You Don't Have to Learn the Hard Way: Making It in the Real World: A Guide for Graduates

Life lessons bound into a book. That's what You Don't Have to Learn the Hard Way: Making It in the Real World: A Guide for Graduates is all about. Sounds simple enough, but the trick is getting your graduate to read it! I suggest mom or dad read this book before handing it over to your high school or college graduate. Although this is something that needs to be in your child's hands, mom and dad or any other concerned elder could take the lessons in this book and slowly direct them to any child of any age.

Let's examine a topic directly from the book, "First Impressions." It immediately starts off with the "old saying" that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. It's very true and most adults will tell you that 95% of the time, you are not able to change what is impressed in the first few moments of meeting someone. So how does Parrish manage to reiterate the importance of this particular life lesson? Like countless other topics his book, he's got a red bolded statement right there in the margin area: A smile is an inexpensive way to improve your looks. Wow - not only is it true, but pretty simple! Certainly he's got other great things to say, right? Yes, he does! Parrish's statement grabs the reader and invites further reading. On the next page is a numbered list of ways to make a positive impression and/or reassure someone else's impression they've made upon you. Again, it is pretty simple and easy!

Even though this book is geared towards those starting out in life, it is still applicable to those still living their life, no matter how far gone that seemingly "bright future" is. Rarely is it ever too late to learn something new and then apply it to your current situation or even life in general. Chapter 3 of You Don't Have to Learn the Hard Way: Making It in the Real World: A Guide for Graduates is all about making dreams come true. It's a lot easier to accomplish and realize your dreams when you are starting off fresh and new in life, just out of college, and ready to take the bull by the horns. Parrish gives you all the tools you need to get it done. But there are many of us who had to live life a little before we were able to realize those dreams, and for those of us who are mid-life and still have dreams, we can still use the lessons Parrish shares.

For example, Parrish reminds us that when we don't like the situation we are in, we should change it. Of course, the older you are, the harder it is to do… but it is possible! Parrish uses the bold red note in the margin to remind us that we can make our dreams come true as long as we are dedicated to it through and through. Our own thoughts, however negative or positive they may be, are what a reality becomes. It is really easy to forget these lessons between all the ins and outs of day to day life, and us "old folk" need to be reminded of this. However, for those starting out in life, it can be something that feeds their attitude towards their future and make the difference between personal and professional success or something less than desired.

Parrish tackles just about every topic under the sun that can help a young adult become successful in life, and if they read it, I do believe they will truly have the positive reinforcement they need to be successful where they dream of success. For parents and older adults needing encouragement to renew their spirit and outlook towards the world, they too will find the encouragement they need to look forward to life as opposed to just living it one day at a time.

Hopefully I can keep these great lessons fresh in my memory to share with my children and when the time is right, hand You Don't Have to Learn the Hard Way: Making It in the Real World: A Guide for Graduates over to them to read. Simply put, this is the kind of book we all need on the family bookshelf!

Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge (Excerpt #2)

The following is an excerpt from Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge by Susan Aldridge, Elizabeth King Humphrey and Julie Whitaker. You can read my review of this book here.

The Religions of the World

The map of world religions reflects the political and social history of humankind. Eternal quests for meaning, along with conquests, migration, trade, and evangelistic fervor have helped to shape the beliefs of nations and peoples alike.

Every human society has had some form of religious belief or practice. In simplest terms, religion is the belief that the world is inspired and directed by a superhuman power of some type.

Christianity, with some 2.1 billion followers, is the largest of the world's religions. Though it originally began in the Middle East, Christianity is no longer the dominant faith there. It is, however, the predominant religion in much of Europe and in North and South America.

Like some other religions, Christianity is divided into a number of different churches: In Russia, Orthodox Christianity is the leading religion. In South America, most Christians are Roman Catholics, and the same holds true in southern Europe.

Protestantism is more prevalent in both northern Europe and North America. With more than 1.5 billion adherents, Islam is the world's second most popular faith. Following the faith are most people of the Middle East and North Africa, a significant number in South and Southeast Asia, and long-standing minorities in the Balkans and eastern Europe. An influx of immigrants from former European colonies has seen the number of Muslims in Western Europe rise in recent decades.
Hinduism, the world's third largest religion, is prevalent in India, though large populations of Sikhs and Muslims can also be found on the Indian subcontinent.

