Great books for grads

Graduation is one of the few times when it’s okay to dish out advice. It may even be expected. There are certainly more than enough books on the market that capitalize on the moment. Here’s a few of this year’s crop that stand out.

Let me say up front: I am not a fan of book collections of old newspaper or magazine columns. The operative word here is old. And to steal a tired cliché: Yesterday’s news is best used as fish paper or to wrap up fish. That said, my number one pick for this year’s graduates is “The Explainer” by Bryan Curtis (Anchor Press, 2004, $11.95), a compilation of Explainer columns from Slate magazine.

Put simply: an explainer explains “something you don’t get” after “reading the morning paper or listening to the TV news,” writes Slate’s founding editor Michael Kinsley in the book’s introduction. “To wrap up fish” is an explainer for how fish paper is used.

The real question for reporters and editors is: To explain or not to explain. Explain too much and the reader is bored or even offended: “I know Dick Cheney is the Vice President,” they say. (But when is the last time you actually saw him?) Leave out information and readers are left clueless: “When exactly was the Vietnam War?” (It may not be so obvious if you didn’t live through it.)

Concepts left unexplained that should have end up in the Explainer column at Slate. And depending on the interest of the reader, an explainer is the beginning or the end of the discussion. A brief explanation to the question, “What is the Arab League” may be enough for one reader, and may inspire another to write a Ph.D. on some aspect of the Arab world. That’s the beauty of an explainer: it not only answers a nagging question but also has the potential to raise more.

Questions answered in the 249-page book range from quirky: “Can ice cubes cool your pool?” to almost textbook: “How do trans and saturated fats differ” or “How did the U.S. get a naval base in Cuba?”

The teaser on the back page of paperback suggests the book answers “questions we never think to ask.” I give the American public more credit than that. Most questions have been asked but not all have been answered. “The Explainer” is a good start. And remember: There are no silly questions.

Dressing for success
Honestly, I wasn’t surprised when a friend of mine was laid off from IBM after ten years of dedicated service. A single mother of two, she worked from home when the kids were sick and stayed late whenever she had to. To this day, however, I’m convinced it wasn’t her performance that led to her “termination,” but in part, her sense of “fashion.” Let me offer an explainer here: In lieu of a professional briefcase, my dear friend carried work papers (and other sundries) back and forth to the office in a canvas tote, covered with colorful embroidered images of people from around the world. She also had a Grateful Dead decal on her car she parked in the company lot.

Remember: This is IBM in the 1980s — if not the inspiration for the term “suits,” certainly a member of the club. The club used to require that men and women in the workplace stuck to a rigid dress code — navy suit with white shirt for him, navy suit with a white shirt for her.

Times have changed since my friend departed from old blue. Relaxed attire is more acceptable now, and in some cases, the norm. But self expression is still out, explains New Haven Register columnist Todd Lyon, author of “Lands' End Business Attire for Men” and “Lands' End Business Attire for Women” (The Crown Publishing Company, 2004, $24.95.)

“Keep in mind that business casual is not synonymous with anarchy,” writes Lyon in the introduction to the men’s book, using as example of an administrative assistant in an investment banker’s office who wears a T-shirt that reads, “Eat the Rich.”

Lyon does a remarkable job of setting out the new rules for business casual without bias, despite that the books were a collaborative effort with Lands’ End. Lyon based the book on interviews with merchants and designers at Lands’ End. All the images in the book were also provided by Lands’ End.

Rather than push a particular style, Lyon presents the reader with options. For example, Lyon divides women’s wardrobe into four categories: traditional tailored, almost a suit, best of both worlds and clearly casual. It’s up to the reader to decide which look fits the occasion. In her opinion, an international summit at the White House still requires a classic dark suit, which continues to be the symbol of power and professionalism for both men and women.

In the end, Lyons writes, “someday, what you wear won’t matter. Your success will be a direct result of your talent, intelligence, spirit, dedication and good ideas. You’ll make the rules. Others won’t argue.”

But we are not there yet. In the meantime, the Lands’ End books are a useful guide.

Give the gift of guidance
The job market also may have changed in recent years but advice about finding the right job hasn’t changed much since Ten Speed Press published “What Color is Your Parachute” by Richard Nelson Bolles in 1972. Bolles’ book, which has been revised and updated or rewritten every year since 1975, created a mold and there’s been no reason to break it. The book remains a great deal at $17.95. Bolles now even offers his readers a companion Web site jobhuntersbible.com.

Like “What Color is Your Parachute,” What next?: The Complete Guide to Taking Control of Your Working Life” by Dr. Barbara Moses (D.K. Publishing, 2003, $20)  takes a three-pronged approach to job hunting. First, job hunters or career changers are encouraged to sort the inner world or who they are. Second, they are prodded to decide what they really want. And third, plot a path to get there. (Most adults — myself included — never get beyond step 1. Perhaps that's why these books continue to sell. In theory, those who have a master plan do “better” later in life.)

“What’s Next?” is designed to be used as a workbook. Each chapter in the 336-page book contains worksheets which help the reader hone in on specific goals, from “know thyself” to “career intelligence.”

What I like best about “What next?” is that Dr. Barbara Moses presents the material in a straightforward manner. Dr. Moses doesn’t talk down to the reader or hip up the language to appeal to a younger audience, in contrast to many recent career guides. She just tells it like it is.

Fun with punctuation

Gotham Books

A far amount of controversy has been generated by the North American release of the British best seller “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”  by Lynn Truss (Gotham Books, 2003, $17.50). That is, if you follow this sort of thing. The little book on punctuation is big on advice, especially for green grocers who misplace apostrophes.

Some question the sense of it all. “The question that readers and editors should ask is not whether the punctuation violates the rules, but whether the meaning is clear,” says The New York Times Almanac’s executive editor John Rosenthal in a bold editorial in The New York Times on May 3.

“Poor punctuation is not limited to those who lack education or language ability. People with master's degrees in English still sometimes confuse “its” and “it’s,” which should remind us that the rules of punctuation can be as hard to remember as the Pythagorean theorem. And at times, they are downright arbitrary,” Rosenthal.

I love this guy — he is a much-needed voice in the old school print world. But I also appreciate Truss and recommend the book to graduates that already have a serious interest in grammar or as Truss calls them “sticklers.”

First of all, Truss’s book is a lot easier to read than Shrunk and White’s “Elements of Style,” first published in 1918. Secondly, Truss does offer up some useful tidbits about the English language. Truss not only confirms that in a grammatically correct world, Lands’ End would be Land’s End but she points out other exceptions for the possessive use of the apostrophe. The possessive of Jesus is always Jesus’, as in Jesus’ disciplines, because “an exception is always made for Jesus.” But Moses in the possessive form is Moses’ as in Moses’ tablets, because the name ends in an “iz” sound, says Truss. In this case, I’d have to argue that the tablets are not owned by Moses but by the people.

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