DISCOVERIES

-----

Money, a Memoir

Women, Emotions, and Cash

Liz Perle

Henry Holt: 288 pp., $23

“Ihad just lost my marriage and my home, and I had fifteen hundred bucks,” writes Liz Perle, speaking of the point in her life when she realized that, like many other women, she had a toxic relationship with money.

Her husband had taken a job in Singapore; the author and their 4-year-old son had just flown over to live with him when he told her, “Please go home.” Flying back to the United States with $1,500 in her hands, no home and no job, Perle, who grew up in the middle class, was appalled by her habit of “intentional avoidance” of financial matters.

“I know more about my friends’ sexual assets than their financial ones,” she realized. Perle and her friends valued money (there was “no such thing as enough”), but, like most women, they also gave men too much control over their financial futures. Perle was raised to be dependent -- not just on men but also on the corporations she worked for.

“This is not a book of financial advice,” Perle warns. It is a book about the disastrous results of letting “our emotions influence -- even dictate -- our financial lives.” One equation she mastered: “Ambivalence + avoidance = anxiety.” Perle describes parents as the “architects” of our feelings about money. We fall into the same roles -- hoarders versus spenders -- as they did.

Women still earn 78% of what their male counterparts earn, she writes. When they have children, they sacrifice their long-term financial security. Perle interviews women who have stayed in marriages to avoid the drastic changes in lifestyle that divorce involves. She writes about women who do not demand what they are worth at home or at work and women who lie to their overly sheltered husbands about the purchases they make. She encourages women to drop their coy relationship with money -- to cut the bonds between love and money. We have all, she writes, given money far too much control over our happiness.

There are some astonishing data in “Money, a Memoir.” The author is at her best when she is being specific about the numbers. Vague phrases -- like “a chunk of money” or “a decent salary” -- are contrary to the full disclosure that this book demands of its readers.

-----

Racism Explained

to My Daughter

Tahar Ben Jelloun

New Press: 208 pp., $13.95 paper

WHEN Tahar Ben Jelloun, a French journalist born in Morocco, took his 10-year-old daughter to a protest against France’s immigration laws, she started asking questions about racism and discrimination. Ben Jelloun and his daughter had the conversations, then he wrote and rewrote this book until the text was as clear and as simple as possible. “By the 1960s, many of us believed that the civil rights movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime,” writes Bill Cosby in his introduction. “But despite significant progress, racism remains.” Cosby commends Ben Jelloun’s efforts to explain to his daughter that racism is an illness. Not only should people stand up to it when they see it but they also should not let themselves “be made to feel inferior by narrow-minded people.”

The book is written primarily for children 8 to 14 years old, but questions like “Do you think I could become a racist?” and “Has racism always existed?” and “What do racists use as their ‘scientific proof ‘?” and “How do you fight it?” are extremely sophisticated.

In a postscript, Ben Jelloun describes his visits to 15 schools in France and Italy, where the book was used in classroom discussions. He takes note of how worried many of the students, particularly the children of North African immigrants, were about racism. Ben Jelloun also includes essays by four academics and writers -- Patricia Williams, William Ayers, David Mura and Lisa Delpit -- on how they used the book as a jumping-off point for instructing their own young. It is particularly touching to see just how much these essayists’ children were able to teach their parents about racism: Delpit’s daughter insisted that her mother buy her a white Barbie. (“Do you like your white friends, Mom? ... Well ... my black Barbies want some white friends, too.”)