September 2022 Cookbook Reviews

 

The Red Truck Bakery Farmhouse Cookbook by Brian Noyes

I put this cookbook on hold at my local library because I remembered liking the first Red Truck Bakery Cookbook that came out in 2018. This cookbook is a follow up to the first cookbook. Author Brian Noyes talks about how regular customers complained when some of their favorite dishes from the bakery weren't in the original cookbook. So, he decided to write a second cookbook during the beginning of the COVID pandemic that would bring in some new recipes and several fan favorites that hadn't made it into the first one. I liked that at the beginning there are tips for pantry items to stock and kitchen tools that are good to have on hand - neither of which includes any crazy out there items. There is also a section on "kitchen advice" that's very handy like don't crack eggs directly into your batter and tips for measuring sticky things like honey (his tip is to spray the measuring cup with nonstick cooking spray first). There are definitely several recipes I'm looking forward to trying.

Simple Pasta by Odette Williams

This is a really comprehensive homemade pasta cookbook. The author covers different kinds of homemade pasta dough, how to make various shapes/kinds of pasta, and several kinds of pasta sauces. Then she gets into seasonal recipes. All the recipes are organized by season - spring, summer, fall, and winter. I really like that it's a seasonally focused cookbook. While I think this is a good cookbook overall, there weren't that many recipes I wanted to try. I do think it's great for someone who is interested in starting to make pasta from scratch or someone who has the basics down and is looking for a few more options with their homemade pasta. My next step is ravioli and I did get some good tips from this cookbook.

A Dish for All Seasons by Kathryn Pauline

I really love the concept of this cookbook. Kathryn Pauline takes 25 staple recipes and gives each one a seasonal spin. So, for each staple she'll include a basic recipe, then 4 additional recipes that focus on seasonal ingredients. The recipes are organized like a basic cookbook with breakfast, appetizers & sides, mains, etc. But, I just love that by giving a basic staple recipe then showing how it can change with what's in season this could help people understand seasonal cooking/eating better. While I love the overall concept, there weren't tons of recipes I wanted to try. But, I do think this is a great cookbook for a home cook who's wanting to step up their cooking game or try to eat more seasonally.

September 2022 Reviews

 

The Rooted Life by Justin Rhodes

I wasn't familiar with Justin Rhodes until we discovered the Homesteaders of America organization. After the Joel Salatin and Mother Earth News falling out we sided with Joel. We had been going to the MEN fairs for several years (which I found by following Joel), but after that we decided we were done with MEN and happened upon the virtual HOA conference in 2020. We made it out to the in-person conference in 2021 and that's when I discovered Justin Rhodes. After the conference I started following several of the presenters (including the Rhodes family) on social media. We also plan to use his Chickshaw model for when we add egg chickens to our homestead. When I saw he had this book coming out I bought it right away, which is something I rarely do as a librarian. But, this is a great book for the beginner homesteader. It weaves together their personal story with tips on how to grow/raise more of your own food. There are definitely some good tips - the only thing I thought was missing was on sourcing land/property. The Rhodes family is lucky in that his family already owned this 75 acre plot that they can now use/live on. But, not everyone is so lucky so at least a chapter or part of a chapter on finding land/property would be helpful. But, it's a great overview and inspiration if you're looking to start homesteading or maybe up your homesteading game.

Wastelands: the true story of farm country on trial by Corban Addison

Eastern North Carolina is home to more pigs than people. These are rural areas you may drive by on your way to one of the NC beaches and not think much of it. But in the past two decades huge industrial hog farms have set up shop all over Eastern North Carolina and have contributed to huge amounts of pollution and nuisance to their unfortunate neighbors. Many of these neighbors are poor African-Americans who have lived on their land for generations. When these hog farms came in they tried every resource they could think of to try to combat it with no help. Until 2013 when a law firm in Salisbury, NC was asked to take on some nuisance lawsuits for clients living near these industrial hog farms. These cases would drag on for 7 years and read almost like fiction for all the underhanded dealings of the hog industry tycoons and their cronies in the NC Legislature. And while I don't want to give anything away it becomes very much a David vs. Goliath legal case that will deal a serious blow to Smithfield Foods (currently owned by China).

This book is the story of the legal battle between Smithfield Foods and several dozen residents of Eastern NC, but it still highlights the horrific practices of the industrial food industry. The only people profiting from Smithfield Foods are the executives - the land, the pigs, the farmers, the neighbors, and the people eating this food all lose. This book also perfectly illustrates the proverb that the love of money is the root of all evil. Which is the motto of the industrial food industry anyway. I was also FURIOUS at the men in power in the NC Legislature that lied, cheated, and paid big money to try to legislate protection for Smithfield. As a native North Carolinian I wanted to throw all those men into one of these hog waste lagoons by the end of the book. It's infuriating to me that these people run under the guise of protecting "family farms" which is NOT protecting family farms, but corporations like Smithfield and their own pockets. This book does give an overall look at how awful industrial hog farms are even though that's not the main point.

Reading this book made me wish I had become a lawyer. This is like the hog farm version of Erin Brockovich. A few reviews complained that it was overly descriptive or overly written and I agree there were a few spots of that, but the overall story was just so compelling I could look past that. My only other minor complaint (that couldn't be helped) was that there were just SO MANY people and names that it was sometimes hard to keep track of who everyone was in the narrative. But, overall I thought this book was AMAZING and I'll be buying a copy. It should be required reading for every NC resident as well.

