Fortune Tellers Folly

In Secrets of Romani Fortune-Telling, Paulina Stevens and Jezmina Von Thiele share the knowledge and personal experiences of being raised to be fortune-tellers. They share divination methods, tools, and techniques that have been created, adapted, or popularized by the Roma, including card reading, palmistry, dream divination, and tea-leaf and coffee reading. They share exercises to strengthen your intuition and discover your natural gifts, and explain how divination helps with shadow work, blockages, and self-awareness.

Kurtz is the Washington Post's media reporter and hosts CNN's Reliable Sources. His three previous books have all looked at various aspects of the way news is reported. He has offered examples of how newspapers have mishandled major stories in Media Circus (1993), lamented the proliferation of talk shows in Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time (1996), and investigated the relationship between reporters and President Clinton's press office in Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine (1998). Now he looks at the explosive growth of financial journalism and questions the reliability of some financial information, wonders about the timing of certain news stories and releases, and raises ethical concerns about conflicts of interest.

The growing accessibility of the Internet and of cable television have made financial information more available to more people than ever before. As Americans increasingly invest in the stock market, journalists who cover Wall Street have gained a celebrity status once reserved for network anchormen. As Washington Post media reporter Kurtz deftly shows in this incisive expos?, the hosts of financial shows on such networks as CNN and CNBC, as well as certain online and print reporters, can "move markets" the way only analysts were able to do in years past. This trend has led to a growing interdependence between journalists, brokers and analysts. Kurtz (Spin Cycle) makes good on his unparalleled access to many of the major players, who come across as professional and thoughtful, though they sometimes get carried away by events they can't control and often find themselves caught in conflicts of interest. Jim Cramer is one of Kurtz's prime examples: founder of the financial Web site TheStreet.com as well as the manager of a $300-million hedge fund, he frequently writes about companies whose stocks he owns. But Cramer is far from the only one on Wall Street touting companies in which he has an interest. While Kurtz concludes with the predictable observation that Wall Street is a crazy, greedy, morally ambiguous place, his first-rate analysis of the interplay between the media and American financial institutions more than justifies the point.

A powerful and witty coming-of-age story of fate versus free will. As the daughter of southern Italian immigrants joined in an acrimonious arranged marriage, Eufemia Fantetti weathered the devastating consequences of her mother's treatment-resistant schizophrenia for years before moving to the West Coast to escape the constant turmoil. In her search for meaning beyond a host of ancestral superstitions—malocchio, maledictions and stregheria—she writes, cracks jokes, meets counselors, studies the sky for planetary alignment, consults her trusty tarot deck for guidance and visits her dad's psychic healer for a prescription for prescience. Fantetti's story is a darkly hilarious, tender chronicle of family, destiny and resilience.

In Secrets of Romani Fortune-Telling, Paulina Stevens and Jezmina Von Thiele share the knowledge and personal experiences of being raised to be fortune-tellers. They share divination methods, tools, and techniques that have been created, adapted, or popularized by the Roma, including card reading, palmistry, dream divination, and tea-leaf and coffee reading. They share exercises to strengthen your intuition and discover your natural gifts, and explain how divination helps with shadow work, blockages, and self-awareness.