by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter, Harper, 2009, ISBN 978-0-06-191604-5
Available at Powell's Books

Jess Walter's Financial Lives of the Poets is grim yet funny.

Business journalist Matthew Prior’s whole life is sliding into the red. His website, an inventive but expensive venture offering financial reporting through poetry—“think of it as money lit”—didn’t succeed.

Now Matthew is scrambling to avert loss of home, wheels and family as he hides looming bankruptcy from his increasingly distant wife.

New business plan
Meanwhile, the depressed financial poet digs the hole of his misery further by making what at first appears to be only a small bad choice—stepping out at midnight to buy exorbitantly priced milk at the local convenience store.

He needs it for his children’s cereal. What he doesn’t need is to get entangled with a group of “wasted, red-eyed, dry mouth high boys” who are shopping for munchies.

But Prior needs money quick, and the marijuana they share with him is so good that he decides to go into business briefly as a dealer. His “Idiot Financial Planner” becomes his first client.

Blank and blue verse
Prior turns his blank verse poetry toward the blank unknown of his future. In a chapter aptly named “Social Networking,” he contemplates the possibility that his wife, Lisa, is having an affair. She spends lots of time chatting online and texting on her cell phone.

“My wife types her life key-by-key/ site-by-site, primarily at night/ on the home PC where I try to find/ work while she’s drowsing, instead/ find the history of her browsing,/ surfing her lost past for evidence/ that she wasn’t always this sad.”

Along with despair and desperation, dark humor pervades Prior’s life: “When I finally go upstairs, Lisa’s in bed, just closing her phone. She’s wearing her giant, population-control pajamas, made of burlap, fiberglass insulation, razor wire.”

Funny and hopeful
It is this hard-edged funniness, Prior’s never-say-die hopefulness, and the likeability of even the seediest characters in author Jess Walter’s quirky novel that kept me reading.

After all, there is a lot to feel glum about in today’s economy, and a reader might prefer to forget troubles by getting lost in a mystery novel or a rip-roaring adventure.  But then one might miss out on Prior’s shaky, but blessed redemption as well as the novel’s unexpectedly sweet ending.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Jump! Get Unstuck: Extraordinary Life Breakthroughs Through Innovative Change, by Robert S. Tipton, Alden-Swain Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-9825900-0-3
Available at Powell's Books

After being stuck for quite awhile trying to analyze my response to Robert S. Tipton’s thought-provoking self-help book Jump! Get Unstuck, I’ve decided to “take a step” as Tipton advises and just see where the writing process leads me.

Let the reader beware
Before getting started here, readers need to understand a few things about me: First, I am a great believer in Ben Franklin’s dictum that “God helps those who help themselves.” Franklin was a great example of the success of self-help since he had to drop out of school at age 10, but taught himself many subjects through reading.

Second, I don’t have a lot of experience on committees aimed at refreshing and restructuring organizations, an activity on which much of Jump is based.

Finally, while I’m okay with an occasional self-help magazine article, I don’t generally feel uplifted by self-help books.

As to my response to Jump, although some of the author's ideas resonate for me and the fictional story at its core is appealing,  I find the book's model for achieving positive change to be frustratingly vague.

The four disciplines aiding change
Nevertheless, Jump leapt from its publisher’s lily pad onto my review pile, and the colorful frogs on its cover have been calling for my attention ever since.

The author, Robert S. Tipton, describes himself as a consultant “who specializes in designing and facilitating innovative change.”

Jump is subtitled Extraordinary Life Breakthroughs Through Innovative Change. Most of us would love positive change in this financially confusing time. However, the book’s process for seeking change can be confusing, whether for organizations or individuals.

Tipton bases his process on four guiding “disciplines,” which he itemizes as  “quantum principles, ancient philosophy, spiritual practices, and sound leadership.”

Ancient philosophy
The part about ancient philosophy concerns being willing to learn from the past.