Some quotes I liked:

"It [the lagoon and spraying system for hog waste] was a colossal exercise in magical thinking. Between lagoon spills and flooding from storms and hurricanes, the industry has despoiled waterways across eastern North Carolina and befouled the air and land in dozens of communities. Yet the corporate hog barons - Smithfield chief among them - have never been held to account. Rather, they have raked in profits by the billions." (p. 27)

"There are nine million hogs in the state, nearly one per person. If humanity suddenly went vegan, almost every North Carolinian could have a pig for a pet. All but a nominal fraction of these hogs are concentrated in the vast expanse of coastal plain east of Interstate 95. In Duplin County alone...there are nearly thirty-five hogs for every human being, a density higher than any other place on earth. Yet this truth has remained largely hidden...North Carolina is famous for many things, but being home to the pork capital of the world is not one of them. Quite conveniently - for the tourist bureau, at least - the hog kingdom is tucked away in a rural region of the state invisible to outsiders and forgotten by most North Carolinians, except when they make the drive down Interstate 40 to the port of Wilmington." (p. 30-31)

[When NC Representative Cindy Watson tried to introduce legislation to help combat industrial hog farms she received death threats] "But informing the FBI was not enough. The following day, Cindy told her colleagues on the floor of the House. 'I have a little tape in my hand. Some of my hog farmers aren't real happy with me. They've threatened to kill me, to drown me in the Cape Fear River. I just want you all to know it. I want to make a public record, Mr. Speaker.' No one on the floor moved. No one spoke. But the message got through. The hog farmers left her family alone." (p. 87) [But, they backed her opponent and she didn't get re-elected during the next election]

"John [Hughes - one of the lawyers fighting Smithfield] wades through court record and finds the contract. It's the first grower agreement he has ever seen. He reads it with fascination. He knew the relationship was lopsided, but the full extent of the imbalance blows his mind...The relationship is purely provisional. The grower must live with the constant risk of total loss, all to earn a subsistence income of a few dollars per marketable hog. Murphy-Brown, meanwhile, collects the fully grown hogs from its farms, slaughters them at its slaughterhouse, packages the meat for sale - or exports it to China or elsewhere overseas - and rakes in around a billion dollars a year in profit. The growers, in effect, are modern-day sharecroppers." (p. 127)

[A photographer and scientist are permitted to test and photograph the inside and around some of the hog farms. There are several pages around how long the smell clung to things and how hard it was for the people who were there to get rid of the smell.] "At Corey's Christmas party, he shows off his camera to a few of his buddies. The smell of the hog barns is like a halo around it. One of his friends suggests he file an insurance claim and purchase a replacement...[he] tries an experiment first. He places the camera outside in the golden Colorado sunshine. He gives it time, allows the intense solar radiation to burn the VOCs and bioaerosols off the glass and plastic surfaces. The experiment was successful. The camera is saved. After two months in the sun." (p. 183)

"The $473 million award - reduced to $94 million by the statutory cap - accomplished what Mona and Mike had hoped: It forced the Murphy men to change. That autumn, Smithfield made sweeping improvements to its production practices, installing refrigerated dead boxes, replacing high-powered spray guns with subsurface injection and low-pressure irrigation, and limiting its trucking schedule to daylight hours. Smithfield also announced the planned conversion of 90 percent of its lagoons into covered biogas digesters. The company's publicists spun these changes as an outgrowth of a broader sustainability initiative designed to cut greenhouse emissions across its supply chain, not a concession to the cudgel of $550 million in jury verdicts. But the targeted nature of the improvements, the tens of millions of dollars required to deploy them, and the timing of the announcement suggest otherwise." (p. 344)

The Comfort Book by Matt Haig (Books & Banter book club)

Matt Haig wrote this book during Britain's COVID lockdown to remind himself of good things during that difficult and anxious time. With no real order or chapters it's a collection of short observations, stories, and quotes about surviving and thriving during difficult times. At the beginning of the book he gives the following guidelines for reading it, "You can read it how you want. You can start at the beginning and end at the end, or you can start at the end and end at the beginning, or you can just dip into it." (p. ix) But, it would be easier to "dip into it" if there was any kind of structure or topics. The book is divided into four parts, but the parts don't seem to designate any topic or theme. It was a random collection of feel-good thoughts, quotes, and stories. It was basically exactly what I expected and exactly what I hated about The Midnight Library. The best part was it's a pretty quick read so I was able to finish it over the course of one day. I personally wouldn't have read anything else by Haig after The Midnight Library, but this is for my book club and I couldn't find any discussion questions. So I forced myself to read it so I could create some discussion questions. Since my book clubs both LOVED The Midnight Library I'll be curious to see what they think of this one. Not having personally experienced severe depression or being suicidal I can't say for sure, but I just feel like this would not help someone in that situation and almost seems to make light of it - which is also how I felt about The Midnight Library. Overall, I would not recommend this one or anything else by Haig.

Blood Orange Night by Melissa Bond

Melissa Bond was already dealing with losing her newspaper job during the 2009 recession and having a special needs infant, plus recovering from a traumatic birth when she suddenly couldn't sleep at all. She was getting maybe an hour or two a night. Then she found out she was pregnant again, so when she went to the doctor they couldn't prescribe anything since she was still in the first trimester. But, later in her pregnancy she found "Dr. Amazing" who was supposed to be more of a holistic doctor, but still a real MD. He prescribed her Ativan and quickly upped her dosage from 2mg to 6mg within a few months. And yet she still wasn't sleeping much. Then she began to experience other troubling symptoms - stomach cramps, dizziness, muscle weakness, olfactory hallucinations, muscle pain and spasms. Only after almost two years of taking Ativan daily did she start doing some research on the drug and almost immediately found out that it's not recommended to take longer than 4 weeks due to being highly addictive. So, all of Bond's mystery symptoms were actually "withdrawal tolerance" even though she continued to take the medication daily her body was experiencing withdrawal symptoms. And stopping cold turkey could actually result in psychosis. Yet, very few doctors understand benzodiazepines enough to help someone get off them. Bond was lucky enough to find one not too far away from her and started the excruciating process of weaning off these high powered drugs. Unfortunately through the process her marriage couldn't handle the stress of two very young children, one of which has special needs, and the physical and emotional toll of the benzos and trying to get off them. But, Bond shines a MUCH needed light on how terrifying these drugs are and how often doctors over prescribe them (and also terrifyingly don't seem to understand just how addictive they are either).

I think what's most terrifying about benzodiazepines is that it is a surprise addiction. It's not like painkillers where people often did abuse them because they felt so great taking them. It's also incredibly hard to get off of them. It's not a short 30-day detox and maintenance, the withdrawals are not just physical, but emotional/mental as well and many people become suicidal while trying to get off them.

