Synopsis: This is a diet book, written by a woman who was raised in France, based on her own observations about the French lifestyle.
Review: F I felt like this should be renamed the pretentious-yet-common-sense diet book. Every suggestion she presents is so immediately evident, yet presented in an extremely superior and smug tone of voice, that it was infuriating. First of all,not all French women are skinny, and most of the concepts that she presented are certainly not exclusive to even Europeans as a whole - for example, her suggestion that you should take the stairs instead of the elevator if you want to lose weight. Duh. And her sense of superiority simply because she is French made me crazy. I only finished reading the whole book because I was working stage crew for an extremely long concert and this was the only reading material that I'd brought. I only read this book in the first place, by the way, because someone in my dorm was throwing it away and I figured, since it's a free book, why not? I wish I hadn't bothered.
Synopsis: This book tries to explain the differences between people who are successful and those who are less so, based on such seemingly arbitrary and/or lucky criterion such as when and where they were born, or happening to go to a certain high school over another.
Review: A I really enjoyed this book. However, it kind of made me feel bad about things, because of a few points that he made. First, Malcolm Gladwell pointed out that some people succeed just based on when they were born, using the example of Bill Gates, who was born at just the right time to take advantage of the boom in the informational technology field. This makes me feel a bit hopeless about being a classical musician in the 21st century, when the peak of my field was in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The other point he makes regards the theory of 10,000 hours, which says that you only have a hope of becoming the top of your field in any field after 10,000 hours of practice. Yet, there are also so many people who do put in the mandatory time and effort, and still never make it. If I make a very conservative estimate, I reached the point of 10,000 hours spent on classical music somewhere around when I turned 23 (counting since I started playing cello at the age of 4 1/2), but I don't think I'm any closer to conventional success in my field than thousands of my peers, seeing as I don't have a job. On another note, I really appreciated Malcolm Gladwell's writing style, which made this book so interesting despite its material's potential for dryness. I finished it in just a few hours.
Synopsis: A young white girl returns home from college with different views on race than the rest of her friends in a small Mississippi town.
Review: A I'd been wanting to read this book since I saw the movie a couple years ago, but I never got around to it until this month. I literally couldn't put this book down, and was reading it as I walked down the streets of New Haven, no joke. Even though I knew what was going to happen because of seeing the film version, I was glued to the page! I know this book and the movie got a lot of criticism for some of its treatment of racial issues, but I don't feel qualified to speak to that. I would, however, highly recommend this book based on its merit as a novel, and I found the movie definitely enjoyable as well.
Synopsis: The subtitle pretty much explains what this book is about, but more or less, Levitt analyzes data such as demographic data collected state by state to explain, in one example, why some teachers cheat on standardized testing and how to catch them, or in another example, whether the name you give your child will affect their opportunities later in life.
Review: B Perhaps because I was already statistically-analysis-ed out from reading Outliers so recently, but I found this book to be almost the same in many ways. Sure, these authors weren't exclusively looking at indicators of success, but the writing style and content was so similar that I almost felt I was reading the same book over again. However, they did find some interesting conclusions. I hadn't realized how indicative my name is of my ethnicity, for example, until I saw it right at the top of the chart of most popular baby names for white girls in my birth year. I also found it very interesting to see the average number of years of education of the mother for each popular baby name. The average mother of a baby named Jesus had only something like 8 1/2 years of schooling (which means they must either have been in the seventh grade at the time of the child's birth, or have dropped out of school at a young age), while the mother of baby Finn's have nearly 15 years of education, on average (meaning a full K-12 experience plus a couple years of college). My name wasn't listed with an average number of years of education, but I wonder what it would have been. I found all of this quite interesting, but I definitely wouldn't recommend reading this book at the same time as Outliers to avoid the statistical burn-out I experienced.
Synopsis: This is a memoir written by one of the most famous female comedians alive today.
Review: C I'm sorry to give this book such a mediocre review, since I fully expected to love it going in, based on how I feel about Tina Fey and her work on "30 Rock" and "Saturday Night Live". I was pretty disappointed, though. Despite a lot of interesting and amusing stories, much of the book to me came across as trying too hard to be funny. But I admit humor is a hard genre to transcribe, and I've heard that this book works better as an audio book, which I almost wish I'd gone with. Maybe I would have found the humor less forced that way.
Synopsis: This feminist manifesto follows the life of the author through her discovery of her own sexuality and life choices both as an adolescent and into adulthood, and also introduces thoughts regarding today's feminism.
Review: A+ At first I thought this book would be a bit much for me, since in some of the early chapters she is quite explicit in her description of her sexual behaviors, but I grew to really appreciate her positive and empowering message, and by the end vowing to buy this book for a number of young women that I know. A few things really popped out at me: her definition of a feminist, and her brutally honest description of having an abortion. This is a book I think all women should read at least once and have in their libraries, but you should probably know that I already considered myself a feminist before reading this, so maybe not everyone would agree with my evaluation of this book.
Synopsis: An upper middle-class journalist/writer goes "undercover" working a variety of minimum wage jobs and living only on the money she earns there, in order to explore the living conditions of people at the poverty level. Her jobs include working as a waitress, cleaning houses, and working at Wal-Mart.
Review: B I feel bad saying I enjoyed this book, since I don't think the word "enjoy" has any place in this somewhat sobering subject matter. It was very amazing the obstacles the author encountered when doing what many people would consider unskilled labor. As a highly educated woman (she has a Ph.D.), she got rejected from many places of work she applied to, such as grocery stores and chain fast-food restaurants. I'm already quite liberal, but this gave me a different perspective on minimum wage workers, since one so rarely sees reporting that isn't from an outsider's perspective. The unfortunate thing about this book is that it was written almost fifteen years ago and I imagine many of the situations she references would be quite different today. I would be quite interested to see if anyone else has conducted a similar experiment more recently, and which of the difficulties they experienced were the same or different, and in what ways.
Check back tomorrow for another update to the blog, and next month for another issue of What I'm Reading.
Until next time!
Lauren
*During this month, I also finished reading Moby Dick (finally!), but since that is one of the things on my list of 25 things to do before I turn 25, its review will come in a separate blog entry.