As Tipton says about himself, “I guess I was about 35 or so before I realized asking for help was a sign of strength and not an admission of weakness…. Then, some life-altering experiences showed me just how much I was missing by not actively seeking help, answers, insights, suggestions, input, and perspectives from others.”

Spiritual Practices
Tipton describes spiritual practices as being things we do to be “in harmony with nature, with other human beings—and with the universe as a whole.” Focusing solely on self-interest won’t create sustainable success.

Readers who are not Christians may feel a bit uncomfortable with his focus on that faith alone.

Quantum principles
Bouncing back to the most difficult idea--quantum principles—Tipton connects ideas from physics with social interaction. He says, “Our lives are driven by our choices in the same way the observer in quantum physics makes waves [of energy] collapse into particles.”

He implies that once individuals and organizations identify what they want to achieve, they can become more powerful and get to where they want to go by carefully altering and aligning small choices. The analogy he uses concerns a school of fish that all manage to shift direction together quickly.

Sound leadership
Finally, readers may end up feeling like Tipton is talking in circles about what sound leadership entails.

However, he hits the administrative pushpin on its head when he says not to “confuse leadership with the ability to be powerful over someone else.” Instead, he indicates that it is the ability to empower others to do the right thing.

Steps toward change
Tipton then details what he describes as an idealized four-step process moving from the first step of deciding “let’s change” (preparedness) to the final step of “make it real” (implementing the change).

Layers of Jump
Similar to a sandwich, Jump has three main layers. The top slice of bread contains all the ideas described above.

The middle, or meat of the book, is a 180-page fable about the rescue and positive transformation of a philanthropic organization.

The bottom slice contains flowcharts called “process maps” and diagrams based on nautilus-shaped Fibonacci spirals (also called "golden spirals") that are intended to illustrate change.

The process begins in a tightly coiled part of the spiral  labeled “let’s change” and swings out into a broad arc that ends at “make it real.”  Tipton likens the broadness of this arc to a person or group “sitting on a space rocket’s worth of positive energy” and blasting off at an ever-increasing speed toward the desired change.

Quick look at the fable
The fictional core of Jump is intended to illustrate the “Jump model for innovative change.”

The story concerns Franklin Falcon, a Horatio Alger-type figure whose business success and generosity led him to create a foundation to help poor, but promising students go to college.

As Falcon’s story opens, it becomes clear that the foundation may fail, because he has made some bad business decisions.

The heart of the tale involves Falcon’s staff learning to become a team again and refresh their mission of serving others. They do this during a blizzard that strands them at a crowded motel near their headquarters.

 Important strategies that arise include learning how to use social media—Facebook, My Space, Twitter, YouTube, other Internet websites, and email—to network and build support for their cause.

Like a ball of yarn, tossed hand to hand by millions, the news about the goodness of the Falcon Foundation and its woes “goes viral” spreading worldwide and building financial support.

Jump’s major drawbacks
Jump has three major drawbacks. The first one, already stated, is that although the book is highly detailed, its ideas for achieving change seem vague. It lacks the kind of straight-forward, how-to approach that individual readers may need to make its ideas usable.

The second problem is that it is a difficult book to read without the support of a group—preferably one led by a facilitator familiar with Tipton’s ideas. To some degree, this gets in the way of self-help.

While I agree with Tipton that it often takes a village to solve a problem, I like an “I get it” feeling when I am reading material that is supposed to help me make changes.

The third problem is that the core of the book would be far more helpful if it were based on a number of real-life examples of people and organizations that used Tipton’s process to improve themselves.

However, Tipton says, that was not possible.

“Some books of this kind use case studies, but I decided to use a fictional story because my clients tend to get miffed if I share the details of their specific situations! So I created a fictional situation based upon the work I do as a change coach.”

Nevertheless, it is difficult, based on allegory alone, to buy Tipton’s message of amazing growth simply by redefining purpose, networking,  using social media, and letting the spirituality flow.