Subscribe via RSS Feed

Category: For Men

Review: Keep the Change by Steve Dublanica

[ 8 ] October 12, 2011

Reviewed by Jill Elizabeth

Don’t you love it when you learn something and are vastly entertained at the same time? I certainly do, and Steve Dublanica’s latest – Keep the Change – is my new favorite exemplar of this. The book, a follow-up to his 2008 hit Waiter Rant, is a fascinating exploration of the service industry and tipping. Read it – you’ll love it and I guarantee you will never look at a waiter, taxi driver, valet, or any other service worker the same way again…

The book opens with a trip to Vegas to learn about stripper tipping – and it only gets better from there. And just to cover this right up front, he does it in an entirely non- skeevy way, even though much of the tipping does border on – if not downright enter – some potentially skeeve-worthy territory. Because yes, his exploration of “personal services” tipping includes how to compensate strippers, prostitutes, dominatrixes (or is it dominatrices? who knows?), and phone sex operators for their time, as well as the more conventional waiters, bellhops, concierges, and cab drivers.

The history of tipping is oddly fascinating, as is the compensatory schemata for all the various service-providing professionals covered in the book. In fact, the information on how all these different jobs pay (or more accurately fail to pay) their practitioners is almost more interesting than the information on how we, the consuming public, are supposed to tip them. I was quite surprised to learn how many ridiculous ways employers screw service personnel out of minimum wage (and sometimes even out of the tips they actually manage to earn) – and once I had read through them all, I found myself a lot more sympathetic as far as tipping is concerned…

Dublanica’s writing style is conversational and extremely engaging. He pulls you right along with him on his tip-exploring adventures, and I dare you to not find him to be a fun companion.

Rating: 5/5

A former corporate attorney and government relations/health policy executive, Jill-Elizabeth walked away from that world (well, skipped actually) and toward a more literary life (equally challenging, but infinitely more enjoyable). If you enjoyed this review, please visit her at Jill-Elizabeth.com, the official home of All Things Jill-Elizabeth – that is, all of the teehees, musings, rants, book reviews, writing exercises, and witticisms of her burgeoning writing career.

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Ecco. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

View Post

Blog Tour & Giveaway: Nerd Do Well by Simon Pegg

[ 86 ] June 10, 2011

Please join Simon Pegg, author of Nerd Do Well, as he tours the blogosphere with TLC Book Tours!

Reviewed by Shannon Hopkins

The best kind of memoir is one where the reader feels as if the memoirist is sitting across from them on a couch, sipping a beverage and chatting comfortably – a flowing and dynamic conversation rather than a dry biographical analysis of how s/he got where s/he is today. Simon Pegg, with his characteristic good humor, sets that perfect tone in Nerd Do Well.

Simon Pegg has near universal recognition after roles in the popular Star Trek reboot (2009) and such offbeat comedies as Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2006), both of which he co-wrote with director Edgar Wright. As his star rises, fans and followers will enjoy tracing his path from the British suburbs to the big screen.

This, however, is no ordinary memoir. While Pegg delves into his past to share with the reader the roots of his love for acting and comedy, he is careful not to overindulge in emotional recollections – he openly expresses a reluctance to address emotion, yet does so just enough to make his story come alive. Pegg also tempers personal anecdotes with an almost academic discussion of cinema and science fiction through the last several decades (with special attention paid to the Star Wars franchise), brilliantly illustrating how the development of the latter contributed to his own personal and professional development.

Every couple of chapters, the reader also encounters a pleasant and highly entertaining surprise: a science-fiction story starring a swarthy and heroic Simon Pegg and his robotic sidekick, Canterbury. The story itself is so over-the-top that one cannot help but laugh, recognizing at the same time that the effort is more to blow off steam than to achieve a literary triumph. The effect, regardless, is an exercise in hilarity.

Nerd Do Well is a tantalizing glimpse into the mind of one of Hollywood’s celebrity outliers – a man of extreme talent and humor who nonetheless is still the little boy from Brockworth, or any other little town, who dreams of something bigger.

Rating: 5/5

Shannon lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her fianc é and a room full of books that she peruses when she isn’t trolling Apartment Therapy for new decorating ideas. In her free time she enjoys maintaining her blog, The Writer’s Closet, planning her wedding, and baking tasty gluten-free treats.

