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M. Harris' Profile
Customer Reviews: 22
New Reviewer Rank: 63,404
Classic Reviewer Rank: 25,053
Helpful Votes:
130
Views:
1537
Helpful Votes:
6
Views:
Helpful Votes:
0
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Reviews Written by
M. Harris
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The Year of Yes
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by Maria Dahvana Headley
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: $12.95 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Caricatured tales of the heart told by someone quite heartless ..., May 30, 2008
One of the most dangerous traits of someone with a way with words is the ability they have of facile persuasion. The reader (or listener) becomes entranced from the way the message is told, without listening to what message is actually being said.
There is no question whatsoever that the author, a playwright, has a gift with words. She writes extremely well.
But the story told is, when reduced to its essences, the story of a woman who finds fault with suitor after suitor, only to find her future spouse -- a man who she knew prior to the "Year of Yes" -- faultless upon their encounter. Perhaps it's too much to ask from a woman priding herself on her New York toughness, but throughout the book, the "freakish" qualities of each dalliance are brought to the forefront, with little thought to uniqueness or the actual personhood of each of those men beneath the caricature she draws for us. Remember, a caricature is a quick sketch in which the most prominent attributes of someone are highlighted and exaggerated even beyond their reality for the sake of humor. This is, spot on, precisely the definition of what the author paints for her readers of each of these men and women from her "Year of Yes."
When she meets her future husband -- again, I reemphasize, a man who she knew prior to the Year of Yes, strongly suggesting to this reader that none of her suitors were ever in the running for anything more than a coolly-made valuation for what visceral experience they could lend to her life -- she sees no flaws in him. Were he to have ended up not being her husband but merely one of the other myriad of men she marched through her life, we no doubt would have instead seen such qualities as his crying and the (technical) infidelity, or some other attribute that wives and husbands easily overlook in the course of their love. (Or were the Actor to have ended up being her husband, the version of their romance we were told would have been far more idyllic.)
Do I sound angry? It is, perhaps, because the quality of compassion means a great deal to me.
Throughout the book, as she is a good author, I had been empathizing with her struggles throughout her Year of Yes. Once I began to conclude the book's final chapter, however, it was a bit of a shock for me to realize at the end that the tales of the heart which we had been told were, in fact, spoken from someone who, throughout the book, had in fact been quite heartless until her long-desired love finally came to her.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Myra Scovel's Grandson Comments on Selling a Memoir in the Public Domain, March 4, 2008
I am the grandson of Myra Scovel, the author of this book.
I would like people contemplating a purchase of this book to know that this book is in the public domain, and thus available to them for free. It was copyrighted in 1962, and American books written between 1923 and 1963 had to have their copyright renewed 28 years after publication, or, as what happened with my grandmother's memoir, the text becomes part of the public domain.
The Internet Archive has made my grandmother's book available for free online. Amazon does not permit me to include a URL in a review, but using any of the popular search engines, you can search for "Internet Archive" (use quotes), and, once there, type this book's title into their search engine in order to find my grandmother's book on it. There, you can download copies in whatever format is convenient for you, at no cost to you whatsoever.
Or, you could of course pay Kessinger Publishing $23 to have them send you a bound print copy. I'd ask you to bear in mind that my grandmother's descendents do not see one penny from Kessinger's sales, since no royalties are due on public domain texts. Nor was Kessinger Publishing my grandmother's original publisher.
Frankly, I would rather you have the opportunity to read my grandmother's memoir for free rather, than for you to pay $23 of profit to these people who have repurposed the public domain for their own profit. As a fan and proponent of the Creative Commons and the public domain, I find that business model rather offensive.
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Sign Companies Should Advertise Correctly Spelled Signs, November 20, 2007
This product would be all the more impressive were the boat's name spelled correctly. As it stands, a profanity not present in the correct spelling is glaringly (and hilariously) obvious.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Light on technique and obnoxiously worded ..., June 14, 2007
This book does have value, but it has extremely serious flaws.
As others have pointed out, the book is heavy on explanatory material and inspirational biographies and light on technique. Additionally, its spacious graphic design and large font seem to have been chosen to make fewer words fill more pages.
Significantly, this book was OBNOXIOUSLY gynocentric in its word choices. Not only was there not one single male pronoun in the book, there were very few entirely gender-neutral sentences (even references to "someone" were quickly followed up with "she", etc.). It was, "a woman feels", "she may", etc. As a man reading the text, this had the effect of constantly distancing me from the advice being given. Yet I think female readers might equally find insult in the book's similar assumption that its female readers are exclusively straight and exclusively married -- with no references to boyfriends or partners, only to husbands and children. If the concept of emotional eating were not so (relatively) new, I would have suspected the text to have been imported whole from the 1950s.
