The Thin Red Line

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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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

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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.

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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.  

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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.

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If you are on a diet or lack a sweet tooth,  this week’s Cookbook Roundup is SO not for you.   I  remember when I was a small child, every summer when peaches were in season my maternal grandfather would drive over from his home in Alabama to visit us in New Orleans and bring us two big bushel baskets of the sweetest, juiciest peaches.   And always my mother and my Aunt Katherine would make homemade peach ice cream.   I have no idea what recipe they used or how they made it turn out so good without using an ice cream machine (they would blend the ingredients with a mixer or blender and pour it into ice cube trays and just stick it in the freezer overnight).   But all these years later,  David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop called up memories of icy, peachy goodness that have me practically salivating over the keyboard.

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April Fools!

Awhile back I did a post about Gary Trudeau’s latest Doonesbury collection and Frank Rich’s The Greatest Story Ever Sold and remarked that while both were excellent books I find I no longer have the stomach to read about our inept and corrupt politicians.   After reading an article in Newsweek  I recently posted to my politics blog (for the first time in ages) to plead my case that opposing Hillary Clinton does NOT constitute misogyny or sexism.   But the four books I am featuring today,  all of which have been in my stack for well over a month and some of which are Past Due at the library,  and  none of which I have been able to bring myself to read strongly suggest that I really am burned out on reading about political stuff.

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I don’t have regular recurring features tied to specific days of the week, like the very popular Wordless Wednesday that many of my blog friends unfailingly participate in.   I do, however, have a number of regularly recurring features, but you never know what day of the week they’ll pop up on. 

My partner, Ron, has very different tastes in books and reading and I am truly grateful for his occasional "Ron Reviews" wherein Ron writes about books of his own choosing, giving the blog a wider variety of books and a nice change of perspective from time to time.   Today’s book is not one I would ever have selected myself.    I hope you will enjoy reading Ron’s review of A Short History of the American Stomach.

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