Giveaway:
I have 1 copy of Nerd Do Well to give away!

Mandatory entry: Please comment here and include your e-mail address.

Extra entries (please post each entry separately, i.e. 2 posts for subscribing):
- Subscribe via e-mail, follow or subscribe to the feed. You must verify the subscriptions. (1 entry each)
- Enter another current giveaway and tell me which one you entered (1 entry each)
- Share this giveaway on a social network of your choice. Click the “Share/Save” button at the bottom of this post (1 entry each)

This giveaway is open to US and Canada residents only. Deadline to enter is midnight on June 24, 2011.

Review and giveaway copies were provided free of any obligation by Gotham. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

View Post

Review: 3D Sports Blast! by David Klutho

[ 3 ] June 4, 2011

Reviewed by Vera Pereskokova (Luxury Reading)

Looking to occupy your young kids with a fun activity for a good long while? Well, if your kids are interested in sports, look no further than 3D Sports Blast! by David Klutho. And quite a few men may be tempted to steal away with this book as well!

The fun begins as soon as you turn the cover and find 3D glasses conveniently tucked into a pocket. After a quick foreword on the making of the photography contained in the book, you will be treated to page after page of mesmerizing 3D images. Hide the blue lens of your glasses, and you will be treated to some hidden images invisible to the naked eye.

The images in 3D Sports Blast! are accompanied by blurbs on sports’ greats like baseball’s Tim Lincecum and basketball’s LeBron James. For example, in addition to seeing the 3D image of Lincecum’s pitch, you can learn that his stride length is 129 percent of his height and in high school, he threw a 94-mile-per-hour fastball.  In an interesting twist, LeBron James’ height, weight and explosiveness are compared to that of a Grave Digger monster truck.

I cannot think of any sport that is missed in this compilation – from football, basketball, swimming and figure skating, to golf, track, and rodeo, they are all here. 3D Sports Blast! is a treat – for the eyes and the mind!

Rating: 5/5

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Goodman Media. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

View Post

Review: WAR by Sebastian Junger

[ 8 ] May 16, 2011

Reviewed by Jenna Arthur

Imagine being in a war camp, surrounded by bullets and battles, planned fist fights, and a ceremony known as “blood in blood out”. Imagine this being your own country’s war camp and imagine being there by choice. Then take a step back for a moment, picture yourself hiding behind your comrades as the enemy fast approaches, watching someone you’ve gotten to know very well take a bullet to the head. This is the picture painted by Sebastian Junger and delivered in his memoir WAR.

Junger is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and has written several pieces about dangerous subjects. However, little can compare to what he experienced in Afghanistan. Along with his photographer Tim, Junger embedded himself within a war zone for 15 months, taping and photographing 150 hours of footage of the fight for the Korengal Valley.

Junger followed a platoon of American soldiers through the Korengal Valley, also known as the Valley of Death, in hopes of bringing the reality of war to Americans at home. Wanting to allow the reader, or in my case listener (I listed to the audio book), to live and see the truth behind the battles, he paints a picture of what war felt like, smelled like, tasted like through blood, sweat, honor and fear. Going through interviews with soldiers, he listens as they describe battles within themselves: drinking, violence, and fights against each other, in preparation for the fight with the indescribable. Painting a clear picture of the truth behind war, Junger spares us no detail of our soldiers’ deaths, the tactics and intelligence used by our enemy, and the bravery that every one of our soldiers must master at every turn.

Highly emotionally charged and disturbing, WAR by Sebastian Junger is a book (or audio book) I recommend for every American. You don’t understand war until you have heard it, pictured it, lived it.

Rating: 5/5

Jenna lives in the bustling city of Pittsburgh, PA with her fiance and her two beautiful cats. Along with her passion for reading and the literary world, she is also an artist, writer, environmental activist, creative coordinator and aspiring culinary genius. She believes there is nothing better to her then a good book, and lives one cover to the next.

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Twelve Books. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

View Post

Blog Tour: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

[ 6 ] March 30, 2011

Please join Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein, as he tours the blogosphere with TLC Book Tours!

