One of the first books that really got me thinking about what I eat and how I eat it was Micahel Pollan’s In Defense of Food. His mantra for this book was simple-Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants. Michael doesn’t care about Carbs or Fats-he cares about the chemical and the artificial hiding in plain sight pretending to be food. The villain in his stories is The Western Diet-lots of processed food, lots of the holy trinity of fat, salt, and sugar, and not too many vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Food Rules contain a list of 64 guidelines…
Category: book review
Why We Get Fat
Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It talks about how the world changed after World War II and how everyone who has been drinking the Calories In/Calories Out Kool Aide is wrong. Once upon a time some serious people studied why humans get fat, why rats get fat, and why old Doc Atkins was right. I have my own theories as to why no one cares-it has to do with the billions and billions of dollars made from fast food, dieting, supplements, exercise products, and doctors who have no interest whatsoever in curing anyone of anything. Ok,…
The 4-Hour Body
I can give you every popular diet in four lines. Ready? • Eat more greens. • Eat less saturated fat. • Exercise more and burn more calories. • Eat more omega-3 fatty acids. -The 4-Hour Body I picked for the 4-Hour Workweek because I thought Timothy Ferriss was the same Timothy Ferris who wrote The Whole Shebang-not quite. The 4-Hour Workweek was fun and silly and about as useful as any other self help book. The first couple of pages of the 4-Hour Workweek said you should start a business that makes five hundred dollars a day-and then he spends…
Room by Emma Donoghue
Room is read by Michal Friedman, Ellen Archer, Robert Petkoff , and Suzanne Toren and they do a very good job of pulling you into the story of a woman and her five year old son who has spent his whole life in a small shack he knows as Room. Jack has names for everything in Room. Rug, Bed, TV, Skylight, Wall, Floor, and so on for the small assortment of items that fill the near identical days of the lives. Told from Jack’s point of view, we experience the world as he sees and hears it-or as he…
Against All Things Ending
Stephen R Donaldson writes about people you don’t like doing things you don’t understand. But I still have a soft spot for him. Among the first books I discovered on my own were the three books of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever. These were kind of a cross between Alice in Wonderland, Lord of The Rings, and Dune, with a touch of The Wizard of Oz tossed in for good measure. I loved these stories. The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant were a little less cheery than the first, and the first were about as cheery as a…
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Michael Chabon’s story of a schmuck of a policeman trying to solve the murder of the latest Messiah is brilliant on any number of levels. First off, the story is set in Sitka, Alaska-where a few million Jews escaped the European Holocaust where about 2 million Jews where killed by the Nazis. Over the years they have come to think of the place as their own, but now, America wants the land back and wants to kick the Jews out. We are told the details of the past fifty years or so as through the eyes and mouth of Meyer…
I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass
I See You Everywhere is the story of two sisters, Clem and Lousia. Clem is slightly more adventurous than Louisa, but Louisa has more refined tastes. It’s a collection of random events starting with the death of an aunt and the divvying up of her possessions. This is followed by tales of the sisters various loves and loses, adventures with whales and artists, a battle with cancer, and the kidnapping of a pack of hunting hounds. We meet lovers, parents, and co-workers. Life, such as it is, goes on. We trudge along in the wake of the sisters and…
Great Philosophers Who Failed At Love
Article first published as Great Philosophers Who Failed At Love on Technorati. Andrew Shaffer has created small love bios of 37 philosophers-from the ancients like Plato and Socrates to more modern love misfits like Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. From celibates to seemingly endless lines of lovers, the great philosophers offer an interesting view of sex, love, and people who think too much. Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love is a slim volume of only 192 pages, with each philosopher rarely getting more than three pages and a portrait. It’s a fast read and the portraits show a group of…
Good Book by David Plotz
What if an agnostic Jew read the Bible and then alternately made fun of it and talked about how it made him a better Jew? David Plotz started Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible as a blog, Blogging The Bible for Slate, and then went on to turn it into a book. About thirty years ago I read the Bible as part of my never-ending quest to be a know it all. The Bible is so full of WTF moments that I must have looked…
Nonsense on Stilts
To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.~Wikipedia I like science. The modern world is a direct result of science-for good and ill. From Play Doh to the Large Hadron Collider, science is all around us. But at the same time, Pseudoscience is also all around us. Things like creationism, astrology, and cures for AIDS provided by greedy bastards. Nonsense on Stilts makes the case for thinking before you accept anything on face value. But Massimo Pigliucci is a scientist, so he has a…