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An almost daily report of interesting, unusual and noteworthy books that passed under my scanner.
An almost daily report of interesting, unusual and noteworthy books that passed under my scanner.An almost daily report of interesting, unusual and noteworthy books that passed under my scanner.An almost daily report of interesting, unusual and noteworthy books that passed under my scanner.An almost daily report of interesting, unusual and noteworthy books that passed under my scanner.An almost daily report of interesting, unusual and noteworthy books that passed under my scanner.
Thank you to blog reader PB for suggesting today’s title. Steve Greenberg’s Gadget Nation is a lavishly illustrated over-sized hard cover filled with two page spreads about hundreds of inventions and the inventors behind them. I was particularly intrigued by the "Clocky"– a rugged alarm clock designed by an MIT student with a bad habit of hitting the snooze button and sleeping in. The Clocky is outfitted with large rubber wheels and when you press its snooze button, the Clocky rolls itself off of the night table and onto the floor, forcing the sleeper out of bed to hunt down and turn off the loud alarm.
Other especially interesting gadgets include a toddler’s food dish that you store in the freezer so that it will quickly cool down foods that are too hot for a young child, supposedly saving Mom from hours and hours of blowing on forkfulls of food and comforting a child with mouth burns and something called the "Head Blade" a bizzare looking contraption with wheels and a squeegee-protected oversized razor blade which supposedly makes it a lot easier to shave your head if you are going for the chrome dome look. I have to confess that none of the features products inspired me to rush to a web site and place an order, though the toilet tank aquarium (the fish and plants go in a transparent lucite box that surrounds the holding tank for flushing) and the "conedom" ice cream cone holder did intrigue me.
For anyone who is tinkering away in a garage or basement trying to invent the next big thing Gadget Nation would be an excellent resource for learning more about successful inventions and the people behind them. Non-inventors will probably find enough that is interesting and unusual to enjoy the book as well. Recommended. Thanks again to PB for suggesting this one.
In attempting to write this review of Barbara Wallraff’s Word Fugitives, a book about finding or coining words needed to convey concepts not defined by a known or existing word, I found myself quite relating to Wallruff’s theme. Somewhere out there, I am certain, is a word that defines a person who is extremely interested in odd and unusual words and enjoys using words no one around them has ever heard of. Sadly neither Word Fugitivesnot any of the dictionaries or thesauri I consulted led me to this particular fugitive term. Thus I was unable to begin this piece by saying "This one is for my ______ friends."
I have a number of cookbooks on hand and was intending to do another Cookbook Roundup to round off the week on Friday. But after spending some time with 1080 Recipes I realized that this one deserved a review all its own. And my apologies for not getting Friday posted until Sunday.
For more than thirty years Simone Ortega’s 1080 Recipes has been considered the authoritative volume on Spanish cooking and has sold millions of copies in various editions in Spanish. This 2007 release from Phaidon Publishing is the first English translation for which Ortega and her daughter Ines have updated all of the recipes to be accessible to home cooks in the English speaking world.
I’ve long been a huge Larry McMurtry fan. While I don’t care for the Western genre and was never able to get into Lonesome Dove or any of his other westerns, I have very greatly enjoyed his novels about modern day Texans. My all time favorite is The Evening Star which was a sequel to Terms Of Endearment. I have also greatly enjoyed his sequence of novels about Duane Moore of the fictional Thalia, Texas which began in 1966 with The Last Picture Show and continued with Texasville in 1987, Duane’s Depressed in 1999 and finally in 2007 with When The Light Goes. It was thrilling to me to return for a few hours to McMurtry’s Texas and I say without hesitation that this volume finds McMurtry at the top of his form as a novelist.
Lately Ron and I have become regular viewers of a show on HGTV where two rather pompous designers visit with the owners of homes that have been on the market for awhile and haven’t sold and advise them on changes they should make in order to get their homes sold. What I find most striking is that in the episodes we’ve seen so far all but one of the hapless home owners has followed the advice (neutralize, Neutralize, NEUTRALIZE!!) and still not found a buyer. The one exception is a home owner who was still contemplating whether or not to follow the designer’s advice when she received an offer and sold the house Without "neutralizing" it. And therein perhaps lies an object lesson for the designers preaching the gospel of Neutrality.
Happy Tuesday! Time for an Easy books round up. Remember you can click on any book cover to place a request for it with Your local library or click on any book title to purchase from Powell’s, an independent and ethical bookseller based in Portland Oregon.