Although Buddhism originated in India, the countries with the largest Buddhist populations are now China, Japan, and Southeast Asian states such as Vietnam and Thailand. Buddhism also has many followers in the Western world.

A notable exception to the dominance of Islam throughout the Middle East is Israel. Large populations of Jews are also found across Europe and North America, the latter home to more than 40 percent of the world's Jews. In fact, New York City has the second largest population of Jews of any city in the world, after Tel Aviv.

The United States is unusual for a developed nation in that a greater than usual proportion of its population holds religious beliefs, most commonly Protestant Christianity.

South America is predominantly a Catholic Christian continent. This is a legacy of the Spanish and Portugese Conquistadors, who brought the continent under colonial rule.

Africans retain many traditional religious practices in some regions. Christianity arrived more than two millennia ago, and Islam is the dominant religion of North Africa and West Africa.

India is a country of many religions. Four in every five Indians are Hindu, but there are also significant numbers of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains.

Australia is primarily Christian; however, its indigenous religions, centered around a belief in the ancient "Dreamtime" of creation, are key to its culture.

The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.

The above is an excerpt from the book Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge
A Reader's Digest book published in association with Quid Publishing. Copyright © Quid Publishing 2008.

Author Bios
Susan Aldridge has been a freelance science and medical writer for more than 15 years and has contributed to a number of magazines and websites. She lives in London.

Elizabeth King Humphrey has been a contributing writer, editorial advisor, copy editor, and co-designer for several magazines, books, and PBS documentaries. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Julie Whitaker has a master’s degree in anthropology and American studies. Whitaker has contributed to many books, including several encyclopedias. She lives on Vancouver Island, Canada.

Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge (Excerpt)

The following is an excerpt from Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge by Susan Aldridge, Elizabeth King Humphrey and Julie Whitaker. You can read my review of this book here.
Earth’s Climate: What Gives?
The Earth's average temperature has fluctuated greatly throughout its history. Today we worry about polar ice caps and glaciers melting more quickly than ever before. Still, there have been times in the past when ice and snow were virtually absent from the planet. Could we be headed for another iceless age?
The term ice age sometimes refers to periods when ice sheets were more extensive than usual. But these times are more accurately called glacials, and they occur within an ice age; the periods between glacials are called interglacials. We are now in an interglacial in what is probably the Earth's fourth great ice age. What has distinguished the last 200 years is the melting of ice at apparently unprecedented rates as the temperature of the Earth gradually grows warmer.
Climate Change
In the early nineteenth century the Swiss-German geologist Jean de Charpentier suggested that the Alpine glaciers he had been studying had at one time been far larger. Later a Swiss-American geologist, Louis Agassiz, built on Charpentier's notion and proposed that Earth at one time had been completely covered by ice.
Ice Ages Past . . .
Since then, scientific advances have contributed to our understanding of the Earth's ice ages, and it is now thought that the first major ice age occurred some 2 billion years ago. Another ice age, 850 to 630 million years ago -- probably the most severe -- may have covered the entire globe in ice, a frosty scenario known as "Snowball Earth."
The end of that ice age seems to have coincided with the evolution of a great many tiny organisms, although whether there is a causal link between these events and what they might be remains a matter of debate.
Then, between 400 and 300 million years ago, another ice age struck, and the planet was again plunged into a cold period, known as the Karoo Ice Age, named for the glacial till (sediment) found in the Karoo hills of South Africa.
. . . and Present
The current ice age began some 40,000,000 years ago, reaching its coldest period about 3,000,000 years ago. The last glacial period (often referred to inaccurately as an ice age) ended about 10,000 years ago, and the first human civilizations began to flourish shortly after. How global warming will affect Earth's cooling and warming cycles -- and, more urgently, sea level as glaciers and the polar ice caps melt -- is the pressing issue of our age.
The Global Greenhouse
Without the greenhouse effect, a natural process that heats the Earth's surface and atmosphere, our average temperature would be a frigid 0°F (–18°C) -- ensuring a permanent ice age, to say the least. The warmed globe radiates what is called "infrared radiation," most of which should travel through atmospheric layers to space. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, more and more infrared radiation began to be absorbed by naturally occurring greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2). The increase of average concentrations of CO2, from about 280 parts per million in 1700 to about 380 parts per million in 2005 is the major cause of global warming.
In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asserted that human activities -- including the use of fossil fuels -- was “very likely” the catalyst for global warming.
Some scientists estimate that the Earth's temperature will rise by as much as 9°F (5°C) by 2050, while others heatedly disagree. What isn't in dispute is that the world's ice is in a literal meltdown. For instance, the largest single block, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in the Arctic, lasted some 3,000 years before it started to crack in 2000; a mere two years later it was split through and is now breaking apart.
The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.
The above is an excerpt from the book Know It All
A Reader's Digest book published in association with Quid Publishing. Copyright © Quid Publishing 2008.
Author Bios
Susan Aldridge has been a freelance science and medical writer for more than 15 years and has contributed to a number of magazines and websites. She lives in London.
Elizabeth King Humphrey has been a contributing writer, editorial advisor, copy editor, and co-designer for several magazines, books, and PBS documentaries. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Julie Whitaker has a master’s degree in anthropology and American studies. Whitaker has contributed to many books, including several encyclopedias. She lives on Vancouver Island, Canada.

