What to Expect When You're Expecting by Murkoff, Eisenberg, & Hathaway

(review by Julie)
What to Expect When You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff, Arlene Eisenberg, and Sandee Hathaway is billed as a staple for the expecting woman- everyone that’s ever been pregnant seems to own a copy, but in the end I thought it was poorly organized, had too much old information, and was belittling somehow. 1 star. Don’t go buy it, you can have mine.

State of Fear by Crichton

(review by Julie)
Michael Crichton is one of my favorite authors and since my undergraduate degree is in Environmental Science, I was especially interested in State of Fear. In this novel, eco-terreroists create disasters to fool the public into believing bad global warming science and to further their own political agenda.

Crichton is such a talented author and he tackles this hot topic with amazing results! I especially appreciate the summary of his beliefs on environmentalism at the end of the book. However, what I found most interesting in the book was the role the media played in the spread of false information and raising the public alarm. I'm often reminded that most media is a for-profit entertainment business and I can't really expect a fair and balanced review of the world's events. Even my beloved NPR probably has it's own agenda. I really hope this book depicted a much more sinister world than reality.

Whether you believe we're causing the earth's temperature to rise or not, it's a good read- 4 stars out of five.

What Should I Do With My Life by Bronson

(review by Julie)
I started very seriously asking myself what I should do with my life back in 2002. I was two years out of college, had a great job and was fairly miserable, professionally. So, I started working on my masters in business, knowing that it was the general direction I wanted to move.

In 2004 I stumbled onto What Should I Do with My Life in a book store. I almost didn't pick it up because the last thing I wanted was another cheesy self help book, but for some reason I took a second glance and noticed the subtitle: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question. It turns out that the book is not a self-help book at all. Instead, it's a collection of short biographies of people who were struggling with the same question: What Should I Do With My Life? Some of the people were wildly successful and others were failures, but mostly, they were somewhere in between. The book is not about success so much as life's journey

I really love this book because of Bronson's refusal to sugar coat reality, but also because it reminds me of that time in my life when I was trying to figure out what I wanted and who I was.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

(review by Julie)
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand is another classic novel that is referenced far more often than those who have not read it realize (Who is John Galt?). It was first published in 1957 but it's just as relevant, if not more relevant today than it was then.

The book is about Rand's philosophy which she calls 'Objectivism'. In the novel, the thinking men and women, after being told what they can and can not do, go on strike and the world falls apart without them. To me, it's mostly an anti-socialism sort of book.

What I take with me from this book is how destructive an entitlement mentality is. We all need to assume we will have to work for what we get. We need ensure there are sufficient incentives in our society to encourage people to create.

Like many people, I have a love-hate relationship with Ayn Rand. In some things, she is so right that I want to force everyone who can vote to read her book, but then in other areas I'd like to shake her into seeing how wrong she is. So, I give the book 4 stars out of five and I think everyone needs to read it (or at least some abridged version of it). I'd love to discuss the book with others and how it applys to our world today.