Investing Your Money

School Library Journal

Gr 6-9-These basic treatments are up-to-date, feature excellent graphics, and generally serve as effective introductions to their topics. However, they suffer from overgeneralization and occasional sloppy editing. Investing dishes out the standard set of recipes for saving with some colorful language but many of the illustrations have little relevance to the text. One graph's caption is highly misleading: it purports to show that investors' returns have outpaced inflation, but fails to do so. Katherine Bateman's The Young Investor (Chicago Review, 2001) and Janet Bamford's Street Wise (Bloomberg, 2000) are better choices. Taxes, on the other hand, focuses too much on their collection and protests against them, and not enough on the services that those moneys provide. Macht's historical account is accurate as far as it goes, but the author almost completely omits the policy uses of taxation, discouraging some activities such as smoking while encouraging others like charitable giving. Charles Hirsch's Taxation: Paying for Government (RSVP, 1993; o.p.) is less exciting but more balanced in coverage.-Jonathan Betz-Zall, City University Library, Everett, WA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.