Obviously this is Bond's story and told from her perspective, but her husband seemed like a HUGE jerk. Instead of being worried about her health issues he seemed irritated that more was expected of him with the kids, yet he also didn't want his mother to help them (and she was VERY willing to help) because he didn't get along with her (and you never know why, I don't even think Bond knew why). Obviously, he had a role in creating these two children, yet he seemed irritated and mad that he had to come home from work everyday and you know, be a parent to his kids. He also seemed to think she was either exaggerating or making up her symptoms. I wasn't surprised when they were separated by the end of the book. It made me wonder if he would have been more sympathetic if she had had cancer or something else that wasn't seen as being her own fault. Even before she was prescribed benzos he wasn't sympathetic AT ALL when she wasn't sleeping and was trying to deal with a special needs baby all day on no sleep. I'm in no way suggesting this wasn't hard for him as well. Even just having a special needs 14 month old and a newborn would be a huge struggle for any parents without the benzo addiction/illness thrown in. But, he really came across like a huge dick throughout the whole book. Luckily, she did have some amazing friends who really stepped up to help her and she managed to find a nearby doctor who was one of the few doctors in the country who could help her. Definitely an eye-opening and terrifying book.

Some quotes I liked:

"Neither of us can believe there isn't more information out there, more doctors who understand what it takes to pull benzos safely from the brain. There are innumerable doctors and clinics specializing in opioid addiction treatment, but this is because the explosion in opioid abuse came with an explosion of overdoses. Part of the horror of opioids is the immense and sudden mortality. Benzos dismantle the brain over time. Instead of a swift and sudden death by overdoes, there's a slide into disability. Cause and effect are harder to track down because the horror is stealth. Instead of a fire burning your house down, benzos are the thief that steals everything you own a piece at a time." (p. 171)

"If I went to a doctor with complaints of numbness or weakness, electric shock sensations and tremors, they'd likely suspect multiple sclerosis or some other neurodegenerative disorder. If I told them I couldn't eat because my stomach cramped and burned, they'd look toward Crohn's disease or irritable bowel syndrome. If I hadn't discovered what was happening, I could be on a terrifying medical track or on terrifying new medications meant to remedy a disorder that was never a disorder at all." (p. 218)

[Bond is contacted by ABC about filming a piece for World News with Diane Sawyer. When she's told it's going to air it ends up being bumped off that night and never ends up airing.] "Len stops calling me after the first week. Two months later I call ABC about the piece. I'd love a copy of the footage, I say. It wasn't run but it means something to me. I'm told that Len is no longer working with ABC and that producers typically take the footage if it isn't aired. I look Len up on LinkedIn a year later and discover he's taken a job with a pharmaceutical company. The piece wasn't run, he likely has the footage, and now he's working for Big Pharma. It's like a bad movie with me as the walk-on." (p. 252)

"In the first year of my withdrawal, I reported Dr. Amazing to the only state agency having a criminal unit for investigation into physician malpractice. A narcotics agent interviewed me and called both Dr. James and Dr. Kate just once, leaving messages. He spoke to neither of them, despite their calls back to him, and the case was quietly closed. Dr. Amazing remains in practice to this day." (p. 265)

The Marmalade Diaries by Ben Aitken

The premise of this sounded really interesting - the reality? BORING. Ben Aitken was looking for a new apartment/roommate and went through a company called Share and Care Homeshare that matched him with a recent widow named Winnie. Winnie is 85 and has been widowed for slightly less than a year when Ben moves in. Part of his low rent is helping around the house for Winnie. But, to say Winnie is demanding is an understatement. She is stingy and particular and less than appreciative as well. I do think Ben and Winnie come to appreciate each other, but based on Ben's telling of it it seems much more one sided (his side). Winnie seems to be like many older people who are aging and unhappy about all they've lost. I don't want to sound like she didn't have reasons to be sad or frustrated, but none of that was Ben's fault and I think he put up with WAY more than the average person would. In fact her son and his family moved in with Winnie at the beginning of COVID and only lasted 6 months and there were STILL hurt feelings between Winnie and her daughter in law over it. And after reading this book I wasn't surprised. She seemed pretty awful and that never got better. I kept reading because I thought their relationship might become more of a reciprocal relationship and less landlady and servant. Overall, I was unimpressed and almost wish I had quit reading after the first few chapters.

August 2022 Reviews

 

Never Simple by Liz Scheier

Liz Scheier grew up in Manhattan as the only child of her single mother, Judith. Judith was extremely charming and outgoing and would do anything for her only child. But, she was also mentally ill with borderline personality disorder and could be terrifying in her rages. When Liz was eighteen her mother casually told her two bombshells: 1) she was currently married to someone Liz had never heard of and 2) that the man she claimed was Liz's father was completely fabricated (she had a biological father who was dead, but all the details she'd told Liz were made up). This was the beginning of Liz's search for not only who were father actually was, but also how much of her childhood was lies and what exactly was the truth. Once Liz is out of her mother's house she begins to figure out that her childhood was anything but normal and starts to figure out how to create some boundaries with her mother. But, it takes her having children of her own to really create and enforce some hard boundaries with her mother. At the end of her life Judith was mentally ill, dealing with dementia and other physical health issues, and about to be evicted from her apartment. Liz has to sort through the painful emotions of how to help her mother without becoming too entangled again and still maintaining a safe home for her own children. A darkly humorous account of a daughter's struggle with a mentally ill mother.

Some reviews I read said that the memoir focused too much on Liz's personal life and not her relationship with her mother, others said she came across like she was trying to justify not helping her mother more at the end of her life. I think the memoir was well-balanced in that Liz's whole life was about trying to figure out her mother and also herself. With no real parental guidance in her life Liz was on her own for her whole life. To me it made sense that a big chunk of the book was about Liz's 20's and 30's and you can see how she was trying to figure things out. The beginning and the end were more about the realities of living with a mentally ill parent (as a child and then later as an adult and parent herself). Overall, I thought it was very well done. I would tentatively compare it to The Glass Castle but more from the perspective of the child in their 20's and 30's instead of childhood. It's similar to The Glass Castle in that I think Jeannette Walls father and Liz Scheier's mother very much loved them, but were severely handicapped as parents by mental illness and/or addictions.

