Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life (©2009) by Gail Blanke is written in a breezy, informal, almost stream-of-consciousness style that ultimately begins to feel rather forced and disingenuous. She totally lost me on page 171 with, “I hadn’t heard back form a financial institution about whether or not they were sending me to Dubai to give an important speech to some of their most valued people in the Asia Pacific Rim.” Nevertheless, I slogged through the book to the end, wading knee-deep through the author’s gloating anecdotes about winning a regional swimming competition at age 12, ibeing the manager of special promotions for the New York Yankees at the age of twenty-four (“Yup. The only woman in Major League Baseball with what they called a front-office job”) and appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, of course she got the Dubai gig. The brief sections on “re-inventing yourself” were nominally interesting, but beyond that, I found the book lacking in helpful advice and I found little in the examples and anecdotes to which I could relate.