Review: An Economist Gets Lunch

Flap Copy: One of the most influential economists of the decade-and the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Stagnation-boldly argues that just about everything you’ve heard about food is wrong.

Food snobbery is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, says economist, preeminent social commentator, and maverick dining guide blogger Tyler Cowen. Americans are becoming angry that our agricultural practices have led to global warming-but while food snobs are right that local food tastes better, they’re wrong that it is better for the environment, and they are wrong that cheap food is bad food. The food world needs to know that you don’t have to spend more to eat healthy, green, exciting meals. At last, some good news from an economist!

Tyler Cowen discusses everything from slow food to fast food, from agriculture to gourmet culture, from modernist cuisine to how to pick the best street vendor. He shows why airplane food is bad but airport food is good; why restaurants full of happy, attractive people serve mediocre meals; and why American food has improved as Americans drink more wine. And most important of all, he shows how to get good, cheap eats just about anywhere.

Just as The Great Stagnation was Cowen’s response to all the fashionable thinking about the economic crisis, An Economist Gets Lunch is his response to all the fashionable thinking about food. Provocative, incisive, and as enjoyable as a juicy, grass-fed burger, it will influence what you’ll choose to eat today and how we’re going to feed the world tomorrow.

Review: I…really struggled with this book. I read Discover Your Inner Economist by the same author when it came out, and I don’t recall struggling with that, so perhaps it was not the writing so much as the topic of An Economist Gets Lunch that I had a hard time with.

The book just seemed so scattershot. It jumps from a chapter on barbecue to a chapter on Chinese food to one on corn production to global warming to a chapter on Mexican food and then a world tour of the best places to eat in Asian and European cities. The author claims to be only an ‘everyday foodie’ and not well traveled, but his food preferences are decidedly highbrow and he’s been to Paris twenty times and somewhere else at least fifteen. It just seems…out of touch with the regular reader.

I will say that there is fascinating stuff to be found in this book. Absolutely fascinating, not least of which is why the food between sister cities El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico is so drastically different to each other, or how we all wind up on autopilot when we enter a grocery store and what combating that autopilot can do for your health, your wallet and your tastebuds, or his conviction that taxi drivers are the single most reliable source for food recommendations in any given city. The points he raised about the food production system we use, the transportation our food is subjected to, and the misconceptions about how what we eat contributes to global warming are salient and startling. With a little more obvious organization, I think this book would be truly accessible to the everyday foodie – and the everyday reader.

Source: Netgalley from Penguin

Book Beginnings: Other Waters

Book Beginnings on Friday is a weekly meme where we answer the question, “So, what is the first line of your current read, and how did you like it?”

I’m currently reading Other Watersand here’s the first line:

He says he’s there to keep an eye on her doctors, but it’s just not true. Maya looked up at Dr. Bernard; he had on his usual listening face, forehead crinkled, blue eyes peering nearsightedly, one finger resting alongside his nose, the rest of his hand scratching his beard.

What’s the first line of YOUR friday read? Visit Rose City Reader to see more book beginnings.

Review: All in Good Time

Flap Copy: Find out The Best Time to Mow the Lawn * Remodel the Kitchen * Run the Dishwasher * Buy Tomatoes * and More…From the founders of YOURWAY.NET and DEALSEEKINGMOM.COM (One of “Forbes” Magazine’s “Top 100 Websites for Women”)

A few dollars wasted here, a few minutes lost there…it all adds up, and soon you’re stretched thin, stressed out, and wishing you had more free time and financial resources for the important things, like your family-and yourself. These authors know-as busy moms with nine children between them, they’ve been there It’s time to get your house- and schedule-in order. The secret to streamlining your life is in the timing: knowing exactly “when” to do, buy, travel, or try…

FIND OUT THE SMARTEST TIMING FOR getting a haircut * flipping a mattress * buying a grill * taking a family vacation * filling the gas tank * buying (and applying) sunscreen * stocking a gift closet * seeing the dentist * getting a mammogram * buying a bike (and learning to ride) * filling a prescription * and much more

PLUS: LEARN THE SECRETS TO CUTTING YOUR GROCERY BILL WITH OR WITHOUT CLIPPING COUPONS

Review: I wanted to LOVE this book, but I only just liked it. It’s just too scattershot a collection of tips to be seriously useful, and it’s got all the benefits of blog posts (short, referencing other sources, punchy) with none of the benefits (searchable text, shareable, linkable).

