Nonfiction Book Reviews

Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife by Irene Spencer was an eye-opening book.  I had already read Escape by Carolyn Jessop, so I had something to compare this book to, and I thought it was interesting how different the two husbands in the story are.  Carolyn’s husband never attempted to be fair and love all of his wives equally, nor did he ever attempt to be a good husband to Carolyn.  Irene Spencer’s husband, Verlan, was very different, and in his own way, he truly loved Irene.  He wasn’t perfect, but then again, neither was Irene.

In a nutshell, Irene was raised in a polygamist family, but her mother left her father when she was young, and eventually when Irene fell in love with a man who wasn’t Mormon or a fundamentalist, her mother encouraged her wholeheartedly to marry this guy instead of marrying a polygamist.  Scared to marry outside of the church and be damned for all eternity, Irene married her half-sister’s husband instead, and became Verlan’s second wife.   She regretted that choice for the rest of her life, as she suffered through abject poverty and third-world living conditions, on top of being subjected to being pregnant 13 times in 25 years.

The book could have been helped by editing - she spends a lot of time talking about how she never got enough sex with her husband, and how she had to share her husband and she was jealous because of it…When I say a lot, I mean the majority of the second half of the book was spent talking about this.  After a while, I started skimming, because there was just so much of that, that I could take, before I wanted to say, “Good, great, let’s get on with it then.  I understand you’re jealous - now what?”  She also seemed to spend most of the book crying her eyes out, which I am the world’s most sympathetic person (I cry when I watch a sad commercial on TV!) but even I wanted to say, “Aren’t you sick of sobbing yet?  Just do something about it already.”  She kept saying she would divorce him if he did blah-blah, and then he’d do it, and she’d stay with him.  Then she’d set a new criteria - she’d divorce him if he did this and this, and then he’d do it, and then she’d stay with him.  It was frustrating because for all of her ranting and raving and yelling and crying, she never followed through on any of her promises and always allowed him to come back into her life.

In the epilogue, I found out she became a born-again Christian.  That part seemed strange to me - Carolyn Jessop of Escape basically became an atheist of sorts, which is probably the same decision I would make if I had lived through what these ladies had lived through.  I would have figured God punished me enough - if he wanted any part of me, he would have made for a nicer beginning to my life. I also thought it was strange that Irene didn’t seem to try to separate out the current LDS Church from the fundamentalist sect she had belonged to.  For the most part, whatever the fundamentalists believed, she seemed to believe that’s what the current LDS Church believed in too.  I don’t know if that’s because of the conversion to born-again Christianity or not, but that left me baffled.

Now that I’ve read both Escape and Shattered Dreams, I’m going to read His Favorite Wife by Susan Schmidt because strangely enough, Irene and Susan were both married to the same man, Verlan - they were “sister wives,” to use the term in the polygamy world for it.  It’ll be very interesting to read about that relationship from Susan’s eyes, since Irene definitely had a lot to say about it. Escape and Shattered Dreams were so different from each other, I can’t wait to see how His Favorite Wife plays out.

I give Shattered Dreams 3.75 stars out of 5 - with better editing, it could have easily been a 4.5 or higher, but it was simply suffering from an overtelling of every single event that happened in 25+ years.  I would say that with what’s happening down in Texas right now, it’s worth the read, although I’d borrow it from the library instead of buying.

Havs

KickAss in College: A Guerrilla Guide to College Success by Gunnar Fox is a laugh-out-loud guide to doing well in college.  I picked it up on a whim at the library because the name caught my eye - there aren’t many self-help books that have swear words in the title. I’m glad I did though - it was an absolutely fantastic book, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.  My only real quibble with it was (would you guess it!) there were quite a few swear words on it. I know, I know, crazy but true. I have a hard time recommending it wholeheartedly because of those swear words, but I also figure that anyone who picks up a book with “Ass” in the title probably knows what’s coming.

The tips in the book are fantastic - he’s direct, he’s easy to read, he’s realistic, and he’s fun.  I read the book through quickly the first time, and then decided to go back through a second time to take notes.  There was enough in there that I knew I wouldn’t remember everything by fall (when I start back to school myself), and I didn’t want to risk that.  If I had read this book before starting college as a freshman in 1999, I would have done so much better than I did. I highly recommend it to anyone who attending either college or high school, and wants to learn how to succeed in the classroom.  He doesn’t have a crazy system for studying where you have to highlight every sentence with a different color, or one of the other bizarre systems that are out there. His system does require you to work hard, yes, but at least you’ll do it knowing that you’re going to actually get the good grades in the end.

If you’re in the market for a great study guide, make sure to pick this one up!

