Nonfiction Book Reviews

I picked up The Only 127 Things You Need: A Guide to Life’s Essentials by Donna Wilkinson because the title caught my eye.  The only 127 things in the whole world that you need?  Why 127?  Why not 128 or 152 or 101?  I started reading it over lunch at the park, and was surprised by the format.  I was expecting a list of 127 things - not an essay style of writing.  That’s not necessarily good or bad - it just wasn’t what I was expecting.

It was fairly interesting reading - it basically touches on every part of your life: Nutrition, sleeping, clothing, shelter, love, and spiritual stuff like doing good unto others, serving others, meditation, etc.

There were a couple of things that bothered me; one of the biggest being that the author repeated the information quite often.  And she wasn’t just repeating the same concepts, but was repeating the same sentences, word for word.  That was a bit disconcerting.  I think she was trying to state the idea in the chapter, then sum it up at the end of the chapter, but to me, it just came across as her trying to pad her word count.  If I had been her editor, I would have been slashing quite a bit of it out.

I did think that the idea was an interesting one, and to an extent, it worked: To give a guide to the basics of how to live your life.  When we were born, we didn’t pop out complete with an instruction manual.  This book tries to fill that gap.  But if you’ve read many womens’ magazines or watched much daytime TV like Oprah, you’ll know most all of this stuff already.  It was kinda fun to have it all in one place though.

Overall, I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.  There simply weren’t enough new or exciting concepts to warrant anything higher.

Hava

PS For those who are interested, no, there never is a reason given that there are only 127 items, and not another random number. Just in case you were curious…

Escape by Carolyn Jessop was a very difficult and depressing book for me.  I picked it up because of course, polygamy has been all over the news lately - even Oprah did a show on polygamy where she invited polygamists to come onto her show and share their side of the story.  There’s also been a plethora of polygamy books released - Shattered Dreams (which I already did a review of), His Favorite Wife, and a brand-new one called Stolen Innocence.

I’ve only read the two books, so I can only compare between them, but I have to say: Carolyn Jessop’s Escape had a very different take on polygamy than Shattered Dreams, although I supposed that’s to be expected.   The author of Shattered Dreams (Irene Spencer) is quite a bit older than Carolyn and her story took place before Warren Jeffs came in and took over, so her version of the sect was much more tame and normal than what happened to Carolyn.  And then of course you’ve also got two very different personalities.  All polygamists don’t think the same, just like all Catholics don’t have the same temperaments.   Some people may feel like if they’ve read one book on a subject, they’ve read them all, but in this case, that’s definitely not true.

I enjoyed reading Escape more - it starts out with a bang, on the night that Carolyn flees with her children and goes to Utah.  It’s fast paced and your heart starts racing just from reading.  Will she get out in time?  Is she going to get caught?  You can feel the tension rolling off Carolyn in waves.  Unlike Shattered that suffered from a real lack of editorial insight, Escape has great pacing and a good timeline to it.

My only real qualm with Escape was along the same lines as the problem I had with Not Without My Daughter - Carolyn has a real bitterness to her attitude and writing.  I didn’t expect her to be all smiles and sunshine about it, but even when something good or funny was happening, I still got this feeling that there is pure anger in her towards the polygamy cult and the experience itself.  I walked away with the gut feeling that Carolyn is going to be healing from this experience for a very long time, as opposed to Irene who I felt healed and forgave faster and easier.

And perhaps I’m way off, who knows, but that was the vibe I got from the books.

Overall, it was a supremely depressing but needed look at the polygamist life.  The Great Escape for Carolyn happened in 2003, so it isn’t as if this is an outdated book and things like this simply aren’t happening anymore.  Instead, she gives a fairly current snapshop into the lives of polygamists - I don’t think I’ll ever see a news story on polygamy quite the same again.

I give it 4.25 out of 5 stars.

Hava

In the cheapskate community, Amy Dacyczyn reigns supreme. And it’s not hard to see why, when you flip through her books.

Amy originally started out by producing a newsletter with tips she thought were helpful. She eventually put those tips into books, and produced three amazing books that every tightwad in the country owns (bought off eBay at a discounted price, of course). They are (originality in naming not being her strong suit) The Tightwad Gazette I, The Tightwad Gazette II, and (drumroll please!) The Tightwad Gazette III. I know, you didn’t see it coming, did you? Neither did I.

Lack of originality aside, there is little here to criticize. Seriously. This is the frugal person’s Bible. Too often, a “how-to-be-frugal” book will simply regurgitate the same tips over and over again. (Great example here. Or here’s another one that did it too, although not to the same extent.) How many times can people say, “Save up money and pay cash for big items” before publishers start to say, “Wait a minute, I think this has been covered before”?

Apparently a lot.