The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore

Most people don't recognize the name Elizabeth Packard, but we should. Elizabeth was shipped off to an insane asylum in 1860 when her husband of 21 years decides he doesn't like the fact that she's become vocal in disagreeing with his theology. She's taken away from her 6 children and dropped off at the state insane asylum. She initially thinks the asylum director, Dr. Andrew McFarland, will recognize that she isn't insane, but she soon realizes he is very much in cahoots with her husband and had no intention of recognizing her sanity. Elizabeth spends three long years in the state asylum - much of that time she's put in the ward with the worst patients (those who are likely actually insane and violent) as a punishment for fighting for her freedom. When she is released - basically because the director is sick of her and she's riling the other patients up - her husband immediately locks her in their home and is planning to ship her off to another asylum where her lifelong commitment is guaranteed. At this time in history women are seen as the sole property of their husbands and have no right to their own personal freedom, money, property, or children. Once Elizabeth is out of the state asylum she makes it her sole purpose in life to change that - and she does. "By her own reckoning, she secured the passage of thirty-four bills in forty-four legislatures across twenty-four states. She campaigned for women's equal rights and for the rights of the mentally ill - the former, tellingly, usually a much harder sell than the latter. And she achieved widespread, long-lasting change, including, for example, the establishment of independent bodies that inspected asylums with the power to go above boards of trustees. Remarkably, in certain states, she was even successful in insisting that a female inspector be included." (p. 437) Sadly, her story, while not totally lost to history, is marred by the fact that she was accused of being insane and was committed to an insane asylum. The same accusation that continues to be thrown at women who stand up to injustice or demand equality - although thankfully today we can't be committed against our wills as easily.

While this book is long, it is a quick read. After reading the first few chapters I actually cheated and Googled her to make sure she did actually get out of the asylum! Elizabeth Packard was a woman ahead of her time and sadly like many trailblazers she took the hits forging a new path to benefit future generations of women. She took what her husband intended for harm and turned it into a cause that changed laws and the future for women. I was continually amazed at her strength and grit to not only survive, but thrive and make the asylum better while she was there. This is truly a name every woman should know.

Some quotes I liked:

"'As soon as [the allegation of insanity] has been whispered abroad, its subject finds himself...viewed with distrust,' explained a leading nineteenth-century psychiatrist. 'There still lingers something of the same mysterious dread which, in early times, gave him the attributes of the supernatural.' It was not so many years since the whisper would not have been 'insane' but 'witch.'...(p. 16)

"'The working of this Institution is so carefully covered up,' she thought, 'and so artfully concealed from the public eye, that the external world knows nothing of the 'hidden life of the prisoner' within.' If only, she thought, someone could reveal it. Perhaps that person could be her...'It shall be one of the highest aspirations of my earth-life, to expose these evils for the purpose of remedying them,' she announced. 'It shall be said of me, 'She hath done what she could.'" (p. 151)

"If only she wasn't so persuasive. So damn compelling. She had, McFarland thought, a 'more than lawyer-like ability to put her own case.' And in the only court available to her - his asylum - she seemed to have the jury of all its residents, sane and insane alike, in the palm of her hand." (p. 172)

"Back in January, she'd been given a binary choice by her lawyers, the latter option really just a joke. 'The only way I could secure any rights at all,' she'd been told, 'was either by a divorce, or by getting the laws changed.' Now, Elizabeth said fiercely, 'I chose the latter.'" (p. 357)

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara is an AF or Artificial Friend who is extremely observant and interested in everything going on around her. She is purchased for Josie who is a sickly child. As she tends to Josie and tries to help her in any way she can, Klara learns more about human emotions and needs. Josie's next door neighbor Rick seems to be her only real-life friend and their time together is limited because Rick isn't "lifted" or genetically enhanced. AFs are solar powered so to Klara the Sun is almost godlike in it's power to her. When it seems like Josie is getting sicker, Klara decides to make a deal with the Sun to heal Josie. But Josie's mother has another idea for Klara and her role with Josie which stretches the boundaries between people and AFs.

I didn't really have any expectations for this going in and I felt like the storyline was compelling enough that I wanted to keep reading to see what would happen. I do wish a few more things had been spelled out - what exactly did "lifting" entail? How big was Klara supposed to be - like an American Girl doll or the same size as Josie? Where was the story taking place? I felt like two things stood out as very odd - 1) Klara's belief that the Sun was person/deity-like and had healing powers. As an AF she was incredibly skilled and smart and that seemed so child-like that it seemed unrealistic for an AF. 2) that Paul, Josie's father, would help Klara carry out her "mission" to the Sun so it would heal Josie. It seemed odd that he would help with this obviously non-sense mission when he clearly didn't like Klara and the plans Josie's mother had for her and Josie. And the ending was kind of a let down too. I'm not really sure what the author's point was - that robots can never replace humans? or that messing with human genetics isn't a good idea? It's not really clear what happens to Klara either other than she's become outdated now that Josie is going off to college, but if this is supposed to be the future couldn't she be refurbished or something? Just an odd ending to an overall odd book.

Cults: inside the world's most notorious groups and understanding the people who joined them by Max Cutler

I wasn't familiar with Max Cutler or his podcast about cults, but stumbled on this book because I am interested in all things cults. This book is a sampling of 10 of the cults that Cutler has explored on his podcast. I do wish he had given a little more reasoning as to why he chose these 10 as there were a few I'd never heard of (and I'm pretty well read on this topic). For each cult he gives a keyword that he feels sums up that cult or leader like Shame, Exploitation, etc. In each chapter he gives as much background about the cult leader as he can and how that may have led to what they became. There is history of the cult and how it ended. I felt like it was an interesting look at a few unique cults. There were kind of mixed reviews about this one, but I really liked it. I felt like each chapter covered the cult and it's leader very well and highlighted some of the reasons why it started, how people were drawn in, and why it ended. I'm not a huge podcast listener, but this made me want to check out his podcast to see what other cults he's covered that I may not know about.