I also cannot help but laugh at the irony of what a poor choice of titles this is. For people who are dealing with loneliness, self-blame, and anger, asking them to carry around a book whose cover features, in extremely large letters, the words "STOP STUFFING YOURSELF!" can only be an exercise in cruelty, if unintentional cruelty.
I will not say this book was useless (which is why I won't give it a single star) — it did contain some phrases, concepts, and techniques I found useful, but nowhere near enough in number to justify anything more than a handout. I imagine emotional eating must be covered much more adroitly in other texts, and I urge you to investigate them and not this.
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19 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
An incredibly major lemon ... do NOT buy ..., February 28, 2007
This scale fails at the two tasks required of a scale. It fails to weigh me accurately and it is so small that my feet do not fit on the entirety of the glass. I can step on the scale three times and each time get a separate reading. In one remarkable case this morning, I stepped on the scale, got one reading, and stepped on once more and got a reading that was eight pounds -- yes, EIGHT pounds -- higher than the first reading. I have never had such joy chucking an object into the dumspter as I experienced disposing of this horrid piece of crap that took $50 of my hard-earned money and did nothing of what it was built for. Weight Watchers usually has a fairly good track record, but its partnership with Conair to create scales has led to a line of nothing but lemons; I highly recommend against their brand in this case!
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15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
A fantastic show -- but you can't look past charging double!, December 22, 2006
When Amazon asks us for customer reviews, they are asking us for reviews not of the show alone, but of this particular offering: this show's presentation on this DVD set. As such, my review is tempered. Were I able to rank this offering solely and merely on its content, five stars would not be sufficient. I strongly believe that this is perhaps one of the finest -- and possibly THE finest -- of all the various shows that have hit the airwaves within the last few years. Ron Moore's writing is taut and gripping, the acting is first-rate, touches of humor abound, and human relationships take center stage, even amongst those inhuman, despite spectacular eye candy (and candy of both the CGI and slinky kind!).
That all having been strongly emphasized first, the mercenary rate at which NBC/Universal Studios has chosen to price its Battlestar Galactica offerings simply cannot be ignored. Season 1 was only 13 episodes, yet it was priced at $60. The two individual half-season offerings are only 10 episodes each, yet they're priced at $50. That works out to $4.61 an episode for season one, $4.99 an episode for seasons "2.0" and "2.5." For comparative purposes, a comparable hit, "Lost", offered its 24-episode second season for $60, which is half that: $2.50 an episode.
This product would easily receive five stars were it only to be priced at a rate designed to be equal to those offered for other television seasons. As it stands, charging full price for half-content is an act extremely insulting for a show that has received such emphatic and enthusiastic support, and NBC/Universal Studios should behave better; the review is thus downgraded accordingly. I would, in fact, downgrade it to a single star, except that I cannot bear to go on record as having given this fine series such a low rating. I would gladly rate this a full five stars were the season offered for a price reasonable for a 13-episode season (say in the $30-35 range); as it is, charging a $60 list price for a 13-episode first season, or a combined $100 list price for a 20-episode second season, even one this good, can only be termed massive gluttony and avarice on NBC/Universal's part.
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A fantastic show -- but you can't look past charging double!, December 22, 2006
When Amazon asks us for customer reviews, they are asking us for reviews not of the show alone, but of this particular offering: this show's presentation on this DVD set. As such, my review is tempered. Were I able to rank this offering solely and merely on its content, five stars would not be sufficient. I strongly believe that this is perhaps one of the finest -- and possibly THE finest -- of all the various shows that have hit the airwaves within the last few years. Ron Moore's writing is taut and gripping, the acting is first-rate, touches of humor abound, and human relationships take center stage, even amongst those inhuman, despite spectacular eye candy (and candy of both the CGI and slinky kind!).
That all having been strongly emphasized first, the mercenary rate at which NBC/Universal Studios has chosen to price its Battlestar Galactica offerings simply cannot be ignored. Season 1 was only 13 episodes, yet it was priced at $60. The two individual half-season offerings are only 10 episodes each, yet they're priced at $50. That works out to $4.61 an episode for season one, $4.99 an episode for seasons "2.0" and "2.5." For comparative purposes, a comparable hit, "Lost", offered its 24-episode second season for $60, which is half that: $2.50 an episode.
