Read lately:
The Rookie Mom's Handbook: 250 Activities to Do with (and Without!) Your Baby, by Heather Flett and Whitney Moss - I love Quirk books; they are sturdy with such nice, thick pages - one enjoys the book even before reading a single word. The Rookie Mom's Handbook is a funny and handy guide to activities for the first year of life, organized by month. It's not going to make anyone's "must-have" parenting library list, but it would make a great baby shower or new mom gift. You can check out the authors' blog at www.rookiemoms.com.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. Not as great as Gladwell's Tipping Point, but still has some mind-blowing conclusions:
There are lots of books that tackle broad themes, that analyze the world from great remove. This is not one of them. Blink is concerned with the very smallest components of our everyday lives - the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions of stress. When it comes to the task of understanding ourselves and our world, I think we pay too much attention to those grand themes and too little to the particulars of those fleeting moments. But what would happen if we took our instincts seriously?
Sidetracked Home Executives: From Pigpen to Paradise, by Pam Young and Peggy Jones. - Written by sisters, this book (along with Suze Ormod's The Courage to Be Rich, and Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston) was one of the inspirations for The Fly Lady's system. I personally find the card file concept to be overwhelming, and not as thoroughly explained as could be, but I do use a tickler file for almost everything and heartily recommend it.
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, by Alan Greenspan. I thoroughly enjoyed this book - as much as I read of it. At 544 pages, at a certain point I decided that it was just taking too long to read and I had other, more pressing things to do with my time. The first part of the book is an autobiography of Greenspan, but really it reads as a politico-economic history of the last fifty years. The second half of the book is a discussion of the current state of world economics. This book is fascinating, but not for everyone.
Labels: Biography, Nonfiction, Parenting, Politics
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