Amy stands at the pinnacle of frugalness for a very good reason: None of her “tips” are recycled stuff that someone slapped together from an hour of Googling. Amy never takes the easy way out by saying, “I’ve heard that it’s cheaper to…”

Instead, she sits down with a calculator and figures out, down to the penny, how much something will cost. And then she does it again the other way. Math is not my strong suit, so she completely lost me when it came to some of her calculations, but I was mightily impressed by her conclusions.

Here’s an excerpt on freezing food in bulk that illustrates that point nicely:

The first step was purchasing a humongous, $7.99, 2,000 foot-roll of 12-inch-wide clear plastic wrap from a warehouse store. One could make the argument that free bread bags are cheaper, but this wrap costs just 4/10ths of a cent per foot and allows a stretched-tight wrap that gives good protections from freezer burn. If this quantity is too much for you, we found that store-brand plastic wraps are 6/10ths of a cent. (But be aware that name-brand wrap costs as much as 2 and 3/10ths of a cent per foot.)

Am I just the laziest person alive? I never, no never, would have thought to calculate something like that down to the tenth of a penny.  She does this constantly.  Reading her books is like peering into the mind of a frugal genius, truly.

If you’re really observant (as are all of my readers, naturally) you might have noticed that I reviewed book #3 first.  I did that to make the point that you don’t have to read these books in order.  She does refer back to stories in previous books occasionally, but she always makes sure to give enough of the backstory that you’re not lost.

My only gripe (boring name aside) is that there isn’t anything more to read.  Amy Dacyczyn has retired, and is no longer producing newsletters, books, or even a simple blog. Others have tried to fill the gap by producing their own books and blogs, but none of them are as good as The Frugal Zealot.

Amy, we miss ya.

5 out of 5 stars

Hava

The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate by Gary Chapman is one of the best sources for love advice out there, and I don’t say that lightly.  I know that field is awfully crowded.  But Gary Chapman’s approach to love is simple: There’s in love and then there’s loving someone.  When you’re in love with someone, it’s like the movies and the songs and the Hallmark cards - “Oh, how I love thee!” - but unfortunately, it will not last.  Sorry if I just burst your bubble.

Scientific studies have shown that the in love feeling lasts only 2 years, at most.  When people start to come down off that high, then they think they’re in trouble - there’s got to be something wrong with our marriage! - but that’s not true.  That’s just you coming back to planet Earth.  If you can figure out the five languages of love (and more specifically, which language your spouse speaks) you can easily transition to the loving someone stage.

The five languages of love are:

*Words of Affirmation
*Quality Time
*Receiving Gifts
*Acts of Service
*Physical Touch

He explains each language in-depth, and gives examples of people who “speak” a certain language.  Basically, if your spouse speaks the Acts of Service language and you’re always giving him gifts, he’s not going to feel loved and you’re not going to know why.

Once you figure out which language each of you speak, you can start telling your spouse you love him, using a language he understands.  It’s the equivalent of me going up to my husband and telling him I love him in Chinese.  He’s not going to understand a word I just said.  That’s what happens when you tell your spouse you love him by using the wrong love language.

It’s a fast read, it makes sense, and it’s helpful.  My only word of caution is that the author is Christian, and quotes from the Bible and talks about Jesus throughout the book, but not to an overwhelming degree.  If you’re not Christian, I don’t think you’ll find it too much to handle, but just so you know it’s in there. And if you are Christian, you’ll be right at home with this book.

Overall, I give to 4.75 out of 5 stars.  I honestly think that if every young couple coming home from the church or courthouse after getting married could have this in their pile of wedding presents, our divorce rate would drop dramatically.  I think it’s that powerful.  Two giant thumbs up.

Hava

PS Still in the dating stage? Check out Dating here at Today - it’s got lots of helpful advice.

Photo Credits: Bjearwicke

The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World by Jacques Bosser and Guillaume de Laubier is a gorgeous, picture-packed display of beautiful libraries that had me drooling from page one.  I work at the local public library, and I love the way it looks - windows that stretch floor to ceiling, high archways, polished wood - but after I started reading this book, I realized how plain my library looks in comparison to these libraries.

Of course, my library isn’t built using the overblown Baroque style like many of the libraries featured in this book.  And by the end of the book, I was more appreciative of the simpler style of building anyway - many of these libraries are over-the-top dripping with cornices, embellishments, statues, swags, paintings, busts, intricate wood reliefs, and marble carvings.  Just looking at the pictures in the books left me overwhelmed - it was so busy, your eye never really had a chance to rest on any particular spot.

I can’t imagine how overwhelming these libraries must be in real life.

I definitely enjoyed flipping through the book, though.  There were quite a few pages where the page folded out, giving you an almost panoramic view of the library, and some of the pictures were breathtaking.  The photographer, Guillaume de Laubier, is to be congratulated for his excellent photography skills.  The author, on the other hand (Jacques Bosser) could have used some help along the way.  Some of the text was interesting, but for the most part, it was dry and boring.  I started skipping the text entirely and just looking at the pictures.

