Michael Pollan is a great writer who has a few interesting ideas about food and how it has changed over the past hundred years or so. He’s not a big fan of the Industrial Revolution, Processed Foodstuffs, and the general fall and decline of the quality of life that comes from eating fake food. In Cooked Michael talks about the changes in the way we prepare-or more precisely how we don’t prepare-our food. He starts off by breaking up his topic into the traditional methods of food cooking-Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it…
Category: book review
The Last Dark by Stephen R Donaldson
And so it ends. The Last Dark was good. Vastly better than the last few books. Covenant and Linden return to figures of power and more closely resemble their former selves. The mishmash supporting cast has a few people step forward and stand out from the crowd. Great powers come to a head. And while the Creator remains missing in action, The Despiser returns for a nice cameo appearance. There are still long passages chronicling impossible battles between god like enemies and heroes. Still a lot of noise that signifies nothing. But hey, it’s a novel, so wrapping up a…
I Wear The Black Hat
What is bad and what is good? This is a question I have been thinking about since the end of Breaking Bad. Chuck Klosterman takes a mostly light-hearted look at Bad Guys. Near the start of the I Wear The Black Hat, Chuck identifies the single most evil act a person can do to be seen as Evil-tie a woman to a railroad track. Yes, he sees Snidely Whiplash as the poster-child for villains. After all, his name is Snidely. I’d never heard of Chuck before picking up I Wear The Black Hat, but I get the feeling we are kindred…
The Ocean at The End of the Lane
A story about a little boy and a number of supernatural women who make his life very interesting for a few days when he is seven years old. The nature of these women, and of reality itself, is never fully explained. When our young hero asks about such things he is told that he doesn’t need to know about them and he wouldn’t understand anyway. The Ocean at The End of the Lane brings to mind The Night Circus and Neverwhere in that hidden just below the world we know and think we understand is a vaster and much more…
The Prophets of Smoked Meats
Barbecue is a little bit different as one moves around the country, but I never paid much attention to how much it changed when I moved around the great state of Texas. Author Daniel “BBQ Snob” Vaughn and photographer Nicholas McWhirter have done an amazing job of bringing these differences to light. As a photographer I have to say that I like the style of most of the images in The Prophets of Smoked Meats. They have a nice fine art feel to them, Nicholas McWhirter does great work with depth of field and putting as much info in the background of an…
Photographing Shadow and Light
Joey L is a photographer of the modern age. He doesn’t really care much about film tools, like light meters-why should he? He can see the image when he takes it and judge for himself if it is too dark or too light. At the same time, he has a serious fondness for the lighting styles of the old Hollywood Masters like Sinclair Bull and George Hurrell. The cover of Photographing Shadow and Light has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood glamour shot, bright highlights and dark shadows and an image that tells a story. As a portrait photographer I have…
Woken Furies
Takeshi Kovac, mad killer, body hopping ex-Envoy Agent returns home to Harlan’s World-where we find him busy body hopping, killing lots of people and using his Envoy skills. Oh yeah, he has sex with a couple of people as well. Woken Furies has a lot going for it. Many of the mysteries from the first two books are explored and Takeshi seems to have a mission in life for a change. On the other hand, his mission is killing off fundamentalist believers, so that may not make him much of a hero in some people’s eye. I’ve read other sci-fi…
The First 20 Hours
I remember being greatly impressed when I read Outliers: The Story of Successby Malcol Gladwell. It was a cool book that talked about the Beatles and Bill Gates and how they managed to take over their world by being in the right place at the right time-and by practicing for 10,000 hours. Josh Kaufman was also impressed, because he feels that a lot of people have used the 10,000 hour rule as a copout for avoiding learning anything. Josh says that the 10,000 rule works-if you want to master a topic. But what if you don’t want to be Paul McCartney, you…
Affliction
I decided to give the Anita Blake books one more chance and see if maybe Laurell K Hamilton could get back to supernatural crimes and mysteries. A good deal of the opening pages of Affliction see Anita Blake telling any number of self righteous people that there’s nothing wrong with having sex with hundreds of random strangers and it’s none of their business anyway. In Anita Blake’s universe, just about any ‘normal’ person is now shown as a narrow minded bigot and often, a bible thumping narrow minded bigot. You’re married and only have sex with one person? Bah! What a fuddy…
Bad Monkey
Carl Hiaasen is one of those authors whose name I see a lot, but I’ve never gotten around to reading-until now. Bad Monkey is a fractured story that follows the misfortunes of a half a dozen or so main characters. They each have a small turn in the spotlight before returning to our real hero, a former police officer turned health inspector named Yancy. Set in Florida and the Bahamas we run across con artists, poisonous food, unwanted real estate, and a slightly mad monkey. There are lots of funny bits here and there, even though the story contains a…