The Thin Red Line

Today’s Christmas book is a bit unusual.  It includes a history lesson. Christmas In The Trenches by John McCutcheon with illustrations by Henri Sorensen (who was also the illustrator for The Old Shepard’s Tale, another Christmas book I reviewed) relates the tale of a grandfather and his  in England on Christmas Day.   After the presents and the meal the little girl remarks to her grandfather that this has been her favorite Christmas ever.   She asks if Grandpa has a favorite Christmas.   He does and this is the story.

(more…)

Just in case you are counting, today is my seventh of twelve Christmas book posts.   I have already picked out the remaining five books and am set to post one per day,  concluding on Christmas Eve with Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.   To be perfectly honest,  I really don’t know what to make of Mary D. Lankford and Karen Dugan’s Christmas USA.   The red, white and blue star-spangled color scheme seems more suited to Independence Day on the 4th of July rather than Christmas.   And the drawing of a gingerbread house with an American flag roof is downright off-putting.

(more…)

Sometimes the holiday season makes me feel old.   Recently my friend techfun pointed out how the advent of hundreds of channels and Tivo have retired what used to be annual cultural touchstones we all shared.    Once school was back in session and the evenings became dark and cool the annual telecast of The Wizard of Oz was something that all kids looked forward to.   It would be followed in early–mid November by the Peanuts Thanksgiving Special– The Great Pumpkin and then it would be December and time for our annual rendezvous with Rudolph , Frosty, The Grinch  and of course A Charlie Brown Christmas.

(more…)

Certain cookies just mean Christmas.   For me,  buttery little balls of pecan studded dough rolled in powdered sugar (and known by all sorts of different names) are the Christmas cookie,  though I realize for others it may be gingerbread men,  sugar cookies cut in holiday shapes and sprinkled with red or green sugar.   Whatever your own personal #1 Christmas cookie is,  chances are you will find an excellent recipe for it in Lou Siebert Pappas’  The Christmas Cookie Book.

(more…)

This one caught my eye while shelving in the 200’s.  Subtitled "Biblical Women’s Deadly Banquets", Nicole Wilkinson Duran’s Having Men for Dinner looks at the symbolism of food and drink in the Bible and relates them to issues of seduction and murder.  I had expected it would be an accessible re-telling of the stories of Jael, Judith, Esther  and Herodias with a humorous contemporary feminist perspective.    Sadly, I was very much mistaken.   This slim trade paperback is a Very academic and dry discussion of these famous Bible stories and is not suited for the casual reader.   Unless you are interested in graduate-level critical Bible study, this one is Not Recommended.

   If you are in the habit of clicking on my eye candy selections and getting them from the library to gawk at,  be assured that Trisha Wilson’s Spectacular Hotels will not disappoint in that regard.    I have some reservations about this book but if you’re in it for the eye candy,  they don’t matter in the slightest.     Wilson is an interior designer who has worked on a number of spectacular hotel projects all over the world, and her book is perfect for armchair travel from Africa to the Americas to Europe and the Islands.

(more…)

Just in case you are keeping count, this is the fourth of my Twelve Books For Christmas.   While Christmas dinner is not quite the classic high-stakes, high-stress meal Thanksgiving so often is,  the Christmas season is often a time for many different sorts of parties.   Whether you are planning a very traditional Christmas Day dinner,  a seasonal cocktail party,  a pay-back-a-whole-years-invitations Open House or an intimate Christmas Eve supper, Williams-Sonoma’s Christmas Entertaining has a menu and copious and specific practical advice to make your soiree a success.   

(more…)

Last week I got called in to work a shift  at Sumner Library.   I had worked at that branch once before and they had been very nice to me so when they said they were really desperate for someone to come in from 5–9 pm I agreed.   Since I’d only been there once before I was not as clear as I might have been on the driving directions, and was at the point of wondering if I had made a wrong turn when I realized the library was just ahead on the left.   Since I was in the right lane, I eased over so that I would be able to turn into the driveway, quite failing to notice the big SUV already occupying the left hand lane. 