My other quibble with the book was the title implied that they had pulled libraries from every part of the world, but in fact, the only libraries featured were from Europe and America.  I have a hard time with the idea that the only beautiful libraries in the entire world reside in Europe and America.

What about Mexico? Or Canada? Or Brazil? (Click to make larger)

I think they need to rename it The Most Beautiful Libraries in Europe, leave out the American libraries, and call it good. There were only three libraries from America featured anyway. Then write another book and focus just on American libraries - after all, all of these gorgeous libraries had been left out:

Boston Copley Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts

Suzzallo Library, Seattle, Washington

George Peabody Library, Baltimore, Maryland

For the true bibliophiles out there, this book is worth checking out from the library, if only so you can drool over the pictures and wish that you could wander these halls and lose yourself in the stacks.  But even for the bibliophiles, I don’t know if this one is worth buying.  I can only give it 3.25 out of 5 stars - I wanted to love it, but it fell short of my expectations.

Hava

I remembered vaguely hearing about Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody when I spotted the book doing check-in at the library. Some lady got stuck in Iran and couldn’t leave was about all I could recall. So I checked the book out and brought it home - it sounded like an interesting plotline, and hopefully worth the read. I didn’t realize at the time that there had been a movie made from the book, nor have I watched the movie since, so if any of my readers out there have watched it, please pipe up - I want to hear what you thought about it.

As for the book, it was captivating. I was immediately drawn into the story and could hardly put it down. She reveals the backstory piece by piece throughout the book instead of hitting you all at once with it, so I kept wanting to read further, because there were certain things that she did that made no sense to me. She would hint at the reason, but then draw back and not actually state it. Then she’d do it again 50 pages later.  Arrgh!  Although it drove me crazy, it definitely kept my attention.

But as the backstory began to fall into place, her actions started to started to make sense (finally!) and I was by that point completely hooked. I had to know what happened next!

For those of you who haven’t read the book/watched the movie, it’s basically about how Betty marries Moody (that’s his nickname) who is from Iran.  She’d met him here in America when he was treating her as a patient - he was a doctor and apparently very Americanized, or so she thought.  Backstory, backstory, backstory (hey, if Betty made me wait, I’m going to make you wait, LOL!!!), they get married, backstory, backstory, and finally they end up in Iran on a trip, visiting his family. He completely changes his personality, and he ends up trapping her in Iran.

This trip happens in 1984, and in 1984 in Iran, a woman could be killed for using birth control without her husband’s permission.  She could also be killed for a host of other things (as Betty found out). Back then, women had zero rights - they were to be used and treated as the man saw fit. It was written into their constitution that way (as Betty also found out).  So if her husband didn’t want her to leave, there was no official way for her to get out.  She was stuck.

Betty tried to find a way to escape illegally, but every person who offered her help told her, “I can get you out, but you’ll have to leave your child.” Which is where the title of the book came from, because Betty told them all the same thing: “Not without my daughter.” She would not leave her little girl behind.

I don’t want to say anymore for fear of ruining the book, so I’ll leave the plotline there. I did want to say that there was one thing about the book that bothered me, and that was that Betty comes across as quite a snot at times, especially at the beginning. To me, his family not liking her didn’t exactly come as a surprise. She spends a lot of time bashing living conditions and food preparation, and I can just see her in my mind, looking down her nose at these “backward natives,” as she saw them.

I know it would have been hard to live through, but when you’re in Rome, sometimes you’ve got to do as the Romans do, not just sit in judgment of them and hold yourself as superior. That’s just manners.  So she kinda drove me nuts at points in the book.

Other than that quibble, I quite enjoyed the book, and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting a little more background into the Iranian government and people. Things have changed a lot in Iran in 24 years (not enough, but still, some progress) - but it’s worth the read, despite its age.

I give it 4.25 out of 5 stars.

Hava

Climbers and Wall Plants by Philippa Bensley was a well-written book on climbing plants - exactly what I was needing when I checked the book out of the library.  I am just starting to get into planting and gardening, and I really don’t know a whole lot about different types of plants.  I know what I want to do (I have a large wooden fence that I want to have plants climb up,) but not how to do it.

Climbers and Wall Plants helped me figure out the differences between climbers, and what I actually needed for my own garden.  I learned from the book that there are two different kinds of climbers: Self-supporting climbers and social climbers.

*Self-supporting climbers don’t need to be tied or staked to anything - they can climb up a brick wall or fence and send out “suckers” that will cling to the fence to support it.  They need no outside help.

*The social climbers have to have a trellis or netting that it can climb up and through, and will often need help along the way in terms of ties and stakes.  They use twining leafstalks, tendrils, stems, or thorns to cling to the structure.

