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Book reviews for "Horn,_Stacy" sorted by average review score:
Waiting for My Cats to Die : A Memoir
Published in Paperback by St. Martin's Press (2002)
Author: Stacy Horn
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This is what life is REALLY about!
It was like reading a letter from my best friend. I laughed (a lot) and I cried. Her interviews of elderly people touched my soul. I thought about how important it is for all of us to know how our own loved ones feel about their lives, their work, their place in this world. Stacy is so human. This book helped me feel like my ups and downs are okay. It's okay to be 40 and single. And it's okay to love your cats. There's alot of people (men and women) that are captured within these pages. Stacy's book is so easy to read. She repeats chapter titles so you know she's going to revisit that subject matter. It's hard to put the book down. I truly hope Stacy undertakes another masterpiece very soon!

Life at it's Darkest, Strangest, and Most Alive.
"Waiting for my Cats to Die" Is a book you must read. It's about Stacy Horn. It's about Pamela Benton. It's about your friends. It's about you. It's about the human condition in the new century. It's about time you read it. "Waiting for my Cats to Die" is that book that only comes along every once in awhile, out of the blue, by an unknown author, and takes the world by surprize with it's charm, wit, intellegence, heartbreak and laughter. On the exterior, you see a excerpt from a middle-aged woman's life, dealing with her mid-life crisis. However, once you delve deeper into it's pages you see it's not just for aging women. The issues it deals with pertain to us all. Mortality. Living single. Losing loved ones. Fear. Friends. Wading through the shallow end of the dating pool. Career. Money. Love. Redemption. LIFE. "Waiting for my Cats to Die" will most certainly touch you, stir your soul, and make you examine your own life. It will make you feel better, live happier, and just maybe.. smile. It will probably change you, most certainly entertain you, and maybe make it all a litlle easier for awhile. You don't have to care about Stacy's life... although you will. You just need to read her book, and understand yourself a little more. No, it's not just a mid-life crisis book. It's not an avid reader's self-help book. It's just one great little piece of literature that's really effected me deeply. I'm not a book person, and I don't need to feel young again. I'm just a 24 year old whom ran across this page on Amazon and decided to take a chance. And you know what? I'm glad.

hm..well i wrote this for an english class. GREAT BOOK!!!
Stacy Horn is a 40-year-old New Yorker, strikingly aware that her life is almost over. In Waiting for My Cats to Die: A Morbid Memoir, Ms. Horn writes of her own personal experiences, past and present, hoping to find some comfort in the fact that she is eventually going to die. "We've all read about how men act out their midlife crises over and over and over. Yeah, yeah. What do women do? This book will show you. I've started to act out in all sorts of ways. My pain will be your amusement." Yet this book isn't just for middle aged women. We can all learn from this book about love and hope. Loss and fear. Life and death.

The initial question most readers - including myself - ask is, "Why does she want her cats to die?" There is a severe misunderstanding here among cat-lovers of the world. Stacy adores her cats. She lives, breathes, and works for their very existence. Basically, her cats, Veets and Beams are all she has in the world. Once they die, then she can quit. Oddly enough, her felines are laden with medical problems. They are both diabetic, and Beams also has kidney disease. Stacy goes through extreme lengths to keep them alive, including insulin injections to them both, every twelve hours. I find this kind of love for a pet very endearing, and I admire Stacy for her immense dedication to them, even if it does seem a tad obsessive.

Speaking of obsessions, Stacy is obsessed with death. "I keep coming back to death the same way I can't stop touching a sore tooth with my tongue to see if it still hurts. Death. Still terrifying? Yes. How about now? Yes. And now? Yes. Death is at the heart of the midlife crisis." She goes to every death movie, reads every death book. She even went through the belongings of an eighty-eight year old woman who died, finding the most obscure things - a seventy-something-year-old appendix, for example. Small, short chapters on death are scattered sporadically throughout the book. Stacy visits abandoned cemeteries and funeral homes housing forgotten ashes. She wants to "unearth the unremembered...because if I can resurrect these abandoned histories, I win."

Meanwhile, when Stacy is actually living, runs a New-York-based internet company - Echo. She has been credited as one of the industry's first women to begin such a venture, and it has been around roughly ten years. She is constantly on the phone company's hit list, falling deep into debt, and desperately trying to sell Echo. In the end however, no sale transpires, and Stacy is still the owner. Taking numerous polls from her Echo users, she puts their statistics in the book. "Are you happy?," and "What do you miss the most from your youth?," being some questions that are asked.

Waiting for My Cats to Die: A Morbid Memoir is such an insightful and interesting reflection, not just on the aspects of death, but life itself. It is THE reason why you are never to judge a book by its cover. What I enjoyed most about this book was how honest and straight-forward Stacy Horn was about all her thoughts, feelings, and dreams. "I find it comforting - and liberating - to admit that I don't know anything. Neither does anyone else." I found myself devouring each page numerous times, as if I could gain more information out of it after each read. Although she and I live completely different lives, I could connect, relate, and truly care about Stacy. This is not your average mid-life crisis, self-helper. Stacy Horn stirs your soul to revel in her own seemingly average life, urging you to enjoy your own small glory moments before it's too late.

Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town
Published in Hardcover by Warner Books (1998)
Author: Stacy Horn
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Cyberville readable, highly entertaining
Anyone questioning the relevance of Cyberville as a useful primer on internet culture should be pleased to learn that the book is being used as a core text in a course about cultures and communities in cyberspace at the University of Western Ontario. Don't let the use of Cyberville in an academic setting dissuade you, though. This book is far from your average textbook. Cyberville is an entertaining, highly readable account of author Stacy Horn's experiences with the creation of the online community ECHO. Horn uses a casual approach in detailing many of the issues relevant to online communities, including gender issues, cybersex, and online stalkers. The result is insightful and humourous. Cyberville is reccommended reading for anyone wanting to learn more about online communities. A word of warning, however -- Horn uses many postings from ECHO to illustrate her discussions. These egocentric ramblings from a bunch of self-loathing New Yorkers (especially the frequent examples from a conference entitled "I Hate Myself") are enough to inspire depression in even the cheeriest of individuals.

Very solid book on internet culture
There is a real dearth of good books on internet culture. Cyberville and My Tiny Life are really the only two worth reading. Horn has an amazing ability to step back far enough from the community she is part of in order to do a sociological analysis of it. It's incredibly readable, very human, but a still-relevant look at the way we form communities and relationships online.

Cyberville describes the growth of an online community.

If all you've ever done on the Internet is surf the Web and send Email, you've barely scratched the surface. In Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town, Stacy Horn describes the founding, growth and day-to-day life of Echo, her New York-based online community.

This is a story about people, not machines. There is more here about eunuchs than about Unix. Horn started Echo in 1990, her only financing her severance package from Mobil Oil. Cyberville tells about the early settlers of this electronic homestead and how they grew it into a town with heroes, villains, wackos, love, hate, sex (all kinds), death, birth, laughter and tears.

The people of Echo don't stay glued to their computers. They bowl and drink and play softball and go to the movies together. Horn follows these face-to-face activities and relates them to the online life these people share.

Written in a light and breezy conversational style, Cyberville comes across as a fascinating tale of interesting people settling an uncharted land together.

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