Helpful Score: 15
Thought this was going to be a very interesting book, but being from the Midwest I couldn't relate to the type of lifestyle that the author lived. Her notion of necessities certainly don't match those of most midwesterners. Would be an interested study to be replicated by someone from the Midwest who didn't have the opportunites that the author had (i.e. free days to go to a premier museum, current foreign film theatres, small markets with really cheap prices, etc).
Didn't like how the end of the book really went into mainly politics I doubt your average American can afford to give a couple of hundred dollars to a political party.
I will say this, it was an extremely interesting concept for a book.
Didn't like how the end of the book really went into mainly politics I doubt your average American can afford to give a couple of hundred dollars to a political party.
I will say this, it was an extremely interesting concept for a book.
Helpful Score: 15
This wasn't nearly as entertaining as I expected it to be...too many political forays and "preachy" statements. Good reading when the author and hubby just discussed how they made accommodations by not buying...I learned to skip the opinionated parts and enjoy the rest.
Elizabeth R. (esjro) -
Helpful Score: 10
I was disappointed in this book. The premise is an interesting one and in fairness it was probably difficult to get a book's length worth of material from the experiment. Not Buying It is told in diary format, but many of the entries are mini essays on consumer culture, globalization, etc. I enjoyed the sections when she met with individuals living off the grid and it was interesting to read about groups concerned about consumerism. Ultimately however I found many sections of the books boring - the author spent a lot of time rambling about problems that are so big that, by her own admission, an individual checking out of shopping for a year will have no impact on solving. That reality is so depressing that I was left wondering why she bothered in the first place with this experiment, and why I bought this book.
Helpful Score: 9
This book is mostly a rapidly-becoming-dated political screed about the author's feelings about the president, conservatives, and capitalism. If you don't share her politics (and possibly even if you do, because her musings aren't all that interesting or well-written), the book doesn't have much to offer. She spends more time flogging the Bush administration than she does exploring her own assumptions about which aspects of her own lifestyle count as "necessary" and which are "luxuries" afforded to her by the privileged place she occupies in society. All in all, this book was a disappointment.
Helpful Score: 8
The repetitive tangents espousing the author's personal politics completely ruined what could have been an interesting memoir. I wish she had attempted her experiment in a non-election year so I didn't have to read ad nauseum about her disgust with the outcome; I wonder what she would have spent those 50 pages writing about. Perhaps the intended topic of the book?
Disappointing and only mildly entertaining.
Disappointing and only mildly entertaining.
