The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying and Selling a Home by Shelley O’Hara and Nancy D. Lewis

 

Reviewed by: Chris

Title: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying and Selling a Home

Author: Shelley O’Hara and Nancy D. Lewis

Collection: Adult Non-fiction

Summer is the busiest time of year for home buying and selling, and like many other people, my wife and I are in the market for a new home, our first.  I know a good bit about the local housing market because I’ve kept an eye on it for several years now, but I didn’t know much about the process of buying a home.  So like any good librarian, I turned to the library’s collection for help.  I was very pleased to discover that the Allegany County Library System has several books available to help us find out way along this confusing path.

Even though this particular book is almost a decade old, I think it contains a lot of excellent information.  It gives tips on everything from finding the right home for you to closing the deal, and it has special sections for second homes, condominiums, and even coops.  It also covers the subject for both the home buyer and the home seller, which provided me some good perspective.  Best of all, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying and Selling a Home puts it all into easy to understand terms that make me feel more confident as we move ahead with our plans.

The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner

   Review by: Chris

Title: The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World

Author: Eric Weiner

Collection: Adult Non-Fiction

Eric Weiner, a foreign correspondent for NPR, has certainly lived in and visited some exciting places, but none of them were particularly happy places.  A self-confessed grump, Weiner (pronounced whiner) decides to visit some happy places to see if he can figure out exactly what role environment plays in happiness.  It’s a clever premise.  Geography of Bliss is not about a certain place or a particular journey.  In fact, while Weiner does describe the appearance of most of the places he visits, it is not his focus nor are his efforts to get there.  Rather, Weiner covers a variety of obscure locations with very little in common other than the relative happiness, or unhappiness in one instance, of their populations, and his focus is on the people and their state of mind.  Each chapter of the book explores a single destination and what Weiner discerns as the general cause of its happiness.  The tone of the narrative is simultaneously witty, sarcastic, introspective, and exploratory.  I never thought I would enjoy reading about places like Qatar and Moldova, but Weiner’s approach makes them interesting, despite my very slight dislike of Weiner himself.