Some quotes I liked:

"It may seem like a dangerous contradiction, but one of the greatest weapons in the arsenal of the psychopath is that, on a good day, people tend to enjoy being in their company." (p. 16)

"It started innocently enough, with a ranking system (Raniere had been inspired by Scientology's eight levels of Operating Thetan) made visible to everyone enrolled in ESP, and later NXIVM, by sashes that Espians were expected to wear around their necks. The sash system determined where a person stood in the hierarchy...To move from one color to the next, a student had to first earn four stripes on the sash they currently possessed. This was another studied variation of Scientology, which offers a graduated path they term the 'bridge to clear.'...During EM [Explorations of Meaning] sessions, a coach would take a student through an analysis of a thought or behavior to find the root cause of the student's negative emotional responses...In this way, Explorations of Meaning were very similar to Scientology's auditing sessions." (p. 286-87)

[On Credonia Mwerinde and the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God cult in Uganda] "Viewed on its own, her behavior stands out for its exceptional ruthlessness, but in a country whose history has been soaked in bloodshed, her cruelty had plenty of precedents." (p. 321) "In total, at least 1,055 people were killed in the Movement's final weeks, making it the deadliest cult in the history of the modern world." (p. 343)

Mala's Cat by Mala Kacenberg

Mala Szorer grew up in a small village in Poland. While she and her family didn't have much materially they had a loving family and enjoyed the simple pleasures of life. Mala's entire village was Jewish. She was 12 when Hitler came into power in Germany and because she was a child she didn't understand or think much of the rumors she heard about him and the Nazis. But when all the Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend school she knew things were getting bad. Mala was strong willed and as soon as the restrictions on Jews began she defied them. She routinely took off her yellow star and left her village to beg and find food. That was how she survived when her whole family was killed. She was out looking for food and when she came home she saw that everyone had been rounded up to the center of the village and were shot. She and her cat Malach hid in the surrounding woods for several weeks. Mala used her looks and intelligence to her advantage. She was blond-haired and blue-eyed so she didn't "look" Jewish and could convince people that her mean stepmother had thrown her out and they would take her in for awhile. Eventually she obtained fake papers and went to work in Germany. For six years she survived on her wits and with the help of her cat. Malach often sensed trouble before Mala did and helped her avoid capture and find good people who would help her. When the war ends Mala reveals her true identity to the people she was working for in Germany and thankfully they were sympathetic to her and let her stay on for awhile. Eventually she did find some distant relatives and emigrated to London where she met her husband Meir Kacenberg. They went on to raise 5 children together and as two survivors of the Holocaust Mala wanted to tell her story to world in this book.

Mala's story is amazing and highlights how it's often luck and grit that allowed her to survive when so many others didn't. She was strong willed, but after her whole family was murdered she wasn't afraid of death so she often took risks that others may not have. She also credits her cat Malach and thinks she may have been an angel sent to help her. Mala claims she never saw Malach eat or drink and Malach always found her even if they were separated by long distances. And once the war was over Malach disappeared never to be seen again. My only complaints were 1) the story is written in a somewhat choppy way - I think because English was Mala's fourth or fifth language. But, it sometimes makes the story not flow as well as it could. And 2) I find it slightly hard to believe that she had 3 different families offer to adopt her seemingly VERY quickly. Maybe that was commonplace then, but it seemed odd and not what would be the norm during wartime. But, it's overall a very interesting book about one woman's miraculous survival during the Holocaust.

Dinner for One: how cooking in Paris saved me by Sutanya Dacres

Sutanya Dacres met her future husband on a night out with a friend when she was home in New York visiting her family. He was French and was in town on vacation with a friend. They exchanged contact info and started emailing. Soon they were emailing daily and talking on the phone too. When Sutanya goes to Europe on a trip with some friends she meets up with The Frenchman (as he’s known in this book) in Paris and knows this is it. After three years of long distance dating they get married in 2013 and she moves to Paris. But what seemed like a fairytale romance quickly fades under the stress of living together full time and for Sutanya the struggles of adjusting to France and trying to learn a new language. Within three years of their wedding they are getting divorced. Sutanya really struggles with the divorce and what to do with herself. She loves Paris so she decides to stay and finds that rediscovering cooking for herself is what starts to heal her. The last section of the book is a collection of recipes.

I didn’t love this memoir. I honestly didn’t like Sutanya very much. I also thought based on the description of the book it would be more about food and cooking. It was more about all the dozens of men she hooked up with and how much she partied and self-medicated (both before and after her divorce). I was expecting more The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry and got the hookup diaries Paris edition. Overall, I would not recommend this one.

July 2022 Cookbook Reviews

 

Super Simple Homemade Pasta by Aliza Green

This homemade pasta cookbook cover the basics of making your own pasta dough and various ways to shape/cut it. The first section covers making/shaping dough and a few recipes for different types of dough. The second section covers recipes for various types of pasta dishes. I was hoping to find some recipes for ravioli or other recipes using fresh pasta. I didn't really find any recipes I wanted to try and overall just didn't feel like this was a very helpful cookbook overall.

The Wellness Principles: cooking for a healthy life by Gary Deng, M.D.

I was interested in this cookbook since it's written by a medical doctor. I liked that in the introduction of the book he talks about being frustrated that as a doctor he wasn't really making his patients well he was treating their problem/issue only for them to keep coming back with the same problems/issues over and over again because other things weren't addressed like diet, sleep, etc. He included a section called "healthy living beyond the plate" that covered things like exercise, stress, sleep, social environment, etc. But, what I didn't like right from the start is that he was pushing a plant-based diet. Milk, red meat, and butter and NOT the dietary problems. Especially if you source those products from local farmers who are practicing regenerative farming. Fake milks and meats are NOT the answer to dietary or environmental concerns. So, I was already turned off by that and honestly didn't see any recipes I wanted to try. I wouldn't recommend this one at all.

July 2022 Reviews

 

Edible North Carolina: a journey across a state of flavor by Marcie Cohen Ferris, ed.

Edible North Carolina is a collection of essays all about food in North Carolina. From how restaurants adapted to survive the COVID shut downs to histories of local, family farms and everything in between is covered in this book. Each essay was followed by a recipe that was mentioned or pertained to that story. While I liked most of the essays and I love that Vivian Howard wrote the foreword, the Introduction was SO long and detailed that it should have either been fleshed out into it's own book or greatly edited/shortened for this type of book. I also wish that the essays had been organized by region, the order and topics just felt very random. I was also disappointed that there were very few essays about the Charlotte/Piedmont region of the state. It's obvious there is a HUGE local food movement in Asheville and Raleigh/Durham, but nothing much about Charlotte which is surprising because I think Charlotte is the biggest city in the state and we have tons of small, local, family farms in the Charlotte area. Overall, I did like it, but I think it could have been organized/edited better to create a more cohesive book.

