Real Life Notes
 Kenneth Jedding
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2002 Double Rose Books
  ISBN: 0967854555
Amazon's price is: $12.95

Reflections and Strategies for Life After Graduation.

Life after college is complicated when you consider how many jobs, opportunities & directions you face, not to mention all the decisions you've got to make.

Real Life Notes is the textbook you give your soon-to-be-graduates as they start their last year, or at the very latest, AFTER they've taken their finals & BEFORE they toss their mortarboards in the air.

Kenneth Jedding wrote this book because, when he graduated twenty years ago, he couldn't find it in his college bookstore. He was looking for “THE BOOK” -- you know, “...the one that will give me a clue about the rest of my life...” Years passed with many a bruise & an abrasion as this author stumbled through his life without much of a plan, cracking his shins on the passage of time, on short-lived relationships, on a dead-end career, until he started mentoring, started giving back. That's when it dawned on him, he could write that book he'd been seeking, all those years before. So he did!

Real Life Notes deals with the five basic terrors ahead of every student who is finally graduating from the American education system -- Career, Perspective, Relationships, Parents & Yourself.

Kenneth Jedding has written one of those lively self-help books that doesn't have a pompous opinion in it, although it has a slew of quotes from world renown writers & thinkers, like Winston Churchill, Lin Yutang, Aldous Huxley, Helen Keller, Oprah Winfrey.

He spends a while on Making Money -- what it means, how we earn it, how to pay off our school debts & what having it will bring. He wants us to think about what are our passions, & how to get paid for doing what we love.

Then he takes us to The Oracle who simply said, “Know Yourself.” & off we go on the whitewater of learning to look at ourselves other than what we've been named, the gender, nationality & social circle we came in on.

Real Life Notes really are notes, jottings of common sense that's not always so common. You may slap your brow with an “I knew that!” exclamation, however, part of what education is designed to do, is make you forget all that innate wisdom you inculcated without even knowing it. Part of education's purpose is to mold you into good little drones.

Real Life Notes will help you take back your authenticity, your originality, your passion & your life.

& in the end, this author muses on that inevitable & silly habit we all accrue -- the what-ifs.

A perennially perfect gift for everyone graduating into real life.
(01/19/03)

Rebecca