DOWNSHIFTING is the new buzz word for downwardly mobile professionals who leave frenetic careers to live a simpler, more balanced lifestyle.

Downshifters are people who freely choose to earn less. Despite reduced income, they tend to gain control over their personal finances (ironically enough), live a healthier lifestyle and care for the environment.

Downshfiters reduce spending; free themselves from debt; avoid clutter and waste; eat healthily; often become self-employed and make more time for themselves, their relationships and whatever matters most to them in life.

It's all the rage in the US. Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute in New York, estimates that 5 per cent of Americans have already downshifted. Last spring Daniel Yankelovich, a public opinion analyst, told Esquire magazine that downshifting was set to become "the political issue of the future".

In 1995 the Wall Street Journal warned that the frugal lifestyles of downshifters could undermine the US economy.

Polly Ghazi and Judy Jones's Getting a Life; The Downshifter's Guide to Happier Simpler Living presents itself as the first comprehensive guide to downshifting, a book to help you look before you leap and the definitive guide to why and how to downshift. It claims to offer the best advice there is on how to live better with less, and includes what it describes as an indispensable downshifter's directory.

Last year, Polly Ghazi took voluntary redundancy from her position as Whitehall Correspondent with the Observer. Judy Jones, another former staff journalist with the same paper, left last April to "get a life".

The first words of the preface of their book could be intoned as the preface to a eucharistic service: "Britain is increasingly an over-developed, dysfunctional and unhappy nation ... " Undoubtedly true, but the (sustained) sermon-like tone and (unremitting) targeting of a British readership jarred with this reviewer, raising a doubt about this book's purported comprehensive, definitive and indispensable stature.

Getting a Life publishes a 1996 survey which found that 6 per cent of people in work in Britain took steps to reduce their income in the previous two years, confirming the American estimate. The authors track down 11 downshifters, the wisdom of including some of whom could be questioned. One downshifter's partner admits: "Basically, I'm living out somebody else's dream, here. I am the reluctant partner.

Another downshifter spends his time on self-development courses and voluntary work and is training as a counsellor. He can afford to. His property investments still net him some £50,000 a year.

The chapter on money half-way through the book ought to be its strongest, but is in fact its weakest. It reads like an inadequate skim through the thoroughly excellent American bestseller Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominquez and Vicki Robin (Penguin, 1992), a truly comprehensive, definitive and indispensable book for anyone - downshifter and yuppie alike - who wishes to gain control over personal finances.

Getting a Life's five pages on the subject of self-employment are considerably less useful than the start-your-own-business-packs which are available free of charge from many Irish banks and county enterprise boards, while the chapter on accommodation options for downshifters is wafer-thin in quality; a moderately intelligent Junior Cert pupil would do as good a job on the back of a large envelope.

Thereafter the book deteriorates (further) into a tired and eclectic hotchpotch of gardening, transport, household management etc. For anybody who is seriously considering or has already embarked upon what can undoubtedly be the exciting adventure of downshifting, be advised that this book will only add to the clutter you should be getting rid of and reading it will eat into the time you could be spending getting a life. {CORRECTION} 97021900035