STACKED

books

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee

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I was a psychology major in college which may explain a lot about my review tendencies. It also explains the utter fascination I have with books that delve into the psyche of people who have mental illnesses. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things grabbed me immediately, as I’ve developed an interest in hoarding, thanks to C. J. Omololu’s Dirty Little Secrets.

Stuff is a non-fiction work that dives into the mindsets and experiences of compulsive hoarders. Frost and Steketee are university professors of psychology and social work respectively, and their backgrounds inform the story they tell. Little research has been done on hoarding until quite recently, as many believed that rather than being its own mental illness, hoarding was a component of obsessive compulsive disorder (and indeed, many with ocd do have hoarding tendencies, but not everyone who hoards has ocd).

Throughout the book, we are introduced to a variety of individuals and their hoarding experiences. We begin at the very beginning with the famous Collyer mansion case in New York City that happened in 1947: two brothers who lived together died in their own filth. The hoarding was so bad that their building was believed uninhabitable and eventually was destroyed to make way for a park. From there, we are introduced to modern hoarders and learn about what their obsessions are while Frost and Steketee offer insight into what may be triggering the illness.

The reasoning behind hoarding is well fleshed, but what I appreciated most in this title was that there was no “one size fits all” diagnosis: Frost and Steketee do a great job of offering the multitude of possible triggers for hoarding and I think they do so without making this one of those books that convinces readers that they, too, suffer. Of particular interest to me in this was a discussion of the difference between collecting and hoarding, and it made me realize that I don’t have a single collection. For their purposes, collections are something that people have and have an orderly, well-reasoned, and logical organization or methodology behind. Think, for example, people who collect baseball cards — they put them into binders or display units that are meant for organization and safe keeping. People collect baseball cards because they love the sport, they enjoy collecting signatures, or they are holding on to them for resale purposes (among other reasons, of course). Hoarding, on the other hand, is when there is just accumulation without logical methodology or reason beyond just needing to have things. This is displayed through their character studies in the book.

Stuff is a highly readable book that moves relatively fast and is conducive to skimming and skipping around — something that I know some non-fiction readers require of the books they choose. The personal stories and the reasoning are interspersed but repeated enough that picking up at any chapter will not leave a reader lost. There is a variety of ages and genders represented in the examples.

And like any good non-fiction book, readers are treated to a list of resources in the book, as well as a chapter on identifying problems and seeking help for yourself or loved ones.

As many other reviews have mentioned, the style and tone of this book is reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, who is most well known for his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It is written with knowledge and without judgement, meant to be accessible to a wide audience. I read Sacks’s classic in my high school psychology class, so I would find it easy to hand this book over to teenagers, as well, despite it being published for an adult audience. Since hoarding has been in the spotlight recently, this is a title that will find a wide readership, and it is for good reason.

Ripley’s Enter if you Dare

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I’m in Las Vegas this week — the second time I’ve been to the land of the unique and strange and downright fantastic. So, I thought I’d leave you with some field notes on Ripley’s newest addition to their family of books: Ripley’s Enter if You Dare. I was able to give a length review last year here, so check that out if you want a little more about the Ripley’s titles.

Full color photos are of stand out note in this book that is filled to the brim with facts and figures covering everything from the amazing human body to incredible feats to weather to animals. This is a book that begs you to browse and browse and browse again. But not only that, this is a book that will have some reading every word straight through, as it is that interesting and engaging.

Did you know the world’s heaviest cat weighs in at 22 pounds? I kind of find that lower that I’d imagine, seeing one of my cats is himself 15 pounds. Check out this photo:

Doesn’t he look a heck of a lot bigger than just 22 pounds? Yikes! Don’t worry, the book says he was told to be put on a kitty diet.

What I like about the Ripley’s books is that they celebrate, rather than lampoon, oddities. Back in the day, people with long fingernails, bigger girths, or very strange hairy spots were circus freaks. In these books, they’re celebrated: they are unique and interesting to learn about, choosing to put themselves out there (for the most part — some are nameless statistics, which I find as respectful since it provides anonymity). I quite enjoyed digging through the parts about the circus in this volume because I live in the 19th Century Circus Capital of the World (complete with buried elephant under one of our lakes). Readers will be enthralled with the double page spread, too, about vampires, the shortest teenager around, and more.

The use of the double page spread is effective and exciting. Again, can I emphasize that when I was a kid, these books weren’t in full color like this?

