Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Wonderful resource for writers, roleplayers, and of course, parents-to-be!

Customer Rating:

This is a very focussed book, containing baby names and nothing but baby names. If that's what you're looking for, you've seriously come to the right place. It has a couple of aspects to it that I really love and that put it head and shoulders above the other naming books I've looked at. For one, it doesn't just take names from cultures--it has lists of names of celebrities, sports heroes, award-winners of various types, and so on. It provides a much wider array of lists to keep you interested and give you something to think about when naming your child. You could name your child after a Nobel Prize winner, an Olympic gymnast, the CEO of a famous company, an opera singer, an activist, or a mythological figure. The one negative here is that some of these lists seem rather short and arbitrary (lists of actors and actresses, for example, seem to pick a rather arbitrary small subset of the possibilities), however, simply by pointing out the types of names you might look at the book gives you a place to start looking for more if you don't quite like the specific options it presents. I like the fact that last names are included in some of these lists, which isn't the case with any other baby name resource I've found. You can use these last names as middle names, or, if you're a writer or roleplayer looking for inspiration, you can mix-and-match first and last names that you like. All in all I think this is the most fun, interesting, and useful naming book I've seen so far. However, it does have a couple of problems. In one section the book promises to include a list of "no-nos"--names you should avoid giving your child--yet I couldn't find this section at all. Some of the sources get pretty silly, such as superhero secret identity names and brand names--I just can't imagine naming my kid after yogurt, thanks. And a few suggestions would get your child into so many fights at school that I can't even believe the authors included them (Uranus as a boy's name, anyone? *Shudder*). Exercise a little restraint and maybe run your ideas past your neighbor's 10-year-old to make sure he doesn't start laughing too quickly or find an obvious crude joke in the name.