Adults Books

Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before

Jean M. Twenge

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 73 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Called "The Entitlement Generation" or Gen Y, they are storming into schools, colleges, and businesses all over the country. In this provocative new book, headline-making psychologist and social commentator Dr. Jean Twenge explores why the young people she calls "Generation Me" -- those born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s -- are tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also cynical, depressed, lonely, and anxious.

Herself a member of Generation Me, Dr. Twenge uses findings from the largest intergenerational research study ever conducted -- with data from 1.3 million respondents spanning six decades -- to reveal how profoundly different today's young adults are. Here are the often shocking truths about this generation, including dramatic differences in sexual behavior, as well as controversial predictions about what the future holds for them and society as a whole. Her often humorous, eyebrow-raising stories about real people vividly bring to life the hopes and dreams, disappointments and challenges of Generation Me.

GenMe has created a profound shift in the American character, changing what it means to be an individual in today's society. The collision of this generation's entitled self-focus and today's competitive marketplace will create one of the most daunting challenges of the new century. Engaging, controversial, prescriptive, funny, Generation Me will give Boomers new insight into their offspring, and help those in their teens, 20s, and 30s finally make sense of themselves and their goals and find their road to happiness.

A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America

Dudley Clendinen

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Old age in America is not what it used to be

In 1994 New York Times writer Dudley Clendinen’s mother—a Southern matron of iron will but creaking bones—sold her house and moved to Canterbury Tower, a geriatric apartment building with full services and a nursing wing in Tampa Bay. There she landed in a microcosm of the New Old Age. Canterbury was filled not just with old Tampa neighbors but also with strangers from across the country. Wealthy, middle class, or barely afloat; Christian, Jewish, or faithless; proud, widowed, or still married; grumpy or dear—they had all come together, at the average age of eighty-six, in search of a last place to live and die.

A Place Called Canterbury is a beautifully written, often hilarious, deeply moving look at how the oldest Americans are living with the reality of living longer. Peopled by brave, daffy, memorable characters determined to grow old with dignity—and to help one another avoid the dreaded nursing wing—A Place Called Canterbury is a kind of soap opera. Likewise, it is a poignant chronicle of the last years of the Greatest Generation and their children, the Boomers, as they are drawn into old age with their parents. A Place Called Canterbury is an essential read for anyone with aging parents and anyone wondering what their own old age will look like.

The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization

Diana West

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Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

“WHERE HAVE ALL THE GROWN-UPS GONE?” That is the provocative question Washington Times syndicated columnist Diana West asks as she looks at America today. Sadly, here’s what she finds: It’s difficult to tell the grown-ups from the children in a landscape littered with Baby Britneys, Moms Who Mosh, and Dads too “young” to call themselves “mister.” Surveying this sorry scene, West makes a much larger statement about our place in the world: “No wonder we can’t stop Islamic terrorism. We haven’t put away our toys!” As far as West is concerned, grown-ups are extinct. The disease that killed them emerged in the fifties, was incubated in the sixties, and became an epidemic in the seventies, leaving behind a nation of eternal adolescents who can’t say "no," a politically correct population that doesn’t know right from wrong. The result of such indecisiveness is, ultimately, the end of Western civilization as we know it. This is because the inability to take on the grown-up role of gatekeeper influences more than whether a sixteen-year-old should attend a Marilyn Manson concert. It also fosters the dithering cultural relativism that arose from the “culture wars” in the eighties and which now undermines our efforts in the “real” culture war of the 21st century—the war on terror. With insightful wit, Diana West takes readers on an odyssey through culture and politics, from the rise of rock ‘n’ roll to the rise of multiculturalism, from the loss of identity to the discovery of “diversity,” from the emasculation of the heroic ideal to the “PC”-ing of “Mary Poppins,” all the while building a compelling case against the childishness that is subverting the struggle against jihadist Islam in a mixed-up, post-9/11 world. With a new foreword for the paperback edition, "The Death of the Grown-up," is a bracing read from one of the most original voices on the American cultural scene.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Personal Finance in your 20s and 30s, Third Edition

Sarah Young Fisher, Susan Shelly

Amazon Price: $12.89 List Price: $18.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Alpha Amazon Marketplace: 53 new & used starting at $4.24

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Lack of respect for both readers of the authors themselves. 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This book truly stands to the series name "Idiot's guides" by being full of extremely basic advice. These authors inform the readers that there exits publics transportation services such as subways and buses as good options to save money. Actually, this advice is not for an idiot but for someone who's been isolated from the world forever. Besides, the advice is only applicable to big cities, and even in those cities there are limitations. USA is basically made for car owners.