Reviewed by Erin McKibbin

What do the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, the psychologists Hermann Ebbinghaus and George Miller, and Dom DeLuise hula-hooping have in common? They are all various chapters in the centuries long journey and research into the realm of mnemonics. Dictionary.com defines mnemonic as “something intended to assist the memory, as a verse or formula.” Joshua Foer, a freelance journalist, defines it as a path to a vital truth: “In every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.”

In the fine tradition of other Gonzo Journalists, Foer doesn’t just tell the story of the history of memory through to the current world wide memory championships, he lives it. His voyage begins in a Manhattan auditorium where he observed the 2005 US Memory Championship and met Ed Cooke, a memory savant from Britain and regular participant in the arts memorativa (art of memory). Instead of just writing an article for a magazine about memory, Foer allows Cooke to take him under his wing and train him for the 2006 US Memory Championship. With the help of mnemonics experts throughout the ages, Foer not only discovers the rich cultural history involved in remembering, he arrives in the Con Edison headquarters one year later to give memory experts such as Maurice Stoll a run for their money.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is a fascinating study about remembering. Man has been attempting to increase his ability to remember since ancient Greece and despite the advances in “external memory” (paper, books, the internet), the human race still finds it needs the ability to fill their minds, and lives, with memories. Joshua Foer does a fantastic job in proving that with largely forgotten methods, we can all improve our memories.

Rating: 4.5/5

Erin fell in love with the written word as a small child and subsequently spent most of her life happily devouring literature. She works as a freelance news, marketing, and technical writer as well as a full-time researcher/investigator in the sign industry. Erin lives just outside of Cleveland, Ohio enjoying the beauty of life with her children and grandchildren.

Review and giveaway copies were provided free of any obligation by Penguin Press HC. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

View Post

Review: The Confirmation by Ralph Reed

[ 4 ] March 5, 2011

Author Ralph Reed has decades of experience working with government officials.  He was an adviser for 88 Senate, Governor, and Congressmen campaigns and also worked on seven presidential campaigns. His extensive knowledge of how the political world works shows through in his novel, The Confirmation.

Iraqi terrorists have hijacked nuclear materials and are threatening to bomb a major city in the United States. With laws concerning issues like abortion and same-sex marriage on the docket, Supreme Court Justice Peter Corbin Franklin has a massive stroke. Bob Long, former governor of California, is now the newly elected president of the United States and is left with the weighing task of finding a replacement for Justice Franklin. His nominee, Marco Diaz, creates havoc for President Long when the media destroys him for his religious beliefs and with gossip from his past.

The Confirmation read like an earlier work of John Grisham’s as it was fast-paced and exciting. It captures you from the very first page and is hard to put down. Though it is filled with chaos, it gave an interesting view of what goes on in our nation’s capital and how the election process works. With each character we get to see exactly what running for office does to a person, on a mental as well as a physical level.

Although I enjoyed The Confirmation, it was also a difficult read in some aspects because there were too many characters to keep up with. When I read a book I like to get to know the characters, and that was hard to do here. I found myself turning back to the beginning pages to remind myself of each character and his role in the story. Nevertheless, I thought this was an exciting book and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys political thrillers.

Rating: 4/5

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Fidelis Book. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

View Post

Review: The Athena Project by Brad Thor

[ 3 ] February 14, 2011

Reviewed by Joanne L.

I enjoy settings where smart women are kicking ass: Modesty Blaise and Buffy come to mind. I also enjoy real science and technology in a fictional setting, seemingly fantastical inventions that are viable in this day and age. Recall Dan Brown’s opening pages for The Lost Symbol…”All rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.”

Brad Thor’s recent novel The Athena Project had, on an opening page, “All of the science in this novel is based on reality.”

Here, I thought, we go!!!

The Athena Project is a US military project initiating the inclusion of teams of women in the realm of the military’s Delta Force; elite and secret operatives kicking the butts of the enemies of the United States. The four women of the team whose story Thor tells, are athletic, beautiful, and deadly. They follow the trail of Nazi-based technology being handled by a variety of bad guys representing nationalities where shady occurrences are commonplace.

I had trouble differentiating the four women; I think there was one getting over an affair, there was one always hoping for some action, and maybe one that was a little petulant. Or maybe they were all the same person – character development was weak.