This product would easily receive five stars were it only to be priced at a rate designed to be equal to those offered for other television seasons. As it stands, charging full price for half-content is an act extremely insulting for a show that has received such emphatic and enthusiastic support, and NBC/Universal Studios should behave better; the review is thus downgraded accordingly. I would, in fact, downgrade it to a single star, except that I cannot bear to go on record as having given this fine series such a low rating. I would gladly rate this a full five stars were the complete season offered for a $60 list price; as it is, charging a $60 list price for a 13-episode first season, or a combined $100 list price for a 20-episode second season, even one this good, can only be termed massive gluttony and avarice on NBC/Universal's part.
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14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
A fantastic show -- but you can't look past charging double!, December 22, 2006
When Amazon asks us for customer reviews, they are asking us for reviews not of the show alone, but of this particular offering: this show's presentation on this DVD set. As such, my review is tempered. Were I able to rank this offering solely and merely on its content, five stars would not be sufficient. I strongly believe that this is perhaps one of the finest -- and possibly THE finest -- of all the various shows that have hit the airwaves within the last few years. Ron Moore's writing is taut and gripping, the acting is first-rate, touches of humor abound, and human relationships take center stage, even amongst those inhuman, despite spectacular eye candy (and candy of both the CGI and slinky kind!).
That all having been strongly emphasized first, the mercenary rate at which NBC/Universal Studios has chosen to price its Battlestar Galactica offerings simply cannot be ignored. Season 1 was only 13 episodes, yet it was priced at $60. The two individual half-season offerings are only 10 episodes each, yet they're priced at $50. That works out to $4.61 an episode for season one, $4.99 an episode for seasons "2.0" and "2.5." For comparative purposes, a comparable hit, "Lost", offered its 24-episode second season for $60, which is half that: $2.50 an episode.
This product would easily receive five stars were it only to be priced at a rate designed to be equal to those offered for other television seasons. As it stands, charging full price for half-content is an act extremely insulting for a show that has received such emphatic and enthusiastic support, and NBC/Universal Studios should behave better; the review is thus downgraded accordingly. I would, in fact, downgrade it to a single star, except that I cannot bear to go on record as having given this fine series such a low rating. I would gladly rate this a full five stars were the complete season offered for a $60 list price; as it is, charging a $60 list price for a 13-episode first season, or a combined $100 list price for a 20-episode second season, even one this good, can only be termed massive gluttony and avarice on NBC/Universal's part.
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7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
A tragically missed opportunity to chronicle an amazing accomplishment ..., June 30, 2005
This was the first book I ever tossed in the trash. I did so after having attempted four times over the course of a year to make it through this book. It proved impossible. Anderson's book began its life as blog entries, and the material did not transform well at all.
The material is comprised of either the rather boring life minutae one would find in a weblog entry, or, worse, what I must unkindly call 'psychobabble' - material that oft seems poorly rehashed from other motivational sources. The overly frequent motivational material proves quite uninspiring, and, when taken cumulatively, becomes both exasperating and flaccid.
The complete and utter failure of this text is very tragic, since the battle Anderson fought is flabbergasting in its difficulty and his accomplishment in and of itself is amazing and deserves high respect. A more aptly written tale of the journey from extremely morbid obesity to a fit physique could have proved both inspirational and life-changing to a wide audience. But this particular journal of his journey is far too lacking in simple human emotion and far too overladen with recycled stale platitudes to be of any use to the great majority of people seeking to emulate Anderson's journey.
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6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Net Force Goes Red State, January 31, 2005
Prompted by the November 2004 elections, Net Force loses all of that namby-pamby commie pinko bleeding heart liberal bullhockey and becomes tough as nunchucks! With its usual sense of subtlety (guided by the precept of "why use a chisel when you can use a sledgehammer?"), Perry and Segriff wedge neocon appeasement into every corner and crevice they can! Net Force gets adopted by the Marines! TEN-HUT! John Howard starts proselytizing Net Force staff! Everyone proposes to people they've just met last week! Everyone accepts! MARRIAGES EVERYWHERE! "Smokin' Jay" Gridley loses the "smokin" and spends most of the book in a state of whining angst! And that's not all you get for your $7.99! Act now, and you'll get stereotypical depictions of the French as arrogant snobs! Plus, strong female role models like Saji becoming crying messes, as well as women being depicted as nude sex objects for most of the book! (Where the heck's Toni Fiorella when you need her?) And ... oh ... a little bit of a plot dropped in here and there! Good blippin' grief, what the heck happened to this series? [Sadly, I should point out that not one plot element above was invented or exaggerated for this review.]
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