Want to compare pros and cons of buying vs building a house? You'd need to get much advice on whom to approach, how to tell good house builders from bad ones, what to do in case of scams, builder's associations to approach, and several more facts. Yet, these authors will only tell you in a long whole page that building a house has the advantage of being made as you want it, while a used one was made according to the previous owner's tastes. They say that "hopefully" (in their own words) you'll get a good builder team. And so it's the rest of the book. "Hopefully" you'll find a good book on personal finance.

But as for this book, you won't learn almost anything about personal finance. All you'll get is a chit-chat talk that you can get from any neighbor, relative, friend, co-worker, etc. I well know that many people have serious communication problems and these simple talks are not so simple for them. If this is your case don't let these authors take advantage of you and seek a good book. The Dummie's series on personal finance is a good alternative. If you also want some charismatic and inspirational reading, my recommendation is Andrew Mathews' books.

There are many scammers out there, self-proclaimed financial advisers. This book's authors are some of them. I think the most famous of all is Suze Orman. They'll tell you ton of very interesting stories, but that's no way to learn about finances. You'd never finish hearing personal stories, yet you'd still need to learn much more. These writers normally focus too much in making their reading fun, actually using a rather juvenile language and these authors' style is particularly juvenile since they wanted to identify with rather young people; they did it too well. These kind of sloppy authors also spent too much time on encouraging readers to save. The topic on saving is quite simple and lets them fill their books. As important as saving is, it must only take a few pages in book. If you do have a problem with saving, you'd better get a full book on the topic.

The big problem with more effective books on finance is that you'll have to deal with more math and less entertaining readings, and judging from the many reviews giving 5 and 4 stars here, I realize that this is a big problem for many people who actually prefer to fool around (or areactually terribly ignorant).

The book has several annoying commentaries that I could put off with if it really were useful, but since it isn't the commentaries just add insult to injury. The authors say, for example, that only like 10% of people around 30 have reached the 5 qualities of adulthood: being financially independent, leaving off their parent's, being married, having children and a 5th one I don't remember. The world is full of people with severely unattended children. And the fact that you are wealthy and with a stable job doesn't imply that you are ready to have children either. I can even say that most middle class and rich parents spend most of their time shopping, watching TV and more personal fun than spending time with their children. And the same applies to being married if you don't work your relationships. Being realistic by being aware that marriage and children is not for you is more mature that making a conventional family, and being able to deal with the loneliness that come with that is definitively mature.

It's a shame that two people, supposedly certified in finance, couldn't make a barely comparable work that what the Dummie's writer did on personal finance.

Editorial Review:

Start-today strategies for a better financial tomorrow.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide‚ to Personal Finance in Your 20s and 30s, Third Edition, clearly explains everything members of this age group need to know to get a handle on their pocketbook and their portfolio, from planning their personal finances to enhancing their current financial plan to getting better returns on their investments. This revised and updated third edition includes completely new material on:
• Internet banking
• Debit and prepaid credit cards
• Online car shopping
• The latest in effective job hunting
• Online college degrees and what they can get you
• Investment strategies for the next decade
• Home-based employment opportunities
• New financial impact of marriage and children
• Home ownership options from building your own to townhouses and condos
• Online mortgage brokers
• All-new websites and resources

America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction

Brian Alexander

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Welcome to the America we don’t usually talk about, a place where that nice couple down the street could be saddling up for “pony play,” making and selling their own porn DVDs, or hosting other couples for a little flogging. As award-winning journalist Brian Alexander uncovers, fringe experimentation has gone suburban. Soccer moms, your accountant, even your own parents could be turning kinky.

Stunned by the uninhibited questions from ordinary people on his msnbc.com column, “Sexploration” (“My wife and I have heard that a lot of couples in their thirties are playing strip poker . . . as well as skinny-dipping with other couples/friends. Any idea if this is a fashionable trend or has it been going on for some time and we never knew it?” or “I am interested in bondage and hear that there are secret bondage clubs someplace. Can you help me find them?”), Brian Alexander was driven to understand Americans’ desire to get down and dirty—especially in an era where conservative family values dominate.