Luckily it was quite minor as collisions go.   The Jeep SUV’s rugged side panels showed no damage at all and the scuffs on my driver’s side doors will buff right out.   I did knock the side view mirror off, but re-attaching it proved easy and inexpensive.    The other driver was very nice and after re-assuring each other we were fine and that no damage needed to be reported to police or insurance,  I wandered into the staff lounge at Summer,  sat down at the table,  broke into my emergency Pop-Tarts and picked up the first book at hand to distract myself so I could calm down and work my shift.   

(more…)

After ‘ooohing and ahhing’  over the spectacular log mansions, I came across two more very eye-catching books,  that focus on very modern and high tech versions of the vacation cabin.   The Texas hill country vacation home pictured on the cover is a big glass box that’s been designed to be energy efficient and cool in the heat of the day.  It is just one of the oh-so-stunning vacation residences featured in Modern Cabin by Michelle Kodis.    Each featured vacation home is shown in multiple day and night exterior photos and multiple interior shots.   The floor plans for each home are also provided as are details of the use of recycled and eco-friendly materials and the incorporation of design elements and systems to make these homes low impact on unspoiled natural areas.

(more…)

I really wanted to like Faith Willinger’s Adventures of an Italian food lover.   Recipes from 254 chefs all over "The Boot"  collected by a woman in Florence, Italy famous for writing about the best of its native restaurants and cuisine, charmingly illustrated with water colors of the featured chefs and food.    It seemed like a sure thing.

(more…)

Today is my second of twelve Christmas book selections. Yesterday Bev blogged about going downtown to Christmas shop and recalled how it was a major event, warranting one’s best clothes and all the trappings of an occasion. I remember as a child how exciting it was at Christmas-time to go downtown and gawk for ages at the many and spectacular window displays at the D. H. Holmes and Maison Blanche department stores on Canal Street in New Orleans. Indeed if you lived in a city of any size, you probably got nearly as excited by the spectacular displays of your department store as any of the folks who queued up in New York City to gawk at the windows of their famous stores.

(more…)

I thought briefly of signing up for Holidailies and committing to posting about Christmas books every day in December but decided that, much as I love Christmas, I would burn out on it well before thirty posts and I fear you would too. Thinking of a favorite Christmas carol I decided instead to present for your holiday reading consideration Twelve Books For Christmas. This is the first, the twelfth will be Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol featured on December 24th and the remaining ten will be surprises scattered as regular posts between now and then. Cajun Night Before Christmas, first published in 1973 is one of my oldest personal favorite Christmas books.

(more…)

I have long been a huge fan of Unshelved, the daily comic strip about the life of Dewey, the lazy librarian at the Mallville Public Library. The strip by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum is wildly popular with library staffs everywhere. And it’s very funny, even if you don’t happen to work in a library. So I was thrilled when shelving in book length comics collections at 741.5973 to come across a copy of Read Responsibly, the latest Unshelved collection. As always the strips are clever and thoughtful and laugh out loud funny. "Creative Problem Avoidance" is a hoot. Highly Recommended.

Earth Then and Now is a unique pictorial geography book showing dramatic changes to the earth’s surface all over the world. Consisting mostly of before and after photographs and some other before and after depictions of human impact on the earth in a particular country or region.

One of the most dramatic photos is a single photograph (not two before and after photographs) that shows the edge of the Gifford Pinchon National Forest where land owned by timber giant Weyerhauser has been clear cut to a straight line reflecting the boundary of the National Forest. I’ve been to the Gifford Pinchon forest and it is a magnificent special place. And this is just one of over 100 comparisons.

An abandoned open pit mine in Cornwall, England that has been transformed into a lush garden and a biosphere ecology exhibit is one of many comparisons that highlight a positive outcome. The spectacular reconstructed cathedral on the site of the Brandenberg Gate in the now unified Berlin, Germany is another strikingly positive comparison. The site of the former twin towers of the World Trade Center and a photograph of New Orleans on sunny day in March 2005 and flooded out following Katrina are among the more somber before and afters.

This one is definitely worth checking out to spend some time perusing and contemplating these very striking images. Recommended.

My first thought on seeing this latest Rough Guides publication was that it was proof positive the brand is so diluted that the Rough Guides imprint and logo means nothing at all, where once it had clearly meant a line of destination travel guides with an attitude.

