Category Archives: Book Reviews

50 Book Challenge: #9 Freakonomics

From amazon.com: Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?

What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?

How much do parents really matter?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head. 

Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.

Freakonomics

What I Say: I think this book was hard to read right after Blink but I did enjoy how it was an easy read. I know now how to truly disband the KKK should they ever make a massive comeback. What I did like about this book was the study of incentives and what makes people tick. This is imperative in a management position and learning how to motivate others to want to work for vs. need to work for you.

I also know I should get my real estate license should I wish to sell my condo anytime soon 😉

50 Book Challenge: #8 Love Anthony

From the Chapters website: I’m always hearing about how my brain doesn’t work right. . . . But it doesn’t feel broken to me.

Olivia Donatelli’s dream of a “normal” life shattered when her son, Anthony, was diagnosed with autism at age three. Understanding the world from his perspective felt bewildering, nearly impossible. He didn’t speak. He hated to be touched. He almost never made eye contact. And just as Olivia was starting to realize that happiness and autism could coexist, Anthony died.

Now she’s alone in a cottage on Nantucket, separated from her husband, desperate to understand the meaning of her son’s short life, when a chance encounter with another woman facing her own loss brings Anthony alive again for Olivia in a most unexpected way.

Beth Ellis’s entire life changed with a simple note: “I’m sleeping with Jimmy.” Fourteen years of marriage. Three beautiful daughters. Yet even before her husband’s affair, she had never felt so alone. Heartbroken, she finds the pieces of the vivacious, creative person she used to be packed away in a box in her attic. For the first time in years, she uncaps her pen, takes a deep breath, and begins to write. The young but exuberant voice that emerges onto the page is a balm to the turmoil within her, a new beginning, and an astonishing bridge back to herself.

In a piercing story about motherhood, autism, and love, New York Times bestselling author Lisa Genova offers us two unforgettable women on the verge of change and the irrepressible young boy whose unique wisdom helps them both find the courage to move on.

Love Anthony

I needed this book. I need the strength of the two women. I needed the friendships. I need to read about the magic of writing. I needed to read about love. I read about the pain and loss that infidelity and a broken marriage can cause a family and how you can find yourself again after feeling lost in a relationship. The epilogue had me in tears over and over again. I may have now read it 5 or 6 times.

I recommend this book to everyone who loves a heart warming tale. If you love writing and books you’ll love the writing theme of the novel. This is now my third Lisa Genova book. I’ve read Still Alice and Left Neglected and just love her style of writing and insight into the workings of the brain and it’s afflictions at times.

If you care for anyone with autism my heart goes out to you. You are stronger than you know and from reading this book I can now admire your strength and dedication and unconditional love for another human being no matter how they show you love back.

50 Book Challenge: #7 World War Z

World War ZBook Synopsis from Amazon.ca:

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

After seeing the trailer to the motion picture for World War Z I was so excited for the movie. Then I found out that it was an adaptation from a book and I got even more excited to read the book. Although lately I like to see movies before reading the book as the movies always let me down. Since I’m hooked on the Walking Dead and talking about zombie apocalypses then I knew I would enjoy this book.

I’m not really sure how they are making the book into the movie as it is a series of short stories. I loved reading it. It was slow to get into but after a few stories I became riveted and just wanted to read the next and the next.


Who wants to go see the movie with me?

 

50 Book Challenge: #6 Inside

Inside

From the Chapters Website:

When Grace, a highly competent and devoted therapist in Montreal, stumbles across a man in the snowy woods who has failed to hang himself, her instinct to help immediately kicks in. Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward.

At the same time, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments. And Mitch, Grace”s ex-husband, a therapist as well, leaves the woman he”s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing. With a razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the manifold dangers and imperatives of making ourselves available to, and indeed responsible for, those dearest to us.

I read this book in a week on the subway and then dove right in and finished it on the plane to Mexico for a fitness retreat. This book was difficult for me. Mental illness and being/feeling responsible for other’s lives really hit home and I definitely had to wipe away tears on the plane so no one would ask why I was being emotional. I loved Alix’s way of writing and didn’t even realize that the 3 characters lives were so interwoven. I’m slow that way sometimes with books. I liked that the book took place in Montreal and New York and LA. Three of my favourite cities! I highly recommend this book but definitely warn of book hangover.

50 Book Challenge: #5 Blink

I dragged on reading this book and it almost took up to two weeks for me to finish but I’m done! Finished on the subway ride home tonight.

Blink

In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. 

Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?

In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of “blink”: the election of Warren Harding; “New Coke”; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police.

Blink reveals that great decision makers aren’t those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of “thin-slicing”-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.

What I Thought: I really liked the chapter on whether a marriage will last, how to make a first impression about someone based on their living space and facial expression watching to learn about fleeting expressions that reveal so much about someone’s personality.

Lots of food for thought. It’s a book about thinking that really made me think. I know so cliche. Now time to go back to a chick lit for my next book!