Who knew?  I certainly didn’t.  This was a great book for a gardening novice like me.

The book was well laid out, it explained terms and ideas simply, and had lots of pretty pictures. More than just a picture book to drool over though, it actually provided helpful information - it should have been called Climbers and Wall Plants for Dummies.

I give Climbers and Wall Plants 4.75 out of 5 stars.

Hava

Well, one thing I can say about Hard Corps: From Gangster to Marine Hero by Marco Martinez: I was never bored while reading it.  The story is a remarkable one: A boy who grew up in a stable, loving family, but ended up joining a gang anyway on the first day of seventh grade.  Things went downhill really fast from there, and he ended up spending his nights doing drugs, trying to avoid getting shot, stealing from stores, and any other grand schemes he and his buddies could dream up.

Now comes the remarkable part: Marco Martinez’s life turned around when he met his first Marine ever, Staff Sergeant Marquez.  His muscular physique and daunting demeanor made an impression on Marco.  He went home that night and thought about his life and where it was headed.  What was he going to do with his life?  Where was he going to end up?  He didn’t like what he saw, and he decided right then and there to join the military.  He scoped out the different branches, and decided that he too wanted to be a Marine.

I don’t want to tell the whole story, so I’ll just quickly sum it up by saying that after he survived boot camp, he ended up a decorated hero because of his actions in Iraq.  All in all, a very inspiring story.

Having said all that, I have to give some HUGE caveats to recommending this book:

A) Martinez was once a gang member, then became a Marine.  Neither of those lines of work are conducive to clean mouths.  I have never, ever seen so many swear words packed into one book before.  Here’s an excerpt from the book - I have starred out the swear words:

“Is dat **** seeded, Cuz?” Tyrone said while punching De Andrea.
“Who do you think I am, ****?” De Andre said.  “I already **** did that **** last **** night, Cuz!”
Tyrone and De Andre said “Cuz” at the end of every other sentence.
“Hit that **** as hard as you **** can, iiight, Cuz?” De Andre said.
“Iiight.  But we need some music up in this ****,” Tyrone said.  “Put on some Brotha Lynch Hung, Cuz!” Page 17, Hard Corps

Luckily, the whole book doesn’t read that way, or I would have put it down long before the end.  Sometimes Marco even goes a whole page without a swear word, LOL!, and other than dialog between gang members, he uses very little gangster slang.  The book is very easy to read, fast-paced, and interesting - it doesn’t read like Gangster Rap 101 or something.  But still, some of that is in there.

B) Martinez serves in Iraq as a soldier, and he makes absolutely no bones about supporting the war and what’s being done in Iraq.  He also doesn’t make any bones about wanting to kill someone (no, I’m not kidding).  If that kind of thing would be offensive to you, then I suggest you skip this book.

I picked it up originally because a patron came into the library and applied for a card for the sole purpose of checking this book out.  When I asked why it he was so deadset on reading it, he told me that he had served with Marco Martinez in Iraq, and wanted to see what he had said in his book.  Since my father was in the Marine Corps for 20 years and I spent my formative years on military bases, I figured the book would be fun to read.  After I finished it, I passed it on to my father, who, upon giving it back, said, “That was pretty hard core, even for me.  And boy does that kid have a dirty mouth on him!”

If the book were ever made into a movie, I have no doubt that it would be rated R for language and violence. The saving grace for me was his love for this country, and serving his fellow Americans.  He said at one point, “I’ll always regret being a [gangster].  I’ll never regret being given the privilege of becoming a Marine.”  He has a lot of patriotic pride for America, but unlike many of us flag-waving Americans on the 4th of July, he was actually willing to lay down his life to defend America.

Overall, I enjoyed the story line and I enjoyed the author’s style of writing, but I’d still have to give it 3.75 out of 5 stars.  If you’re in the mood for a real “tell it like it is” memoir on the Marine Corps, I don’t think it would get anymore real than this.

Hava

Desperation Dinners: Home-Cooked Meals for Frantic Families in 20 Minutes Flat by Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross is a good resource for quick recipes. I saw it at the library while doing check-in, and thought, “Hey, that would be helpful!” I am always leaving dinner to the last minute (although of course my goal is to have it figured out and in the crockpot in the morning, but somehow that never happens. Hmm…) Anyway, there is a dearth of recipes that I can make in a jiffy - most of my recipes take an hour or longer to make, and that’s just way too long some days.

So I checked the cookbook out, took it home, and read it through. As I said in my last cookbook review, I tend to eat “normal” stuff, so I skipped over recipes like “Curried Lamb in Pita Bowls” and “Tortellini with Raisin Butter” - if you like very different recipes outside of the normal realm of things, then you’ll adore this cookbook. In fact, that was one of my bigger complaints about it - there were a lot of “exotic” recipes, and not nearly enough “normal” recipes, LOL! Take into consideration that I’m a country girl in Idaho who does meat and potatoes for dinner when you read that complaint - I’m sure that to others, my taste in food is the “weird” one!

