Product Description

Compressed into one slim but surprisingly informative and intensely researched volume, The Best Time to Do Everything is an irresistible guide to the essentials of living.

The Best Time to Do Everything is really just that—a guide to the best time to do everything in life. From buying shoes to cleaning a murder scene, each entry is built around the well-informed advice of an expert in that particular field: Donald Trump on the best time to haggle, Johnny Ramone on the best time to learn to play guitar, Bill Maher on the best time for a political conversation, the Car Talk guys on the best time to repair your car. Not all of the advice comes from celebrities, but all of it does come from people who know their stuff. Incredibly useful (best time to buy life insurance, best time to look for a job, best time to purge and organize), entertaining (best time to start a high-fashion modeling career, best time to approach a celebrity, best time to cheat on your diet), and outrageous (best time to get punched in the face, best time for a coup, best time to have sex with 209 strangers), The Best Time to Do Everything is educational, practical, and wholly addictive.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #253214 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-01
• Released on: 2004-12-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The best time to clean up a murder scene? Sooner rather than later with a shooting in bed, to keep blood from leaching into the floor. The best time to write a scathing tell-all about your boss? After he’s dead. Best time to pose nude for Playboy? Between the ages of 18 and 25, though they have photographed women over 40. Did you need to know any of this? Probably not. Kaplan’s volume carries self-help to absurdity—it’s designed more for an occasional idle browse than as a compendium of truly useful information. That said, there are some good tips here: fish at your local fish market is freshest on Tuesdays and Fridays, according to a fish distributor in New York. Appliances are cheapest after January 1, but electronics should be bought before Thanksgiving, according to a former online retailer. Kaplan, the gambling columnist for Cigar Aficionado, has consulted experts in each area, from Donald Trump on deal-making to the stars of Car Talk for car repairs. There’s no table of contents, and the tips seem randomly organized, so if you need specific information, head straight for the index.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
�Intriguing.� (Miami Herald )

�Delightful�Guaranteed to stimulate interest.� (Atlanta Journal-Constitution )

About the Author
Michael Kaplan is a journalist based in Brooklyn, NY, and his writing has appeared in Wired, Details, Spin, Playboy, and SmartMoney. He is the author of the nonfiction book Buried Mistakes and the gambling columnist for Cigar Aficionado.

Customer Reviews

Many useful tidbits here!
Some books grab you by the title . . . that was certainly the case with THE BEST TIME TO DO EVERYTHING by Michael Kaplan, a journalist who is the gambling columnist for CIGAR AFICIONADO.

The subtitle caught my attention, too: EXPERT ADVICE ON HOW TO LIVE COOLER, SMARTER, FASTER, BETTER . . . being interested in all those possibilities, I read this book's 170 too-brief pages in one sitting.

Some of what I learned wasn't all that practical; OK, OK, not practical at all--such as how to stage a coup . . . I also wasn't very interested in such other topics as the best time to deliver
a baby, get punched in the face or sweat a perp.

However, I found much of the other advice both interesting and helpful (either now or in the future) . . . for example, as a result of reading Kaplan's work, I now know the best time to downsize, pick up a lunch or dinner tab and thank your parents.

This latter bit of advice rally struck a chord . . . according to Mary Marcadante, author of MY MOTHER, MY FRIEND: THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT THINGS TO TALK ABOUT WITH YOUR MOTHER and one of the many experts interviewed in the book:
"There are no times soon enough to tell our parents how grateful we are for their raising us. . . . I told my parents [recently] that I am glad to be alive, and I thanked them for the gift of life. I pointed out a few details--like the fact that my father used to take me to skip stones--and they helped my parents to recall some great memories. It's the sort of thing that rejuvenates you and them."

Among just a few of the many other tidbits that I found useful were the following:

Auto prices are always somewhat negotiable, but at the end of every month, salesmen become downright flexible. It's when they focus more on volume and less on commissions from individual car sales. "We have monthly quotas that we try to hit," says Fred Altman, one
of America's most successful Dodge salesmen (he works out of Christopher's Dodge World in Golden, Colorado, which consistently ranks among the country's top dealerships). "Everything in the car business is on a monthly schedule. Sell enough cars in a given
month and you get a higher commission percentage the next month, as well as a better work schedule. As the thirtieth and thirty-first approach, I am definitely more aggressive in closing sales."

[Best time to be photographed]
"Not early in the morning-which is what a lot of people think," says Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, who photographs for the Vanity Fair and has shot portraits of the biggest names in pop music, art, and business. "You've been sleeping on one side of you face or the other. So it's puffy. You want to start with hair and makeup at ten-thirty or eleven and get on the set by noon. That's what you'd do if you were Paris Hilton or Babe Paley. By the way, you don't want to be photographed late in the afternoon, either-when you're tired and it shows on your
face and in your eyes."

[Best time to start a road trip]
"About six in the morning," suggests Ken Smith, a co-author of ROADSIDE AMERICA and a serious enough driver that he put 25,000 miles on his automobile's odometer while researching the book. "At that hour, your system is alert, there's not much traffic, and you can put two hundred miles under your belt before breakfast. Then you sit down
in a diner and enjoy your pancakes while everyone else is stuck in traffic."

Interesting or not? Depends
This is much more a leisure book than a reference one, despite the author's statement on the front cover "Expert Advice on how to...", of which a reader's liking depends much on whether he/she is interested in the topics chosen by the author. Pitifully the choice of the author didnt suit me well. Anyway, i strongly suggest you to check the "Index" available here on Amazon before you make your purchase.

Not worth it
Thought this book was going to be interesting but it wasn't. It told of things that most of us wouldn't even think of doing.