A recent release in the Cat In A Hat line of Easy Readers The Belly Book is a delightfully illustrated look at all sorts of bellies from bear bellies to brass bellies, glass bellies and hula-dancing grass bellies. As always the Easy Reader uses a carefully chosen and limited vocabulary and is specifically designed for our newest readers. Recommended.
If you’ve ever felt royally ripped off by a big company chances are Bob Sullivan has some useful advice. Gotcha Capitalism chronicles the ways that big corporations from hotel chains and airlines to supermarkets and cell phone providers use hidden charges and fees in order to advertise lower prices than can realistically be offered. Sullivan, author of msnbc.com’s Red Tape Chronicles, provides clear and specific advice about what types of additional charges to watch out for as well as when and how to complain in order to maximize your chances of having extra charges waived or refunded.
When I first started this blog I remember hanging out on Blog Catalog and it always seemed I was talking to people who were facing writers block or unable to think of topics to post about and generally struggling to regularly publish a blog. And I would look at the huge stack of books on my couch and think to myself, ‘at least I don’t have _that_ problem.
And let me say right off that my stack of books is as tall as ever, so I can’t really use that as an excuse for my recent lack of posts. Honestly I don’t know why I have been spending my time lately playing games and watching television and even reading books rather than posting and promoting my blog. Sometimes, I suspect, you just need a mental break. Having recharged my inner batteries I hope to on Monday resume my five posts per week and thought I would ease back into things by posting today about three great books I’ve read during my hiatus.
My regular readers who’ve been with me awhile already know that I really hate memes, though like Turnip of Power wrote in this post I generally try to be a good sport about them albeit most always with a twist of my own. (See The Einstein’s Brain God Does Not Exist Meme or The Why We Want To Kill You For Not Understanding Iraq Meme.) So none of my friends should be too surprised that having been tagged by my friend JD over at Techfun with Geek Mom Mashup’s Seven Weird Things About Me meme I am NOT in fact going to paste in and follow the instructions. Instead I decided to post about seven books, each of which while not exactly "weird" is a bit unusual or at the very least a bit interesting. (Saavy readers will realize that I am using this as yet another excuse to clear my stack of a bunch of books that I’m just not going to get around to reading. SHHH!!!. Please don’t call the Meme Police on me.)
If you are trying to watch your weight and eat healthier, it can be easy at times to be overwhelmed by all the conflicting information out there. And if you are sometimes unable to avoid eating out it can be very difficult to weigh the available choices and make good selections. David Zinczenko, editor or Mens Health magazine has written a very user friendly book to help you out. Much of the book consists of two page spreads with recommended options (Eat This) on the left and less healthful options (Not That) on the right. There are pages for many fast and slow food restaurant chains as well as for various supermarket aisles and photographs of all items are provided so it is very clear what menu items and products are in each category.
When I picked it up and perused the cover I had presumed that I would be panning Michel Richard’s Happy In The Kitchen. Just seeing that Thomas Keller wrote the introduction made me immediately assume it would be yet another Big book of chi-chi frou-frou glam presentations and labor intensive nonsense that no one sane would ever bother to make. But then I read the book and I actually quite liked it.
I have to confess, right off, that there is no theme, no connection no rhyme or reason behind today’s book selections. These are five that just caught my eye and found their way home with me and each is just so unusual and interesting that I just had to share it. Ranging from a huge 10 inches tall by 14 inches wide to a squat and chunky 6 inches square, from the Duba plains in Botswana (Africa) to the foot, err feet of Texas, from the islands of the South Pacific to the crayon factory, these five books are just All over the map.
Welcome! If this is your first visit please note that you can click on any book cover to get the book from your local library or click on any book title to purchase it. Browse recent book reviews on the front page or browse by category in the sidebar. I welcome your comments and will try to reply as soon as possible.
One Sunday afternoon I was working at the check in desk. One of the reference librarians handed me her return materials, including Free For All, which she heartily recommended. ‘It’s a hoot’, she said.
Ouch! I tripped and fell on the sidewalk taking some clothes to the laundry room today and scraped my hand up pretty bad. Tough to type with big bandages on my right hand fingers. So just a short post today to share a book with one of my favorite bloggers. This book isn’t new but it remains popular at the library and is still worth checking out.