4.75 out of 5 stars (marked down just slightly for the cuss word content).

Havs

Financial Peace: Restoring Financial Hope to You and Your Family by Dave Ramsey is an average book for those who are just starting out on the road back to fiscal responsibility. If you have never read a book about how to manage your finances and want a very general overarching idea of where to start, this book is for you. If you’re a fan of Dave Ramsey and want to learn a bit more about his background and how he got started counseling people on their finances, this book is for you.

Unfortunately, I don’t fall under either of those categories, and so although the book was slightly entertaining to me (Dave can be quite funny at times), overall the book simply seemed repetitive. Every financial book seems to cover the same bases: Pay yourself first, put together a budget and stick to it, always spend less than you make, spend time looking for good bargains (never pay retail!) and put together an emergency fund in case of a rainy day. Dave is no different – he covers these same points just like every other book out there.

The book also suffers from being on the older side – it was originally written in 1992, and then reprinted in 1997, and it definitely shows. Last but not least, Dave Ramsey is Christian, so he spends a lot of his time quoting scriptures out of the Bible. I’m a Christian too, so this didn’t bother me too much (although I’ve never figured out how finances and Christianity related to each other), but I did think that was worthy of mention, because if that’s something that would bug you, you won’t want to pick this book up, or any book by Dave Ramsey since he does the same thing in his other books.

To be fair, there were parts that made me laugh. Case in point: Dave was trying to drive home the point that bad things will always happen to you, and so he gave the following “test” for the reader to perform:

“Put this book down now. Hold your right hand up in front of you with your elbow bent. Now reach your left hand across the back of your wrist to where your fingertips touch your main artery, and then check for a pulse. Is your heart beating? If you are alive and walking around, things will happen to you that you don’t think will. The only way you can avoid unexpected financial events is not to be alive – so they’re not ‘unexpected’ events, are they?”

He also said, “One of my friends said her grandmother taught her to have a G.O.K fund – God Only Knows.” That made me laugh out loud, which isn’t common for a nonfiction book on finances. I decided my emergency fund needed to be renamed to the GOK fund, because that sounds much cooler than a plain ole’ Emergency Fund.

But overall, a much better book to read Dave Ramsey’s other book, “Total Money Makeover.” That has more concrete information that is actually usable.

Overall, I give it 3.25 stars out of 5.

Havs

The World’s Worst Cars: From Pioneering Failures to Multimillion Dollar Disasters by Craig Cheetham was a depressing book. I picked it up because I thought it looked interesting - something my father would like. He always gravitates towards books on mechanical things like tractors and pickups, and I thought this would be another good one for him to read. I checked it out of the library and sent it home to him, and he returned it with a note, “This book was depressing.” Surprised, I asked him why. He said, “It was page after page of cars that didn’t work, and why they didn’t work, and there just wasn’t anything uplifting or happy in the whole book.” I thought depressing was a strong word for a nonfiction book on cars, so I figured I’d read it and see what I thought, instead of just turning it back into the library as I had originally planned.

Turns out, my dad was right (see Dad, I do say that sometimes! :-P) - this book was depressing. I also didn’t agree with it entirely. My great-grandmother’s car was in there - the Chevy Nova. Not that I was in love with that car, but considering she’d had it since it was brand new off the lot from ‘70 all the way up in 2004, I think you’d be hard pressed to say it wasn’t reliable. It also listed the Ford Explorer because of the fiasco with Firestone tires, but the American public has a short memory, and if the amount of Explorers on the road is any indication, people have gotten past their fear of driving that SUV.

The cover is fun (it shows the Reliant Robin, a three wheeled car that tipped when you went around corners too fast) and the premise is great too. But don’t plan on sitting down and reading it cover to cover any time soon - it’s much too depressing for that. If you’re a car buff and want a book for your coffee table, this one might be good to generate comments during dinner parties, but that’s about it.

2.25 out of 5 stars.

Havs

Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand up to the Facts by Popular Mechanics is an excellent book on one of the biggest conspiracies out there right now. Move over UFO’s, forget JFK - did the federal government and/or another “shadowy group” orchestrate September 11, 2001? The resounding answer is no, and this book explains exactly why that is.

I had read several websites claiming to have inside knowledge on the federal government’s involvement in 9/11, and when I read their claims, it did sound plausible. Why did the 7th tower fall? Why didn’t someone intercept Flight 93? But despite their claims to be laying out the “true facts” of the case, the side “no one” wants you to know, I was fairly certain that something was missing here. The biggest question in my mind was the fact that it would have taken huge manpower to pull off a stunt like this, to coordinate it to look like an Al Qaeda job. Hundreds of people would have had to have been in on it. What are the chances that all of them would have kept quiet for all of this time? I’ve heard the saying that the only way to have three people keep a secret is not to tell the secret to two of them. How about keeping hundreds of people quiet? No way.