I got some neat tips out of the book (such as: toss your kitchen sponge in the dishwasher to kill the bacteria instead of microwaving it!) and I wound up with nearly two dozen sticky notes stuck in my book – but I suspect these are all tips I could have gathered from the authors’ blogs for free.  Some content just doesn’t work as well in book form as it does in blog form, and I think this is an example.

If you’re not familiar with the mommy blog world, though, and you’re looking for a great  primer on organizing your life, this would be a good book to get you there and introduce you to some of the most important blogs for moms that cover the topic.

Source: ARC from Penguin

Review: White Horse

Flap Copy: Thirty-year-old Zoe leads an ordinary life until the end of the world arrives. She is cleaning cages and floors at Pope Pharmaceuticals when the President of the United States announces that human beings are no longer a viable species. When Zoe realizes that everyone she loves is disappearing, she starts running. Scared and alone in a shockingly changed world, she embarks on a remarkable journey of survival and redemption. Along the way, Zoe comes to see that humans are not defined by their genetic code, but rather by their actions and choices. White Horse offers hope for a broken world, where love can lead to the most unexpected places.

Review: One thing that the flap copy does not tell you about this book: it’s scary. I started reading it shortly before bed one night, and read 78 pages before I felt like I hit a passage where I could stop without having nightmares. And truthfully, I might have gotten more rest if I just stayed up all night to finish it! The psychological stress of Zoe’s world put me in mind of the traveling sections of The Passage – that sense of knowing the evil behind you, not knowing the evil in front of you, and pushing on towards it anyway.

Zoe is a sympathetic heroine, and the reader trusts her implicitly. What’s happening to and around her is atrocious and horrifying, but Zoe makes a point to retain her humanity even in the worst possible situations. That she does so betrays he once or twice, but at least she can live with herself – a message that’s rare to find in apocalyptic literature.

At one point, I thought I had the book wrapped up and figured out, but to any other reader who thinks the same – read the last line very carefully, and see if you don’t get goosebumps! An absorbing debut from an author I’ll be watching.

Source: ARC from Atria Books

Book Beginnings: All in Good Time

Book Beginnings on Friday is a weekly meme where we answer the question, “So, what is the first line of your current read, and how did you like it?”

I’m currently reading All in Good Time and here’s the first line:

This book isn’t about frugal living or financial management. And it’s not about tackling your time management skills so you can be more productive. What it is is a collection of tips and shortcuts that are sure to save you time and money here and there, as you choose, so you’ll have more of both to spend on the things and people that really matter to you.

Well, that’s about as concise a description of this book as you’re likely to find! So far it has proved to be exactly as promised, and I’ve jotted down a number of notes to myself already.

What’s the first line of YOUR friday read? Visit Rose City Reader to see more book beginnings.

Review: The Power of Habit

Flap Copy: A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.

Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.

They succeeded by transforming habits.

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

Review: Charles Duhigg has written what might be the perfect book for readers of narrative investigative nonfiction. Filled with anecdotes ranging from personal to societal to institutional habits, The Power of Habit is a broad and deep examination of how habits can rule our lives – for good or ill.

The majority of the book focuses on the history of this developing science – this is not a prescriptive book because as the author points out, each habit is different and there is no one-size-fits-all fix for the ones we’d like to change. Instead, learning how habits work can give us the knowledge and power to conquer our mindless behaviors. An appendix offers specific reader’s guide to changing habits (it’s available on Scribd) and helps the reader put into practice everything that Duhigg has explored in the previous pages.

I enjoyed this book every bit as much as I’d hoped I would – it’s a wonderful, modern look at the topics covered in books like Blink, The Paradox of Choice and Emotional Intelligence. Highly recommended.

Source: ARC from Random House

Review: Carry the One

Flap Copy: Carry the One begins in the hours following Carmen’s wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests accidentally hits and kills a girl on a dark country road. For the next twenty-five years, those involved, including Carmen and her brother and sister, craft their lives in response to this single tragic moment. As one character says, “When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.” Through friendships and love affairs; marriage and divorce; parenthood, holidays, and the modest calamities and triumphs of ordinary days, Carry the One shows how one life affects another and how those who thrive and those who self-destruct are closer to each other than we’d expect. As they seek redemption through addiction, social justice, and art, Anshaw’s characters reflect our deepest pain and longings, our joys, and our transcendent moments of understanding. This wise, wry, and erotically charged novel derives its power and appeal from the author’s exquisite use of language; her sympathy for her recognizable, very flawed characters; and her persuasive belief in the transforming forces of time and love.

