Salon.com > Helaine Olen

“Real Estate Rookie” tells all

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 11:33:00 +0000

"There's a joke in the industry that real estate is no one's first career," writes Alison Rogers in her new memoir, "Diary of a Real Estate Rookie: My Year of Flipping, Selling, and Rebuilding -- and What I Learned (The Hard Way!)." "It's always something people come to by default, seeking money."

Rogers is no exception. A seasoned business journalist and a founding editor of the New York Post's real estate supplement, she quit her job after a promised raise failed to materialize, and went off to seek her fortune as a home flipper in New Jersey. That she didn't live in the Garden State, and had yet to learn how to drive the car she would need to use to view a potential purchase, didn't deter her. After all, home prices in Newark were increasing by more than 30 percent year over year. How could a girl miss?

Needless to say, things didn't go according to plan. Rogers discovered that finding a suitable home, performing some quick and none-too-expensive renovations, and selling the home for a profit were a lot harder than they look on TV shows like "Property Ladder" and "Flip This House." Soon she turned to brokering in Manhattan to pay the bills -- and though she met with some success -- the big payday she'd dreamed of still eluded her.

The littlest shoppers

Wed, 30 May 2007 11:28:00 +0000

Baby Einstein videos, infant gym classes, talking toys that teach phonics: Every year more and more American parents snap up the latest kid-centric luxuries, convinced they can provide their children with a head start on everything from education to socialization. But are the secrets of good parenting really on sale at Toys "R" Us? Not according to journalist Susan Gregory Thomas. In her new book, "Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds," Thomas contends that rather than enriching young minds, companies like Baby Einstein and Nickelodeon have become lifestyle brands for chic toddlers and have turned little ones into restless shoppers long before they understand the concept of buying. Eager marketers plaster familiar faces like Bob the Builder and Elmo on everything from books to blocks to Band-Aids in an effort to goose the bottom line. Even the train table in the Barnes & Noble children's department is a marketing ploy, placed there by the company peddling Thomas the Tank Engine toys.

The mind’s missing pieces

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 11:00:00 +0000

Memory, as Oscar Wilde wrote, is the diary that we all carry about with us. Open one volume, and you recall a summer picnic from childhood. Open another and there's a grocery list from last week. But what happens when the journal pages get stuck together? Or, even worse, tear loose and vanish entirely?

Thanks to advances in medicine and ever-lengthening life expectancies, most of us will live to find out just how ephemeral memory can be, says Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, author of the new book "Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife." Beginning in our 40s or 50s, we may begin to misplace words -- not to mention our house keys -- with greater frequency. And for some, that forgetfulness will turn pathological, leading gradually down the path toward dementia: According to the Alzheimer's Association, adults who survive past the age of 85 currently have a 42 percent chance of suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Taking it to the streets

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 12:00:00 +0000

You see them downtown: teenagers with punk haircuts and chains, hanging out in parks and under highway overpasses. They scowl at each other and sometimes at you. But you take for granted that though young and troubled, they're likely harmless.

Rene Denfeld begs to differ. A feminist writer and the mother of three adopted children from the Oregon foster care system, Denfeld began to investigate the world of street kids after the widely publicized 2003 murder of a developmentally disabled young adult named Jessica Williams by members of a Portland street family. Her latest book, "All God's Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families," is the result of that research. Using the Williams case as a prism, Denfeld crafts a chilling portrait of street culture -- one that will turn your assumptions about these kids and their lives inside out.

Let’s get it on

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Is it really possible to make marriage feel sexy? Esther Perel, a New York couples and family therapist, argues that it is, but that it involves nothing less than a rethinking of what matrimony has become for most Americans, as well as a hard look at how we deal with the competing roles of parent, worker and lover. In her new book, "Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic," she takes aim at the modern conception of marriage as a milange of the romantic, the sexual, the economic and the companionate.

Erotic desire, Perel argues, thrives on mystery, unpredictability and politically incorrect power games, not housework battles and childcare woes. Furthermore, increased emotional intimacy between partners often leads to less sexual passion. "The challenge for modern couples," she writes, "lies in reconciling the need for what's safe and predictable with the wish to pursue what's exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring."

Baby blues

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 11:44:00 +0000

Betty Friedan famously called the unhappiness of mothers in the post-World War II era "the problem that has no name." More than 40 years after the publication of "The Feminine Mystique," we're still trying to come up with a diagnosis and cure.

Enter Tracy Thompson, a former Washington Post reporter and author of a previous memoir about her pre-parenthood struggles with depression, "The Beast." Thompson set out to discover how common maternal depression was, and how it affects children, after suffering her own bout of post-motherhood blues. In her new book, "The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling With Depression," she expanded her personal story into the realm of parenthood by working with an Emory University psychologist to survey almost 400 mostly middle-class moms diagnosed with clinical depression who responded to queries posted in O: The Oprah Magazine and a number of newspapers.

A truce in the “Mommy Wars”

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 12:31:00 +0000

The pursuit of happiness has always been a loaded concept for mothers. We constantly juggle our wants and our children's needs in an uneasy balancing act. The struggle often leaves us quick to anger. Sometimes the mere mention of words like "motherhood" and "employment" or "breast" and "formula" in the same sentence can cause us to go a little feral.

Welcome to the "Mommy Wars." The term was coined in the late 1980s by Child magazine to describe the tension and anger that existed between working and stay-at-home moms. But in the 20 years since then, the phrase has been overused by an eager media that seems intent on pitting women against one another.