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Mark Di Vincenzo knows the best times of the day, the week, the month, the year, and a life to do a variety of things—and he shares his amazing expertise in Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon. A fascinating, entertaining, and eminently useful compendium of everything from the mundane (the best time of day to go grocery shopping, the best day to buy an iPod, the best month to visit Disney World) to the serious (the best time to buy or sell a home, to get married), Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon proves that timing is everything. Here is information you need in tough economic times to save time and money.
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“The breezy little paperback offers hundreds of tips from the former investigative reporter, whose research is evident and sources carefully listed at the end. That keeps the attribution from cluttering up the info, which ranges from sublime to silly.” (Los Angeles Times/Travel blog )
“Food for thought.” (Boston Globe )
“Sure to liven up a boring cocktail party . . . [W]ill enlighten, surprise, even disappoint you.” (Houston Chronicle )
“Straightforward.” (Richmond Times-Dispatch )
“Full of amusing and helpful timing tips.” (Sacramento Bee )
“Strangely compelling.” (The Guardian )
“[Di Vincenzo] doles out advice with practical reasoning . . . [U]seful and interesting.” (Cleveland Plain Dealer )
“[Di Vincenzo] gets into the nitty-gritty of why timing really is everything.” (Chicago Tribune )
From the Back Cover
Have you ever wanted to know the best day of the week to buy groceries or go out to dinner?
Have you ever wondered about the best time of day to ask someone out on a date—or for a raise?
Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon tells you the best time—of the day, of the week, of the month or of the year—to do almost anything. Do you know:
The best time of day to be operated on?
The best month to buy an iPod?
The best day of the week to avoid lines at the Louvre?
The best day of the month to make an offer on a house?
Get more for your money, maximize your time, take better care of your health and be savvier about your career—all by doing certain things at the right time.
AUTHOR As a journalist with nearly a quarter century of experience, I've exposed abuses and been described as a writer who makes the complicated seem simple.
During a two-year stint as a reporter on the two-person state desk of a small daily newspaper along the southern shores of Lake Erie, I was the first reporter in Ohio to write about the state's first AIDS victim and about one of the first Ohioans diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease.
From there, I moved to Virginia, to work for the Daily Press, a 100,000-plus-circulation newspaper. As a reporter there, I exposed wrongs, such as rampant abuses at public mental hospitals and decades of neglect by the agencies that monitor the environment. Newspapers from coast to coast, from The Washington Post to the Spokane (Washington) Review, published many of my stories, regardless of their length. (The Post jumped one of my stories three times, from page 1 to page 4 to page 5 to page 6 - a rarity even at a newspaper not afraid to publish lengthy stories.)
I've landed interviews with many VIPs, including Billy Graham, Jesse Jackson, Strom Thurmond and others, including Soviet generals and European royalty.
And I've won numerous awards, competing against reporters from The Washington Post, The Washington Times and The Associated Press, among others. In 1999, the Virginia Press Association created an award for the best news writing portfolio in the state - the closest thing Virginia had to a reporter-of-the-year award. I won it that year and then again in 2000. The next year I beat out reporters from The Charlotte Observer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to win the Southern Environmental Law Center's first-place journalism award. In 2001, I became the Daily Press' metro editor, shepherding and editing my reporters' award-winning stories and directing coverage of the newspaper's urban and suburban areas.
Over the years, I supplemented my newspaper work and honed my long-form writing skills by doing magazine cover stories.
During the summer of 2007, I left daily journalism to pursue book projects and long-form journalism and to start Business Writers Group, http://www.businesswritersgroup.com, a corporate writing and public relations company.
Born and reared in Cleveland, I'm a first generation American who graduated with honors from Bowling Green State University. I live in Newport News,a shipyard town in coastal Virginia that produced William Styron, Ella Fitzgerald and Pearl Bailey, with my wife, Jayne, and daughters Olivia and Sophia. My oldest daughter, Rosie, attends Oklahoma University.
This book is great for more than just lovers of trivia - it is a practical guide to life and full of "who knew" surprises that you can put into practice. The writing makes it entertaining and fun to read, but it's obvious that real research went into it. I like the way it's organized into areas of life. I grew up in California and it's true - Fall is the best time to go to Disneyland!
If you enjoy saving money, increasing your efficiency, or outsmarting the world, this is a great book for you.
Buy Ketchup in May is a fun book that lets you in on the secrets of how and when to do many of life's common activities, from when to eat dinner out (Tuesday) to when to apply ice to sunburns (never).
The book is written in a short question-and-answer format that is easy to follow and remember. I appreciated how Di Vincenzo refers to the research methods behind his answers, so the reader knows where the answers are coming from. I recently found myself quoting the book in a conversation with friends about when to buy airline tickets. And the book covers so many different topics that it's hard to imagine a month going by without using at least one of his recommendations. For me, the book paid for itself right after I got it. The book pointed out that pants often go on deep discounts after back to school. So when October came around, I decided to test out this claim. I ended up buying a pair of nice $70 pants for $35!
So if you like useful information that will help you save money and increase your efficiency, definitely get this book!
Could be the perfect gift book as the holidays approach, and its no coincidence that it just showed up on NYT's How-to Bestseller list. To coin a phrase, this is the kind of thing a person on your gift list will really like, if they like this sort of thing.
Really there is not much insight here, and after having heard Di Vincenzo pitch the book on NPR, his methodlogy is not exactly the rigorous stuff or peer reviewed economics research (or even journalism for that matter).
There are just not enough (or enough interesting) stories-behind-the-stories for his tips. The ketchup gambit is titleworthy, but much of the rest is common sense.
Get the first surgical appointment of the day? Fly midday, midweek and you'll save money? Buy stuff when the people selling are inclined to make better deals? No big surprises.
The book might be the perfect gift for that reader who loves quirky insight and the trivial made useful. It may even inspire ten minutes of communal reading and good conversation around the tree when unwrapped. For those reasons, its a three; but, this is really a two-star read with perfect timing.