Putting that aside, one of the things that I really enjoyed about this cookbook was the side notes, where the authors gave helpful tips and explained how they came up with the various time savers they employ. Some of the hints were a revelation to me, like from page 131:

We always used to cook too much pasta, and the leftovers got pushed to the back of the fridge. Forgotten, they turned green - or even purple. So how much was enough to cook, but not too much? After months of guessing…we decided to nail down this mystery once and for all…Here’s what we found:

In practically every case, 2 ounces of dried pasta - regardless of shape - is a reasonable portion for most adults, provided it’s served with a typical sauce of vegetables and meat…

[They then provide specific information to different types of pasta]

Spaghetti - Two ounces dried yields 1 cup cooked spaghetti. To feed four, cook an 8-ounce box of dried spaghetti. Since you can’t fit long pasta into a measuring cup, you’ll need to go by dry weight or learn what 2 ounces looks like. To help you visualize, go get a US penny. Place it on the counter. Grab enough long pasta tightly in your fist so that the tips exactly cover that penny. That’s 2 ounces. ~Desperation Dinners, page 131

Who knew? I certainly didn’t! My husband and I are always messing that up. Making spaghetti is always an adventure at our house - are we going to have too much pasta, too much sauce, or too much meat? At least with this tip, we’ll be sure about the first one, although the second two are going to remain a mystery.

My only other complaint about the book was that a lot of the recipes depended on convenience ingredients that my husband and I don’t normally buy, like bottled, minced garlic, or frozen green, red, and yellow bell pepper stir-fry mix, etc. I know that’s because they’re trying to cram a recipe into 20 minutes, so they have to depend on those convenience items, but that makes for a more expensive grocery bill when our grocery bill is already high enough, thank you very much. So then I’d chop the garlic by hand, or clean and slice the bell peppers by hand, and of course this would add more time to the recipe. I know that’s not the authors’ fault that I’m cheap, but in case any of my readers out there are cheap too that’s something to keep in mind. Adding in that extra time, most of these recipes are going to actually clock in at 30 - 45 minutes, if not more (depending on the recipe, of course).

Overall, I think it was good enough that if I see it at the store, I’ll probably buy it (especially if it’s on sale). I also saw them advertising a new book called Cheap, Fast, Good! so I’m going to borrow that from the library and check it out. Watch for my review on that!

I give Desperation Dinners 3.75 out of 5 stars.

Havs

PS If you’re on the hunt for good quick recipes, make sure to check out a blog here at Today - Quick and Easy Cooking!

Nothing to Wear? A 5-Step Cure for the Common Closet by Jesse Garza and Joe Lupo was an interesting book to me.  I tend to wear the same color over and over again: Black.  It’s not because I’m obsessed with the color, but more because it’s safe, it looks good on me, and it’s a “professional” color that you can wear to work.  It’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re wearing neon pink.

But my tendency to wear a lot of black clothes has earned me the nickname of “Goth” by my husband, and truly, I do deserve it, I’ll admit it.  I pulled out my summer clothes a couple of weeks ago, and out of all of the shirts that I owned, exactly two were not black.

I only wish I were kidding.

So I picked this book up with a real sense of urgency - I needed help, and I knew it.  After the introduction, the first step was to take an 8-question quiz to help me figure out my sense of style, something I had never thought about before.  I tend to be one of those people that if it looks cute at the store, then I’ll just “find a place for it” in my closet.  Never mind that I didn’t have anything else to go with it.  And then, the inevitable: Eventually I’d get rid of it because I never wore it.  Wow, there’s a shocker.

But now that I know my sense of style (chic/classic, the most common combination there is, according to the book) I can look at a shirt and realize that it’s entirely too “whimsical” or “bohemian” to really fit into my wardrobe.  I never, ever would have looked at it that way before.

The book takes you all the way through from figuring out your style to cleaning out your closet to buying new items to fill your closet.  It’s fun to read, even for someone like me who isn’t a big shopper (I last about an hour before begging for escape).  If your wardrobe needs spicing up, you might want to pick this book up at Amazon before heading to the mall.

I give it 4.75 out of 5 stars.

Hava

A Brother’s Journey: Surviving a Childhood of Abuse by Richard B Pelzer was a very difficult memoir for me to read.  The abuse described in this book made me sick to my stomach.  I’d read his brother’s memoir, A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer, back in high school and remember crying - sobbing really - because of what happened to him.  Richard’s memoir affected me as deeply as Dave’s had.

If you haven’t read A Child Called It, I would say that’s almost a must before reading Brother.  Richard pretty much just jumps into the story with very little explanation - it’s almost as if it’s a sequel to Child.  Reading them one right after another might be a bit much to stomach, however, because they are both so darn depressing.