The bad guys were a bit cartoonish in that they almost inevitably could be swayed to make a serious mistake when presented with a beautiful woman in revealing wear who eventually out-smarted them, and then beat them up. This happened a lot –and satisfied my penchant for smart women, kicking ass.

The mysterious Nazi technology gave some meat to the story. The evil scientists that the Allies scooped up by the truckload after the war, had created technology akin to the Star Trek transporter. People were finding failed experiments evidenced by skeletons half in and half out of solid rock, all over the place.

I found The Athena Project easy- going and entertaining, even with the overall weakness of the characters. Is it literary genius? No. It was fast and fun and I anticipate that Mr. Thor, if he writes more about the women of Athena, will become more adept at developing these characters in their battle against evil.

I did found myself worrying though, about the livelihoods of male Delta Force operatives; perhaps there are evil geniuses who are female where they can ply their manliness?

Rating: 2.5/5

Joanne is an organization development and human resources professional with a business background living in Ohio. She has lived in Europe, Africa (including her Peace Corps service in South Africa), and arround the United States. She loves to plays volleyball, read, write, and has a cat named Ender.

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Atria Books. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

View Post

Review: The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

[ 7 ] February 7, 2011

Reviewed by Mac M.

In The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino, one of Japan’s bestselling novelists, beautifully creates a Holmesian atmosphere and still manages to portray the frustration inherent in trying to sift through the inner workings of a criminal mind.

Ishigami, a once promising math scientist, teaches high school math during the day and works on nearly unsolvable mathematical problems alone in his apartment through the night. His only pleasure is watching his neighbor, Yasuko, the woman he loves, from afar. Every day, on his way to school, he stops at the lunch box shop where she works, hoping to find the courage to speak to her intimately, hoping that she will notice his fondness for her.

When Yasuko kills her ex-husband in a passionate act of self-preservation, Ishigami is listening next door, and he finally finds a way to become part of her life. He helps Yasuko dispose of the body and creates an alibi for her, and in doing so, becomes a suspect in the murder himself. Yukawa, Ishigami’s former class-mate and friend and a genius himself, aids Kusanagi, the police detective, in the investigation. Yukawa eventually sees through Ishigami’s intricate plot, but even in deducing Ishigami’s love for Yasuko, he never learns the whole truth of the lonely math teacher’s devotion.

The most famous and most popular fictional sleuths, like Sherlock Holmes, are the ones able to pierce the mind and predict the behavior of criminals with nearly superhuman powers of observation and deductive reasoning. Higashino constructs a masterful Holmes-type character in Yukawa. And Kusunagi plays a perfect Dr. Watson, smart and instinctive, but never quite able to put all the pieces together. Ishigami’s brilliance in constructing an alibi and disposing of the body and Yukawa’s brilliance in deducing the truth might be slightly overdone, but the technique doesn’t detract from the overall story.

[amazonify]0312375069[/amazonify]In the real world of crime, the question of motive is elusive. The subtleties of the human mind and heart often place the answers to questions of reason firmly in the regions of the unknowable or the incomprehensible. Yet how someone commits a crime, especially in the most extreme cases like murder, is usually closely related to why the crime was committed. The best that a detective can hope for is to understand enough of the how and why to properly identify the right person and bring them to justice. Cases are solved and adjudicated every day with dozens of questions unanswered. The ending of Higashino’s novel pays tribute to this real world fact, and even if the reader is let in on the secret, the author makes it clear that no one else will ever know.

The principal defect in the book cannot be attributed to Higashino but to the translator. Several passages, especially in the initial pages of the story, read awkwardly and flat. Perhaps the translator made his best effort to communicate ideas that could not be translated from the original language, but the English version definitely suffers in tone and pace.

Bottom Line:  The Devotion of Suspect X is a Holmesian detective novel with a firm foundation in the real world of crime, even if the criminal and the detective are slightly too brilliant. Read past the early translation difficulties as the ending is worth the effort.

Rating: 4/5

Mac M., aka blackdogbooks on Librarything, lives in the American Southwest and works in law enforcement.

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Minotaur Books. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

Related Posts with Thumbnails
View Post
Page 1 of 3123