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Book Review of Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work

Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work
reviewed on + 11 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


Artist and educator Tim Gunn, improbable star of the mega hit TV series Project Runway, introduces the timeless rules to succeed in life for a new generation in this, his second published book (the first was A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style). Most of his rules are based on old-fashioned values that have gone dangerously AWOL in modern society, like honesty, politeness, industriousness, fairness, consideration, team work, contributing to your community, etc. You will enjoy this book immensely if you are a fan of Mr. Gunns approach to mentoring the designers of Project Runway, but even if you dont follow the series, this is a book that can be enjoyed on its own.

While the rules can get pretty basic (Rule 4: Dont abuse your power) his way of presenting them, with examples from his own life, make you reminisce about times when you might have broken them, and then banged your head against a wall for having done so.

One of the best elements of this book is the way the author talks about very private stuff, without giving away too many embarrassing details. We get to know about the man who broke his heart while Gunn was just a young man in love, and the retrospectively funny story about Anna Wintour, hard-as-nails Vogue magazine Editor-in-Chief.

Some of the stories that Gunn presents in the book are so far removed from the experience of normal people (i.e. those who actually work for a living in an average office) that they can be a bit hard to believe, like the story of the young girl and her mother whom Gunn met at a dinner and who talked about the rest of the world as if she was the owner and everybody else in it were her servants, including Tim Gunn. Its not that Gunns exaggerating or lying, but that it can be unbelievable that people like that really exist.

The book can get a little sprawling, all over the place, but Gunns voice remains authentic all along. This book was co-written with Ada Calhoun, author of Instinctive Parenting: Trusting Ourselves to Raise Good Kids, and founding editor-in-chief of the online magazine Babble.com.