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…
Category: book review
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…
Altered Carbon
Our story opens with the hero and his girlfriend being killed-which leads to them being sentenced to digital storage for a hundred years. In this brave world of the future death is a little less permanent than it is now. Unless someone burns your stack-then you get the Real Death. Altered Carbon is filled with future slang and it does a pretty good job of sliding in a ton of backstory about the many elite groups that have a hand in ruling the universe. The main gimmick is the digital downloading of consciousness upon death and how a rich person…
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
It’s always hit or miss with David Sedaris. His most brilliant work often involves his family and always involves some personal flaw. His worst work, which can be offensive, belligerent, and nausea inducing, usually involves his views on politics. I don’t mind David Sedaris having political views or hating conservative-I just don’t want to find these tirades grouped together with his more traditional humor and nostalgia pieces. Like Squirrel Seeks Chipmonk, I’d like it better if he wrote this stuff under another name and collected them in separate books, perhaps only available in Iran or North Korea and then…
For Whom The Bell Tolls
“Wipe the pap of your mother’s breast off thy lips and give me a hatful of that dirt,’ the man with his chin on the ground said. ‘No one of us will see the sun go down this night.” ― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls A tragic tale of woe and misfortune about an American who has been ordered to blow up a bridge. Over the course of about three days we watch and listen as Robert Jordan and a band of Spanish Rebels prepare themselves for the battle to come. Given the title, it should come as…
Ilium by Dan Simmons
Image you’re a Lit Major who has made a number of amazing and critical discoveries about the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and Proust. Now image your disappointment at finding there is no real money to be made criticizing Homer, Shakespeare, and Proust. What do you do with all that damned research and all that time wasted reading the Iliad, the Sonnets, and Swann’s Way? Why you write a space opera, of course. Or so it seemed to me while I was wading through Dan Simmons Ilium. Ilium is a long book that is basically three novels morphed into one. Two…