So I read this book with relish, because I was interested in seeing some real facts on what happened on 9/11. It was extremely well written, with a great format, and no technical jargon at all but instead laid out in layman’s terms. It went through conspiracy theory by conspiracy theory, and blew each of them to little smithereens. If you have any doubts about what happened on 9/11 - if you’ve read one too many wild conspiracy websites and started to wonder if what you’d read was true - you need to read this book. If you’re interested to see what Rosie and Charlie Sheen are blathering about, you need to read this book. Your opinion of them and their intelligence will fall immeasurably after reading it (and I like Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men. I just try to ignore his political views if at all possible. ;-)) If you want a book to explain why things happened the way they did (why didn’t we shot down the second plane when we realized that they were being used as missiles, why did the 7th tower fall when no plane struck it, etc) then you need to read this book.

I thought it was an excellent and quick read - I give it 5 stars!

Havs

Be the Pack Leader by Cesar Millan and Melissa Jo Peltier is an excellent book to read if you’re interested in dog psychology and why it is that your dog does the things that it does (like bark incessantly, dig holes, or develop other strange obsessions like chewing on rocks). Cesar has a real gift with dogs, as is obvious on his show, The Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic Channel.  The things that he’s able to do with dogs is nothing short of amazing.

Unfortunately, it’s been hard for me, at least, to duplicate his results on my own two troublemaking dogs.  I think Cesar’s method is harder than a “regular” training course, because he doesn’t focus on teaching them tricks like sitting or laying down on command, but instead focuses on making you the leader of the pack, and changing your psychology and how you approach the dog.  That’s much more difficult to do, quite frankly, and even though I read and reread parts of his book, I still don’t have a good understanding of how I’m supposed to make this happen.  He says things like, “Claim the space” and I want to yell in frustration, “What does that mean?  How do I ‘claim the space’?”  It’s not simple step-by-step instructions that you can follow easily, but instead requires you to change your psychological outlook on how you deal with your dogs.  A part of me really wants to learn it well, and a part of me wants to throw my hands up in the air and just give up.

I am still giving it 4.5 out of 5, because I know that a) Other people may not be as thick in the head as me, and perhaps others would more quickly pick up on how to do this, b) The breed information and how to deal with each specific type of dog was very interesting, and c) The stories he tells and the style of writing are both superb.  I really enjoyed reading the book, even if I didn’t “get” everything in it.

Try it for yourself, and report back what you think.  Oh, and I should have given this disclaimer before: I don’t have cable TV, so I have never watched a full episode of The Dog Whisperer (I caught some clips on YouTube but nothing full length).  Perhaps fans of his show would understand the book a lot better…? It’s a thought.

Happy readings!

Havs

I ran across Don’t Call Them Ghosts: The Spirit Children of Fontaine Manse on accident at the library tonight, and decided that it looked interesting enough to preview on my 15 minute break. I was instantly hooked. It was almost physically painful to close the book after 15 minutes - I wanted to know what happened next!! I took the book home and finished it in about 2 hours (it’s a pretty quick read - simple narration, and only 255 pages long).

The true story is of a family who moved into a house and two days later found out (in a very dramatic fashion) that it was haunted by ghosts. As time passed, Mrs. McConnell eventually figured out that there were three of them, and they were all children. Although she was quite terrified of them at first, she eventually realizes that the children are harmless, and she ends up calling them her “other children” and loves them as much as she loves her own children.

Most ghost stories are about terrible hauntings where the ghosts do horrible things to the inhabitants of the house - this book was not like that in the slightest. Sweet, simple, and cozy is how I would describe both the book and the author. She was quite hilarious when it came to writing up her inner dialog - she would talk along to herself, calling herself a “dumb butt” for not understanding something fast enough, and often said that she was just a simple country girl. Mrs. McConnell is unbelievably believable in this book. I could see myself curling up with a cup of hot cocoa and talking with her like an old friend - she comes across as being very approachable and down to earth. A down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth woman who just so happens to love three children she can’t see or hear.

My only small quibble with the book is the fact that there are so many mistakes in the printing of it - misplaced quotation marks are the worst offenders, although misplaced apostrophes and commas also rate high. I don’t know if this was a mistake on the author’s part or the layout person in charge of printing, but either way, the editor in me had a hard time with that. But overall, this is one of the best books that I’ve read in a very long time. I give it 5 out of 5 stars, and highly recommend that if you’re interested in ghosts or spirits at all, to pick this one up. And make sure to pick up a box of Kleenexs too!

