Before my first pregnancy, I'd never given much consideration to baby name books; I'd always felt pretty confident that I would be able to come up with the perfect names for my children right out of my own head. But once confronted with the huge task of choosing a name out of the thousands and thousands of possible names, I realized I needed some help. And, since I'm one of those people who really likes to research things and explore my options, I went shopping for name books. Most books just present you with long boring lists of boys'& girls' names -- very much like reading a dictionary -- and don't put the names in any useful sort of perspective. Rosenkrantz and Satran, however, present the names in a series of really helpful lists, ie., trendy names, popular names, cool names,names you probably want to avoid and so on. I really appreciated the lists of celebrity baby names because those names tend to become very trendy and common a few years down the line and I wasn't interested in bestowing too-usual a name on any of my children. Thus the title -- Beyond Jennifer & Jason.

But the main thing with this book is that it's a great read. Even if you aren't expecting a baby, this book is incredibly funny. I found all the lists were helpful to me in sorting out a lot of my baby-expectations. Did I want to give my boys smart-sounding names, handsome names, macho names. . . ? The authors are never less than brutally frank with their opinions, classifying names as wimpy or downwardly mobile and the result is never less than an extremely funny, helpful and revealing book.