Reading Fanatic Reviews
All Nonfiction ReviewsHow to Have a Meaningful Conversation by Sarah Rozenthuler
Available at Amazon, paperback only
How to Have Meaningful Conversation*
The Art of Conversation
Conversation and sincere dialogue are essential even in this day of tweets and texts. Especially when dealing with those who are close to us, meaningful conversation is essential to true intimacy; it is also crucial to getting the most out of life both personally and professionally. I think that sometimes when we have the need for one of the great conversations that can cause a shift in life, we can have a lack of clarity within ourselves that is magnified when we attempt to communicate our wants, desires, and needs to another. This book gives you seven shifts or frameworks for the important conversations that we have with those who matter. The author has many examples to show what these mean and what effective and ineffective conversation looks like. She even has exercises at the end of the book that will help you increase your capacity for creating meaningful conversations, although some of them are simply helpful just to help you get clarity about your thoughts and your regular patterns of communication. If you’ve ever felt yourself at a loss for those significant conversations or they didn’t turn out quite as you had hoped, this book can guide you on the path to more effective conversations.
A Writer’s Paris by Eric Maisel
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Google Play, Thalia, Mondadori, Angus & Robertson, Indigo (Chapters), and Bol.de
A Writer's Paris*
The City of Lights from a Writer’s Perspective
What an unusual and delightful book! I’m been finding it hard to describe precisely. The author is a writer who has spent time writing his books in Paris, and this book is meant to encourage other authors to make a similar pilgrimage for their art. He is very specific about places to go, sometimes just to appreciate the place and sometimes to inspire writing. It’s broken down into 34 lessons, which are bite-sized nuggets about writing, Paris, or some aspect of the French or France. He discusses practical issues on occasion, like writing blueprints for your time in Paris and how to work around the potential language barrier. The glimpse he gives of Paris is very intimate, discussing things like footbridges and the human scale of the city. You can tell the man has a great affection and appreciation for Paris, and not only for what magic it evokes for his creative Muse but also for itself. I have never been to France—but took the language in high school and college—but I will admit that this book has given me a bit of the travel bug, making me wish that I would take such a writing pilgrimage. Perhaps one day. And I know just the guidebook to help me along the path.
Speaking of Feminism by Rachel S. Seidman
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Google Play, Scribd, Thalia, Mondadori, Angus & Robertson, Indigo (Chapters), and Bol.de
Speaking of Feminism*
Modern Voices of Feminism
This book is a collection of social history interviews of women who are prominent either nationally or locally in the feminist movement. For some reason, the author restricts herself to women between the ages of 20 and 50. This is such a fascinating read that I find myself curious about what the interviews would have looked like with women who are older feminists. After all, 50 is still relatively young in general and particularly if you look at the broader history of the feminist movement. In fact, those around the age of 50 would have been children during the feminist wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s. So I would have loved to have seen interviews with the still-living women who might have been a part of that particular wave. That said, this book does give fascinating insights into the lives and minds of 25 unabashed feminists. Their individual journeys are both unique and universal. With three decades looked at, are there are definitely generational differences between how they came to feminism and how they approach it now. I like how the book looks at feminism’s past, present, and future.
With the #MeToo movement, women’s marches, pink hats, and media leaders like Samantha Bee, feminism and all that it means is at the forefront of national consciousness quite often. As it well should be, because these issues matter to more than the just over 50% of the population that women are.
What Does It Feel Like to Die? by Jennie Dear
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Google Play, Scribd, 24 Symbols, Thalia, Angus & Robertson, and Bol.de
What Does It Feel Like to Die?*
Scientific and Practical Guide to Death and Dying
As an RN who has seen death firsthand, I was curious about what this book had to offer. The author is a hospice volunteer, so she does have some viable personal insights into death and dying, and she has gone further and talked with medical professionals, some of whom specialize in palliative care, and studied current research into death and dying. She also shares some of her personal experience in dealing with her own mother’s death. If one is up for reading the science, I believe that this book would be helpful for those who are newly diagnosed with a terminal illness and for family members touched by such. The book not only looks at the physical aspect dying process itself (insofar as we can know it) but also at coping with it and getting your affairs in order. You’ll learn a little about the hospice system, which is not as well understood as it could be.
I feel like the book should have actually been several books: one just for the person who is dying, one for family members, one for caregivers, and one that speaks directly to the science of it all. At times, this book does feel like it is trying to be too much to too many types of people, so a specialized set of books would be more helpful. For instance, I believe that a simplified, well-organized version would be fantastic for the person who is actually dying, stressing the situations so they will run across in the physical aspect as well as the mental and financial preparation.
I find myself wondering at the statistic that she gave in the beginning, that 90% of us will die after living with a disease for days, weeks, or years. I don’t quite buy that, or at least, wouldn’t put it that way. Life is terminal; we will all die. Chronic diseases give one a higher chance for mortality but don’t necessarily cause death directly. After all, say, a person with high blood pressure doesn’t necessarily die from it even if they’ve lived with it for years. Sometimes death is sudden, like in a car crash. However, often it is more of an aggregate of certain factors: age, general health, and chronic diseases (co-morbidities) than a specific terminal illness.