For the few people who haven’t heard of A Child Called It or A Brother’s Journey, basically what happened is Dave and Richard grew up in California in the ’70s, and were subjected to intense abuse by their mother. When Dave was a part of the family, he was called It or or sometimes That Boy when someone was feeling nice that day. Eventually, the state came and took Dave away. Once Dave left, Richard became the de facto whipping boy, literally.

The mother was unstable, completely unbalanced mentally, and a horrid drunk to boot. She was regularly wasted by 10 in the morning, and sometimes woke up still drunker than a skunk because of how much alcohol she’d consumed the day before. The father was terrified of his wife, and stayed married to her until the day he died, even though he moved out of the house when Richard was still just a young boy.  The mother is a monster, and that’s the nicest thing I can think of to say about her.

One thing that bothered me about A Brother’s Journey is that the story ends when Richard is only 15 years old. I felt like the author had intentionally cut the story in half (after all, he’s still living with his mother and brothers at this point - there is no Great Escape like there was at the end of Child) in order to write another book and make twice the money on the same story. Sure enough, after finishing this book, I did a Google search and saw that there is a sequel, A Teenager’s Journey. I don’t know if I want to read that one or not.

Overall, this was a hard book to read - I felt physically sick to my stomach during parts of it. I wouldn’t recommend it to the faint of heart.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars

Hava

I picked up Living Well on a Shoestring: 1,501 Ingenious Ways to Spend Less and Have More by Yankee Magazine on a whim.  I tend to like “how to live thrifty” books, and am always looking for a new money saving tip.  I’ve already reviewed America’s Cheapest Family and I have several similar books in the queue.

Well, this thrifty living book left me with mixed feelings.  I would read an entire section where there wasn’t a single new idea that I hadn’t heard before, and then the next section I would read a tip or two that I think, “Well, I wouldn’t necessarily do that myself, but at least it is new idea.”  Overall, there just wasn’t much originality to the book.

Then there was a tip that was completely and utterly wrong.  It was in the getting-out-of-debt section, and it advised the following:

Do you have a credit card that has gotten out of hand, and you have to struggle to pay even the minimum balance every month?  Do yourself a favor: Cancel the card immediately.  That way, you can’t make new charges while you’re getting the balance under control. Living Well, page 28

Warning!  Warning!  Warning!  Do NOT, any ANY circumstances, follow the above advice!  Once you cancel a card, the credit card company has exactly zero reasons to work with you.  It makes your credit report look even worse than it already is, and your credit score will drop.  Your interest rate will likely zoom up into the stratosphere because, again, the credit card company has no reason not to twerk you off.  In fact, they’ll kinda want to because they want that money back so they can lend that money out to other people who will borrow it over and over again.  You, however, are officially no fun: You’re never going to borrow anymore money from them.  Why play nice?

So that part made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.  Then there was the section about saving money, where the tip was to assign each household chore a specific monetary value that you would’ve had to pay a housecleaner in order for it to be done, and then pay yourself that amount.  No, wait: It gets even better.  They said to put the money in a savings account instead of spending it - that way, you’ll have a nice fat savings account, and a clean house!

Yeah…Not so much.  If I could afford to pay a cleaning woman to clean my house A) I would and B) Why would I be reading this book?  And even if I did, do you honestly think I’d have the self control to clean my house, give myself money for cleaning, and then not spend that money?  Not a chance, Sunshine, not a chance.  But it wasn’t just cleaning the house - they suggested doing the same thing for mowing your lawn, repairing household appliances, and other chores like that.  I wasn’t impressed.

There were a few ideas scattered in there that I hadn’t heard before, but overall, it was a recycling of the same generic tips you hear everywhere, not to mention a few tips that completely led you astray, and more tips than I care to think about that just left me scratching my head.

I just can’t give Living Well higher than 2.75 out of 5 stars.  It was a disappointment - there are better books out there on this subject.  I’ll be reviewing a favorite of mine, The Tightwad Gazette, later on.  Watch for that.

Havs

PS Looking for some thrifty tips?  Be sure to visit A Frugal Mom here at Today - she’s got a great blog packed with good ideas.

Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog by John Grogan was an absolute joy of a book.  I laughed so hard I cried, and then did it all over again three pages later.  And then again five pages after that.  At one point I was doubled up on the bed, gasping for air, as the tears streamed down my cheeks.  I don’t know if it’s because I have two terrible dogs of my own (as I briefly mentioned in my review of Be the Pack Leader) or if it’s just because John’s that darn funny and would be to everyone, but either way, I adored this book.

