Book review: Your New Money Mindset by Brad Hewitt and James Moline

The ninth book I read in 2017 was Your New Money Mindset: Create a Healthy Relationship with Money by Brad Hewitt and James Moline.  In a world that already contains Dave Ramsey and Crown Financial Ministries, one might well wonder why anyone needs another Christian money-management ministry, but for an introductory offer to receive the book for $5, plus shipping and handling, I was willing to find out.

Hewitt and Moline divide unhealthy attitudes toward money into four categories: equating wealth with security, using it for independence, inability to stop craving more, and seeing it as a measure of success.  Over and against these four attitudes are their opposites: living without financial fear, using wealth to build community, contentment, and locating success in living one's individual divine calling.  An online assessment is included for the reader to assess his or her attitudes toward money in these four areas.

As a veteran of The Total Money Makeover, I didn't find anything particularly new between these covers (and I scored well on the assessment).  This book differs from Ramsey's in that it doesn't attempt to provide a framework to take practical steps toward financial health; it's more a touchy-feely book to reorient one's thinking and produce, as advertised, a "new mindset" on money.  There's some of that in Ramsey's approach, too: overcoming fatalism and opening one's mind to new possibilities, but I prefer Dave's more practical approach.  It's the old faith vs. works dichotomy. Granted, taking the "baby steps" without changing one's financial practices will end in relapse, but mental assent to Hewitt and Moline's assertions is also possible without translating said assertions into action.  Turning belief into action is the goal ... but action without belief at least accomplishes something.

Book review: When Broadway Went to Hollywood by Ethan Mordden

The eighth book I read in 2017 was When Broadway Went to Hollywood by Ethan Mordden.  Its subject is movie musicals from The Jazz Singer to Chicago, although the author stipulates in the introduction that his subject is not so much Hollywood musicals as the experience of Broadway songwriters in Hollywood. 

The early musicals felt they had to explain where the music was coming from and why people were singing; as such, they were usually about people putting on shows.  (Al Jolson was, in fact, a jazz singer, after all.)  Mordden amusingly reduces these early musicals to three basic plots and then refers to various movie musicals in shorthand as A, B, or C. 

PLOT A: Two women love the same man as they all put on the show.
PLOT B: A male star on the rise gets ego fever and deserts his true love, to reconcile with her after various hardships as they all put on the show.
PLOT C: The woman star becomes indisposed and her understudy wows the public as they all put on the show.

After this, Mordden advances through various songwriters who took their turn in Hollywood: De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson; Irving Berlin; George and Ira Gershwin; Rodgers and Hart; Jerome Kern; Cole Porter; Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, and Harold Arlen; Rodgers and Hammerstein; and Lerner and Loewe.  Interspersed are two digressions, one on operetta, and another on shows "direct from Broadway," that is, filmed in a manner faithful to the Broadway staging rather than adapted and altered from their original versions.  He concludes with what he calls "the last Hollywood musicals," unsuccessful movies including Annie and Mame, that spent lots of money and cast huge names rather than worry about whether or not the actors could sing. 

Overall, I found this book a little too technical for my grasp, and I didn't always agree with Mordden's conclusions. 

Book review: The Hidden Keys by Andre Alexis

The seventh book I read in 2017 was The Hidden Keys by Andre Alexis.  This is a very literary book, in which a heroin-addicted heiress hires a professional thief with a strict code of honor to solve the riddle of her father's will.  He left to each of his five children an unusual item which, when combined with the others, will lead to even greater riches than they have already received.

This book is supposedly "inspired" by Treasure Island, but I couldn't find the parallels. 

Book review: Precious and Grace by Alexander McCall Smith

The sixth book I read in 2017 was the seventeenth book in Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, Precious and Grace.  The A-plot has to do with a Canadian woman who spent her childhood in Gaborone and has returned looking for her old home, a childhood friend, and the woman who was her nanny, whom she remembers only the by the name Rosie.  In the background, Fanwell acquires a stray dog he can't shake, Violet Sephotho is nominated for Chamber of Commerce Woman of the Year, and the hapless Mr. Polopetsi unknowingly becomes drawn into a pyramid scheme.

Book review: The Gypsy Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

The fifth book I read in 2017 was the sequel to a book I read and loved as a child, The Egypt Game.  The Gypsy Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder was published thirty years after The Egypt Game, and had the world changed big time in the meanwhile!

For the kids in the story, however, 1967 has blended into 1997 with nary a hiccup.  The story picks up where it left off, with April asking Melanie about gypsies.  Gypsies are a very different subject matter than they were in 1967, however, so the story quickly segues into discrimination and death camps and homelessness and the general injustice of Western society.  As a matter of fact, they never play the titular game at all, despite the author's dedication "[t]o everyone who asked for another game with the same players."  It was a little early for the term "cultural appropriation," but playing another culture was already off-limits in polite society, a la the Maui Halloween costume.

Another twenty years on, and Snyder doesn't even get credit for being primly woke, despite her wildly racially diverse cast of characters, as the very term "gypsy" is considered a racial slur in the progressivest circles.  As with Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Mocassin Trail, ancient Egypt is still considered fair game for imagination, but Native American and Roma cultures have become a third rail.  This book is mostly depressing in its demonstration how restrictive popular culture has grown.

Book review: White Christmas by Jody Rosen

The third book I read in 2017 was White Christmas: The Story of an American Song by Jody Rosen.  It is, as the subtitle proclaims, the story of how the famous song was written and recorded. 

Some interesting facts I discovered in this book:

• Despite being Jewish, Irving Berlin celebrated Christmas with his wife and children.
• He did so with a sorrowful heart, however, as an infant son died on December 24, 1928; he and his wife visited the child's grave every Christmas Eve.
• Bing Crosby recorded the vocals for the song in only two takes and eighteen minutes of studio time.  Five years later, when he had to re-record the song because the master dub plate had been worn down due to its popularity, he recorded it in one take.

Book review: The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The first book I completed in 2017 was the second volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.  This volume includes books three and four of the massive work, and I found it more personal and interesting than the first volume. 

In this section, Solzhenitsyn describes the work camps and the stories of the people who lived and died there.  The Holocaust got the press, and rightfully so, but it's disheartening that similar atrocities were going on during the same time period, and longer, in the Soviet Union and have still not received the global denunciation and grief they deserve.  This is no doubt due in large part to the fact that the anti-fascist forces chose to ally with Stalin during World War II and facing up to what our "friends" were doing behind their own borders would tarnish the legacy of the Last Good War.  Also, I think, Hitler's homicidal policies were racially based, and post Civil-Rights-era America can absolutely come down on the side that racial discrimination is wrong; Stalin's equally homicidal policies, however, were motivated largely by politics, and we are still too caught up in politics ourselves to confess that discrimination based on a person's thoughts and beliefs is just as evil as that based on genetics.  Somehow, because a person could change his mind and disavow his former positions, it seems to be less reprehensible to persecute them on that basis than on factors they didn't choose and can't change. 

One volume to go, and I will finally "have read" The Gulag Archipelago.