To find out what people are really doing—and why a country that suffered a national freak- out over Janet Jackson’s breast was enthusiastically getting in touch with its inner perv—Alexander set out on a sexual safari in modern America. Whether mixing it up at a convention of fetishists, struggling into his own pair of PVC pants for a wild night at a sex club, being tutored on dildos by a nineteen-year-old supervisor while working in an adult store, or learning the surprising ways of Biblical sex from an evangelical preacher, Alexander uses humor and insight to reveal a sexual world that is quickly redefining the phrase “polite society.”

Gonzo journalism at its funniest and kinkiest, America Unzipped is a fascinating cultural study and an eye-popping peek into the lives of people you’d least expect to find tied up and wearing latex.


One Dozen Things to Avoid When Exploring American Sex

1. Asking an enthusiastic devotee to explain cock-and-ball torture while standing within arm’s length.

2. Assuming an evangelical Christian will not be familiar with the term “69.”

3. Incredibly tight PVC pants.

4. Trying to become the first male sex toy home party salesman in Missouri.

5. Standing too close to bondage models without wearing overalls and safety goggles.

6. Insisting that Dan Quayle would never invest in porn.

7. Displaying a look of surprise when a grandmother discusses the risk of removing a dildo from a microwave oven.

8. Admitting your sex vocabulary is smaller than an eighth grader’s.

9. Explaining the difference between “cream pie” and “gonzo” to a suburban mom shopping for her son’s birthday sex DVDs.

10. Trying to interview a naked submissive locked on a cage.

11. Expecting answers about sex from a six-foot-tall pink rabbit.

12. Thinking that porn kings could not possibly have Ivy League degrees and run charitable foundations.

The World According to Y: Inside the New Adult Generation

Rebecca Huntley

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Preening Monsters of Inconsequence 3 out of 5 stars.
9 of 25 people found this review helpful.

Gen-Y'ers, Huntley's book has shown me, have heads so full of Madison-Avenue platitudes that I really despair for the future. They're not stupid, nor are they dull. Rather, they're cagey and single-minded, albeit provincial and unenlightened, attesting to saccharine dreams of affluence and seamless self-actualization -- dreams which at this historical and cultural moment are risibly recherché. And they attest to them with such a tone of unalloyed optimism that a postmodern subject like me cannot help thinking that they're simply paying lip service to PC politesse.

I mean, such "golly-mister" ambitions do not accord with what market demographers otherwise tell us about the current lot of early twenty-somethings. They're the ones the Culture Industry so breathlessly panders to, the ones who inform media content. If we regard these realities as more indicative than any rah-rah rhetoric they can muster, then here's what they say about themselves in the lifestyle choices they make: they're the MySpacers, the FaceBookers, the lappers-up of bloody delicacies proffered by the latest cinematic torture-porn, the freak-dancers, the body-obsessed, the compulsive exercisers, the blasé wearers of overpriced slave-sewn garments, and, most abhorrently, the tunnel-visioned enablers of the status quo. Abu Ghraib or Grindhouse -- it's all the same to them, just as long as the current geopolitical situation doesn't prevent them from plunging headlong into the economy to snatch up dollars that, if you pay close attention to how these twenty-somethings couch their remarks, they believe theirs by divine ordination. American prosperity, a pettifogging abstraction which conceals real exploitation and malfeasance, is for them a roasted goose of such abundant flesh as to surfeit generation upon generation forever. They scoff at such secular Armageddons as peak oil and global warming. Sure, they've seen Al Gore's film -- but that Hummer H2? Man, it's just to pimp a whip to pass up.

These folks represent, in other words, the undiminished legacy of the Eighties, the decade of their inception: "Show me the money, and Devil take the hindmost!"; "trickle-down" everything. They are all ripples and surfaces illumined by sparks of excessive self-regard, are the people for whom life is one elaborate reality-TV show. Children of the simulacrum. More troublingly, they're a generation for which the contortions of public relations have become a veritable habitus: good is what nourishes the ego; evil is what you didn't get away with. The real is the rational. They'll certainly profess to hold the interests of others as they're own, when it's convenient to do so, but the clichés with which they express these interests, and the utterly diffuse and noncommittal means they suggest to secure them ("I owe other people a friendly smile." "The best thing I offer other people is the ability to listen." Political boilerplate at its most nauseating.) leaves you suspecting that they're real desire is to drink and fornicate and speed in their cars and get over on each other.