How cool is that?

Ripley’s Enter If You Dare has wide appeal, and it will have special appeal to tween and teen boys, who love non-fiction. These books fly off the shelf at my library, and I suspect that this addition will do the same. The facts are new and fresh, not rehashed information with new pictures. These are the sorts of books that are not only fascinating, but they are appealing across generations. This is the kind of book parents can sit down with their kids and browse through and talk about.

If you haven’t read one of these titles in a while, I urge you to pick one up. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how readable, browsable, and bright they have become. And yes, I totally have seen some of these people in my trip, thank you very much city of lights!

What I’m Reading Now

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In 140 characters or less, what’s on my bedside table, in my car stereo, and blaring from my boom box:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson
Third in the famous Millennium trilogy, and so far the weakest. Seems like there’s no mystery left, but Larsson keeps writing anyway.

The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex
I thought Rex showed promise with Fat Vampire, so decided to try his middle grade book about aliens. So far it’s amusing and more cohesive.

Alchemy and Meggy Swann, by Karen Cushman (audio)
Excellent narration and Cushman’s trademark amusing curses – Ye toads and vipers! – bring the streets of 16th century London to life.

Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff
Fascinating biography of a woman about whom we actually know very little. Includes info about the honored royal practice of murdering one’s family.

First Light, by Rebecca Stead
I enjoyed Stead’s Newbery winner, and I hope this one, about the far North and a community of people beneath the ice, will be just as wonderfully odd.

Non-Fiction: Watch This Space – Designing, Defending, and Sharing Public Spaces

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One of the best books I read in my life has been Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place. The book is a treatise on the value of the third place — somewhere people can go that is not centered on consumerism and is neither work or home. Think cafes in Europe, pedestrian malls, libraries, museums, even the internet.

Hadley Dyer and Marc Ngui, a pair of Canadians, have taken this idea and made it accessible to a younger audience. Watch This Space: Defending, Designing, and Sharing Public Spaces is a non-fiction, fast-paced, and engaging read directed at teenagers that seeks to highlight how important it is to have safe spaces in the world where teens can interact with one another and with all members of society. The book is colorful and quick to connect to, and it serves a great purpose in defining what a public space is and why it is important for teenagers to care about these things.

A quick overview of the history and intricacies of designing public spaces was quite interesting: when I was a teenager, there weren’t a lot of mall restrictions, for example, but the authors highlight how many malls have implemented rules meant to keep teenagers out or from congregating. Dyer and Ngui repeat throughout, though, that malls AREN’T public spaces; rather, they serve as an example of what a public space should be for teenagers: appealing, spacious, well-lit, and inviting to partake in any number of safe activities.

In addition to defining and illustrating the history of public spaces, this book gives teenagers a list of HOW to get involved with their communities. There is a do-it-yourself activity in designing a space, as well as a list of places where teenage input is valued (including things like the public library’s teen advisory board).

Be aware, though, there is a definite bias in this book, much like there is in Oldenburg’s book, and that bias is against the American life style. That’s not to say there is a bashing of it in any way, but as a reader I was quick to sense that there was the belief that the American mode was inadequate and there was little work in improving it. I don’t necessarily believe that, though some of the points made were valid — a lot is also overlooked in the progress America has been making in developing public spaces in a suburban-dominated country.

Watch This Space is a book that would be a fantastic book discussion choice. It can be read quickly and discussed in one session. I think teens would get easily fired up about this and could easily become motivated to get involved in their worlds. A good book talker can sell this one without problem. I think there is a real opportunity to pique the interest of socially conscious teens who may be coming back asking for some of the titles of books by well-known sociologists quoted throughout. The book is a worthy title for adults to read, too, especially those who work with teens or think that teens are often forgotten about in our world — you, too, may be motivated to be their advocates.

The Real Estate

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I’ve mentioned once or twice I am a pretty big non-fiction reader. I don’t review a lot of it because much is super specific and wouldn’t have wide appeal. But today’s your big day. I’m giving you a quick peek into a few of the real estate books I’ve read and found to be quite readable and interesting.

House Lust by Daniel McGinn was one of the first books on this topic I read and fell in love with. McGinn is a writer for Newsweek, so his style was fluid and easy to follow.

This particular title published January 2008, right around the crash of the housing market. But, considering how long it takes to research and write, this book was put together right as the housing market was where there was a ton of money to be made. I read it in the summer of 2008, so the housing market was just beginning to nose dive.

