Books

Dear me, let us be elegant or die!

by

You can’t accuse me of a boring consistency in the books I write about on this blog.  Last week’s book had a gun on the cover and talked about the logistics of killing someone; this week’s tells you why you should dress, eat and indeed live like an elegant Frenchwoman.  (Note to guys reading this:  the rest of February’s books are also going to be pretty female-centric.  Fine with me if you want to read the blogs or the books themselves.  I’m just a-sayin’.)

I can’t quite remember why or how I ran across this book, although I do know that I actually bought it, a rarity for me.  It was enjoyable and, I thought at the time, pretty lightweight, one of many memoirs about Americans going to France and finding out what they’ve been missing.  

Read more

A Lesson in Logical Thinking

by
JFK Assassination Logic:  How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy by John McAdams, Potomac Books, 2011.

I freely admit it–I’m a JFK assassination junkie and periodically get drawn into the vortex of the massive amount of material that’s out there.  You could make a full-time job out of just watching all the videos on YouTube on the subject. (Not that I’ve done that–yet!)  I can tell you Oswald’s scores on his two Marine Corps rifle tests (“sharpshooter” and “marksman”–with scores of 212 and 191, respectively), how much he weighed (150 pounds), how tall he was (5’9″), the path of the single bullet that hit Kennedy and Connally (basically straight and slanting downward), the length of the brown-paper package of so-called curtain rods that Oswald brought to work the morning of Nov. 22 (38 inches), why he bought the rifle that he

Read more

Clear the Decks!

by

Now folks, this is a somewhat weird book.  I highly recommend it or I wouldn’t include it here, but there’s no question that Ms. Kondo has her own idiosyncratic view of how you should treat your possessions.  Being one of her clients must be quite an experience, as she insists that things be done her way or else.  (She has a three-month waiting list for her personal consultations, so people don’t seem to mind.) She has two central ideas.  The first is the one that’s the most problematic for me:  that you must do the tidying up of your surroundings all at once.  If you do it gradually, she says, you’ll never finish.  In an ideal world she’d probably be right, but most of us can’t really take a whole weekend to throw out stuff.  If we have to do it that way, we’ll never do it at all.

Read more

How a two-hour class . . .

by
. . . added to my happiness.

I’m often reminded about the necessity of pressing on with our plans and resolutions in spite of our inability to fulfill them perfectly.  What keeps us going, though?  Where does the motivation come from?  We often think that bawling ourselves out and heaping on the blame will work, but those methods are counter-productive.  What does work?  Inspiration.  “I have to do this or else” has to become “I get to do this.  I want to do this.”  

Read more

It’s Okay to Be an Introvert

by

Bookcover of "Quiet"Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain, New York: Crown Publishers, 2012.

My mother used to say to me, “Don’t be self-conscious.” Other times she’d tell me not to be shy. This book tells me that she might as well have said, “Don’t have blue eyes” or “Don’t be good at spelling.” Introversion is an inherited trait.I got so tickled at Mimi Wilson, a Christian writer and speaker who was featured at a recent retreat I attended. She said she was such an extrovert that she’d have a hard time in Heaven if the mansions were all separated from each other; she was hoping they’d be more like apartments. But while I’ve become much more people-friendly since marrying Jim, I have to say that my idea and Mimi’s idea of Heaven don’t exactly coincide. While I do enjoy talking to people much more than I used to, at some point I have to have some alone time. My dear friend Cecelia said once that she drew energy from other people; for me, it’s the other way around in that people draw energy from me. I can take only so much togetherness!

Read more

Boy, Am I Going to Get Organized!

by

Cover for "SCRUM, The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time"Scrum:  The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, Crown Business, New York, 2014.

I am an absolute sucker for any book or article that tells me how to do more in less time.  I’m a terrible timewaster/procrastinator/piddler.  My mother used to say to me, “Debi, do you have to make such a project out of everything?”  But here’s a book that sort of pushes the idea of making your life into a series of projects.  It’s mainly directed to the business world, but, like the dinner book and the choosing college wisely book, there are wider implications to these ideas, and Sutherland acknowledges that fact.  He includes a discussion of how Scrum would work for planning a wedding, but it would really work in any situation where you’re trying to get a specific task done or event carried out.

Read more

A Fighter for Justice

by

Cover for "Just Mercy"Just Mercy:  A story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, Spiegel & Grau, 2014.

Gideon picked this week’s book.   We had both heard the author interviewed on NPR and thought he sounded fascinating, so I got his book.  When this guy had the time to write it  I do not know.  He got involved in death penalty cases while he was still in law school, and this passion took over his life.  You can listen to the NPR interview here and watch his TED talk here.

I found this to be a hard book to read because it’s so heartbreaking but also because there’s no resolution for most if not all of the crimes he discusses.  The spine of the book concerns the case of Walter McMillian, a young black man who was tried and sentenced to death for the murder of a young woman and who always insisted that he was innocent.

Read more

“This Is the Saddest Story . . . “

by

Book cover for "The Invisible Front"The Invisible Front:  Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War by Yochi Dreazen, Crown Publishers, 2014.

If you’re a fan of early 20th-Century fiction (or if you’ve taken college-level literature classes), you probably recognized the title of this post as being the first line of Ford Maddox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier.  This book is indeed beyond sad:  the story of a military family, the father a two-star general, who lose two sons:  one to suicide and one to battle.  It caught my eye on the new books shelf at the library, and I checked it out thinking that I probably wouldn’t read much of it since it would be unbearable.   What pulled me along was the quality of the writing:  Dreazen is a well-respected military journalist, and he tells this story without any attempt to wring tears from his readers, which he doesn’t have to do anyway.  The story speaks for itself.  He is able to bring many voices into his narrative; people were astonishingly open with him.

Read more

Life Lessons from a 21-Year-Old

by

Cover of "Debt-Free U"Debt-Free U:  How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching Off My Parents by Zac Bissonnette, Portfolio/Penguin 2010.

Even if you have no kids going to college, or you’re not a kid planning to go to college, you should read this book.  (But you should also read it if you do fit into one of those categories.)

A couple of posts ago I wrote about Dinner:  the Playbook, and I said that book wasn’t valuable so much for the recipes or the specific information about planning meals as it was in promoting a general outlook that says:  “What can I do right now?”  A proactive approach.  Well, this is the same type of book, in that it contains principles that go far beyond making sound economic choices when it comes to college.

Read more

The Start of Tabloid Politics

by

Cover for "All the Truth Is Out"All the Truth Is Out:  The Week Politics Went Tabloid by Matt Bai, Alfred A Knopf, 2014.

Yet another NPR-publicized book.  If you’re of a certain age, the name “Gary Hart” conjures up one image, and one image only:  of the smiling, mop-haired man in a “Monkey Business Crew” t-shirt with the beautiful woman on his lap.  And that’s it.  When that one picture hit the papers it was all over for a man who at that point was virtually a shoo-in to be the Democratic nominee for President in 1987.  Nothing else mattered.  He pretty much disappeared from political life.

However much you (and I) may deplore adultery (and whatever may have ultimately happened between Hart and Donna Rice, there was no doubt that he had had numerous affairs during his long but troubled marriage), it is fair to point out that with this one incident the rules of engagement between the press and political candidates changed.

Read more