Review: The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living

The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living by Wendy Tremayne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

You figure with the words lab, experiments, and hands-on in the title, you’d be getting a instructional book. But here, that’s not what you’re getting. More than half of this book is the author’s story about why she and her husband moved from the big city to desert New Mexico to live life off of the waste stream of society and nature. I liked how the author described the issues and the thinking she went through to make this decision. I don’t foresee myself ever making this same kind of decision, but I find it interesting when people think through issues and consider or ignore some aspects. You can understand what they value through that journey. When they get to New Mexico the author describes the many ways they made their way through life, making a living, foraging for food and supplies, and the like. The last section of the book, less than half, provides some capsule comments on the specific things they tried, from food foraging in the desert to using used cooking oil to power a car. There wasn’t enough detail here to guide the reader to experiment, so I found the title of the book misleading. However, this was of some interest in the variety of topics covered. I used to read “Whole Earth Review” and “The Whole Earth Digest”, and this is the kind of post-hippy maker-forward content in variety, if not in depth, that I enjoy.

The three things I found most interesting in the book:
- The author starts with attending Burning Man, and from there starting an event to re-use modified clothing that becomes somewhat popular. Certainly interesting from an entrepreneurial perspective, and you get that builder mentality throughout the book.
- People that use a restaurant’s used frying oil to power their cars are affectionately known as “greasers”.
- The author’s husband creates and sells electronic devices he designs and makes on the side. While a lot of what this couple does seems like subsistence work, this was the best example of how they could get ahead in the moneyed economy as well. Quite interesting ideas for products.


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Review: Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals

Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals by Rachel Hollis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

57 year old male here. Why did I read this? I thought it might interest my college-age daughters and wanted to get an idea of what is popular motivational book would be for that age. What did I find? I found a typical book about planning and meeting goals. I found the author to be a very strong voice, one that tends to be uplifting. But also, a voice that has a personality that could rub you the wrong way at times. Do you have a friend that is always talking, and it’s become such a habit for the friend that at times the talk wanders into the bizarre or non-sensical, and you think, “Oh, he ran out of things to say and had to make something up.” That’s kind of what happens here on occasion. Hollis starts crabbing about how hard it is being rich. Later she’s bragging about her boob job. This is all mixed in with a mild goal setting process that she describes. It kinda works, in a manner. Let me put it this way. Say there is a “popular” group in school and you are not in it. And one of the popular girls offers to teach a class on goals. If you go, you know she’ll try hard to relate her life to yours, but she’ll also slip up and say things that show she thinks much higher of herself than any of her audience. But you think you’ll get something out of the class. Do you go? That’s a way to describe how I felt about this book and how I’ll describe it to my daughters. One daughter stared reading this before I did, but I suspect she won't finish it. I think she'll get the basic ideas and the voice quickly, and opt for her self-help in shorter blog entries she finds through her friends. I could understand how some people could really enjoy this.

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Review: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I listened to this audiobook in part to check off the longest audio in my TBR list on Hoopla. At 35 hours, I found that I was kept entertained by the author, so in that respect, this was a job well done. How did he do that? For one thing, he doesn’t answer the toughest question of whether Rockefeller was a bad guy or a good guy. He provides stories to illustrate both, but on the whole I’d say Rockefeller comes across quite well. A second way that the author made this more engaging for the length is that some of the story delved into the biography of others. I’d say that the story of Rockefeller’s father, his son, and Ida Tarbell could have been cleaved off as separate books had the author wanted a collection. The father was a character. Ida Tarbell was a trailblazer. And Rockefeller Jr’s story shows the moral growth of an executive through adversity. All very distinct stories. The author weaved these together as needed to make the overall book more appealing. Another way that the book remained interesting was that the author did not focus on Rockefeller’s day-to-day business dealings. I was expecting more about the day-to-day office intrigue, the politics, the strategy. I’d consider this less of a “business biography” and more of a “personal biography” of a business executive as written. Again, to make the book more readable, I believe this was the correct strategy.

Favorite anecdote: Rockefeller would carry pockets full of dimes and nickels. He’d give dimes to adults and nickels to kids that he met during his day, instead of autographing things. When he gave these out, he’d also provide a little sermon on the value of work and investing. Imagine Mark Zuckerberg doing this nowadays and how that would go over.

