The Thin Red Line

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

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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Happy Friday!    Back when I was in the eight grade one of our teachers made our course grade dependent upon a special project in which we would strictly limit the amount of television we watched and keep a journal and report on what things we did when not watching television.

I’m pleased to say that this junior high school experiment largely saved me from being a slave to the boob tube the way so many of my generation are.  So I was initially quite sympathetic in my approach to Living Outside The Box—TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets.  Surprisingly author Barbara Brock managed to quite lose me, in spite of my general and long time support of turn off the tv and DO SOMETHING with your life initatives.

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It was a stroke of serendipity that I happened on the same day awhile back to stumble on both Mandy MacDonald’s Culture Smart Cuba and Nancy Alonso’s Closed For Repairs on the same day.    It seems to me that we mostly hear about Cuba only in terms of the political agendas of some wealthy Miamians who have an agenda and the various other political players who have to play with or against them.     What is sadly lacking is any reporting that sheds light on the real lives of the remarkable Cuban people whose struggles and in spite of the United States continuing embargo are creating a new path for themselves.

The Culture Smart guide is one of a series of titles that attempts to give travelers to poorly understood parts of the world a base understanding of the people, cultures and pressing local issues they will encounter.  The guides also seek to give the traveler the knowledge  and confidence to veer of the well trod tourist path and allow himself to meaningfully interact with the people whose country he is visiting.

By contrast Havana author Nancy Alonso’s Closed For Repairs, a selection of eleven fictionalized vignettes of Cuban’s dealing with the realities of life under the US embargo from planting vegetable gardens in pots  in urban apartments to dealing with the sometimes dysfunctional transportation and distribution facilities.   This English translation by Anne Fountain is available from Curbstone Press.   Combined with the somewhat more marketing oriented Culture Smart volume, Alonso’s front line reportage on the lives of work a day Cubans provides a rare opportunity for an informed glimpse about a part of the world so close by but in such a real sense so far, far away from the US.   Both are Highly Recommended.

It almost feels like a cheat to blog about a book I first read more than twenty years ago, but the fact is the past few days I have been ignoring three new novels awaiting my attention (including Water For Elephants, which I really want to read) in order to re-read for the bazzillionth time John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces.   So rather than attempt to write what would be yet another paean to what is already a well-known and well-loved novel  OR tease out three paragraphs of  on the stories of having met Toole’s mother at a speech and reading she gave at Dominican College in New Orleans (where Toole himself had been on the faculty prior to his suicide) and the errrrr unforgettable experience of seeing the work produced as a MUSICAL at LSU in Baton Rouge.  

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…to Miss New Orleans.   And after reading City Adrift, I fear that the day is coming that New Orleans exists only as a memory, not just for me but for everyone.    Released by Louisiana State University Press and the Center For Public Integrity, City Adrift is a very carefully reasoned and balanced review of eight serious aspects of the problems facing New Orleans before and after Katrina.

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Happy Monday!  Usually I select just three or four books for my "Roundup" posts,  but today I have no less than eight great selections from the cookbook aisle, all of which are variously  so interesting, unusual or  noteworthy that I felt I just Have to share them  all.

Martha Rose Shulman, a cook book author and cooking instructor, who achieved success in those fields without the benefit of any formal culinary education has penned a captivating memoir with recipes of her experience at "Culinary Boot Camp"– a one week program at the famed Culinary Institute of America intended for  home cooks.   The boot camp program seeks to give the hobbyist or home cook a grounding in the basics of classic cooking techniques and theories.

I was struck by the fact that even though, the boot campers are provided with cooking assistants to do much of the heavy grunt work required of  the regular students,  the schedule and pace of the program emphasize, just as the CIA’s regular programs do, the long hours and physically demanding hard work that are inherent to the professional kitchen.   While I did not think much of the included recipes,  I thoroughly enjoyed Shulman’s memoir.    Recommended.

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Awhile back I heard someone refer to the imprisonment without charges or recourse to the courts at Guantanamo Bay as "un-precedented".     This book of photographs I recently came across demonstrates it is anything but.

Dorothea Lange, a noted photo-journalist was hired by one branch of the government (the War Relocation Authority) to document the forced migration of Japanese Americans to the detention camp in the desert at Manzanar California.   The Army later ordered the photos censored and they remained hidden from public view until the publication of  Impounded:  Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internmnet.

Two lengthy introductions, totaling some eighty pages, by Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro tell the stories of Dorothea Lange and her extraordinary career and of the Japanese American peoples’ round up and imprisonment following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.   Highly Recommended to WWII history buffs.