Customer Reviews

Living Cheaply With Style: Live Better and Spend Less

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and quite a few stupid things, too, including hitchhiking as a viable transportation method. Many other books will give you much more info than this one. The real goal of this book is in the last chapter (yes, I read it all) - buy less. Buy less because it is better on the Earth, on your budget & on your health. I suggest you save on all of the above and don't buy this book.

I have immensely enjoyed Callenbach's Ecotopia books (part of the weirdness that is Mamalinde?) but found this tome practically useless. Yes, we HAVE become consumer zombies, and a reconnect with reality is necessary and desirable. While I might not embrace the suburban ideal I also have to decline many of Callenbach's ideas: powdered milk, building my own furniture, using a public hospital, going on welfare, scavenging old food at the grocery store, living in a mobile home or a gypsy wagon, and raising bees are not what I consider viable stylishness.

Callenbach's ideas are wildly opinionated (but what did I expect) and way too out there to entice most of the consumer zombies to do anything but laugh. He does say some important things about packaging, advertising, and brand names, as well as the ever insidious "planned obsolescence" consumers buy into with regularity. This is a well thought out and constructed book, but one with little practical value for this user.

I bought this book thinking it would be a new and modern upgrade to the 1990's edition with reference to the internet, more ideas in the modern world type of thing. Well, I was dissappointed, if anything it is a watered down version of my old favorite (the 1990's version is my favorite), the new one is the old one with larger print and fewer pages... Stuff must have been cut out.

I really enjoyed the previous version and would read it for enjoyment and diversion often, but the latest copy 2000, is really bad. I recommend going to a used bookstore and getting the older version.

This book's suggestions are simple, basic and despite that, not deeply explained. They seem to be aimed at big city apartment-dwellers, but no such 'disclaimer' is stated. Thankfully, I checked this book out of the library rather than spending money on it. Do yourself a favor and buy another book with some meat to its frugal suggestions.

I, too, enjoyed the previous version, "Living Poor With Style" -- enough that I remembered that book for however many decades it's been. I expected this book to be equally useful and thought-provoking, and to have at least some new ideas.

Man ALIVE, I couldn't have been more wrong. Looks to me like the author "blew the dust off" the old book and got a publisher to reissue it with a new cover. (Though, actually, I remember the old book being... well, SMARTER than this one, too. Admittedly, however, allowing for my standards changing over the decades, so I'm probably wrong about that part.)

Anyway, for goodness' sake, be smarter than I was and buy 10,001 Ways to Live Large on a Small Budget instead -- now, THAT book is impressive -- up to date and FULL of thought-provoking ideas and further resources. (THAT book is actually quite a bit better even than I EXPECTED this book to be.)

Now in a thoroughly revised and updated second edition, Ernest Callenbach's Living Cheaply With Style: Live Better & Spend Less is written and designed for the reader wanting to choosing gracious living over rampant consumerism, who seeks to live carefully and ecologically on a comfortable income with enough time to experience and enjoy their life. Callenbach has filled this little guide to inexpensive, gracious living with a wealth of money saving tips on food, housing, clothing, furniture, child rearing, travel, transportation, and more. Whether just starting out as a young independent adult, or entering one's golden years of retirement, Living Cheaply With Style will prove one of the most valuable money management and life-style guides you will have ever encountered.

I had borrowed "Living Poor With Style" from a friend long ago, when I was able to buy a "revised" copy it was "The Ecotopian Encyclopedia" or something and it seemed to have been substantially watered down. I'm reluctant to order this title, I want the OLD version, I want the unvarnished original version. Perhaps it is "stuck in the Sixties" but you know what? I unapologetically believe in those values and have lived my entire life following them, although I was ten years late, I was a kid in the 60s. Crunchy granola through and through. What's so funny about peace, love and understanding? Unshackle yourself from chasing quatloos (anyone remember the original Star Trek?) and your life is greatly improved -- the original version of this book was very helpful to me. I wish I could find the original title without any of the dubious "improvements" Callenbach made over the years. Be true to the dreams of your youth. Be true to yourself. Be strong.