i before e (except after c)

While in high school and college, I found some very ingenious ways to memorize those desperately needed tidbits of information for tests and reoccurring topics. Those mnemonic strategies are still with me today. In Judy Parkinson’s book i before e (except after c), countless mnemonic strategies are presented in ways the young and old can appreciate.

Parkinson starts with the first trick of memorization we learn in life, our ABCs. She actually provides a little history with this mnemonic learning tool, along with many others in i before e (except after c). Who knew there were so many different ways to memorize topics of the English Language?

Not only are English Language mnemonics used, but there are examples for memorizing a myriad of facts. One in particular I wish I had known in my science classes was for converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa. But it is coming in handy now that I have Canadian friends that refer to degrees Celsius when talking about the weather! I just remember:

Celsius to Fahrenheit:
Multiple C by 9
Divide the answer then by 5
Next, all you need to do, is to add 32.

We’ve all used mnemonics whether we realize it or not. Or perhaps you didn’t realize that old saying “Righty-tighty, Lefty-loosey” is an example of mnemonics. Either way, we all benefit from these simple and fun ways of memorizing rules, proverbs, facts, people, places and things! Judy Parkinson makes mnemonics fun for everyone of every age in i before e (except after c), which by the way, is something I say to myself each and every time I have to spell the word “receipt!”

More Book Information:

I Before E (Except After C)
Old-School Ways to Remember Stuff
By Judy Parkinson
Published by Reader's Digest
April 2008;$14.95US; 978-0-7621-0917-3

Description

Hundreds of Memory Tricks You Learned in the Classroom

"Thirty days hath September..." How many times have your relied on that old maxim to figure out a calendar?

Or how about "Every Good Boy Does Fine" to remember the notes on the treble clef?

These ingenious, practical memory techniques abound in I BEFORE E (EXCEPT AFTER C) with its hundreds of curious sayings. In this clever -- and often hilarious -- collection, you'll find engaging mnemonics, arranged in easy-to-find categories that include:

• Geographically Speaking
• Time and the Calendar
• Think of a Number
• The Sky at Night and by Day
• Guarenteed to amuse and inform, this little book is a perfect gift for students of all ages.

Author Bio
Judy Parkinson is a graduate of Bristol University. She is a producer of documentaries, music videos, and commercials, and won a Clio award for a Greenpeace ad. Parkinson has published four books and has contributed to a show of life drawings at the Salon des Arts, Kensington.

Reviews
“Parkinson’s book is a welcome throwback, an indispensible guide that can be used for general knowledge revision, or whenever that simple nugget of information proves elusive.”
-The Good Book Guide

“Remember all those awesome acronyms and nifty mnemonics you learned in school, to stop stuff going in one ear and out the other? No? Well, never mind—a new book called i before e (except after c) is here to re-educate the educated.”
-The Sun
If you like this book, you may also be interested in reading reviews on these other books:

• My Grammar and I... Or Should That Be Me?
• I Used to Know That

Baby Signing 1-2-3

When my son was born, I knew nothing about baby signing. The older he got, the more I started seeing topics on the internet about the benefits of baby signing. As mothers, we want our children to be the smartest, most intelligent child on the block. However, I thought I had cheated him out of this language skill because I didn't start him as soon as I could have. Then I was introduced to Baby Signing 1-2-3 by Nancy Cadjan, and to my surprise, it really doesn't matter when you begin baby signing because children of all ages will benefit from the use of ASL (American Sign Language).