McGinn’s book discusses how American culture has always had an obsession with housing, and in the high times of real estate, there was a ton of money to be made (and spent!). This book focuses very little on the financing aspects of real estate and much more on how we obsess with what features a home has, what areas of the home need to have the most value, and perhaps the part I loved most, our obsession with reality home television. It was interesting to learn how people began falling in love with HGTV’s House Hunters and with the obsession we have with the notion of square footage and price per square foot, the writers of the show rewrote it to include this information.

This is also the book where I learned about the power of the website Zillow. Did you know people used to hold (and maybe still do!) hold Zillow parties where they’d get together and price all of the homes in the area to see where they stood up?

If the social aspect of real estate interests you, this is a good pick. I noted in my review of this title 2 years ago that I found his style a little grating and that some of the really interesting stuff (to me!) got less time than I wish it did. Thinking back on this title in comparison with the two I’m going to talk about next, this is a terrifying look at how the real estate market got to where it is now. I might need to reread it, simply to see where the signs were so clear. This will both interest and sicken readers, which is what a good piece of non-fiction should do. Check out the website if you want more info or want to read an excerpt.

So, now that we know about the obsession American culture has with homes, how about what happens when we can’t afford what we lust for? Alyssa Katz, in Our Lot, published in June 2009, deep in the heart of recession. Of course, take some of that with a grain of salt when you consider the time period of her writing and researching.

Katz, like McGinn, is a journalist and writes for a number of outlets. In Our Lot, she tackles the topic of American greed and how it ultimately came to cause the collapse of the housing market. She writes fluidly — and with less grate then McGinn — making a book that could otherwise be overwhelming with its jargon and technicality on banking and financing really accessible. And utterly terrifying.

I read this book while trying to get my own mortgage, and it made me eternally grateful for the struggles we had in attaining our financing. Reading about how bankers utterly deceived people in order to build a profit made me sick to my stomach, and it made me reevaluate how I had perceived the great real estate collapse (more on this in a second). For the most part, I thought it was even-handed politically. Katz gives us some insight, too, into how we can get our obsessions in check for a much sounder, safer real estate world. This book will teach you a lot about the banking side of real estate, and it should be read in companion to House Lust.

If you want more information, she maintains a nice real estate and financing blog on her website.

Last, but certainly not least, I finished up Edmund Andrews’s May 2009 title Busted this week. If Katz’s title can be called a good look at the “faceless” side of real estate, I think that Andrews’s title could be called the face of greed.

Andrews is a journalist for The New York Times and more specifically, an economic reporter pulling in a 6-digit salary every year. In the midst of the housing frenzy, he chose to invest in a house on a low-doc mortgage well beyond anything he could ever imagine to afford. HE KNEW THIS going in, and yet, he followed his lust and jumped into it.

Busted does a little bit of what Katz’s book does in unraveling the complexities of the housing collapse on the banking side, but what made this book stand out to me was that Andrews himself is a person facing foreclosure and the loss of his house. He gives us the background into how banks were misleading underrepresented groups with subprime lending, as well as how bankers and underwriters were approving (and even encouraging) applicants to lie or not even mention important things like income in their mortgage applications. Reading this after the hellacious experience I had getting a mortgage made me grateful again it was such a horrible experience.

That said, this book shows us the utter greed people like Andrews brought to the collapse of the housing market. He, with his 6-figure job, background in economics, and education, knew better than to do what he did, but because he was lusting after more (see House Lust), he chose to jump in anyway. And it doesn’t work. This is his attempt to document it.

Unfortunately, while this book reads well and does a good job of putting a face to the crisis, I never once felt sympathetic for Andrews. I felt even less sympathetic when I found out later he omitted some pretty important details in his experiences (like the fact his new wife had filed for bankruptcy twice). Reading this in conjunction with Katz’s title, though, was important because it emphasizes that there was no one cause for why real estate fell to pieces. It was a combination of greed from a number of sources, as well as deception from a number of sources. Bonus: he has a little report, too, in the NYT for your reading pleasure.

If you have even the slightest interest in our current plight, read these. Read them each with a grain of salt, of course, as you would any non-fiction title. They will inform you and inform each other. Even if you have no background in real estate or financing, you will find all three accessible (and skimmable for if you find yourself bored by some details).