non-fiction

Kiss My Asterisk: A Feisty Guide to Punctuation and Grammar by Jenny Baranick

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A short, sassy and innuendo-filled collection of tips on grammar and spelling that stays PG despite references to Richard Gere and gerbils. The book is derived from the blog Missed Periods and Other Grammar Scares, a title that pretty clearly sets the tone for the book.

I think my favorite thing in Kiss My Asterisk were the examples of the creative spelling used by some of Baranick’s students:

whorable (“I am having a whorable day.”)
thoughs (“I love old black and white comedies. Thoughs are the best.”)
celeberde (“Have you ever met a famous celeberde?”)

While the book on the whole covered familiar territory for me, it did help me to better understand my abuse and misuse of commas, so I consider the purchase as money well-spent. If there are any misplaced commas in this review, don’t blame the author. I am not always a fast learner.

My only serious complaint is how abruptly the book ends. I mean, it just stops and you’re looking at an answer key for the exercises. It was a bit disappointing. The tone, though consistently cheeky, sometimes misses the mark, but I did find myself chuckling more than a few times. There aren’t a lot of books on punctuation out there that can do that.

Overall, recommended, though you might want to read a sample before committing, because if the tone doesn’t work for you, the whole book will be fingers-on-a-chalkboard annoying.

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In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox by Carol Burnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I would feel bad rating this book lower than four stars because it is an adorable, gushing and heartfelt love letter to the show Carol Burnett put on for 11 years.

If you are looking for behind-the-scenes dirt, you’ll find none here, save for one brief mention of a troublesome guest star who walked out. Apparently high at the time, Burnett only goes so far as to allude the person was “on something.” Even with the worst guest ever she pulls her punches because she is just that sweet.

Her reminisce does touch on some negative aspects of the era in which The Carol Burnett Show ran, though (1967-1978), particularly the sexism that allowed men to be “commanding” and take charge on their shows, where women were expected to keep quiet and know their place. Burnett, to her regret, played along, finding the absolute nicest ways to raise any criticism when she thought the writing of a sketch was weak, or a particular bit just wasn’t working.

The majority of the book, though, are reminisces of Burnett’s favorite episodes, sketches, characters, musical numbers and guest stars. She lavishes praise on her own cast and the many people who appeared on the show and you can’t help but come away with how incredibly kind and generous she is. It made me want to go back in time to be on the show. Especially if I could go back in age, as well. 😛

I was 14 when the series ended in 1978, but I watched the last four seasons or so and loved it nearly as much as Burnett herself (though I was a little impatient with the musical numbers and I didn’t catch a lot of the references in their movie parodies–though I still clearly remember the trampoline in their Airport ’75 spoof).

There are a surprising number of photos included (Carol watched every episode as research for the book) and while they are screen grabs, they immediately took me back to the 70s (the contemporary fashions are as tacky as you’d expect), the nostalgia hit immense and satisfying. If you read the ebook on a tablet, the photos are in color as a bonus.

If you expect deep insights or as I mentioned earlier, dirt, you may come away disappointed, but Burnett walks the reader through the entire production of the show from first script reading to taping, with lots of amusing bits sprinkled in. In the end, this was what I expected–a fond look back at Carol Burnett’s favorite part of her long career, showcasing her own personal highlights from her show–and it is the warmest, friendliest book I’ve read in a long time.

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Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World by James Ball
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The biggest issue with Post-Truth is that the people who could most benefit from it will never read it. In fact, they’d likely just disregard it as more “fake news.” For someone like myself, there is little in here that is revelatory. I am only too aware of the rise of not just fake news (both real and imagined) but also what author James Ball calls “bad news,” which is not to say someone is calling to tell you your pet hamster Binky just had a very unfortunate accident, but is rather a description of news that is poorly researched and presented, or otherwise fails to meet the standards one would expect from a reputable news source.

