Farmstead Chef by John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist
So, on Hoopla this book is described as a collection of essays, but in the introduction the authors call it a cookbook and it was definitely both. Basically, this is a cookbook geared toward eating and preserving local, seasonal food. But, it's also a collection of essays by the authors about their journey from city folks to full time farmers. I really liked the essays and pretty much agree with them almost 100% on their food philosophy and anyone who quotes Joel Salatin gets points from me. There were also several recipes I'd like to try. My only complaint is that being an ebook I didn't get to see all the pictures of the recipe food as you might in a print book. There were some pictures, but often the ebook is a different experience. Overall, I did like it and it was a solid cookbook and collection of food essays.
Some quotes I liked:
"This cookbook redefines healthy eating in a way that reaches out to a more balanced worldview on food beyond calorie count and fat-free or 'meat-free' fake food. There's sugar, flour and salt in many of our recipes. Cheese and butter, too. No swearing off alcohol or caffeine..." (p. 14)
"This reality of third-party food providers, combined with a growing awareness of what's happening to the planet and how we treat our animals, the land and the farmers, has spawned a diverse range of declared dietary preferences, from omnivore to vegan to locavore to flexitarian - and now, there's someone we call the farmsteadtarian, a person who eats as much as possible from their own gardens, community and, when necessary, from carefully selected sources as close to the farmers, ranchers, food artisans, beekeepers, brewers or growers as possible." (p. 16-17)
Book Girl by Sarah Clarkson
Books were always a part of Sarah Clarkson's life. Her parents encouraged (and modeled) reading all kinds of books to Sarah and her siblings. Clarkson was so passionate about reading that she ended up studying how reading affects children and their development and ended up writing two books about that topic. When she became pregnant with her daughter she was reflecting on what books shaped her as a girl and what books she would want to share with her daughter - and this book was born. The book has 10 chapters that focus on one aspect of how reading shaped her and then two book lists that fit into that chapter's focus.
I LOVE reading and have enjoyed it since I was a child and also had parents who modeled reading as well (not quite to the extent of Clarkson's parents though). But, I read all kinds of books and as I've gotten older I have particularly come to love non-fiction. I felt like Clarkson had a lot of good points in this book, but it was very repetitive. She loves C.S. Lewis, Classic Fiction, theology books, Wendell Berry, and Elizabeth Goudge. If any of these are your favorites, you will LOVE this book, but for me it just got repetitive. If one or more of these was not in every single list in the book I would be surprised. This book is written as a Christian book to show how reading (not just the Bible) can help shape your life and faith, but I personally don't think just Christian books can do that. There was very little in any of the lists that weren't Christian authors or themes. And again, that's great and I do read those kind of books, but not exclusively. Overall, I didn't love this one. But, she loves L.M. Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables as much as me and quoted an Andrew Peterson song so I added an extra star just for that.
Here are some quotes I liked:
"Reading, whether you are four or twenty-four, provides you with the words and comprehension to encounter a new idea and understand it; to walk forward into new subjects, new facts, new possibilities, and thus a constantly expanding self." (p. 42)
"...I am convinced that great children's books, in their clarity of language, in the disciplined simplicity of their themes, bear as much insight into the workings of the human heart and its desires as the great adult classics. But they manage to do all that while being accessible to a child's wonder and innocence." (p. 72)
"What this suggested to the researchers is that reading allows us to place ourselves in another's shoes, seeing the world through another's eyes, empathizing with views different from our own." (p. 157)
"One of Andrew Peterson's songs ('Shine Your Light on Me') recounts the way his friends once were 'singing out my song / when the song in me had died,' and I often feel that this is the grace of memoirs. They sing and speak what needs expression, and sometimes rescuing, within us." (p. 171)
I LOVE reading and have enjoyed it since I was a child and also had parents who modeled reading as well (not quite to the extent of Clarkson's parents though). But, I read all kinds of books and as I've gotten older I have particularly come to love non-fiction. I felt like Clarkson had a lot of good points in this book, but it was very repetitive. She loves C.S. Lewis, Classic Fiction, theology books, Wendell Berry, and Elizabeth Goudge. If any of these are your favorites, you will LOVE this book, but for me it just got repetitive. If one or more of these was not in every single list in the book I would be surprised. This book is written as a Christian book to show how reading (not just the Bible) can help shape your life and faith, but I personally don't think just Christian books can do that. There was very little in any of the lists that weren't Christian authors or themes. And again, that's great and I do read those kind of books, but not exclusively. Overall, I didn't love this one. But, she loves L.M. Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables as much as me and quoted an Andrew Peterson song so I added an extra star just for that.