The greatest part of all is, I didn’t want to read it.  Have you ever heard about a movie or book that you knew would be a real tear jerker, so you purposefully never watched/read it, because you didn’t want to cry and go on the emotional rollercoaster that a truly wonderful story puts you on?  When Titanic came out into movie theaters, I didn’t want to go watch it, because I knew I’d cry.  I went anyway, and sure enough, I bawled.  I haven’t watched the movie since, despite owning it (I won in it a radio contest, but never got the guts to watch it again).

Well, I had heard that Marley and Me was also a tear-jerker, and quite frankly I wasn’t in the mood to cry.  So it sat on my bookshelf for several weeks.  Then I looked at my schedule of books (yes, I’ve gotten to the point where I have so many books that I want to read, that I have actually written up a schedule to keep track - I’m pathetic, don’t remind me) and groaned when I saw Marley and Me on the list, up next.  I pulled the book off the shelf and decided that if I was going to suffer through reading the book, I might as well enjoy a nice long soak in the bathtub while doing it.

Well, I read until the water got freezing cold, and then just kept going.  I was mesmerized by the story, and laughing so hard I thought I’d surely burst a blood vessel or two before the book was done.  I’ve been having good luck with journalists lately - perhaps I should start looking specifically for autobiographies written by a journalist, because they seem to be of a much higher quality than a regular “first-time” book by an amateur.  Ironically enough, both of the journalists-turned-authors that I’ve read lately (Jeff Gammage and John Grogan) work for the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Just how many novelists do they have working there?

Anyway, back to the book, and an example of a great snippet: Basically, John had given his wife, Jenny, a plant as a gift.  A plant she killed off in no time flat.  She got upset about that, and decided that they needed to get a dog, because she was worried that if she couldn’t keep a plant alive, how could she raise a child?  So she wanted to get a dog to practice on before advancing to an “actual” child.  Here’s the story in his words - see if you agree with me on the funny quotient:

 …she promptly went on to kill my gift to her with an assassin’s coldhearted efficiency.  Not that she was trying to; if anything, she nutured the poor thing to death.  Working on the assumption that all living things require water, but apparently forgetting that they also need air, she began flooding the plant on a daily basis.

“Be careful not to overwater it,” I had warned.

“Okay,” she had replied, and then dumped on another gallon.

The sicker the plant got, the more she doused it, until finally it just kind of melted into an oozing heap.  I looked at its limp skeleton in the pot by the window and thought, “Man, someone who believes in omens could have a field day with this one.”

Now here she was, somehow making the cosmic leap of logic from dead flora in a pot to living fauna in the pet classifieds.  Kill a plant, buy a puppy.  Well, of course, it made perfect sense.

~Page 3 of Marley and Me

I laughed hard at that, because my husband and I made the same (not-so-logical) leap.  To a woman who is worried about becoming a mom for the first time, killing a plant is a very worrisome thing. Thus, getting a dog to practice on only makes sense.  Right?  Right.

So that’s how John and Jenny ended up with Marley, the goofiest, most neurotic, and fiercely loyal dog that ever walked the earth.  His antics put my two dogs to shame, and I started to realize that on a scale of 1 - 10, with Marley being a 13, my dogs are really only a 4 or so.  They have never torn up a couch cushion, mattress, or door (yes, you read that right: A door.  Marley used to eat his way through wooden doors.  And drywall.  And electrical wiring.  And anything else he deemed interesting).  My dogs yank and pull on a walk, and sometimes they escape out the front door when we don’t want them to, but really, in comparison to Marley’s antics, my dogs are full-blown saints.

If you’re an animal lover, you’ll absolutely adore this book.  And even if you’re not a dog owner/lover, the humor and the fast-paced read (I read it in roughly two and a half hours) will make this worth it to pick up.  John Grogan is an extremely talented author, and I hope to be hearing more from him in the future.

5 out of 5 stars.  I would not change a thing about this book.

Havs

PS If you do love dogs, make sure to check out the Canine Connection here at Today - great blog for the dog lovers out there!

Money for Nothing: One Man’s Journey Through the Dark Side of Lottery Millions by Edward Ugel was not about a guy winning the lottery, as I had originally thought it was.  Instead, Mr. Ugel worked in the lump-sum business: Basically, if someone was receiving an annuity payment over the course of 20 years because of winning the lottery, he would buy them out upfront and give a lump settlement to them, all for a fee, of course.  He made very good money, but it was an extremely competitive business and some of the tactics he used to find and sign up lottery winners was, to put it nicely, cutthroat.  He never broke any laws, but he did use some amazing salesmanship to “get ‘er done.”

It’s a fast-paced read - I finished the 235-page novel in just one day - and overall, I enjoyed it quite a bit.  There were several things that detracted from the novel though: First, the author didn’t shy away from using swear words.  If this were a movie, it would be rated PG-13 just for the language.  Yeah, sure, cutthroat salesmen probably weren’t worried about whether their language was clean or not, and I realize that it’s realistic this way, but still, I’m not a fan of swear words, and that did bother me.  Second, the author tended to tell stories within stories, and jump back and forth through time without explaining what he was doing.  The book is not organized chronologically, and he would refer to his wife, then fiancée, then child being born, then suddenly she’s his fiancée again.  I never quite knew where in time we were at.  And he’d also start telling a story, then start another story, go back to the first story, start a third story, then finally finish the first one.  For a speedreader like me, that was hard to keep up with.