Baby Signing 1-2-3 is arranged in a very comprehensive way. The first part of the book addresses your child's developmental stages and the appropriate signing that can be used during that time. For those with children who develop at a slower pace either mentally or physically, an entire chapter is designed on how to modify the signing used during that child's individual development. The actual signs used during the developmental stages are contained in the second half of the book, and those same words are bolded in the text in the chapters from the first half of the book. This design makes it incredibly easy to reference the stage you are in with your child.

Since my son is four now, the stages of development aren't the most important parts of the book for our situation, but he can still learn signs in the order in which he would have if I had introduced ASL to him as an infant. Much like our children's own speech development and their capacity to understand, learning the signs he would have learned from stage one still applies. Words like mommy, daddy, milk and more are great starters even for the older child. The best thing is we can learn more signs at a quicker pace now that he is older.

Baby Signing 1-2-3 has been a great tool for my both my son and myself, and we've both enjoyed sitting down and learning signs together. He actually picks up the book and asks for me to help him learn. The added benefit is that once our next child is born, both my older son and I will be able to help baby learn ASL at a much younger age with the great help of Baby Signing 1-2-3. I highly recommend Baby Signing 1-2-3 for any individuals who are new to ASL and want to teach themselves and their children this life long, beneficial communication tool.

Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge (Review)

At least once each time my husband and I sit down to watch television, I spout off some useless trivia about Hollywood stars that he has absolutely no interest in. It usually starts off with something like "Hey, did you know the lead singer of that group is married to..." or "That actress' mom is the same actress who played in…" and so on. His usual response sounds something more like an animal's grunt, far from the response full of amazement or shock that my best friend would have supplied. Either way, I still enjoy sharing this useless information because I believe - rather, I dream of the day it will come in handy for him. Who knows, maybe he'll end up on Jeopardy one day and the question to the answer will be something he learned from me. Yeah right… dream on!

But now I have a plethora of facts to quote to him. Everything from protons, neutrons and electrons, to facts about the Cold War, Stock Markets, Religion, Philosophy, art, music and so much more. Facts that are more likely to be topics of interest on Jeopardy as opposed to which actor is divorcing over a love interest they met on their last movie set. Not that either of us will ever end up on Jeopardy, but Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge is in fact the best book I have on hand to help me feel like the studious citizen I wish I had time to be!

Know It All wraps up almost a hundred different subjects in just two pages each of straight facts. Each topic provides just enough information on its subject to enlighten and educate the reader, in preparation of conversations that could make their way around to these talking points. These "subjects of study" are broken down into nine different chapters of the book, including "Invention and Discovery," "Conflicts of the Modern Age" and "Religion and Thought." Know It All wraps up many things I should have learned (or remembered) from my schooling, but I either didn't pay attention that day, or I didn't use it, and years ago, I truly did lose it.

Know It All also throws in special features - little snippets of information packaging a topic in "an even smaller nutshell" like "Conversation Starters" you can use in casual situations, and even quiz pages to review what you may have learned in that chapter. Even as the book educates you, it does it in a fun and interesting way that will leave the reader wanting more. Each subject is an easy read as there are no fillers and the information doesn't go on and on - just the facts ma'am!

So, whether you are simply looking to increase your knowledge of worldly subjects, or you are interested in cramming for that Jeopardy try-out, Know It All is your best and quickest bet to learning more on the topics that not only come up from time to time, but actually have something to do with your day-to-day life.

Personally, I plan on memorizing a chapter or two so that when my husband and I are drinking our morning coffee and watching MSNBC, I can throw something even more meaningful out into the conversation at hand. Perhaps then I will watch his eyes light up in amazement of my broader scope of knowledge. That would be a nice change from his uninterested grunt over my Hollywood dribble! Thanks Know It All! Now I can feel like a know-it-all, too!