You’d have to have Lots of money and endless vacation time to ever be able to do all 1,000 of these things. For most of us, this is a kind of neat round the world brochure for some of the more amazing things this planet has to offer. A Rough Guide To The World (Recommended.)

Thanksgiving dinner is a notoriously difficult meal to pull off. It often involves cooking for a much larger number of people than even the most enthusiastic thrower of dinner parties is used to cooking for, and very often the planning, cooking and serving take place amidst severe emotional stress as less than amicable members of the larger clan prepare for and arrive for this annual reunion.

Whether you’re never cooked for this many people before and are in need of a life raft or are an experienced Thanksgiving host looking to upscale your menu a bit and learn the easiest ways possible for planning, preparing and serving this big deal meal, the editors and contributors of Fine Cooking magazine have got you covered with How To Cook A Turkey And All The Other Trimmings

An A to Z soup to nuts reference for the Thanksgiving dinner host or hostess. Everything you need to know about buying and cooking a turkey. Excellent recipes for easy side dishes from the traditional mashed potatoes and green beans to various flavors and variations for the turkey, gravy and stuffing to imaginative appetizers and desserts to round out the meal.

The book is well organized and clearly written. While not every recipe appealed to me, many of them did such as Garlic Roasted Green Beans with shallots and hazlenuts and the Cornbread Pecan Stuffing and the Chocolate Pecan Pie. If you will be cooking and serving Thanksgiving dinner, get a hold of a copy of this book. It will be a huge help. Highly Recommended

This is one of Ron’s picks, and not one I myself would have selected. This fourth volume of true stories of people who have "removed themselves from the gene pool" by killing or sterilizing themselves through acts of great stupidity strikes me frankly as more than a little over the top and I am frankly uneasy at making fun of the suffering of stupid people, knowing full well that all of us behave stupidly at times.

Judging from Ron’s frequent bursts of laughter as he read the selections by Wendy Northcutt and her website community, some of these tales must be quite funny, but I was so horrified after hearing the one about the Romanian who in 2004 was infuriated by a noisy chicken that kept him awake all night that he one night rushed outside and snatched up the chicken and chopped its head off with his yard axe only to look up in horror as the un-beheaded chicken scampered away and a passing dog ate his penis, which had fallen to the ground beneath the chopping block that I didn’t read any of them.

I am thankful for each and every one of you who visit The Thin Red Line and especially to Majik, who’s meme I’m not actually going to answer. (Sorry.)

Awhile back I addressed a question I sometimes hear about “Do You Really Read All of These Books?!?!?” And today I thought I would address another one that comes up fairly often, how do you decide which ones to write about?

The answer is that I go about my job as a library page, which involves processing and shelving books pretty much constantly all day long. Think about that for a second. If I am work, the chances are I have a book in my hands or am reaching for one or have just set one down in a stack or on a shelf or a cart. And I just grab any and everything that catches my eye.

It All gets checked out and brought home and piled on my couch, which is Always covered in books. One of my cardinal rules, which I have only broken once when I wrote about titles suggested by my readers and made clear that I was conveying others suggestions and had not actually seen or read the book, is that I ONLY blog about books that I actually have in my hand.

The stack on my couch grows formidable at times. And sometimes, as now I have to just face the fact that some of these books just are Not gonna get read and blogged about and are going to have to go back to the library unread.

I have gone ahead and added Worldcat links for every book cover, each of which represents an actual book that I am removing from the big stack on the couch and moving them to the stack on the bookshelf where we gather anything going back to the library on the next trip. Worldcat can guide you to the nearest library copy if you want to add the book to the stack on your couch. And do let me know if you end up reading one of them.

Since I did not in fact choose to ever read these books, their appearance and inclusion here means that one, they caught my eye. And two, I sent them back without ever reading them even enough to do a good blurb about each. This hardly qualifies as an endorsement so I have saved myself the considerable chore of
providing you with the titles and Powells purchase links. If the fact that I just couldn’t get around to it makes you want to Buy one of them, please do use the Powell’s search box in the upper right sidebar to buy it from a reputable bookseller and support this blog.