Two giant thumbs up!

Havs

Escape from Saddam by Lewis Alsamari is a pretty good autobiography, especially if you’re interested in learning more about Middle Eastern politics from an insider. It centers around Lewis Alsamari, a boy who lived in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s reign and who wanted to escape the country. It’s entitled Escape from Saddam even though he never met Saddam and was never influenced personally by him. From the title, I was expecting something more along the lines of him being a part of Saddam’s inner circle, but somehow getting out of the country and living to tell the tale. Instead, he met Saddam’s son once, for a brief five minutes on the street, and that was it.

I never really got heavily into the book, and I think it’s because I didn’t relate to Lewis on any level. It was a pretty gripping read, even so, and I did finish it in a couple of days. He went through some hellacious stuff, and it made me realize what a gigantic gap there is between our cultures. Over there, if your father is a part of the “right” political party, you got an extra 5 points on your graduation test, and if he served in the army, then you got another five points. He said it was common to have people graduate with 110% scores. Here in America, I can’t even fathom something like that happening. Never in a million years.

He does stay out of the political end of the Iraq war, until the Epilogue, which I appreciated - I didn’t want to read the book and have the whole thing be slanted one way or the other. His feelings are very strong on that subject - I won’t ruin the surprise and tell you what they are, but he definitely has an opinion!

If you’re interested in Iraq, the political landscape there, and what it was like before the Iraqi War, I think this is one of the better books out there to read.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Havs

Enter the Past Tense: My Secret Life as a CIA Assassin by Roland W Haas was a disappointment, to me at least. I spied the book while checking it out to a patron at the library, and had thought it looked like a very interesting book. After all, who wouldn’t enjoy a tell-all book from a CIA assassin?

Me, apparently.

My biggest problem with the book was the man himself, Roland Haas. He is NOT a good guy. Perhaps I’ve been steeped in too many Hollywood movies where the soldier is the good guy, or perhaps it was being raised by a dad who served in the Marine Corps for 20 years and talked endlessly about duty and country and “doing the right thing even when no one was looking” but to me, this guy was just a creep. At one point, upset with his up-to-that-point best friend, Roland took an ice pick and swung with all his might into the side of his best friend in an attempt to kill him. This was in either junior high or early high school – the book wasn’t quite clear on the timeline. His best friend lived, but they were not (shocking!) best friends after that. A murder attempt tends to put a damper on things.

He also spent most of college higher than a kite, he listed every drug he ever used, and even described in detail the various delusions that he suffered through. All of that would have been fine, if he had gone on to somehow redeem himself by changing his life around, etc etc, but instead he agrees to be an assassin on a lark, and then spends his time either learning how to kill people, or getting drunk or high (sometimes both at the same time). He just isn’t likable.

And all while reading this, I kept thinking, “Is this guy for real? Could he have honestly done all of this, or is he just writing this fictitious life in order to sound a lot cooler than he really was?” Maybe he wanted a good excuse as to why he was kicked out of college, and thought being a CIA assassin was a good cover story. Who knows. So I hopped online to read reviews on Amazon.com, and there were more than a few reviews on there that said that they believed the book was fictitious. We’ll never know for sure unless the guy confesses, but I have to say, I truly doubt half the stuff in this book.

I only got a third of the way through before deciding that I didn’t want to read about this guy any longer. He was depressing, he wasn’t a very nice human being, and I didn’t see this getting any better any time soon. I didn’t expect him to be a Boy Scout (after all, it was about an assassin!) but some of the stuff he did as a kid was just outright horrid.

Perhaps an adventurous soul could read through to the end and find a kernel of goodness and worthiness in the guy, but I would say there’s better books out there to spend your time reading.

2.25 stars out of 5

Havs

I picked up Home: A Memoir of my Early Years by Julie Andrews from the library because I grew up watching Sound of Music and it remains to this day one of my all-time favorite movies.

I discovered a lot of interesting information about her in this book, although it wasn’t quite all that I was hoping for. Because of my love of Sound of Music, I had hoped that she would go through to that part of her life, but it stops short of her starting work on Mary Poppins, which was the movie she completed directly before Sound of Music. So I was rather disappointed about that, although if I hadn’t expected anything about Sound of Music, that obviously wouldn’t have been a big deal to me. The subtitle was, “A Memoir of my Early Years” but I was still hopeful.