Review: Carry the One is the sweeping, heartbreaking tale of a tragic moment and the pall it casts over the lives of those involved. The ensemble cast of characters alternately forge confidently ahead or flounder into their futures, reacting to the accident in their own individual way.

More than being about this pivotal moment, Carry the One can also be read as a story about what happens to us as we age – as we achieve or fail to achieve the lives we hoped to be living. Do we change or does the world change around us? What happens when we get everything we want, and it doesn’t fill the void within us? While Carry the One‘s characters are answering these questions through the lens of the death they inadvertently caused in their twenties, the answers they find can be enlightening to those of us who don’t have such regrettable moments in our past. The lessons they learn about love, loss, and life are valuable to the reader no matter what.

Carry the One absolutely swept me up from the first page, and I finished it in a single sitting. Then I fell asleep and dreamed of the characters in all their fully-faceted beauty. It’s a story that will stay with me for a long time.

Source: ARC from Simon & Schuster

Book Beginnings: An Economist Gets Lunch

Book Beginnings on Friday is a weekly meme where we answer the question, “So, what is the first line of your current read, and how did you like it?”

I’m currently reading An Economist Gets Lunch and here’s the first line:

American food is in crisis, and rarely has more disruption loomed before us. People are rebelling against current food-production methods involving long-distance shipping, fertilizers, and genetically modified organisms. Many people have returned to eating locally grown food from small farms, and there is a fear that our agricultural practices lead to mass-produced food products that are bad for our health and worsen climate change. But is this fear well founded? Is local a good thing?

This hard-eyed look at “common” knowledge is what I’m looking forward to seeing in this book!

What’s the first line of YOUR friday read? Visit Rose City Reader to see more book beginnings.

Review: Comeback Love

Flap Copy: What would you do if you had a second chance with the one that got away?

More than thirty-five years ago, Gordon Meyers, an aspiring writer with a low number in the draft lottery, packed his belongings and reluctantly drove away, leaving behind Glenna Rising, the sexy, sharp-witted med student he couldn’t imagine living without.

Now, decades later, Gordon is a former globe-trotting consultant with a grown son, an ex-wife, and an overwhelming desire to see Glenna again. Though she’s stunned when Gordon walks into her Manhattan office, Glenna agrees to accompany him for a drink. As the two head out into the snow-swept city, they rediscover the passion that once drew them together—before it tore them apart. And as the evening unfolds, Gordon will finally reveal the true reason for his return. . . .

Comeback Love is an evocative journey into the hearts of two lovers who came of age in the 1960s, and who never truly let each other go. Plumbing the depths of youth, regret, and desire, Peter Golden deftly illuminates the bonds that mysteriously endure in the face of momentous change.

Review: Who doesn’t love a good story about second chances at relationships with The One That Got Away? With a well-fleshed-out narrator and a great perspective on New York in the 1960s, Comeback Love swept me up right away.

I wish I had believed in the importance of Glenna and Gordon’s romance more, but he was such a jealous jerk in their youthful stage that it was hard for me to think that she’d really want him back later in life. On the other hand, it was his jealousy and ultimately the trajectory of change within his character that made the book interesting, so in the end it worked. I’d say that Comeback Love is One Day with a MUCH better ending!

Source: ARC from Atria Books

Review: Time and Again

Flap Copy: “Sleep. And when you awake everything you know of the twentieth century will be gone from your mind. Tonight is January 21, 1882. There are no such things as automobiles, no planes, computers, television. ‘Nuclear’ appears in no dictionary. You have never heard the name Richard Nixon.” Did illustrator Si Morley really step out of his twentieth-century apartment one night — right into the winter of 1882? The U.S. Government believed it, especially when Si returned with a portfolio of brand-new sketches and tintype photos of a world that no longer existed — or did it?