Eating to Extinction: the world's rarest foods and why we need to save them by Dan Saladino

This is a really unique book that explores the importance of food diversity through foods that almost went extinct, but have been brought back from the brink by committed farmers and communities. The book is divided into 10 sections for types of food like vegetables, meat, cheese, etc. and each section explores a few specific types of food that were once commonplace in a specific area, but are now on the verge of being wiped out. Many of the food explored thrived in a specific environment and were crucial foods for that local/indigenous community, but as globalization and homogenization of food continues local foods are often lost to industrial, cheap food. Dan Saladino does a great job of really exploring this issue and highlighting what will be lost if these foods go extinct.

Joel Salatin, my favorite lunatic farmer, often says you never see monoculture in nature. Nature is diverse and when we try to force our monoculture will on nature it's a lose/lose for everyone. Thankfully Saladino found lots of people around the world who are working hard to keep their local food traditions not only alive, but to encourage these traditions to continue in the future.

Some quotes I liked:

"Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly eats just nine, of which just three - rice, wheat and maize - provide 50 per cent of all calories. Add potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar (beet and cane) and you have 75 per cent of all the calories that fuel our species...Seen in the context of 2 million years of human evolution, these dietary shifts taking place at a global level, all pointing towards uniformity, are unprecedented. This is happening as we're just beginning to understand the importance of diversity to our own health. The richer our gut microbiomes (the trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes we all host) the better for us. And the more diverse our diets, the richer our gut microbiomes become." (p. 8)

"In the 1830s, the United States government saw it as a public duty to distribute diverse seeds 'of the choicest varieties' for free through the US Postal Service to farmers and homesteaders. In the space of two decades, the Federal government posted over a million seed packets to American farmers from a selection of 497 varieties of lettuce, 341 varieties of squash, 288 varieties of beets and 408 varieties of tomato. By the end of the twentieth century, only a tenth of that diversity had survived." (p. 106) [And now instead of handing out seeds the US government gives huge subsidies to industrial monoculture "farming."]

"'Outsiders criticise us for killing whales and wild birds, and they laugh at us for eating what they describe as rotten sheep,' [Gunnar] Nattestad said at the end of the meal. 'But I believe we are the ones who know the truth of what it means to kill an animal and eat its meat....the whales are free until the point of death, and our sheep are allowed to grow old. In your world, animals are trapped inside buildings and hidden away from view. Why is our meat any crueller than the slaughter of millions of animals inside industrial abattoirs no one ever gets to see?'" (p. 153)

"The idea was explored in the 1980s, using a line of birds which were born blind due to a genetic mutation. Like the ones in the Brazilian story, the chickens displayed no signs of feather-pecking or acts of cannibalism. 'They did not appear to have any other obvious welfare problems, and they were more productive,' said a review of the experiment years later, adding that scientists involved 'were of the opinion that blind hens could play a role in the future...This seemed, so to speak, to be a win-win situation: Farmers would make more money and hens would live better lives.' Bigger, faster and, for our benefit, even blind? Among animal ethicists, this is called the 'Blind Hens' Challenge.'" (p. 162) [WTF - this is like the more recent article about giving cows VR goggles so they can't see how terrible their CAFO living conditions are.]

"Yet science has taught us that microbes can also be dangerous, that some bacteria can kill. In the twentieth century, the view of microbes being deadly organisms took precedence. As a result, we waged a war on them, and cleansed and sterilised our homes and our food without discretion - all in the name of safety. Only recently have we learned that, from a health point of view, we have lost something in this process." (p. 264)

"There is an old Palestinian saying that Sansour shared with me before we said goodbye. 'He who does not eat from his own adze [a farming tool] cannot think with his own mind.' This is why a watermelon, a grain of wheat or a tiny sesame seed is such a powerful thing. Each one can be a taste of freedom." (p. 357)

I'll Be There (But I'll Be Wearing Sweatpants) by Amy Weatherly and Jess Johnston

When I first picked up this book and realized the authors were Christian I was glad, but also slightly worried - PLEASE don't let this be another version of Find Your People by Jennie Allen (also with a yellow cover and in my opinion awful). But, it's not. Amy Weatherly and Jess Johnston are obviously Christians, but they are not beating you over the head with it. And they actually have some good tips throughout the book. I liked that they alternated writing chapters and were real with the struggles that come with friendship as adults. They did give some solid, do-able tips (even for introverts) and covered some thorny issues like when a friendship ends or dealing with disagreements/arguments/fights, etc. I liked the book overall and felt like the tone was one of friends chatting. The main thing I didn't like was that they both seem to be part of the "messy mom" trend where you kind of brag about how messy and crazy your life is. I'm sure that's the truth, but that's not my life so I can't relate to that. One of my biggest issues in friendship is that I'm childfree and also a Christian, so in Church circles I've often felt like a circus freak. Many of their examples involved bonding with other mothers who had children close in age to theirs which is all great but not something I can personally relate to or do to find friends. Overall, I did like the book and felt like it did have some decent tips. And while the authors are clearly Christians I think anyone could get something out of this book because that's not the main focus.

Halfway Home: race, punishment, and the afterlife of mass incarceration by Reuben Jonathan Miller

Reuben Miller was a former chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now is a professor of sociology. He has spent a decade studying mass incarceration and the after effects. He says that life after incarceration is it's own kind of prison - lists of very specific rules, hoop after hoop to jump through, and the demoralizing realization that the odds are very much stacked against you. But Miller has a personal connection to the prison system - both of his brothers and his father all spent time in prison. At times his grandmother, who was raising him and his two brothers, had to choose between watching one of her grandchildren go to jail or a group home or be evicted from her apartment for housing a criminal. Miller grew up poor and black and has seen countless friends and family members go to prison. While he managed to "make it" to the middle class this issue is still very personal to him and continues to affect him and his family personally.

