A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder

Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

"I read A Perfect Mess because I just saw it at the library and I thought it looked interesting.

A Perfect Mess is about how mess — as categorized by a million different words, he has categorizes a bunch of different kinds of mess — can be sometimes useful in regular life and lead to positive outcomes. One of the examples he talks about in the book is about how penicillin was discovered because a researcher left Petri dishes out and some mold got in there, and that ended up being, you know, "Wow, that's penicillin!" As a messy person myself, I was hoping that I would get a lot more ammo from this book for, "Yeah! I'm messy because what he said!" But I didn't get quite as much as I was hoping.

I would give A Perfect Mess about three stars out of five. Ironically, what I didn't like about the book was kind of that — it approached the topic in a kind of messy way. It did a lot of anecdotes and took a long time to get around to so where are you headed with this?"

© Copyright 2007, 2008 Pacific Book Exchange LLC