For ender, who is always building amazing Lego models I picked up a copy of The Ultiamte Lego Book. The official authorized biography of the little building bricks that could. I was sorry that my Legos were something I had to leave behind the last time I moved and thoroughly enjoyed reading about and seeing pictures of the Lego manufacturing process and the building of the huge models for the three Legoland theme parks. For Lego fans this one is Recommended
While I posted an Easy Books roundup just yesterday I felt this Easy Non-Fiction title I stumbled upon last week rated a post of its own. The Librarian of Basra is a true story about Alia Muhammad Baker who is the librarian in Basra, Iraq. When war comes Alia fears that her library and its 30,000 books may be destroyed. She begins taking the books home and storing them safely and arranges for other library staff members to do the same. While the library does end up getting burned and destroyed Alia and her colleagues are able to save fully seventy percent of the library’s collection.
The children’s area of the library can be at times both the most frustrating and most rewarding area to work. There is nothing like setting off to make closing pick up rounds and finding that every toy and nearly every book has been strewn hither tither and yon and know you are Really going to have to hustle to set things to right in the short time available until closing to remind you of the real challenge of serving patrons who are still learning their ABC’s and can thus be forgiven for putting books back in the wrong order, though I sometimes wonder if the parents who quite fail to teach their toddlers to put things away when they are finished live in surroundings like this all of the time.
OK. So first off I got confess that now that I am officially middle aged I don’t actually ride roller coasters anymore. But Joel was a huge Disney fan and I have been to Disneyland as an adult an inordinate number of times for a non parent. And time was that I loved the roller coasters most of all and always looked forward to these Southern California trips. And it was that younger me that was so entranced by the cover of Richard Barth’s novel Jumper, A Mystery.
First, my thanks to Techfun for suggesting this one to me. It’s taken me an awful long time to read it but I have and I’m glad I did. In Friday’s post I pointed out that art can be much more effective than traditional in conveying complex realities. I believe that A Thousand Splendid Suns is an excellent example of a novel that conveys the complex and messy truths of the real life story through novels that, imho, do a better job than history books sometimes in educating a mind about a particular place and peoples. I previously posted about Gary Geddes’ Kingdom Of Ten Thousand Things which touches briefly on the plight of present day Afghanistan before rushing off to pursue a very different main theme.
In October of 2001 my later partner, Joel, and I took a long planned ‘once in a lifetime’ trip to Hawaii. It was somewhat surreal traveling in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. There were rifle-toting National Guardsmen all over every airport but apart from their conspicuous presence, airport security was still pretty low key and ‘customer service’ oriented (if the security rules that had been in place on 9/11 had actually been FOLLOWED, none of the hijackers would have been allowed to board). Passenger screening had Not yet been "Halliburtoned" into a passenger funded federal agency that has turned checking in for a flight to Phoenix into an experience only slightly less intrusive and de-humanizing than be booked into a typical county jail.
I vividly remember as a child, in the days before Court TV when cameras were generally not allowed in court rooms, seeing the artist’s renditions of key testimony from various trials and hearings on the evening news. I remember being so struck by how the drawings of what happened that day seemed to make it all more Real to me than the broadcasts of real trials and hearings would later seem when as now such broadcasts became ubiquitous.
Steve Mumford’s Baghdad Journal, subtitled An Artist in Occupied Iraq caught my attention the moment that I saw it. It is the first time in many years I have encountered art as journalism, and I was struck once again at how much more effective good drawings can be at conveying a reality vis a vis the endless propaganda errr copy and film footage we have already seen regarding Iraq.
Thank you to blog reader PB for suggesting today’s title. Steve Greenberg’s Gadget Nation is a lavishly illustrated over-sized hard cover filled with two page spreads about hundreds of inventions and the inventors behind them. I was particularly intrigued by the "Clocky"– a rugged alarm clock designed by an MIT student with a bad habit of hitting the snooze button and sleeping in. The Clocky is outfitted with large rubber wheels and when you press its snooze button, the Clocky rolls itself off of the night table and onto the floor, forcing the sleeper out of bed to hunt down and turn off the loud alarm.
While I posted an Easy Books roundup just yesterday I felt this Easy Non-Fiction title I stumbled upon last week rated a post of its own. The Librarian of Basra is a true story about Alia Muhammad Baker who is the librarian in Basra, Iraq. When war comes Alia fears that her library and its 30,000 books may be destroyed. She begins taking the books home and storing them safely and arranges for other library staff members to do the same. While the library does end up getting burned and destroyed Alia and her colleagues are able to save fully seventy percent of the library’s collection.
OK. So first off I got confess that now that I am officially middle aged I don’t actually ride roller coasters anymore. But Joel was a huge Disney fan and I have been to Disneyland as an adult an inordinate number of times for a non parent. And time was that I loved the roller coasters most of all and always looked forward to these Southern California trips. And it was that younger me that was so entranced by the cover of Richard Barth’s novel Jumper, A Mystery.
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