Miller does a great job of exploring this issue from both a sociological standpoint (which is his primary work) and his personal experiences. It really gives a much better view of this overall issue and how it's such a vicious cycle that includes poverty in childhood, unresolved and generational trauma, drug use, lack of good jobs and housing, to all the limitations put on convicted criminals once they are out of prison. It's a sad book, but the overall tone wasn't depressing. The tone was more like the tired sigh from someone who's exhausted, but has no choice but to keep going. Definitely a very needed book about a very hard issue.

Some quotes I liked:

"The plea deal is a perverse kind of a confession. It is an abdication of the inquisitorial process. Fact-finding is unnecessary. No deep truths are revealed in plea deals. They are negotiations between a prosecutor with the power of incarceration and death at his or her disposal, whether or not there is evidence, and a defendant who just wants to go home...The people who take these pleas are typically stuck in cells and live under the threat of long prison sentences. They've been separated from their families. They confess guilt to a judge and to their accusers in open court, giving up their right to a trial that they likely couldn't afford. They do this whether or not they believe that they are guilty because copping a plea is the fastest way to get home, but almost everyone I met who took a plea regretted it." (p. 37)

"In Detroit, in 2013 the average response time for a 911 call was fifty-eight minutes, and that was for 'high-priority calls' like robberies, sexual assault, or active shooters. And the homicide clearance rate in Chicago in 2017 was 17 percent. This meant that 83 percent of the city's murderers were never brought to 'justice.' Why would anyone call the police?" (p. 76)

"In that moment, I understood why Jimmy worked so hard to make sure that I was comfortable. He lived in an economy of favors. With so many rules to follow and so much risk involved - one mistake could cost him his freedom - he needed favors from people he barely knew to meet his basic needs. Life for Jimmy was so chaotic in part because he was so often rejected. He moved from one catastrophe to the next. There was no way for him to anticipate that he would need a ride from me, but he had to stay in my good graces just in case he needed me." (p. 123)

"We were both surprised to learn that half of everything he received [money sent to prisoner's accounts for them to buy clothes, food, etc. in prison] over fifty dollars in a thirty-day period would be applied to pay down his legal debt. He owed thousands of dollars. He was charged six hundred and fifty dollars for the privilege of being represented by the checked-out public defender he'd met just once, on the day of his hearing, and sixteen hundred and eleven dollars for 'court costs.' Judges, stenographers, bailiffs, and clerks had to be paid, I suppose. There was a four-hundred-dollar extradition fee and a sixty-eight-dollar fee for the 'state minimum costs' to record his felony conviction...Every month, I spend hundreds of dollars on e-mails, phone calls, trust-fund deposits, and food for my brother, more when he needed to make a special purchase, like shoes that didn't give him blisters, and more still on holidays and when I visited him, something he never asked me to do. He knew how busy I was, and he didn't want to impose. But this was my brother, and he was alone. I had to go and see him." (p. 134 & 136)

"Just about every woman I talked with had been sexually assaulted. An uncle. A boyfriend. A parent. A half sister's husband. One in six women nationally and a staggering 86 percent of all incarcerated women are survivors of sexual assault. Three-quarters of these women were abused at home, and over half were abused as children." (p. 148-49)

"The people the government has incarcerated, cut off from their family and friends, are twice as likely to die from any cause than anyone else in this country. They are three times as likely to die from heart disease and four times as likely to die from cancer. They are most likely to die within the first few years of their release...Studying the mortality of people released from prisons in New York State, the sociologist Evelyn Patterson found that for every year someone spends in prison, he loses two full years of life expectancy." (p. 196-97)

"Zo faced eviction. He had been to many different kinds of prisons - to juvie, to jail, to penitentiaries downstate - but he had never been homeless. Worse still, homelessness was a violation of parole." (p. 215)

June 2022 Reviews

 

The Babysitter: my summer with a serial killer by Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan

Liza Rodman grew up in the 1960's and while her mother was a school teacher during the school year, in the summers her mother worked as a maid in a motel in Cape Cod near Provincetown. Rodman's mother was horrible and never seemed to want her children around. Once her shift was done at the motel she and her best friend would go out dancing and drinking leaving Liza and her sister Louisa with whoever was around. One of Liza's favorite babysitters was Tony Costa, the maintenance man at the same motel where her mother worked. Tony would let Liza and her sister ride with him to the dump and would stop to buy them ice cream or other treats on the way back to the motel. Tony seemed to enjoy being around kids - Liza, her sister, and their cousins. He would also sometimes take them out to the woods where he had a "secret garden" - this garden is where he grew pot, but also where he dumped the bodies of 5 women killed. Liza never knew Tony was a serial killer until she was an adult and started having nightmares about Tony. When she called her mom to ask if anything ever happened with Tony her mom said, "well, he turned out to be a serial killer." Liza became obsessed with the case and started researching Tony's past and his crimes. If it hadn't been the 1960's I don't think he would have gotten away for so long, but this was the time of hippies, drugs, and hitchhiking so it was easy to assume the missing women were just off partying somewhere - at least until the bodies turned up.

The book alternates between Liza's story of her childhood - which was AWFUL - and Tony's history and his crimes. Seriously, I think her mom was almost worse than the serial killer babysitter (he never harmed Liza or her sister). Tony had a pretty traumatic childhood as well, but it also seems like he was a sociopath from a pretty early age. He was also doing a LOT of drugs and it seemed like he was trying to self-medicate or suppress his violent tendencies. There is a lot of detail about Tony's past and his crimes so the authors were very thorough in their research. My only complaint was that the alternating chapters between Tony and Liza were really short and it made the story feel choppy. I wish the alternating parts had been a little longer so you got more of each story at one time. Definitely a chilling story and it says a lot about Liza's childhood that a serial killer was kinder to her than her own mother was. "'That's just the way it was back then,' she said recently, and chuckled softly, remembering her golden days on Cape Cod. 'Boy, oh boy, I sure had a good time. But then I remember I had two little kids and I wonder who the hell was looking after you girls.' Who indeed." (p. 301)

Becoming Bulletproof by Evy Poumpouras

I was familiar with Evy Poumpouras from the true crime docu-series The Disappearance of Maura Murray. So when I saw that she had written a book I wanted to check it out. Poumpouras has had an amazing career and was very driven from a young age. She started out applying for the NYPD and during the police academy she had the opportunity to apply for the United States Secret Service. The Secret Service only admits 1% of applicants (for comparison Harvard admits 6% of applicants), so the fact that she did get in and make it through the training says a lot about her. She went on to protect several US Presidents and their families all over the world. She also became a highly trained polygraph examiner for the Secret Service. So, in this book she shares many of the techniques she's learned in her time in the Secret Service about how to protect yourself and your family, how to read people, and influence situations. She gives both "real-world" examples and examples from her time in the NYPD and Secret Service. She is most definitely a badass and anyone could learn something from this book.

