A useful, highly structured reference book on home organization.
A debut guide tells readers how to arrange their homes.
A disorganized home is a stress on an individual’s space, time, and psyche. The worse the problem gets, the harder it is to try to fix it. “People don’t know where to begin or how to approach organizing,” writes Kempner in her opening chapter. “This book helps to guide you through various organizational tasks by breaking down each task into manageable steps that can be spread out over time.” Employing a minimalist approach to home organization—promoting the belief that less is better and the unnecessary should be eliminated—the author walks readers through the various areas of their dwellings in order to show them how they might be properly sorted, simplified, and freed up for better use. After an introductory section on storage essentials, common challenges, and maintenance strategies, Kempner gets into the specific areas of the house and their particular needs. She tackles bedrooms and closets (including “closet systems”), kitchens (“The Pantry: An Overview”), bathrooms, laundry rooms, home offices, and even the dreaded garages. Each section proposes several alternative templates accommodating whatever spatial situation readers might have to work with. The author includes numerous bulleted lists of tips as well as cute diagrams by debut illustrator Erickson depicting efficient (and aesthetically pleasing) storage techniques. The author writes in an authoritative but calming voice, succinctly anticipating the requirements and instincts of readers: “The most important thing to accomplish with footwear storage design is not to end up storing any loose shoes on the floor, no matter how well they’re initially lined up. Inevitably, order will be lost, and the closet floor will become a mess.” While the book becomes a little dry when read straight through—Kempner does not inject anecdotes or personal experiences into the work, giving it the feel of a true manual—the sections are meant to be consulted out of order according to need. Anyone with a hall closet or kitchen nook that has gotten a little (or more than a little) out of control would do well to see what the author has to say on the subject.
A useful, highly structured reference book on home organization.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 333
Publisher: Yaz Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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