Ball does devote a chapter at the end on ways to combat the rise of BS, but it is, perhaps by design, a combination of the obvious (“if you want to be trusted, be trustworthy,” “try not to succumb to conspiratorial thinking”), the somewhat depressing (entreaties to essentially dumb things down, wear your biases openly, and try to look anti-establishment even if you aren’t, because the tide has turned against the establishment) to the exceedingly unlikely (like asking people to go outside their bubbles. While on the surface it makes sense to step beyond your proverbial echo chamber–Ball advises following “thoughtful people” on the other side–it entirely skips over how one addresses or interacts with the more problematic people at the fringes that are driving so much of the BS into the mainstream. How does one even find a “thoughtful” racist, much less engage them meaningfully?).

Some of the suggestions are appealing, though. I particularly like the concept of the tech giants funding an independent news organization as a way to combat the death of newspapers and other news media. But even if such an organization existed, you would still have plenty of news media that are more interested in pushing an extremist agenda propped up by lies and distortion.

In the end this is a bleak book because, though Ball never explicitly says so, you are left with the impression that most people are easily-snookered idiots, and that perhaps we have only made it so far as a civilization because a strong minority has pushed against the ignorant masses. But for now the ignorant masses seem to be winning–or rather, allowing the autocrats they adore to win.

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Strangers To Superfans: A Marketing Guide to the Reader Journey by David Gaughran
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book. It’s a short book. You should read it.

The End.

Okay, I should probably elaborate a bit. If you’ve read David Gaughran’s two other books on self-publishing, Let’s Get Digital and Amazon Decoded, then Strangers to Superfans will nicely complete the trilogy, and unlike some trilogies, the Shire doesn’t get burned to the ground in the process.

Superfans is less nuts and bolts than the other books, discussing some of the intangibles of self-publishing, focusing on the potential pitfalls (the failure matrix, as Gaughran calls it) in trying to capture and hold readers, then turn them into willing promoters of your work. In this sense, the book is going to be more useful to those with one or more books ready to be set loose into the sea of millions of other self-published efforts. Amazon is once again the focal point of discussion and rightly so, as it utterly dominates the ebook market, but Gaughran doesn’t ignore other markets, and even highlights how they can present unique opportunities given their smaller size.

And while there may be fewer specifics in this book compared to his others, there is still plenty of sensible advice on advertising (he is a strong advocate on newsletters), positioning and categorizing your books, along with tips on how to hook the reader at the end to keep them engaged and wanting more.

Overall, anyone thinking of self-publishing would do well to read all three of Gaughran’s books, in the order of release: Let’s Get Digital, Amazon Decoded, and Strangers to Superfans. There’s no guarantee his advice will make you rich, but your odds will certainly be better. As a bonus, his writing style is so utterly friendly and engaging you can’t help but feel more excited to self-publish afterward.

Recommended.

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Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thinking, Fast and Slow, is in a small way a depressing read, in that author Daniel Kahneman explains–as documented by years of research and studies–just how susceptible we are to leaping to the wrong conclusion, making clearly unwise choices and falling victim to blatant manipulation.

On a more positive note, Kahneman also shows how we can at least be aware of both how our brains work when making decisions and the ways it which our brains can be manipulated, whether through deliberate action or side effect.

The book lays out its essential premise, then builds on it in citing the many studies Kahneman and others conducted. The premise is that our brains run on two main systems, System 1 being fast, driven by emotion and intuitive, while System 2 is more deliberate, logical, but also kind of lazy, often letting System 1 win because doing all the background checks on what we impulsively think is right is just too much work. To our benefit, it turns out that System 1 is right most of the time.

The bulk of the book goes into detail about various ways we filter the world and how these two systems deal with what we find, whether it’s making a seemingly safe but sub-optimal choice due to loss aversion (we feel loss much more than we feel gains, something that can be used by companies or other agencies to steer us toward the choices they want us to make), or letting the last memory of an experience shape our desire to go through it again, even if that last memory is not representative of the experience overall.

This is a thorough book and the author does at times belabor the points being made. A few edits would keep all of the ideas presented intact while only losing some redundancy, but Kahneman’s writing style is completely accessible, so the difficulty is entirely in the length and not in the prose.

Recommended.

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