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March 27, 2006
"Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich
"Nickel and Dimed" reads as smoothly and engagingly as many fictions I've read. Ehrenreich's story of her experiment living as a low wage worker was both fascinating and horrifying. Her description of working conditions in WalMart, family restaurants and cleaning services are vivid and answer many of the questions that the average middle class person asks but can't answer. She also does a really good job of debunking the idea that former welfare recipients are now thriving on the low wage jobs they found when welfare was reformed.
She not only discusses the actual day-to-day physical experiences but delves into how living as a low-wage worker quickly and thoroughly reduced her mental and emotion state to one focused on survival and on winning the approval of her supervisors at any cost. Although Ehrenreich's experiment was admittedly fixed - she had plenty of start-up allowance that the average WalMart employee does not, and she knew that she had an escape at the end of the experiement back into upper middle class comfort - her chronicle still reveals an often-invisible sector of our society that desperately needs to be looked at and addressed.
ISBN: 0-8050-6388-9
Jennifer N., reference
Posted by jnardine at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2006
"Brand New" by Nancy Koehn
A while back I read Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell" by Nancy Koehn. This book talked about creative business leaders, in most cases their names are their company’s names, such as Wedgwood, Heinz, Marshall Field, Estée Lauder, Howard Schultz (Starbucks), and Dell. These innovative entrepreneurs changed business, at least during the time they were involved, and how it interacted with consumers. With historical coverage going back to the late 1700s and moving on up through the late 1990s, it gives insight into the world of marketing, product placement, and consumer driven businesses. The book has plenty of pictures to illustrate the points and is a quick and interesting read.
ISBN 1-57851-221-2
Pam M., reserves
Posted by jnardine at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)
"Fitzwilliam Darcy: Gentleman" by Pamela Aiden
There are lots of books that re-work classic novels. I have just read one of the many such stories that re-tell Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Pamela Aiden’s three part series, entitled Fitzwilliam Darcy: Gentleman, tells the familiar story from Mr. Darcy’s point of view. The parts are: Book 1, An Assembly Such as This (2003), Book 2, Duty and Desire (2004), and Book 3, These Three Remain (2005). Overall I liked this series. It gave me a better understanding of Darcy’s stiff and odd behavior in the original book and showed a possible explanation of how he came to change and grow into the man that Elizabeth Bennet could love, after starting off as a man she found arrogant and conceited. Although at times the story, most especially Book 2 which covers the time after Darcy leaves Netherfield and before he meets Elizabeth again at Rosings, seemed slow going and full of unnecessary dramas (a country house party with horrid people, Irish plots against the British prime minister, spies, etc.), overall it remained true to the spirit of the original and provided a plausible back-story for Mr. Darcy that led me to admire him and his struggles to influence Elizabeth Bennet even more.
ISBNs: An Assembly Such as This - 0972852905
Duty and Desire - 0972852913
These Three Remain - 0972852921
Pam M., reserves
Posted by jnardine at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2006
"Haroun and the Sea of Stories" by Salman Rushdie
"Haroun and the Sea of Stories" is the most accessible of Rushdie’s novels, and this little book is almost perfect. No, seriously—in the way that "The Great Gatsby," "The Old Man and the Sea," or "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is perfect: a brilliantly cut, brightly polished little gem, with well-drawn, believable characters working through a well-paced, reasonable (given the magical realism of the circumstances) plot.
Set in an imaginary Kashmir, in a fictional now, Rushdie’s masterwork (and I say this knowing full well what a truly magnificent book "Midnight’s Children" is—but it, like "Moby Dick," is a wonderfully, humanly flawed work, of such scope and complexity that perfection is unthinkable) is appropriate for children, in spite of the adult themes that spark the plot. Haroun, himself a child, undertakes to save his father’s career (and marriage) by traveling with a water genie to Earth’s second moon. Here, he must intervene in a war and reverse an intentional environmental disaster to save the Sea of Stories, from which his father draws the stories he tells for a living.
Of course, it all works out in the end and Haroun learns the value of stories. Read it as an environmental metaphor, as an allegory for contemporary degradation of our humanity, or simply for fun—but read it.
ISBN 0140157379
Everett W., Reference Assistant
Posted by jnardine at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)