Unlike people their age of decades past, they're not romantics; they opt instead for the treacly cynicism that is "enlightened" permissiveness. They're infantile, and, if crossed, will rage and will seek revenge remorselessly. They are, in short, preening monsters of inconsequence. This is, however, something this generation's advocates will never tell you; to them, they are the dominant ideology made toned, flawless flesh, shaped in the most flattering light and without shadow or remainder. You can almost see them in the studio sleekly basking in the eminently deserved approbation which dull pseudo-liberal hordes slavishly heap on them.

Editorial Review:

Fresh insight into the "troublesome" Generation Y—the children of baby boomers—is offered in this personal, witty, and thought-provoking analysis. This fascinating volume investigates Gen-Yers' attitudes about sex, relationships, marriage, friendship, consumerism, celebrity, body image, work, politics, and religion. Also addressed is how the generation defines happiness, and what it envisions for the future.

Adults on the Autism Spectrum Leave the Nest: Achieving Supported Independence

Nancy Perry

Amazon Price: $22.95 List Price: $22.95 Not yet published By: Jessica Kingsley Pub

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Editorial Review:

Children on the Autism Spectrum often grow up to find they are unable to cope effectively with the challenges of adult life. This book shows that, with the appropriate lifelong care from parents and carers, it is possible for those with neurodevelopmental disabilities to achieve supported independence and live fulfilling adult lives.

Adults on the Autism Spectrum Leave the Nest provides a guide for parents on how to prepare their children for adulthood, and describes in detail the kinds of services people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) need in order to live independently, away from the parental home. The author explains the importance of the cognitive abilities that enable us to regulate behavior and adapt to changing situations, known as Executive Functions, and how an individual's deficits in this area can be especially problematic in the adult world. The book provides approaches to managing Executive Function Deficits and describes an innovative therapeutic program that successfully allows adults with ASDs to live with their peers and develop meaningful adult relationships.

This book provides practical and accessible guidance for parents, therapists, people with ASDs, and anyone with an interest in helping people on the Autism Spectrum lead their lives with a sense of dignity and independence.

My Time: Making the Most of the Bonus Decades after Fifty

Abigail Trafford

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Kids grown? Mortgage paid? Career topping out? What now? In My Time, best-selling author Abigail Trafford answers the questions more and more 50-somethings are asking themselves. Thanks to the longevity revolution of recent decades, today's 55- to75-year-olds are living and working longer and healthier than ever before. This generation is the first to experience the period of personal renaissance in between middle and old age-what Trafford calls "My Time." Defining this period as a whole new developmental stage in the life cycle, Trafford skillfully guides readers through the obstacles of My Time and offers them the opportunity to take full advantage of the bonus decades. With the same wit, compassion, and vivid storytelling that made Crazy Time one of the best-loved books ever written on the subject of divorce, Trafford blends personal stories with expert opinions and the latest research on adult development. From the psychoanalyst who gave up his practice to write self-help books, to the widowed mother of three who reinvented herself as a successful photographer, true tales of crisis and triumph sparkle on every page of this inspiring and insightful book. Like Gail Sheehy's Passages, My Time profoundly impacts the journey through our adult years.

My Father Before Me: How Fathers and Sons Influence Each Other Throughout Their Lives

Michael J. Diamond

Amazon Price: $16.47 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: W. W. Norton Amazon Marketplace: 36 new & used starting at $9.95

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A powerful depiction of the unexplored reciprocal relationship between fathers and sons.

For decades, mothers were thought to be the only real influence on a child. Now we recognize that the father's involvement also has a profound impact, but how sons affect their fathers is too-often overlooked. In My Father Before Me psychoanalyst Michael J. Diamond firmly establishes fatherhood as an essential event for both the son's and the father's development. With chapters analyzing the father/son relationship throughout the life cycle, and demonstrating the powerful influence between them, Diamond calls for a more inclusive notion of masculinity, thus allowing men to access parts of themselves they previously ignored. He argues that sons are largely responsible for helping their fathers embrace this more flexible notion of manhood, making them better partners and better parents. Diamond has written an important book that enables us to make sense of the question: what does it truly mean to be a man.

Adult Development and Aging, 2nd Edition

Marion Perlmutter, Elizabeth Hall

List Price: $99.40 By: Wiley Amazon Marketplace: 20 new & used starting at $3.42

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Editorial Review:

Takes a life-span view of development and a multi-disciplinary approach to adulthood, presenting development and aging at multiple levels: biological, psychological, sociological, anthropological, cultural and historical. Stresses the plasticity and diversity of aging. Promotes an understanding of adult development and of life in an aging society. Intended to develop analytic skills in students by allowing them to interpret age differences.