The Thin Red Line

Part of me feels guilty for posting about a second memoir by a second Los Angeles area librarian within less than three months, but Quiet Please   Dispatches from a Public Librarian was just barely too good to pass up.  Scott Douglas’ memoir of his career with the Anaheim library lacks some of the pizazz of Don Borchert’s Free For All  (reviewed here)  but the crisp writing and the creatively Dewey-numbered chapters go a long way with me, though to be perfectly honest at times I found this young man’s outlook and worldview a bit appalling.  

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Chas Newkey-Burden’s Great Email Disasters is a UK trade paperback book about e-mails that have come embarrassingly to light, leaving their senders to look like real schmucks.   While reading titillating e-mails is fun I suppose,  the fact that I really didn’t Know who most any of these people Were detracted for the experience for me.    This one is mildly Recommended to folks in the UK.   (And maybe they can tell me what all the fuss was about

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I have to say right off, going in, that I really wanted to like Clifford A Wright’s Bake Until Bubbly– The Ultimate Casserole Cookbook.   But Wright in several ways made that very hard for me to do.    The first time in the early pages he decried using canned cream of whatever soups in favor of freshly prepared bechmael sauces.  All of what I would call the easy steps in casserole-preparation have been replaced with extremely labor-intensive recipes which seem as though designed to show just how much hard work is normally replaced by the use of canned soup in casseroles that by the end of the 450 page plus new 2008 release I was mainly seized by an imperative urge to hurl the bloody book across the room.   This one is Not Recommended.

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If you’ve ever hesitated to eat seafood due to concerns about mercury or other pollutants or concerns about sustainability OR if you’ve ever hesitated to try cooking some exotic variety of seafood or other out of ignorance,  Paul Johnson has written the perfect book for you.   Subtitled "the definitive guide to understanding, selecting and preparing healthy, delicious and enviornmentally sustaingable seafood", Johnson’s Fish Forever is an encyclopediac guide to edibles from the sea.

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Pack your bags and get ready for the ride of your life.  The Space Tourist’s Handbook  tells you all you need to know about vacationing in space.  Written by Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, this $16 book is part brochure for the range of trips offered by Space Adventures, part introduction to various aspects of space travel and 100% All out of this world.

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$3,000,000,000,000.00.  Or, if you prefer, three trillion dollars.  Any way you cut it, that’s A LOT of money.  And according to Joseph E Stiglitz and Linda J Blimes, that’s how much the United States’ war in Iraq has cost, estimating conservatively.  Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist takes a fascinating look at the cost of the Iraq war.   And the numbers are not pretty.

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I had thought that  I was burned out on reading about hurricane Katrina but when I happened upon Michael Tisserand’s Sugarcane Academy the other day I stayed up until after 2 a.m. reading it.    I found myself fascinated by the story of Paul Reynaud– a New Orleans first grade teacher who was the driving force behind the creation of Sugarcane Academy, a school for evacuee children that was created in New Iberia Louisiana in the weeks immediately following the storm and then continued in borrowed space at Loyola University in New Orleans once people were allowed back into the city.

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Having considered and rejected five other cookbooks for today’s post, I can say without hesitation that Andreas Viestad’s Kitchen Of Light is no ordinary cookbook.   There is first the photography,  which is highly evocative of Thomas Laupstad’s blog, depicting ethereal images of Northern Norway.   And then there are the essays, each like a postcard or travelogue from a  cold, exotic land.   And then of course are the recipes– largely for fish with just enough vegetables and sweets to make a well-rounded cookbook.

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So today I was supposed to write about Divided America,  a book long on statistics and short on useful ideas.   But given Barrack Obama’s selection as the Democratic nominee,  I find myself less able than ever to delve into Earl and Merle Black’s thesis that America is an evenly divided country with the Democrats controlling the Norheast and the West Coast, the Republicans controlling the South and the Mountains/Plains states and the Midwest  cast as the eternal "swing" region.   Of course, I could easily point out how dry and un-engaging I found the Black brothers analysis of long term regional polling data or the fact that the Black’s intense categorization of the electorate as, for example "non-Christian whites" vs "New American minorities" left me cold and confused.   But today, it seems to me is a day to celebrate Obama’s victory.   And the Blacks’ dry statistical analysis be damned.

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Several years ago I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, an expose on just how badly low level employees of major companies are treated and an examination of just how challenging it is to actually survive on what these companies pay.   While it was mildly interesting to learn a few more details about just how bad it is down here in the trenches, being myself one of those over-worked and underpaid front line employees I was greatly offended by Ehrenreich’s rather condescending approach to the workers whose plight she examined and by the pains she took to establish that she was somehow different from and better than these people.

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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.

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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 Fugitives not 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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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