Reviews for Gimme Shelter

The average rating for Gimme Shelter based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-27 00:00:00 Sean Carlisle God created realtors to make lawyers and publicists look honest. Mary Elizabeth Williams The day after Thanksgiving in 2006, I went house-hunting for what I hope is the LAST TIME in my life. We toured 13 properties that day. The highlight was the gorgeous, supposedly haunted, Queen Anne-style home that we really couldn't afford, but the realtor was kind enough to show us anyway. The lowlight was an oddball house someone had started to remodel, then just walked away from, leaving shingles and opened paint cans in the living room. My youngest son was thrilled that the house had "cowboy doors" - swinging saloon doors that lead into ...a bathroom. (Yeehaw! Put down that blow dryer and give me all your hair gel, pardner!) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This book is full of "lowlight" encounters. From a house with a color scheme that features "brown, light brown and paneling," to one with no roof priced at a cool $800,000, the houses run the gamut from dump to one literal "shit-hole." Williams and her husband live in a rented apartment in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. They love the area. They belong there. They'd love to fulfill the American dream of home ownership, but can't find an affordable home in their beloved neighborhood. And so the search begins. The author has a lot going on in her life as she searches for her "dream" home. She's expecting a second child, coping with her strangely distant mother, and trying to connect with her father, a man she's recently met for the first time - but she somehow manages to keep her sense of humor as she tours a slew of gaggingly overpriced, dark, cramped houses. A handwritten sign in the window advertised a one-bedroom "plus den" at the high end of our price range. The "den" is Brooklynese for the cell-like side room that every apartment seems equipped with. It's where you stick the crib after you've gone from couplehood to familyhood and before you get fed up and move to Jersey. And many do get fed up and flee to Jersey. Williams talks quite candidly about the bargains to be found in other markets, but she is a city girl and wants to raise her children where all the good bagels can be had. She bemoans how gentrification is driving up the costs of real estate all over the city, and how her own neighborhood is constantly getting more upscale. - We're white trash, and everybody sniffing around is Eurotrash. Imagine her horror at discovering that she can't even afford the neighborhoods she DOESN'T want to live in! This book is an interesting combination of a memoir and a study of the recent housing bubble/mortgage crisis. She discusses friends' experiences purchasing homes in other parts of the US, and disasters caused by overbuying, subprime mortgages, and unscrupulous lenders. There are also a few poignant pages about living in New York City after the September 11th attacks, and her decision to stay while some friends left for other areas. I used to read newspaper stories about bombs going off in nightclubs in Tel Aviv or the West Bank, or in cafes in Sarajevo or Belfast, and think it was insane that anybody who lived in Tel Aviv or Sarajevo would be out in a nightclub or cafe in the first place. Why would anybody be dancing in a messed-up environment like that? Now I understand. It's because we keep going. Not because the mayor or the president or Madison Avenue tells us to. Not because if we don't, some undefined enemy will have won. There are days when hiding under a desk sounds like a great strategy. We don't, though, because it's unnatural - not to mention boring. So we make plans for next week and we drink coffee and we keep having babies. Human beings aren't built to hole up. We're built to live. And dance. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We bought the 13th house we looked at that day - a spacious ranch home sitting on half an acre. We got it for a song. So here I sit, snugly and smugly ensconced in my palace in the suburbs. But then again, a good Chinese restaurant is at least 25 miles away. Ditto, a decent bookstore. The nearest escalator (the surest sign of civilization) is over an hour away. We all pay a price to live where we choose. That's just life - in or out of the big city.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-03-16 00:00:00 Dennis Schoenauer 4 of 5 people found the following review helpful: 1.0 out of 5 stars The moaning of the plagued privileged is not a pretty sound., March 9, 2009 By Alexandra Henshel - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) Gimme Shelter: Ugly Houses, Cruddy Neighborhoods, Fast-Talking Brokers and Toxic Mortgages: My Three Years Searching For The American Dream is the whole overblown title, which promises much more than is delivered in this surprisingly weightless book. For 310 pages, Williams moans with the dreadfully self-conscious tone of the plagued priviliged, and it is not a pretty sound. The book is not, as implied, a look at the greater collapse of the American housing industry or what have you- it is a great whine about how she (freelance writer for publications such as Salon) and her husband Jeff (on-and-off employed copy editor) couldn't afford to buy in Brooklyn's Carrol Gardens during the housing boom. Considering that they had lived there for years before prices skyrocketed, it seems rather sour grapes of her how much she bitches and squeaks about those friends of theirs who did buy early and made mad money from their foresight, and what she has to say about those dreadful new rich people who priced her out of what she clearly felt was rightfully her cool neighborhood- well, you can practically see her stamping her little feet. She did have the grace to realize, close to the end of the book, that what she and Jeff were doing by buying and tarting up a place in way way uptown Manhattan (Inwood) was the same thing the wealthy were doing in Carroll Gardens- gentrification, lady. The rock stars priced you out of your neighborhood, now you're doing it to the residents of Inwood Park, the immigrants and the elderly. I grow weary of these- The House on First Street, about the terrible agonies of restoring one's mansion in post-Katrina New Orleans, Not Buying It, (incidentally also set in smug-as-hell Brooklyn) about the fearsome self-denial it took not to recreationally shop for a year, Bitter is the New Black, whose loathsome author memorably carried a Prada bag to the unemployment office... In times of such turbulence, it's a turnoff.