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Book Review of It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff

It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff
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Helpful Score: 3


I'll edit this review in the future, to be more useful, but for the time being - I'm disgusted by this book (and really, really, really disgusted to see it eagerly wished-for on PBS). The concept sounds fine: you own too much junk, and it's starting to own you. The solution? Get rid of it? Not exactly - throw it away is Walsh's specific solution. And while that might make great TV (in my opinion, it's moronic TV, too) but it's irresponsible and trite.

The first section of the book, you can skip entirely, because this guy is just too damn chatty. I don't need to know all this stuff, and he's not exactly informative, just chatty. He finally gets to the point in part two and then, immediately, starts babbling again. I do not need to be psycho-analyzed by a professional organizer, a career option that shouldn't even exist.

What I want, and want he provides in the way of organizing, could have been printed on a leaflet, thereby saving me a couple hundred pages of clutter in the form of the book. Instead, I've got this guy blah-blah-blahing his way to a point. The point: Take all the stuff that you don't want, need, use or care about and over-stuff the already overflowing landfills so that my children, and yours, can what? live in a clutter-free home between mountains of garbage on a planet slowly dying from the amount of garbage we make?

Sickening. Read the book, if you're really incapable of handling your own clutter. It's got some decent ideas about WHAT to part with. But have a garage sale, donate it, recycle it, give it away (and I'll credit the schmoe for mentioning these things, but because he doesn't push these ideas anywhere near as hard as he pushes "throw it in the garbage", he gets jack in the way of stars for it) - don't keep adding to the horrific amount of trash we make. I'm literally appalled by this thing. And I will, indeed, be posting the book on PBS: recycling is GOOD! Walsh is half-baked. 2 stars, no more - and here's a real bit of de-cluttering advice: stop wasting space in your house on books that tell you how to de-clutter it.