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Forum » Book Reviews By Students » Common Cents by Nancy J. Kimelman » ** Two Stars
** Two Stars
vivianmknguyenDate: Thursday, 2012-06-14, 5:05 PM | Message # 1
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Common Cents is a nonfictional book written by Nancy J. Kimelman. It gives the average American insight of how the economy works. The book is divided into two parts—the first half covers the fundamentals of the American economy while the second half tackles large-scale economical issues.

Throughout the book, Kimelman breaks down complex concepts down to the ABCs of it, such as how bonds, interest, and rates work. The beginning builds up from a foundation of supply and demand, and works its way up to who is in control of the global economy. Economical concepts take up about 2/3 of the book, which was not a joy to read as I am not very into how the economy works. The rest of the book was fairly decent and somewhat enjoyable to read as she discussed the economical problems that the world faces today. I only enjoyed reading it because I could relate the problems to things we have already learned in AP Human Geography. These problems included outsourcing our jobs to other countries and the battle for oil.

I had no trouble understanding the material that she provided, but it was quite tedious to read as she would sometimes ramble on about the same idea over and over unnecessarily. In addition, the first segment of the book was extremely boring because it was more of a manual than a book. The author would try to relate her corny sense of humor to economical concepts…this did not entertain me at all. I felt like she could have done a better job at providing graphs for the reader to gloss over while she explained the concepts. Instead, there were only two visual representations—one was a list of how to put rutabagas into good use and the other was a chart comparing/contrasting what sector of economy America has shifted into.

Asides from her corny jokes and lack of visuals, I didn’t like how Kimelman decided that you were either a pro-capitalist or a diehard communist. She puts great emphasis into capitalism, and even though I am all for capitalism, the author was so biased that she overlooked other economical problems that could’ve been explained in the book such as how agriculture affects our economy and why communism is slowly diluting in some nations.

I never meant to write such a long review, but I felt like this should be put out there. Unless you are tremendously interested in how economy works and corny jokes, I do not recommend this book at all. With that, I rate this book two stars out of five, not one, only because some parts of her book were very informative.
 
Forum » Book Reviews By Students » Common Cents by Nancy J. Kimelman » ** Two Stars
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