Now that I’ve finished the longest audiobook on my Hoopla list, it’s time to start thinking about listening to the new longest book. Appropriately, it’s a Charles Dickens story about businesspeople. I’m expecting some similarities.


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Review: Accidentally Like a Martyr: The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon

Accidentally Like a Martyr: The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon by James Campion
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve read a few books and articles on Warren Zevon. They all seem different, focusing on different things. This one was quite focused on the music, especially the lyrics. You still get a great feel for the person, with many friends, relatives, and musicians interviewed and plenty of anecdotes. But this one comes not from the mind of a biographer, but from the mind of a rock critic. I grew up reading Rolling Stone and the like, and found that some of the music writers really focused on what I’ve come to call the hyperbolic writing style. These writers have never met a metaphor they couldn’t stretch into extremes. You picture them breathlessly typing with maniacal smiles as they try to top their last pithy yet over-the-top phrase describing some aspect of a song. What I actually picture is Mel Gibson in “Conspiracy Theory” or John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind”, with bulletin boards full of snippets of info connected with yarn. The best rock writers share this belief in hyperbolic connectedness with conspiracy theorists.

Ends up I enjoy an occasional trip through a conspiracy theory, and likewise through a rock critic talking about a whole lot of songs. So many things can mean so many things, sometimes it’s just fun to go along with the author. That’s what I did here. Fun ride. And overall, I found I liked this better than those other Zevon books and stories because it’s aimed at the fan who wants to get a glimpse behind the scenes of the songs and the person. I enjoyed the detailed review of lyrics throughout, and I even liked the many references to authors and books that influenced Zevon. This is a real fan’s book. I don’t think people that aren’t already fans of Zevon would appreciate this as much.


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Review: The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting, good but not great story of a young woman who attempts suicide, only to find herself in a purgatory, if you’d call it that, of a library containing volumes of books each reflecting different life choices. The library concept was used, it feels, to draw in a certain type of reader, one who is keen on libraries. The library is a major part of the plot and our main character ends up there many times. The description, initially like the in-between world described in “The Magicians”, ended up being a bit of comic relief through the efforts of the librarian and a catastrophe. I found the many different lives the main character tried out to be quite interesting. I especially appreciated that the author made the main character a student of philosophy, so you get some deep thoughts on what was occurring and major life decisions that had quite different and unexpected impacts on everyone’s lives. Overall, fun to think about these philosophical concepts and how they relate to life, but at times a bit too comic book.

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Review: I Should Have Quit This Morning: Adventures in Minor League Baseball

I Should Have Quit This Morning: Adventures in Minor League Baseball by Kathy Diekroeger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have enjoyed a number of books on the minor leagues of baseball over the years. I find the hopes and promise of lightly tested players matched against each other to learn while competing for limited openings at a higher level leads to many compelling stories. I also appreciate that the minors often are played in towns and villages that are not your well-known metropolises, but are often held in third tier towns, the ones people have heard of, but might not know where they are on a map. Minor league teams have an outsized importance to their towns, compared to the majors where there are plenty of entertainment offerings on a typical summer day or night. I found “I Should Have Quit This Morning” to be an excellent review of the first perspective I mentioned, but not so much on the second.

The book is an edited compilation of interviews of a number of (former) minor league players. The author has gathered together interview snippets based on topics, but loosely based on a baseball season. The book begins with players telling of how they are drafted and came to be on their team. There is a lot of variety here, with highly ranked players as well as “just barely made it” players who tell their stories and explain how this process works. I found this a very interesting beginning. The book then focuses on spring training, and continues the a minor league season and, in some cases, the call up or the letting go. There is a lot of anecdotal detail here. You understand the things that are important to the players after you read this, including things you might not have thought players would spend much time thinking about. For me, learning about the differences in food between the minors and majors was interesting, as was the constant issue of short-term apartment leases and revolving roommate issues. You really get a feel for what a modern minor leaguer deals with on a day to day basis in this book. Well done.

Given that this book was focused on players, you don’t get much about the teams. There’s not really much baseball action, and you don’t hear from the managers (although you hear about them and other staff, especially the stadium attendants). And you don’t hear about the fans or the towns, much, outside of some glowing description of host families. I missed this, mostly because a number of the players played for the team of my hometown, the Quad Cities River Bandits, and I enjoy reading about the area. But given how detailed the player stories are, I can’t complain. I found this a very good book on the player’s perspective on a minor league team, and I would look favorably to more books on the topic by this author.


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