer versus a do-it-yourself service. A section that specifically addresses “funeral, cremation & burial planning” may be the most unsettling for some readers; in a sensitive yet objective manner, the author covers such issues as whether or not the body of the deceased should be viewed, what happens if a death occurs away from home, the increasing popularity of cremation, the “death awareness movement,” organ donation, and natural, “green” burials. The author offers a brief overview of estate planning with the caveat that he is a financial planner but not an estate attorney. The final chapter addresses the creation of legal “incapacity documents”; Barnsdale advises, “Thinking about our potential incapacity is not uplifting, but considering the risks of doing nothing, it is important.” This book is more of an introduction to the process of death planning than a substantive discussion. Still, it can act as a valuable conversation starter for a difficult subject.
An authoritative, useful overview of making final arrangements.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781525584916
Page Count: 120
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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