"One of the best strategies toward objectively fixing a problem is to use the Third-Person Soluntion. Take whatever dilemma you're facing and project it onto someone else. Perhaps a friend or family member. Now, look at the issue as if they're coming to you with it. What would you tell them? What guidance would you give? If you can avoid making it about you, you can begin to see it as a more simplified and less muddied version of the problem, and then begin making clearer decisions." (p. 75)

"Situational awareness is more important to your personal protection than learning how to handle yourself in a fight. If you're aware of your surroundings, odds are you won't need to fight. On the other hand, you can learn all the fancy self-defense moves and techniques and strategies out there, but if you don't see the problem coming, none of it matters. You will be blindsided when things go wrong, which means you won't have the chance to thwart the threat or get to safety." (p. 94)

"We all make mistakes. Some are small and some not so small, but the fact remains that they happen. We've all been taught that mistakes are terrible, a source of shame that will tarnish us forever. Frankly, that's true only if you don't take accountability for them. Here's the thing- many mistakes are inevitable and forgivable. Yet, no mistake is worse than failing to own up to it. It's a matter of character and integrity. There is truly nothing more inspiring than when people make an honest and thorough appraisal of a mistake and take full responsibility for their own errors or lapses in judgement...And remember that no one wants to follow anyone who shirks or cowers away from taking responsibility. We all fuck up. But how we recover from our fuckups is how we differentiate ourselves." (p. 261)

Confident Women: swindlers, grifters, and shapeshifters of the feminine persuasion by Tori Telfer

This is a compilation of stories about famous, or infamous, con women throughout history. The book is divided into sections of types of con women - the glitterati, the seers, the fabulists, and the drifters. Telfer is a good writer and storyteller. I'm not sure this book would have been as interesting if someone else had written it because it's just a collection of stories about con women. I think some of the ones earlier in history were women who weren't made for that time - too smart and driven for the prescribed roles of the day. But, most of the women profiled in this book are just awful people, plain old criminals and sociopaths. There are definitely some interesting stories and Telfer does a good job of telling their criminal tales.

True Story: what reality TV says about us by Danielle J. Lindemann

Danielle Lindemann is a sociology professor at Lehigh University. In True Story she explores what reality TV says about us as a culture and our values. The first section of the book looked at how to view reality TV shows through a sociological lens and the second section focuses on what reality TV says about different aspects of our culture - class, race, gender, sexuality, and deviance. It's an interesting book and it definitely made me think more about some of these shows that I often write off as trashy or dumb (any Real Housewives or Kardashian shows). I definitely watch reality TV and Lindemann does a good job of really exploring what these shows say about our overall culture/values and why we are drawn to them. It was really interesting when she talked about why people watch reality TV - whether lower class people aspiring or dreaming of being rich like the Kardashians or Real Housewives or upper class people watching more as a "train wreck" to reinforce their own views and position in society as right/better. The chapter on deviance was really interesting too because Lindemann doesn't mean deviant like kinky or criminal, but more in outside the norm - so shows like My Strange Addiction or Hoarders fit into this category. Overall, a really interesting and unique book.

Also, as a side bar, if you don't hear Jon from Real World season 2 singing "true story" from the intro to the show when you read this title did you even live through the 90's?!

Some quotes I liked:

"Like our controlling images of poor and working-class people, or the racial stereotypes that have their roots in minstrelsy, our long-standing beliefs about women and men as 'naturally' different helps to justify the unequal roles we play in the home, the workplace, politics, and the economy." (p. 197)

"The presence of deviance doesn't mean that society is breaking down; it means its working correctly. For [Emile] Durkheim, deviance shores up our notions of what's normal and, in doing so, reinforces our social cohesiveness. Like townspeople in an old horror film chasing after a monster with their torches, we are bonded in our collective rejection of the ones who do not belong. This has always happened, Durkheim suggests, and will always happen. If fact, if we were a society of saints, we would simply redraw the boundaries of acceptability so that some of our members might still be cast as deviant." (p. 247)

"Even if the acceptability of these programs does vary, there's a reason people refer to the genre, writ large, as 'guilty pleasure' TV. We reserve that label for a particular range of cultural pursuits. We likely wouldn't call attending a Shakespearean play or reading Proust a 'guilty pleasure,' so why are we guilty about this?...aside from the occasional educational nugget, we don't 'get' anything from these programs. Yet professional sports don't have intellectual value either, and we don't regularly refer to them as 'guilty pleasures.'...unlike sports, it's a genre associated with more female viewership than male and we tend to devalue cultural products geared toward women (e.g., 'chick flicks,' 'chick lit')...There's a stink to reality TV that has never quite worn off, no matter how many people watch or how much the genre becomes a part of contemporary life. And maybe we're reticent to admit we watch these shows because we think their participants' behavior reflects on us - and maybe because we know that it does." (p. 251-53)

[On Donald Trump as reality TV star turned President of the United States] "As the communications theorist Dana Cloud points out, Trump's devotees took him 'seriously' but not 'literally': 'His language is keyed to produce a feeling rather than make a convincing argument....Part of being credible is resonating with the lives and struggles of one's audience.' Along similar lines, the media scholar Misha Kavka has pointed out that reality TV 'works at the level of feeling rather than cognitive content.'" (p. 260-61)

"Americans have long been concerned with the erosion of 'traditional' values, and one might expect reality TV's outrageous misfits to be at the leading edge of that erosion. But while conservative groups would be unlikely to endorse most of these shows, they've havens for some of the most old-fashioned values that pulse through contemporary American society. They show us how steadfastly we cling to conventional ideas about, for instance, families, marriages, sex, women's roles, Black bodies, and queer people. And here, too, reality TV and Donald Trump align. Both have relied on conservatism repackaged as outlandishness." (p. 262-63)