It was worth jumping through time though, because the stories were absolutely fascinating.  I kept thinking to myself, “Why aren’t any of these people smart about the money?  Why do they blow through the money so quickly?” And then of course the requisite, “If I won millions in a lottery, I would be smart about it.” Which I believed all the way until I got to the end of the book, where Mr Ugel made the following statement:

“If you were handed a thousand dollars, if you won it out of the blue, what would you do with it? No lying.  Yeah, I’d blow it too.  Now, if you were made to dig a ditch or paint a house, or do any job for a day or two in order to receive that same money, what would you do with it then? Exactly. Me too.  Bills are bills.

“Earned money is more valuable than found money because it is more valued.” Page 207, Money for Nothing

Touché, Mr Ugel.

Anyway, if you don’t mind a PG-13 book because of language and gambling (no sexual scenes, murder, or drugs in it anywhere, just swearing, drinking, and gambling) then you’ll be fine with this book.  And if you’re wanting to know more about the gambling industry, lottery winners, and the lump-sum business, then you’ll thoroughly enjoy this book.  I learned some pretty interesting facts, like the idea that lotteries help fund education is a bunch of bull, which took me by surprise because I live in a lottery state and I am constantly watching ads on TV about how lotteries help our schools prosper, blah blah.  Turns out that is a complete lie.  The government, lie about money?  Never.  I know, I know, shocking.

I give Money for Nothing 4.25 out of 5 stars.

Havs

There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Anthony Flew was definitely written by a philosopher.  I guess I was expecting too much, I don’t know, but this book was a struggle for me to read the first time around (I’d originally read it several months ago, and then decided to reread it yesterday so I could write a review on here.)  Not surprisingly, it made more sense the second time around.  I’ve never been a big fan of “deep mysteries” where you ask philosophical questions that don’t actually have an answer.  That’s too nebulous for me.  I think philosophy and I don’t get along for the same reason that I’m not a big fan of poetry - I like concrete facts and things that I can categorize in my mind, or at least understand, lol.

Here’s a quotation from the book that left me scratching my head:

“Perhaps the most important and wide-ranging of these insights was that we must become constantly and crisply conscious of how all philosophy (insofar as philosophy is a conceptual inquiry) must be concerned with correct verbal usage.  We can have no access to concepts except through study of linguistic usage, and hence, the use of those words through which these concepts are expressed.” Page 38, There is a God

If you enjoyed that (or even understood that!) you should definitely check out the Journeyman Philosopher here at Today - I think you’d enjoy that site.

For me, that didn’t make much sense. I struggled through the middle of the book (the beginning was written in plain English, and the end wasn’t too bad either - it was the middle where he started explaining his philosophical beliefs that just completely lost me.)  I was almost to the point of giving up when it started to get good again: He started to explain the things that made him change his point of view on atheism, and he did it using language I could understand.

One of the most interesting parts was on page 75 - 78, where he talks about the work done by Gerry Schroeder to disprove the “monkey typing” explanation.  We’ve all heard it: Lock a group of monkeys in a cage and give them computers, and if they banged on the keyboards long enough, they’d eventually be able to produce a sonnet by Shakespeare.  The analogy is often used to explain how it is that this world, galaxy, and universe in all its complexities, could be produced by random chance.  I won’t go into the refutation by Gerry Schroeder because this post is getting too long, but definitely check the book out if you’ve ever thought that this sounded like a reasonable explanation, because Schroeder does an excellent job of tearing that idea apart using simple mathematics.  (Of course disproving an analogy does not disprove the random chance theory, but I did find it interesting that Mr Schroeder was able to disprove it so convincingly.)

In case anyone was wondering, Mr Flew did not become a theist because he attended a revival and “found Jesus.”  Far from it.  He doesn’t believe that there’s life after death, nor does he believe the Christian religion is true (although he does say that if you were to believe that revelation really does happen, Christianity has got the best explanation for it out of all of the religions).  He believes basically that there was some sort of intelligent being who created the universe, galaxy, and world, and then just left it to its own devices, never to bother with any of it again.  This is roughly the same theory that Albert Einstein had.

There’s something in here for everyone: I think the book will by turns offend and then please people, depending on their own ideas of how the universe came into being.   It is a great book to read if you’ve been thinking and wondering about the origins of man and universe - just skip over the boring parts if you get bogged down.  I promise I won’t tattle on you.

4 stars out of 5.  Too many dry spots to rate it higher than that.

Havs