Lit List: Life-Enhancing Ideas Website Non-Fiction

Lit List: Life-Enhancing Ideas Website Non-Fiction

By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews

This is to show all of you dear Readers that I have not been neglecting the blog or reading. On the contrary, I have diversified my reading and reviewing abilities to spread throughout the Internet. I am showing pages of many of the reviews that I have been working on for other sources. Most of them are smaller reviews or reviews that belong to the other site, but I am permitted to share links. If you have any books that you would like me to read and review on these sources then I would love to hear about them.

These reviews are for the blog Life-Enhancing Ideas which feature articles on education, psychology, and other means of self-improvement. The books I have and will review for this blog are non-fiction and cover education, psychology, gender studies, race relations, and business. I would like to extend a big thank you for the blog administrator Ernst Marc for giving me the chance to review these books for his blog.

1. A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story About Schizophrenia by Sandy Allen-A moving and heartbreaking story about Allen's uncle Bob who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia from the time he was a teenager. The book is effective in writing about Bob giving us a full picture of the man as well as the illness. It also covers the difficulties that family members have in understanding such a condition.

2. Sharp: The Women Who Made An Art of Having An Opinion by Michelle Dean-A witty and memorable collection of biographies about female writers who stunned the world with their opinions, writing, and witty repartee. Dean focuses on such noted authors as Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Nora Ephron and others who not only sought to change the world and get people's attention, but made sure that they always had the last word.

3. The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by Scott Galloway- A sharp and biting look at the tech companies that have shaped our lives: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Galloway reveals the corporate strategies that the companies used to take over the tech industry and become a huge part of our lives. He also shows how we can adapt to their presence.

4. The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre-A brilliant and insightful biography of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the women who created it. Emre neither praises nor condemns the test nor its creators, mother and daughter Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. Instead she takes a middle ground revealing its uses for career placement and relationships but also the difficulties people have of fitting themselves into tiny boxes.

Exuberance: The Passion of Life by Kay Redfield Jamison-
A fascinating look on the emotion exuberance and the people who have it. Jamison discusses various people whose exuberance led them to achieve great things like Teddy Roosevelt's commitment to conservation, Wilson Bentley who studied snowflakes, and Humphrey Davy whose love of science was only surpassed by his love of teaching. She also explores people whose sense of exuberance led them to foolish even dangerous things such as tulipmania in the 17th century and the authors F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Louis Stevenson who battled with alcoholism and mental illness respectively.

My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots by Thulani Davis
A fascinating biography of Thulani Davis's family. She relates her grandmother's mixed race heritage as the daughter of Chloe Tarrant Curry, the daughter of African-American former slaves and Will Campbell, a Scottish American man whose family founded Springfield, Missouri. Davis covers the couple who had a very unconventional romance for their day as well as their family members who ran the gamut from authors, to farmers, to politicians and were involved in changing the post-Civil War American South.