The other thing that struck me strange was how the book ended. She’s married to a guy that she had known and had been friends with since the age of 14. They had dated for a long time, eventually moved in together, and eventually after that got married. She never hinted at any sort of trouble between them. She talks about having a baby girl together. Life is great. The book ends with them literally flying off into the sunset (they were off on their way to California for Julie to shoot Mary Poppins). You never would have guessed from what she was writing, that her marriage was anything but idyllic. Except because of comments made earlier in the book, you know that 11 years later, she’s divorced from her first husband, and married to the second one. ??? Perhaps she was trying to protect the first husband by not going into personal details, I don’t know, but it made for a rather confusing ending, because I kept waiting for an explanation as to why her first husband and her divorced. I never got one.

Other than those two items, I really enjoyed the book. I hadn’t spent a lot of time previously exploring Julie’s life, so I don’t know how much of the information in the book had been known before to Julie fans, but to me, it was all new, and all quite good to read. It’s amazing how much she’s gone through in her life - you would never have guessed it, looking at her and how she comports herself in the movies and in interviews. Her mother was a drunk and not at all a stabilizing influence; Julie spent most of her childhood taking care of herself; they were very poor and as a teenager her family almost completely depended on her to bring in the income to keep them off the streets; her stepfather was a drunk too who couldn’t keep down a job and who tried to molest Julie as a child - it was not a picturebook childhood, to say the least. It’s amazing to me that she can portray such an amazing motherly persona as an actress, with virtually no role model to get the inspiration from. Her childhood story is quite depressing, although Julie relays it all with the famous British stiff upper lip - she didn’t bemoan and groan that childhood as others might have done. She simply talked about it as “that was the way it was” and there wasn’t much else to it.

If you’re looking for a great biographical read on one of the best known actresses/singers out there, you’ll really enjoy this book. She’s a talented writer (she wrote the book herself, which is rather unusual for star autobiographies) - I give it 4.25 out of 5 stars. Also, if you want more information, she has a website - The Julie Andrews Collection , which has lots of info on the children’s books that she’s written.

Havs

I work at the local library, so I get to see all of the new books that have come out that look intriguing. I was checking a patron out a couple of weeks ago, and I saw a book in the stack called Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives. Being a closet fan of 48 Hours Mystery, I thought, “Wow, that looks interesting!” I say that refrain often at work, and have had to work very hard to keep my house from overflowing with “interesting” books from the library. My only defense is that at least the books are free, right? If I worked at Barnes & Noble, I think I’d have to pay them to show up to work!

So as I checked the patron out, I copied and pasted the barcode information into my account to put it on hold, and then when the patron returned the book, I was next in line and able to take it home. Now that I’ve read the majority of the book (I probably won’t finish it) I have to say: This is not a book for the faint hearted. She freely discusses how the murderers have dismembered and chopped up their victims (who are always either wives or girlfriends) and then calmly went on with their lives. Gruesome and horrifying doesn’t even begin to describe the stories in this book.

For those with weak stomachs, skip this next paragraph. For those who are interested in knowing what kind of material is covered in the book, this might give you a good idea. One of the stories she talks about was a husband who was sick of being married (apparently), so he killed his wife, and wrapped her up in plastic. He bought a huge freezer the day of the killing, and placed her inside. After she was thoroughly frozen, he took her body out into the woods, and, using a chainsaw he had borrowed from a friendly neighbor, went about chopping her up into manageable sizes. He then fed her through a wood chipper that he had rented from a rental store. He took what came out, disposed of it in the river, and then cleaned the chainsaw and wood chipper and calmly returned those items, the owners oblivious to what had happened. Through some real luck, the police figured out what happened, and found bits of her in the chainsaw and wood chipper. All in all, they recovered a mere 3/4’s of an ounce of her body. The rest was gone forever. But it was enough to convict him.

None of the crimes in the book are a crime of passion. All of them are well thought out, and all of the murderers believed they would never be caught. The author goes into detail as to the similarities and differences between psychopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellians - their social thought patterns and other interesting information, and even for no other reason, the first couple of chapters are very interesting to read, to get a better understanding of how these men think. But then she starts to delve into the particulars of each case, and what the man did, and how they caught him, and what happened at trial, and it ends up getting very gory.

Of course, it’s a book about psychopathic murderers killing their loved ones, so I’m not sure what else I thought it should be, except gory and gruesome! For fans of Ann Rule and other true crime authors, this would be a great book to pick up and read.

If you’re up for a depressing but rather interesting and very in-depth look at psychopathic murderers, this newest book by Marilee Strong will be right up your alley. I give it 4.25 out of 5, and would recommend it to others, as long as they know what they’re getting into.

Havs
Who really just needs to stay out of the true crime section of the library…