All in all, though, I do you think this is a very helpful book for those involved in the dying process. you may want to cherry-pick your way through, picking the nuggets that apply to you and your situation.
The Gap by Douglas Vigliotti
Available at Amazon only
NOT with Kindle Unlimited
The Gap*
Concepts Standing Between Us and True Understanding
The subtitle of this book definitely intrigues: The little space between what you know and don’t know. In this book, the author seeks to make us aware of this gap that can exist personally, professionally, and culturally. It isn’t a step-by-step blueprint to, say, help you better understand your relationship with your spouse or how to understand your company’s corporate culture. Rather, he looks at several concepts like gatekeepers, intelligence, bias, and specialists; and gives insight into them so that you can better understand what these really mean and how they are reflected in our experience of the world. Within each concept, he gives an example, sometimes a counterpoint, and a one-sentence takeaway. Given that some of the concepts can be a little intangible, the book is surprisingly engaging and makes you think about some of your preconceptions about yourself, others, and the greater world. It is a book best taken in small doses so you can ponder the information presented. The line isn’t always clearly drawn about how a concept is necessarily part of the gap between the known and the unknown, but the ideas are still interesting to think about. If you want to explore some of what could be seen as barriers to true understanding, you may very well enjoy this book. I know I did.
Kicking Financial Ass by Paul Christopher Dumont
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Thalia, Mondadori, Angus & Robertson, Indigo (Chapters), and Bol.de
Kicking Financial Ass*
Surprisingly Helpful Book
I think it is unfortunate when an author or a publisher believes that they have to oversell a book. This book is a victim of just such a stratagem. This is actually quite a detailed, well-thought-out, and well-written book about how to get your financial house in order. So I have issues with the title, subtitle, and book blurb. The title suggests a humorous or edgy approach, and the subtitle—as it begins with a rather strange directive—supports this theory as well. The book blurb makes you think that it is going to be more about retiring early or entrepreneurship. While the book does address the former, that isn’t really the main thrust of the book. The book is really about getting your financial house in order and aligning what you do financially with your own personal values so that you can live a better present and future.
This book is meant for millennials, but I believe that most people could find benefit from it even if everything doesn’t apply to you, because of your age group or for any reason. The book is broadly divided into four parts: foundations, growth, investing, and living your life. The first part begins with getting your money mindset correct by considering your approach two money. This part moves on to take a look at where your money is going and looking at your savings. Then he looks into having an emergency fund before diving into debts. In the growth section, he discusses a salary negotiation and having a side hustle. In the investing section, he looks at index funds, retirement accounts, and real estate. The final two chapters that make up part four step more into the mindset perspective, looking at purpose in retirement and happiness with your financial goals.
This book is chock full of ideas and things for you to think about in your approach to your finances both now and in the future. The author freely admits that most of these ideas are not his own. He does have an MBA and is a certified financial analyst, but he also states that he has gathered information from various places online. Honestly, there is much that will help people here, both in mindset and in practicalities. It will get you thinking about what you do with your money now, what you want to do with it in the future, and why you want (or shouldn’t want) to do all these things. If you want financial freedom now and years from now, I would recommend reading this book—whether you are a millennial or not.
Medical Terminology by Darrell Connolly
Available at Amazon, Thalia, and Bol.de
Medical Terminology*
Disorganized, Poorly Written Book
Merciful heavens! Where do I even start with all that is wrong with this book? The cover doesn’t really state this, but I believe the author intends this book for people early in their medical education. Unfortunately, the book suffers from multiple problems. The first thing I noticed was that the language of the book is ponderous and overblown. I don’t know if the author is a non-native English speaker or just thought that he had to puff up the language to make it have more gravitas. In any event, most sentences in this book just feel like a chore to read.
The book also poorly organized on several levels. I actually have studied medical terminology for a couple of different reasons—first as a medical transcriptionist and later as an RN—and most medical terminology texts have an inherent logical flow to them regarding how you first learn about the generalities of this specialized terminology and then get to the specifics. This book is all over the map in terms of organization. Parts of it are repetitious. Other areas that should be kept together are broken up with intervening information in between that doesn’t seem relevant to the other bits on either side of it. Some concepts that the author has given great importance to, like eponymous medical terms, are actually given such short shrift—as, in this case, there are many eponymous terms—that the glossing over the subject in this book doesn’t do them justice. And in a relatively short book like this, it is better to emphasize the horses rather than the zebras. Many of the topics listed in the table of contents—which is a hot mess—are given just a paragraph or two, not really enough to aid learning. Within the chapters/sections themselves, there is repetition and wordiness along with a nonlogical flow of ideas.
There is no consistency with the actual parts of medical terms themselves. Typically in medical terminology books, learning the roots, prefixes, and suffixes is the heart of the book, especially if learned in the context of body systems. The sections that address these are relatively short—so many more roots, prefixes, and suffixes could have been mentioned—and the section titles are not wholly accurate. For instance, the root section contains many prefixes. Why weren’t those just put in the prefix section? Sometimes prefixes and suffixes are set off with hyphens to show where they join roots, but sometimes they are not. Similarly, root words and combining forms have inconsistencies of format as well.