Here are some quotes I liked:
"Reading, whether you are four or twenty-four, provides you with the words and comprehension to encounter a new idea and understand it; to walk forward into new subjects, new facts, new possibilities, and thus a constantly expanding self." (p. 42)
"...I am convinced that great children's books, in their clarity of language, in the disciplined simplicity of their themes, bear as much insight into the workings of the human heart and its desires as the great adult classics. But they manage to do all that while being accessible to a child's wonder and innocence." (p. 72)
"What this suggested to the researchers is that reading allows us to place ourselves in another's shoes, seeing the world through another's eyes, empathizing with views different from our own." (p. 157)
"One of Andrew Peterson's songs ('Shine Your Light on Me') recounts the way his friends once were 'singing out my song / when the song in me had died,' and I often feel that this is the grace of memoirs. They sing and speak what needs expression, and sometimes rescuing, within us." (p. 171)
The Breakdown by B. A. Paris
Cass has been having a hard time ever since the night she took the shortcut home and saw a woman in a car on the side of the road. The next day she finds out that the woman was murdered and that she actually knew her. Cass knows she should have called the police when she got home, but she had promised her husband she wouldn't take the shortcut when she's alone. Now her guilt is eating her up, but then she starts getting weird phone calls and feels like she's being watched. Then she starts forgetting things both big and small and feels like she's losing her mind. Her mother was diagnosed with dementia at 44, so Cass is constantly worried it might happen to her, so is it now?
As other reviewers have said, with so few characters there are not a lot of options for who the killer is and/or who is targeting Cass. But, I will say I was surprised at who the actual killer was and their motivation. It's obvious from chapter one that her husband is involved in some way, but the ending was still a surprise for me as far as the killer goes. But, Cass wasn't a likable character and parts of the book did drag with her irrational fear and freak outs. But, I read the last 2/3 of the book in one sitting once she figured out what was going on and how she was going to handle it. Overall, it wasn't amazing - it was no Gone Girl, but it was entertaining enough.
As other reviewers have said, with so few characters there are not a lot of options for who the killer is and/or who is targeting Cass. But, I will say I was surprised at who the actual killer was and their motivation. It's obvious from chapter one that her husband is involved in some way, but the ending was still a surprise for me as far as the killer goes. But, Cass wasn't a likable character and parts of the book did drag with her irrational fear and freak outs. But, I read the last 2/3 of the book in one sitting once she figured out what was going on and how she was going to handle it. Overall, it wasn't amazing - it was no Gone Girl, but it was entertaining enough.
Ghettoside: a true story of murder in America by Jill Leovy
Almost every day someone is killed in Los Angeles County and the majority of the time that person murdered is a black man. These murders rarely even make the news and are often left unsolved. Why is that? What can be done to change these terrible statistics? In Ghettoside one case is followed from start to finish and is actually solved and the murderers arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. The case follows Detective John Skaggs as he tries to solve the homicide of Bryant Tennelle - an eighteen-year-old young black man with no gang ties or criminal involvement, who is also the son of another LAPD Detective. Jill Leovy explores why there is so much violence in Los Angeles County and just how hard it can be to solve these everyday murders even when there are dozens of eye-witnesses. She argues that for disenfranchised populations the law is often more harshly applied for smaller crimes, yet less harshly applied for murders - a practice known as "victim discounting." And there is often a "shadow law" that has developed where instead of going to the police family members or friends "take care of things" themselves and the cycle continues - often killing innocent bystanders in the process. I found the first half of the book very interesting. Once the book started to focus more on solving the case of Bryant Tennelle it got a little repetitive and overly detailed. A lot of the book focuses on Detective John Skaggs and how his tenacious work ethic allowed him to solve most of his cases, but including 10+ pages on one suspect interview was a little much. You could get the feel for how he worked without so much detail and word-for-word dialogue.
