Customer Reviews

Beyond Jennifer & Jason : The New Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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...

I'll be honest with you. I have two children already, and I used this book to help select names for both of them. I even wrote margin notes, and devised complicated mathematical formulas to help determine the best fit for the baby. First, the initials could not spell any horrendous words like: BAD, or SAP. Secondly, the name had to be simple and easy to spell. It's no good challenging a kindergarten student to write her name out as Rebeckka, when the teacher would be over her shoulder in an instant telling her to write it correctly. How about just Becky. Not Bekki, or Becci, or Bahki. Keep it simple. This book will show you how.

If you?re wondering why I still keep this book dog-eared on my desk I will tell you now. If you?re not interested, just skip to the end, and vote. This little book is a treasure trove of names for the scores of characters that appear in my short fiction and poems who all need unique names. The Internet has plenty of baby name sites, but this book is a lot easier than scrolling through page after page on a cranky web site that flashes annoying ads the whole time. Get this book if you're thinking of having kids, or perhaps need some help picking a nice name for that delightful mother-in-law character in your first novel. The book also comes in handy for naming pets. We have a cat named Ben, and a dog named Jack. If we ever get a fish tank, I?ll flip to the index, and start naming away.

I loved every minute of reading this book. I have read it cover to cover at least 3 times. I keep it by my bed and reread parts of it when I can't sleep. This book is incredibly helpful. I have let friends borrow it and have even purchased an extra copy for one of my good friends. I highly reccommend this book to everyone. I love it and I'm not even pregnant!!!!!

I found this book very interesting and amusing at times, and since reading it, I have developed an obsession with names. I was impressed with their idea to separate the book into four categories, and I especially liked Image. I believe that these two talented writers are truly experts on the subject. I found that they knew exactly which names fell under what categories. Congratulations on a great book, and here's hoping that another edition will be published in later years.

Beyond Jennifer and Jason and Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby is a good name book and has interesting catagories and ideas but some of the names they say are outdated and too old fashioned actually seem to be making comebacks. Other then that it's a fun book to read.Only other complaint I really have is that they give some very interesting names but don't give the pronunciations but I did like this book and I recommend it, but just be aware that it's not your typical name book where the boy and girl names are seperate and listed alpabetically and is really rather random.

This book lacks substance--no origin, unorganized and poorly researched. If you want to see the origin of the names, an excellent researched book of baby names, I strongly recommend the "Dictionary of First Names" by Adrian Room.

Innovative and interesting. Useful for those of us who want more than a list of names and their meanings. I particularly liked the analysis of naming trends and the connotations that names have.

When my wife got pregnant, we had no shortage of ideas for baby names. I don't need some psycho-babble to tell me whether the name we pick out will be good or not.