Category Archives: non-fiction

Girls that Invest by Simran Kaur book review

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Every so often, I read a book which gives me hope. Which might or might not sound like a strange way to open a review about the Girls that Invest book, a book promising to guide women to financial independence through shares and stocks, but bear with me. I’ve been so impressed with the book and the podcast of Girls that Invest, and particularly with the hosts Simran Kaur and Sonya Gupthan, that it’s given me so much hope for the women of the future. The kids are alright, and I look forward to seeing where this generation of young women take us.

Besides this, Girls That Invest: Your guide to financial independence through shares and stocks is a really good book. It’s accessibly and engagingly written, and totally demystifies the world of investing which from the outside can seem the preserve of finance bros and Wall Street Whizz Kids – to the extent that Sim and Sonya suggest in their podcast that the sociolect of the finance bro and the exclusionary language of the stock market might be no accident.

Building on the aims of the Girls That Invest Community – to create a place for beginner investors from all different backgrounds, allowing them to create a better, more secure future for themselves and their communities, the book addresses common misconceptions which hold us back from investing, offers a really clear and concise introduction to the stock market and different options for investing, before offering a practical guide to assessing your own comfort levels with risk, setting your financial goals and outlining seven easy steps to begin investing, including dedicated chapters on ethical investment and being a female investor.

I wish I’d had this book in my early 20s when I first read about the FIRE movement (FIRE is an acronym for Financial Independence, Retire Early) and looked at starting to invest but became completely overwhelmed with worries about how tax worked and interfaces of various platforms, so scuttled back to my cash ISA. But even now in my late (when did that happen??) 30s, the Girls that Invest book has been a real investment, and has helped me gain a really clear understanding of what the various options for my stocks and shares ISA actually mean, and how well my portfolio balance fits my financial goals for the future. It’s also lead me to join e Toro, a microinvesting platform that you can access from the UK, which as well as allowing you to begin making small investments, offers the option of a virtual portfolio with an imaginary lump sum for you to build up your confidence and financial awareness through virtual investing.

I’m planning to give this book to my sisters and friends (not my copy, that’s staying with me, bookmarked and annotated) and honestly, I can’t recommend it highly enough. I’d also recommend listening to the podcast, where I really love Sim and Sonya’s self-deprecating, teasing dynamic. I nearly laughed tea through my nose when they’d asked friends for feedback on the early episodes and one had told Sim that she sounded like a Kardashian discussing salad. The vibe is very chatty, very informal, and entirely relatable.

The Friendship Cure by Kate Leaver

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The Friendship Cure by Kate Leaver, a confusingly packaged but interesting read on the role of friendship in the modern world

They used to say that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but modern publishing relies on shelf appeal -be that in a physical or online shop- an invests so heavily in cover designs that generally you can do just that. For bigger releases, editorial, marketing, design and sales will all pitch in about the final cover and title of a book to make sure that it’s discoverable to the readers who are likely to be looking for it. They want you to know what to expect.

With that said, it’s rare these days to pick up a book and find that it’s been somehow mispackaged. The Friendship Cure: Reconnecting in the Modern World by Kate Leaver positively screams self-help book, from the title, to the subtitle, to the girly pink and purple crushed tablet of glitter which has bled into the font. But wait, why is the endorsement on the cover calling the author the new Jon Ronson?

The Friendship Cure by Kate Leaver, despite its confusing title, isn’t a self-help book at all, but a treatise on friendship in the digital age. Touching on a wide range of friendship related topics, it draws on social psychology, anthropology and a healthy dose of personal experience and annecdote to explore why most people’s social networks hover around the 150 mark, looking at different categories of friendship like the Bromance, The Work Wife, The Toxic Friend, The Virtual Friend and Friends with Benefits to resulting in an enjoyable exposition on why friendships matter as much as ever in our disconnected world.

Leaver has serious experience as a journalist, and the book tackles head on the hugely topical issue of the loneliness pandemic, and I’d say it does it very well. The writing at times leaned towards excessive self-deprecation, and there were a few sweeping generalisations in the chapter on whether men and women can ever just be friends which seemed to lend more than a little credence to the films of Nora Ephron, but I enjoyed reading this and found it informative. A solid book.

