Book Review: Living Well on Practically Nothing by Edward H. Romney

Well, it's hard to know where to start with this one. It's obvious, I'd think, why a person would want to read a book like this in these difficult times. And certainly, there is some advice within its pages that is worth heeding, though nothing, I think, that the average person can really use that they don't already know. Although this is the "revised and updated" version, the revision was done in 2001, so much of the information is outdated, even if it was accurate when he wrote it. In addition, the author has a weirdly right-wing point of view that I found irritating and insulting.

Reading Mr. Romney's stories was a little bit like listening to my dad, with lots of advice that's not really useable if you intend to be a law-abiding person living in anything resembling a normal human dwelling. Here's an example of what I mean:

Once when I was driving to Canada, I forgot I had a .22 target pistol under my car seat. I had a legal permit for the United States, but there would be trouble if the Canadians at the border found it. Going through a valley I stopped the car, opened the hood to make it look like a breakdown (always wise), and climbed quickly up the side of the hill between approaching cars until I was some distance up. I hid the pistol in a plastic bag in the crotch of a tree, carefully marked it with stones and bent twigs, and resumed my trip. When I returned it was fine. Always mark carefully where something is hidden. I once spent half a day hunting for a cache. If you leave food you have to hide it so bears, coons and other animals will not get it. The usual way is to bag it and suspend it from a tree limb on a rope too high for bears to jump and reach it. If you bury anything, you cannot dig it up after the ground greezes. People forget this.

The author seems not to be terribly prone toward honesty in his business dealings. There are a number of places where he describes or recommends behavior that is at the very least unethical, if not illegal. For instance, he mentions that his ex-wife once sold "antique quilts," then he mentions that she had workers in North Carolina creating them for her. Er, 'scuse me, but if they were being made immediately prior to sale, I don't think they were antiques, now, were they? Another of his recommended business enterprises involves contacting families of the recently deceased to buy the estate, then dumping whatever you don't want out of it in someone else's Dumpster.

After not too many pages, I only continued to read in order to come across the absolutely sparkling gems of ignorance that he managed to sprinkle throughout. I can't help it; I have to share examples here:

Page 57: [The people of New Hampshire] like to mind their business and they do not talk a lot. This is because the intense winter cold hurts their teeth like eating an ice cream cone when they open their mouths. Few people know this.

Page 60: Many workers from the Rust Belt are hostile to management and prone to strike. They have driven out new companies... this attitude is known as tough labor or labor-union mentality... Service in restaurants and stores is poor in the Rust Belt. Mechanics, carpenters, and yard workers are slow and apathetic... Surprisingly, their politics are not particularly liberal.

Page 62: West Virginia citizens are good people but not particularly law-abiding and they regulate themselves with fences and guns.

Page 93: Teenagers have to wear those very expensive sneakers like Nikes because their feet get soft from never going barefoot.

Page 179: Working men spit a lot because they eat very salty food and seldom drink water and it makes their saliva taste terrible to them. If they cut down the salt in their diet, they would not need to spit all the time and they would feel better. This is not generally realized.

I definitely wouldn't recommend that you spend your hard-earned cash to buy this book.