This is a sad, hard book. While Bryant Tennelle's family got justice, they didn't get their son back. And him being the son of a police detective the odds were higher that the police would work to get that case solved. Other cases were discussed in the book, but as one person told Wally Tennelle (Bryant's father) when he was in training that every murdered person is "some daddy's baby" not a prostitute or gang banger, but a life that was tragically cut short. While there are no answers in this book, I think it was an interesting look behind the curtain of just how hard it is to solve these crimes in South Central LA and how complicated the violence is as well.
Some quotes I liked:
"Many critics today complain that the criminal justice system is heavy-handed and unfair to minorities. We hear a great deal about capital punishment, excessively punitive drug laws, supposed misuse of eyewitness evidence, troubling high levels of black male incarceration, and so forth. So to assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter...our criminal justice system...hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate." (p. 9)
"Yet the statistical truth was undeniable, and most Americans understood it intuitively even if they didn't talk about it polite company. There was something in the way the nation acquiesced in shooting and stabbings among 'inner city' black men that suggested these men were expendable - or, worse, that perhaps the nation was better off without them." (p. 11)
"It was often not in the news. 'I remember a banner headline in the Los Angeles Times one weekend,' recalled a detective named Paul Mize. 'A bomb in Beirut had killed six people. We had nine murders that weekend, and not a one of them made the paper. Not one.'" (p. 38)
"This practice of using 'proxy crimes' to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement...They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find the couldn't 'put a case' on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant - or catch him dirty. 'We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,' explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law." (p. 141)
"It might not seem self-evident that impunity for white violence against blacks would engender black-on-black murder. But when people are stripped of legal protection and placed in desperate straits, they are more, not less, likely to turn on each other. Lawless settings are terrifying; if people can do whatever they want to each other, there are always enough bullies to make it ugly." (p. 155)
"That change perhaps has been aided in part by a related development - an increase in public benefits paid to poor black people, particularly men, primarily in the form of SSI (Supplemental Security Income, a payment available to people with disabilities). One reason for this is prison reform. The federal Second Chance Act in 2005 inspired new efforts to provide SSI to prisoners upon reentry; many prisoners qualify, since a third of the state's inmates have been diagnosed with mental illness. As we have seen, autonomy counters homicide. Cold cash paid out to individuals is a powerful thing: this author has watched SSI transform many aspects of life in South Central Los Angeles over about a decade, but the change for indigent black men has been especially dramatic...An eight-hundred-dollar-a-month check for an unemployed ex-felon makes a big difference in his life. The risks and benefits of various hustles surely appear different to him. He can move, ditch his homeys, commit fewer crimes, walk away from more fights." (p. 317)
This is a sad, hard book. While Bryant Tennelle's family got justice, they didn't get their son back. And him being the son of a police detective the odds were higher that the police would work to get that case solved. Other cases were discussed in the book, but as one person told Wally Tennelle (Bryant's father) when he was in training that every murdered person is "some daddy's baby" not a prostitute or gang banger, but a life that was tragically cut short. While there are no answers in this book, I think it was an interesting look behind the curtain of just how hard it is to solve these crimes in South Central LA and how complicated the violence is as well.
Some quotes I liked:
"Many critics today complain that the criminal justice system is heavy-handed and unfair to minorities. We hear a great deal about capital punishment, excessively punitive drug laws, supposed misuse of eyewitness evidence, troubling high levels of black male incarceration, and so forth. So to assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter...our criminal justice system...hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate." (p. 9)
"Yet the statistical truth was undeniable, and most Americans understood it intuitively even if they didn't talk about it polite company. There was something in the way the nation acquiesced in shooting and stabbings among 'inner city' black men that suggested these men were expendable - or, worse, that perhaps the nation was better off without them." (p. 11)
"It was often not in the news. 'I remember a banner headline in the Los Angeles Times one weekend,' recalled a detective named Paul Mize. 'A bomb in Beirut had killed six people. We had nine murders that weekend, and not a one of them made the paper. Not one.'" (p. 38)
"This practice of using 'proxy crimes' to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement...They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find the couldn't 'put a case' on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant - or catch him dirty. 'We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,' explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law." (p. 141)
"It might not seem self-evident that impunity for white violence against blacks would engender black-on-black murder. But when people are stripped of legal protection and placed in desperate straits, they are more, not less, likely to turn on each other. Lawless settings are terrifying; if people can do whatever they want to each other, there are always enough bullies to make it ugly." (p. 155)
"That change perhaps has been aided in part by a related development - an increase in public benefits paid to poor black people, particularly men, primarily in the form of SSI (Supplemental Security Income, a payment available to people with disabilities). One reason for this is prison reform. The federal Second Chance Act in 2005 inspired new efforts to provide SSI to prisoners upon reentry; many prisoners qualify, since a third of the state's inmates have been diagnosed with mental illness. As we have seen, autonomy counters homicide. Cold cash paid out to individuals is a powerful thing: this author has watched SSI transform many aspects of life in South Central Los Angeles over about a decade, but the change for indigent black men has been especially dramatic...An eight-hundred-dollar-a-month check for an unemployed ex-felon makes a big difference in his life. The risks and benefits of various hustles surely appear different to him. He can move, ditch his homeys, commit fewer crimes, walk away from more fights." (p. 317)
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
In the 1870's the Ingalls family lives in the deep woods of Wisconsin. Laura, her older sister Mary, and her younger sister Carrie live with their Ma and Pa. Pa hunts, traps, and farms while Ma keeps the house, kids, cooks, and cleans. Laura and Mary spend a lot of time playing outside except in the winter. While there are lots of dangerous animals in the Big Woods, the girls feel safe in their cabin with Ma and Pa. Most nights they fall asleep to Pa playing his fiddle and singing at the end of the day.
