Non-Fiction: Life in Color: Visual Therapy’s Guide to the Perfect Palette by Jesse Garza and Joe Lupo

Maybe it’s just me, but something about Oprah stylists Jesse Garza and Joe Lupo’s second book just struck me as perfectly 2007. It’s not that the book is dated, exactly. It’s just something about the enthusiastic and unapologetic hedonism in Life in Color: Visual Therapy’s Guide to the Perfect Palette (Chronicle Books) that puts one in mind of a time -- not that long ago in months and years, but perhaps long ago in spirit -- when the most important thing on all of our minds might reasonably have been to discover if our styletype was classic or whimsical or if your colortype was earth, sun, moon or star.

One of the first lines in the introduction sums my feelings up pretty well:

As you make your grand entrance, you can bet people notice the way that drop-dead red dress brings out the rosins in your cheeks -- or, conversely, the way that dreary mustard yellow sweater makes you look drawn and worn.

Here’s what else can make you look drawn and worn: losing your job. Losing your house. Politically losing your way.

I’m not saying Life in Color is a bad book. It probably isn’t. It’s me, really it is. Or it’s the world. I think I would have liked this book a lot a year ago. But times have changed. So many banks have failed. Heads of state have shifted. 401ks have gotten smaller, the endangered list has gotten longer. And those granite countertops I thought I wouldn’t be able to live without? I’m sort of thinking that I can. Realistically, I’m just not in the mood for a “two-man style SWAT team” right now. I’m wondering if anyone really is.