The Thin Red Line

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.)

Sub-titled "From ancient Rome to the 21st century the incredible journeys of the food we eat" Sarah Murphy’s Moveable Feasts offers a fresh and timely perspective on the global food marketplace. Deftly combining history, science and politics Murphy examines the transportation of food stuffs historically and today in a book that profoundly questions the growing "local" food movements.

Stepehn Prothero’s Religious Literacy makes the case that most Americans at this time know very, very little about religions other than their own and argues that religion should be taught in schools, not as an indoctrination or incorporation of any particular faith but from an historical and academic perspective to give us knowledge which is crucial to understanding the interactions of our world and its peoples.

Award-winning wildlife photographer Andy Rouse has taken an extraordinary collection of photographs documenting the lives of the iconic flightless birds which are among the most recognizable residents of Antarctica. The photos in Penguin Life are truly stunning and provide an amazing look at these most unusual birds.

Subtitled "How one man nearly lost his sanity, spent a fortune and endured an existential crisis in the quest for the perfect garden" William Alexander’s The $64 Tomato is a humorous memoir of life with a brown thumb.

Historian John C. Waugh’s One Man Great Enough takes journalistic , reportorial approach to presenting Abraham Lincoln’s road to the Civil War in his own words and through the eyes of his contemporaries.

The Sharper Your Knife The Less You Cry is Kathleen Flinn’s humorous memoir about attending Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris.   

 And finally, Andy Borowitz’s The Republican Playbook is a tongue in cheek look at "dirty tricks" Republicans have employed in their quest to seize power by any means. 

My apologies for being off-line and not posting this week.    I have finished reading several great books and will be posting a number of reviews so please visit again soon to check out the most interesting, unusual and noteworthy books to pass under The Thin Red Line.   And as always,  please let me know should you decide to read any of these books.   Happy Thursday!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Books, Humor and Memes, Reject Pile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.