Little House in the Big Woods sets the stage for the Ingalls family that is followed in the rest of the series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read these books as a child and LOVED them and my Mom actually made me a Laura Ingalls Wilder costume for Halloween one year. In recent years there has been some controversy over these books, namely that Laura's daughter, Rose, was the real author of the series, and that there is racist language especially toward Native Americans in some of the later books. My opinion may change as I keep going, but I feel like the tone is consistent with the time period it was written, not overtly racist on purpose. Overall, I'm excited to re-read these childhood favorites and I think children today could still enjoy this introduction to Laura and the series.
A quote I liked:
"Mary was bigger than Laura, and she had a rag doll named Nettie. Laura had only a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, but it was a good doll. It was named Susan. It wasn't Susan's fault that she was only a corncob." (p. 20-21)
Little House in the Big Woods sets the stage for the Ingalls family that is followed in the rest of the series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read these books as a child and LOVED them and my Mom actually made me a Laura Ingalls Wilder costume for Halloween one year. In recent years there has been some controversy over these books, namely that Laura's daughter, Rose, was the real author of the series, and that there is racist language especially toward Native Americans in some of the later books. My opinion may change as I keep going, but I feel like the tone is consistent with the time period it was written, not overtly racist on purpose. Overall, I'm excited to re-read these childhood favorites and I think children today could still enjoy this introduction to Laura and the series.
A quote I liked:
"Mary was bigger than Laura, and she had a rag doll named Nettie. Laura had only a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, but it was a good doll. It was named Susan. It wasn't Susan's fault that she was only a corncob." (p. 20-21)
Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Farmer Boy follows a year in the young life of Almanzo Wilder, who will marry Laura Ingalls when they are adults. Almanzo has a very different upbringing than Laura. His parents own a large farm and seem fairly well-off for the time and place. But their everyday life is WORK. While the book is written in a way that makes it seem like fun and Almanzo definitely loves most of the work he does on the family farm, it highlights how much easier we have things today. But, I remember reading these books as a child and being fascinated with how they did everything back then. And reading it again as an adult I'm amazed at how this much detailed work is written to make it sound fun. That is really talented writing for children.
My favorite two scenes in this book are 1) when the stray dog shows up and ends up keeping the family from being robbed and 2) when the children spend a week at home alone and Almanzo throws blacking on the fancy parlor wall and his sister patches the wallpaper to cover it up for him.
I don't know if the series numbers changed at all since I read them as a child, but I remember reading Farmer Boy closer to the end of the series when I read these books the first time. But, I do like "meeting" both Laura and Almanzo in the first two books, I think that actually does work better as it's more chronologically correct.
My favorite two scenes in this book are 1) when the stray dog shows up and ends up keeping the family from being robbed and 2) when the children spend a week at home alone and Almanzo throws blacking on the fancy parlor wall and his sister patches the wallpaper to cover it up for him.
I don't know if the series numbers changed at all since I read them as a child, but I remember reading Farmer Boy closer to the end of the series when I read these books the first time. But, I do like "meeting" both Laura and Almanzo in the first two books, I think that actually does work better as it's more chronologically correct.
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