Thursday, February 20, 2014

Dignity is a Renewable Resource by Shanna Goodman



This book was acquired free from the author in exchange for a review.

Dignity is a Renewable Resource is labelled as a self-improvement book that attempts to show the reader how to face their fears by trying new things. The author does something new each month for a year in order to experience new things she has never done while facing her fears.

The book has a simple format - describe an experience and how she went to tackle it. This formula repeats for half the book, and gets old very fast. Most of these simply state "I was scared, I tried it, and it was not that bad." There is not much more beyond this simple statement to summarize each section, and not much for the reader to extract from this information. This is the main part of the book, yet it only covers half of it and feels like not enough time was spent on it.

The second half of the book is a disaster; if you thought the first part sounded lacking, this part will definitely disappoint you. The author talks about her experience leaving a company she had believed in at first, but then lost faith it. Through many pages she talks about it as if she thought you already knew about it. Throughout these pages, information is constantly repeated, with the vibe of the author stating "Yeah, I was right." many times.

After this, it seems that the author had to fill a page quota. She ends up talking about random things that do not have any relevance to the purpose of the book. The worst part by far is when she talks about Obama following her on Twitter for several pages. Remember when the book promised self-improvement? Well, you can forget that, because Obama (United States President) follows her on Twitter! Forget facing your fears and focus on getting Obama to follow you!

Dignity is a Renewable Resource is a book that simply accomplishes nothing. This idea was based off a blog, but the author should have known that a book is not a blog. You can change your posts in a blog any time you want, but you cannot change the fact that this book is a very worthless piece for anyone who is trying to get some self-improvement. If you want a cheap laugh at some poor writing, then this is the book for you.