All the while I was reading it though, I couldn’t help but thinking that if this was a male journalist writing about the importance of friendship, reflecting on his own experience of friendship with men and women and how that had shaped his sense of self, the publishers wouldn’t have gone full throttle on the heavily gendered packaging. The non-fiction market is going from strength to strength in the UK, and it would be nice to see women’s writing being given the same consideration as men’s when publishers are thinking about how they promote books to readers.

We do tend to judge books by their covers after all.

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

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$R0T9BM0A lot has been written recently about the way in which serial killers are treated like macabre geniuses, while the victims of their crimes are forgotten.

The most famous of these is undoubtedly Jack the Ripper, who having evaded capture has become something of a modern myth, and the Jack the Ripper folklore has spawned a micro-economy which trades on the death of his victims for profit; tours of the Whitechapel scenes of the murders, numerous films and television adaptations, even souvenirs with t-shirts and mugs displaying his victims corpses as if they were artworks created by a master craftsmen, not women who lived and breathed.

Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly

In The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Hallie Rubenhold seeks to go some way towards reclaiming the names of his victims, exploring their histories to restore their identities and humanity. It makes it clear that it doesn’t matter who Jack the Ripper was now, what matters were the complex and varied lives that he snatched. One by one she goes explores the lives of the canonical five victims; Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, from their births to their deaths, revealing far more complex lives than any film or documentary purporting to explore the history of Jack the Ripper has ever revealed.

Rubenhold’s The Five is as fascinating as it is heart-breaking, showing the various factors that brought the women to be living such precarious existences in Whitechapel, and reminding the reader just how precarious life could be in the Victorian era, where an extra mouth to feed could tip a family into poverty, or the loss of a male relative could leave a family of women incredibly vulnerable. Where if you were born into poverty, you had little to no hope of escaping, and even if you were born into the middle classes, one mistake or one small upset would be enough to derail your life.

The Five not only returns a sense of the victims as real people but gives a clear picture of what life was like for women and the poor in the era. I found it a really moving read, and although I enjoy a crime novel as much as anyone else, thought it was an important counter voice to the sensationalism of violence against women for entertainment.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

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Humankind by Rutger BregmanMost people, deep down, are pretty decent.

Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

People are fundamentally good. It’s a difficult idea to sell at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a global pandemic with the planet teetering on the brink of climate crisis. All the evidence suggests the contrary doesn’t? Humans are the possessors of the selfish gene, acting only out of self-interest, aren’t they? You don’t have to look far to find multiple examples of people being awful. Five minutes on Twitter should do the trick.

Despite this, Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists, has published a book arguing the contrary, claiming in Human Kind: A Hopeful History that not only are humans fundamentally good, but that our success as a species is a result of our willingness to trust one another and work together to achieve the common good.

Has this description given you an overwhelming attack of Whataboutism yet? Hang back on that, because Bregman has done his research, and the book is a whistlestop tour of history, psychology and philosophy examining cases such as the London Blitz, the Stanford Prisoner Experiment, and the mysterious fate of Easter Island to debunk the myth of man as a purely selfish creature and to reframe them as case studies in his new philosophy of hope. As much as I’d like to believe that all people are fundamentally good at heart, I’m not entirely sold on this, but I don’t think that Bregman is either. Rather, he makes a powerful argument that the relentless negativity of the news that reaches us every day gives us a skewed perception of how bad the majority of humanity are, and this has the opposite of a placebo effect, making us feel worse and expect the worst of out fellow humans, trapping us in a cycle of negativity and cynicism which will make us behave in the spirit of mistrust.

To Bregman, cynicism is just another word for laziness, and a cynical world view is just a self-deceptive trick which gives the cynic an excuse to opt out of working to make the world a better place, and the book is compelling in challenging our cynicism about the average person’s intentions.

It ends with ten rules to live by to readdress the balance and go someway to thinking the best of others to create a positive feedback loop, in which people connect, understand and treat one another better. And maybe it will. What’s to lose in trying?