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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
lots of food for thought, June 9, 2000
This review is from: Beyond Jennifer & Jason: An Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby (Mass Market Paperback)
I think of this as kind of a "companion" book for people researching names - I don't know that it would really fill the bill to be the one and only source a couple uses to make their final decision, but it really motivates you to put some effort into coming up with the most permanent gift you will ever give your child. Whether or not one agrees with the highly subjective evaluations the authors give names on many levels, the book provides food for thought on aspects I certainly wouldn't have thought about. Plus: it reads amazingly easily - as opposed to 99% of other books I ploughed through, which became a chore. One weakness: names from other cultural backgrounds. While these are included - and not just as politically correct oddities, but as valid and even "hip" choices - I question where they were drawn from or how chosen for inclusion. As a native German speaker, I was very interested to see the German list. Given that it was, as can be expected, small (for more extensive lists I would logically look elsewhere than this type of book)I was surprised at how many names were inlcluded that I had never heard of before - much less known anyone of that name. If the German list was so skewed, I would assume that other language groups were as well.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best baby name book around -- useful & hysterically funny, January 28, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Beyond Jennifer & Jason: An Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby (Mass Market Paperback)
This is a fantastic book. I've read virtually the whole baby name genre and there's nothing else out there half this funny or half this useful. The only other baby name book I ever recommend is another book by the same pair of authors -- The Last Word on First Names -- but the books are so different that you really need to read both books. Before my first pregnancy, I'd never given much consideration to baby name books; I'd always felt pretty confident that I would be able to come up with the perfect names for my children right out of my own head. But once confronted with the huge task of choosing a name out of the thousands and thousands of possible names, I realized I needed some help. And, since I'm one of those people who really likes to research things and explore my options, I went shopping for name books. Most books just present you with long boring lists of boys'& girls' names -- very much like reading a dictionary -- and don't put the names in any useful sort of perspective. Rosenkrantz and Satran, however, present the names in a series of really helpful lists, ie., trendy names, popular names, cool names,names you probably want to avoid and so on. I really appreciated the lists of celebrity baby names because those names tend to become very trendy and common a few years down the line and I wasn't interested in bestowing too-usual a name on any of my children. Thus the title -- Beyond Jennifer & Jason. But the main thing with this book is that it's a great read. Even if you aren't expecting a baby, this book is incredibly funny. I found all the lists were helpful to me in sorting out a lot of my baby-expectations. Did I want to give my boys smart-sounding names, handsome names, macho names. . . ? The authors are never less than brutally frank with their opinions, classifying names as wimpy or downwardly mobile and the result is never less than an extremely funny, helpful and revealing book.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good for brainstorming, but..., January 14, 2000
By A Customer
My wife Jennifer and I (Jason, believe it or not) received this book as a sort of gag gift. Initially, we found it useful for naming our baby. However, as other reviewers have mentioned, the book does not include much in the way or origins or meanings, if that is important to you. Also, the book seems to spend as much time detailing "bad" and "old" names as it does suggesting new, fresh ones. We also found quite a bit of repetition between the authors' various categories. Overall, we found the book useful and amusing at first, but I'm not sure it helped us to finalize our baby's name. If you are looking for a "traditional" or "conservative" name, this may not be the book for you. But if you want to go off the beaten path, I would think that this would be a good place to start...
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