Review of Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure (Paperback)

As a reviewer previously noted, there really isn't anything new here. But like a chef who takes ingredients we are well familiar with and combines them to give us a new experience, so too does Maxwell. There are the little gimmicks--calling people warm and cool, talking about the house like a body when he could just say he's writing about attending to repairs (bones), arranging and organizing the stuff in your space (breath), figuring out the functions of each room (head) and decorating (heart). But this is not a meal of last night's leftovers. Instead it is packaged into another gimmick: the eight week cure. There's a lot to do in your eight weeks: and the work seems unbalanced. It starts out slowly (throwing out one thing, making lists) and ends slowly (preparing for a party) but in the middle there's almost an impossible amount of things to do. But it's all laid out. There are worksheets and practical tips to begin. Maxwell has taken all the steps to transforming a living space and laid them all out sequentially. This book is about more than just fixing up your place however: Maxwell aims to change and enrich your experience of your home. And that's the spice that makes the book worth consuming.

This book is also something else. It's a primer for a web site and blog. It sets out the vocabulary and explains the aims of hundreds of people who have already participated in the first on-line cure. Like Marla Cilley's Sink Reflections, the book functions as a portal to the collective on-line experience. There are no lush photographs in the book.They are on the web site.

More than anything, though, Maxwell writes his prose well and in such a way that one feels inspired to tackle transforming one's home and experience in it. I'm not in a small apartment in the city---but a small house in a city whose burbs are ever expanding outwards. I don't need to start cooking at home--as he recommends--but taking those wonderful morning baths he advocates. It'll be a challenge to implement the cure for my home and it will take longer than eight weeks. Nonetheless, he has inspired me to do all he counsels and for that reason I recommend the book.




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