I am to my mid-week weekend and will have some time to rest and read and talk more substantively about books again tomorrow. I hope that you have enjoyed this my second recent effort to
publish a post that looks like a book review, even though it is in fact merely an admission that I simply have not had the time to read any of these books and really isn’t a book review.

That of course was the real point of the Einstein’s Brain God Is Dead Meme, a truly challenging meme that I cooked up the last time I just hadn’t had time to read any books to write about.

I bow in homage and tip my hat to Her Royal Highness Jamie, The Suburbian Queen who today awesomely rose to the challenge of writing a blog post that appeared to be a review of two books with very provacative titles that I expect will deliver interesting search result visitors that featured the covers of the two books but was NOT in fact actually a book review.

On a lesser writer it would have been a mean trick to play but I knew that Queen Jamie was up to the challenge and she showed her stuff today. Do check out her blog and get to know a very clever woman who writes really well about a number of different things. I’m proud to add Suburbian Queen to my blog roll which remains mercifully short because these are all blogs I actually read and not just
links I hope will curry me favor with someone.

It will be interesting to see what Mitch does with it when he gets back from vacation later in the month. And that concludes today’s post that looks like a book review but is not in fact a book review. I am to my two day midweek weekend and will have time to catch up on sleep and reading and talk more substantively about books again tomorrow.

Alternate Thursdays when I work until closing (9:15 pm) and have to be back at work to open on Friday (8 am) are always a stressful day for me. Last week my partner Ron was a great help in getting the review of Armed America posted and today, Ron is once again contributing his take on my chosen book to supplement my own hurried post.

I confess to be a bit more of an idealist than Ron and I wanted to believe in the promise of plug-in hybrid cars to more than double the fuel economy of current hybrid cars, which in turn would make bio-fuels a more practicable alternative to oil given the drastically lower total need for fuel. Ron, however sees pie-in-the sky in Sherry Boshert’s paean to Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars That Will Recharge America.

The problem with this book is one I find in a lot of “Green” books: over reaching optimism. While Plug in Hybrid cars could be an important part of saving fuel and cleaning up the environment. They are not the be all, end all.

While the author is realistic about Fuel Cell Technology not being “around the corner”, she’s not as realistic about Plug in hybrid technology. The major problem is where the electricity for the recharge comes from. In most places other than the US Pacific Northwest , electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. Such plants put way more emissions into the air than the most clogged freeway full of cars could ever put out. Plus you’re still using up a non-renewable resource.

It’s also stated that the electricity draw would mostly be at night when traditionally home usage of electricity is less. But we are a 24/7 country. What about those who work nights or evenings? They’ll be recharging during the day, which will increase the draw and could lead to brown outs during heavy demand periods.

People could make similar drops in emissions and fuel usage by the simple act of keeping their cars tuned up, their oil changed and their tires properly inflated. And there’s also using one’s discretion when choosing a vehicle to drive. So many times I see big-assed SUVs running around with only one person inside. Or one adult and one or two children. For those who say they need storage and hauling space, well, there are a lot of good station wagons and hatchbacks out there. That would fill the need and not use up so much fuel. Individual choice is one thing, but it does effect all of us in ways people rarely think of when they purchase a car.

The book’s discussion of GM’s failure with the EV 1 is not as big of a conspiracy as some people think. GM has been making serious mistakes concerning product for a long time now. They won’t put the money into smaller more efficient cars , when people keep buying those big-assed SUVs. It’s not financially feasable for them to build cars that people aren’t buying in sufficient numbers. People say they want efficiency, but they buy large less efficient and actually less safe vehicles.

Again the human race is its own worst enemy. If we didn’t insist on driving large trucks and SUVs and all used the smallest vehicle that would suit our needs, then we would not be having $3/gallon gas again. The air would be cleaner and we’d all not have to deal with people driving big SUVs who have a “tank” mentality. As in “get out of my way or I’ll run right over the top of you”.

There was a time after I got laid off from Earthlink and before Joel got too sick to travel that we went on a kind of non-stop vacation. My current budget doesn’t permit me to travel very far at all these days, though I hope I will get the chance to roam again. And I also find I sometimes enjoy a bit of vicarious wandering through some of the excellent books about far away places that pass through our library.

(more…)