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Miss Minimalist: Inspiration To Downsize, Declutter, And Simplify (2000)

by Francine Jay(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 4

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English

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review 1: As long as you go in with an open mind and realize that her opinion is the "almighty one" (i.e. every single thing she says isn't going to be for everyone), then it's a great read for those who want to downsize and declutter / want someone to give them "tough love" when it comes to their stuff. She's a bit of an minimalist on steroids though with her minimizing on goal-setting, chemicals in beauty and cleaning products, and how every little thing has to be good for the planet BUT she has some valid points about what getting rid of your TV can do and other obvious-but-not-so-obvious minimalist choices. It was only a dollar through Amazon (and can be borrowed for free with prime), so if this collection of articles isn't for you, don't buy her $10 ... morebook.
review 2: This one really suffered for being a bunch of blog posts thrown together, a lot of ideas got developed separately or inadequately. But she knew that when she was putting the book together. That is why this one is super cheap and her actual book is more expensive, I suppose. So that didn't bring this book down to a 3 by itself.What brought it down is her failure to recognize at all that her minimalist lifestyle depends in large part in her super-priveleged place in society. This is a very common problem among most minimalists that hopefully the movement will widely address soon. It's great that if a natural disaster or political turmoil forced you from your home, you'd be able to leave with no regrets because your not attached to anything, but that's because you have money in a bank account, an employable set of skills and all your important photos and documents backed up online in your fairly expensive cloud storage. It's great that you can travel to all these foreign destinations with only one small backpack, but is flying all over the world on gas guzzling jumbo jets really minimalist, and shouldn't you at least recognize that your are incredible fortunate to be able to do so? Of course, minimalism doesn't have to be undone by its basis in privilege, because being a regular American consumer certainly isn't the answer either, but the issue still must be dealt with.Neither of these are really huge issues, but there wasn't anything groundbreaking here to bring it up either. Although I did question the necessity of our couch for the first time, so that's something. less

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