Review: Time travel is my absolute favorite sub-genre of sci fi/fantasy, and Jack Finney is the absolute master of it. This was my second reading of Time and Again, and pretty much all I remembered of my first reading was the astounding descriptions of New York City’s history and a vaguely unsettled feeling at the protagonist’s choice with regard to the first girlfriend we meet within the story. Happily, the re-read offered the same absorbing qualities in terms of the city as a character (perhaps even more so, because I was able to appreciate the description of two versions of New York City that I would need to time-travel to visit – the 1970s and the 1880s). And the girlfriend bit didn’t bother me at all this time around – the progression of the novel makes perfect sense and the resolution left me happy all around.

Oh, except that of course, now I need to read the follow up, From Time to Time.

Hmm, but I still haven’t really told you much about Time and Again, now have I? Well, I don’t want to give away any spoilers! I’ll say that if you’re not sure if you like time travel or science fiction, this is a very good introduction to it – it doesn’t much around with physics or theory; just presents it as a valid possibility that some people are able to achieve. It’s the results of Si’s achievements that are so interesting, as the people of the late nineteenth century really come alive to him. The sketches and photographs add depth and believability to the story, and the overall package is a fantastic escape from the every day.

Source: Personal library

Review: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened

Flap Copy: For fans of Tina Fey and David Sedaris—Internet star Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, makes her literary debut.

Jenny Lawson realized that the most mortifying moments of our lives—the ones we’d like to pretend never happened—are in fact the ones that define us. In Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson takes readers on a hilarious journey recalling her bizarre upbringing in rural Texas, her devastatingly awkward high school years, and her relationship with her long-suffering husband, Victor. Chapters include: “Stanley the Magical, Talking Squirrel”; “A Series of Angry Post-It Notes to My Husband”; “My Vagina Is Fine. Thanks for Asking”; “And Then I Snuck a Dead Cuban Alligator on an Airplane.” Pictures with captions (no one would believe these things without proof) accompany the text.

Review: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is a madcap ride through the mind of a woman who only sometimes allows her general anxiety disorder to overrun her life, her mind, and her mouth. Feeling like I was finally seeing what the inside of my craziest friend’s mind is like, it’s hard to believe – and impossible to disbelieve – the stories Jenny Lawson shares about her life growing up in rural Texas.

Not all the stories are pee-in-your-pants funny. There are some that are a little painful, and several that are quietly heartbreaking. Many of the stories read as blog posts (the author is a prolific blogger), easy to pick up and put down as time allows. Overall, the book paints a multifaceted portrait of a complicated woman trying to make the very best of her life, and luckily for all of us, taking the reader along for the ride.

Source: Netgalley from Penguin

Review: Financial Peace Revisited

Flap Copy: Dave Ramsey knows what it’s like to have it all. By age twenty-six, he had established a four-million-dollar real estate portfolio, only to lose it by age thirty. He has since rebuilt his financial life and, through his workshops and his New York Times business bestsellers Financial Peace and More than Enough, he has helped hundreds of thousands of people to understand the forces behind their financial distress and how to set things right-financially, emotionally, and spiritually.

In this new edition of Financial Peace, Ramsey has updated his tactics and philosophy to show even more readers:

how to get out of debt and stay out
the KISS rule of investing—”Keep It Simple, Stupid”
how to use the principle of contentment to guide financial decision making
how the flow of money can revolutionize relationships

With practical and easy to follow methods and personal anecdotes, Financial Peace is the road map to personal control, financial security, a new, vital family dynamic, and lifetime peace.

Review: If you’re going to read one classic personal finance book, I think it should be Your Money or Your Life (I wish they’d update it!). But if you’re going to read two personal finance books, or if you really like programmatic approaches, you should definitely read Financial Peace Revisited.

Ramsey’s advice is firm and to the point: spend less than you earn, which means no credit. He details how he hit financial rock bottom and shares lessons that he learned to turn his life around. His advice is simple, but it’s not easy. Still, he’s changed millions of peoples’ lives, and in my opinion, he’s right on the money. (Pardon the pun!)

Caveat: he’s a vocal Christian, and it carries through into his books. If you can’t tune out preaching, this book isn’t for you!

Source: Personal library

Book Beginnings: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened

Book Beginnings on Friday is a weekly meme where we answer the question, “So, what is the first line of your current read, and how did you like it?”

I’m currently readingLet’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson and here’s the first line:

This book is totally true, except for the parts that aren’t. It’s basically like Little House on the Prairie but with more cursing.

Annnnnd…about a quarter of the way through this book, so far, I have to concur!

What’s the first line of YOUR friday read? Visit Rose City Reader to see more book beginnings.

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