The author lists a variety of tools and resources to aid learning of this complex topic, but even these are split out into different sections. I cannot recommend this book. If you have an interest in medical terminology for personal or professional reasons, there are some great websites, apps, and books out there that would be much more useful for you than this.
The Complete Keto Cookbook by Amanda Klein
Available at Amazon only
Free with Kindle Unlimited
The Complete Keto Cookbook*
Brimming with Recipes
Even though it has a very short section in front with brief articles about what the keto diet is, its benefits, and how to set yourself up for keto cooking success, this book is really all about the recipes. There are over 600 recipes in this cookbook. The author has chosen to divide this by the type of meat, with other sections on vegetables, vegan recipes, appetizers, and dessert recipes. I thought that the book would have been arranged better if some of the recipes were split out into more logical groups. For instance, each section has quite a few soups. I would have loved to have seen a soup chapter—as I adore soups and we are heading into soup season. Perhaps within that chapter—if the author had gone that direction—she could have designated the types of meat or veggies that served as the base. I would have loved to have seen other such split outs.
In looking over the recipes, I found some of them to be the typical easy kinds of recipes that people enjoy today while others were a bit more complex. Most just use regular ingredients from the grocery store; only a few called for specialty ingredients. Only the briefest of nutritional information was given. While carbs were listed, it wasn’t stated anywhere in the book whether this was net carbs or total carbs. I thought some of the proportions between ingredients were a bit off. For instance, there was a salad recipe where a serving was one cup of lettuce with 1/4 cup of avocado.(For one thing, I can’t even imagine a salad that small; but that seems like too much avocado for the amount of lettuce.) Inexplicably, some recipes appeared in more than one section.
I thought that the sections preceding the recipes we’re mostly full of the normal information you hear about keto in these kinds of books and on popular blogs. I don’t necessarily agree with some of the information presented; I think it is just the standard stuff that is said for this diet. You can easily skip these sections and just move on to the recipes. There are no photographs in this ebook; the only pictures you will see are on the cover. I can’t really tell you if these are wholly keto-friendly, as I am not 100% knowledgeable about all of the ins and outs of the keto diet. But, however, I did find this set of recipes to be both practical and inspiring, even for people who don’t necessarily follow the keto diet.
Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire by Dan Conway
Available at Amazon only
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire*
One Man’s Cryptocurrency Story
This book is written memoir style by a man who was able to make money by getting in on bitcoin and ethereum. While you do learn a lot about blockchain, bitcoin, and ethereum in the book, this is really more of his story, detailing his life from workaday corporate employee to crypto millionaire. The prologue is his screed against corporate America and in praise of alternatives like cryptocurrencies. I know a little about cryptocurrencies from watching a few documentaries, but it was fascinating to watch in action from a personal perspective, seeing it make a difference in one man’s life. If you have any interest in the subject, the book is a fascinating read. There was only one thing I didn’t like about it. It has a surprising amount of profanity including variations on the F-word. I just don’t like profanity in books, whether it’s fiction, memoir, or nonfiction. Other than that, though, I found it to be a compelling read.
Own Your Weird by Jason Zook
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Google Play, Thalia, Angus & Robertson, Indigo (Chapters), and Bol.de
Own Your Weird*
Own Your Weird… and Capitalize on It
This is a somewhat peculiar book, which I suppose is not expected given its title and its subject. The author purports that the book will help you own your own weirdness. This isn’t just on a personal level as one might think. In fact, the thrust of the book seems to be about how to take your own unique weirdness and turn it into a profit. The author himself has done quite a number of outrageous and unique things that are only possible in this age of the internet: he auctioned the rights to his own last name for a pretty penny, he got sponsorship for one of his books by selling tweet-sized ads in his book to online businesses, and he would wear others’ branded t-shirts and go about on social media for a price.
The book is split into three sections, owning your weird mindset, how he owns his weird, and creating your own weird blueprint for business and life. The book is surprisingly thought provoking. The pace at first is a bit frenetic and odd, but once he gets into the meatier chapters, he simmers down a little bit and actually does provide some nuggets of wisdom. Each chapter ends with a brief exercise to help you find your own weirdness or express it, based on the chapter topic.
The problem with the book, though, is that the author is essentially everywhere in it. It was like he couldn’t keep from discussing how someone could cultivate their own unique weirdness without injecting his story into it, even in the third section. I did find this a bit annoying and perhaps a little pretentious. Also, parts of the book just seemed like some random ideas thrown together. My sense is that he did much of this book on the fly. He does seem to have enough experience and insight that he could have created a pretty amazing book, but it falls short due to the apparently spontaneous nature of the writing and a singular obsession with inserting himself into every bit of the book.
Despite the fact that the subtitle says that this book is about work, life, and love, it mostly talks about how to use your uniqueness to start a business or profit in some other way. There are only very small sections on the other topics. Still, however, I will admit that I found this to be a rather intriguing read, and it did get me into thinking more about my own uniqueness and how I may want to let that shine going forward.
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