A warmly sympathetic, authoritative biography of a true public servant.
The life of a dedicated public figure in the often dismal world of economics.
Veteran journalist and news editor Ullmann draws on 150 interviews with Yellen; her husband, economist and Nobel laureate George Akerlof; their son, economics professor Robert Akerlof; and Yellen’s many friends and colleagues to create an admiring portrait of a woman that he—and many others—compares to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Born in 1946, Yellen is the daughter of a physician whose caring and generosity made a lasting impact on her. “Thinking about the plight of the unemployed, their pain, their economic insecurity, and how they must feel,” Ullmann writes, “has been part of Yellen’s makeup since her father treated so many down-on-their-luck patients.” As the author demonstrates throughout, empathy informs her thinking about issues such as interest rates, banking regulations, unemployment, inequality, and gender bias. In a field dominated by men, Yellen encountered sexism most overtly in her six years teaching at Harvard. After graduate school at Yale, mentored by the like-minded James Tobin, Yellen found Harvard cold and hostile. She left happily in 1977 for a position as staff economist in the international division of the Federal Reserve. After marrying Akerlof the following year, the couple taught at the London School of Economics and then at Berkeley. Yellen was praised for being a clear, accessible professor, and her 23-year career in academia ended when President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in 1994 and as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in 1997. Although bristling at the “old boys’ environment” of the Clinton White House, Yellen stood out as earnest, dedicated, unassuming, honest, and frank. All of these qualities served her when she succeeded Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chair and, most lately, as the first female secretary of the treasury. Ullmann explains clearly the economic crises, decisions, and controversies that have marked Yellen’s storied career.
A warmly sympathetic, authoritative biography of a true public servant.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-0102-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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