Category: Goodreads Reviews

author: Daniel Leader
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2010/03/28
date added: 2010/03/29
shelves: cookbook, wishlist, read-again
review:
Recommended by Mathias, after the First Friday bread "contest" in March — he brought pretzels. (I brought the only other bread: 3 different slow-knead loaves.) Made the pretzels yesterday. OMG good. Don’t know if I’ll make any other recipes while I have it out from the library; most seem to need quite a bit of attention and a baking stone, neither of which do I have right now. But I want to come back to it one of these days.

author: Jake Adelstein
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2010/03/27
date added: 2010/03/29
shelves: autobiography, crime, non-fiction
review:
Fascinating narrative, weird & gritty, even "hard-boiled" — I stayed up past midnight to finish it, after a couple of days of reading little chunks at lunchtime.

author: Jake Adelstein
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2010/03/27
date added: 2010/03/29
shelves: autobiography, crime, non-fiction
review:
Fascinating narrative, weird & gritty, even "hard-boiled" — I stayed up past midnight to finish it, after a couple of days of reading little chunks at lunchtime.

author: Martin Gilens
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.35
book published: 1999
rating: 2
read at: 2010/03/10
date added: 2010/03/24
shelves: economics, history, non-fiction, politics, psychology
review:
Couldn’t get into this one enough to finish it. Very good and important information, but dry. HIDEOUS charts, too. There’s a great popular book hiding in all the data, but this isn’t it.

author: James Turner
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2010/03/01
date added: 2010/03/10
shelves: fantasy, fiction, graphic-novel, read-again
review:
I can’t give this any stars one way or the other — it looked fascinating, but the font was too freaking small to read. Will need to see if I can find a larger copy.

author: James Turner
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2010/03/01
date added: 2010/03/10
shelves: graphic-novel, fiction, fantasy, read-again
review:
I can’t give this any stars one way or the other — it looked fascinating, but the font was too freaking small to read. Will need to see if I can find a larger copy.

author: James Bradley
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2010/03/03
date added: 2010/03/10
shelves: history, non-fiction, politics
review:
Excellent book — uses the far east trip of (at the time Secretary of War) Taft and Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice as a structure to talk about American involvements in Asia in the late 19th & early 20th century. It’s not pretty. Amazing use of primary sources to show the specific elements of racism and imperialism at work.

The author got interested in the subject after writing a book about his father’s experiences in WWII, and so a large portion is devoted to the Americans’ encouragement (development?) of imperial ambitions in Japan, and when push came to shove and the Japanese fought the Russians, how the Americans were quick to go back on whatever they’d said to the Japanese. He also makes the explicit connection — as the Japanese did — between the Monroe Doctrine in the Americas and the Japanese’s view of their dominance in Asia.

A similarly large section covers the Americans’ colonization of the Philippines (and Hawaii as well) — the same combination of confidence & naiveté that you see again in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. You’d think we could learn from the disasters of the past, but apparently not.

Highly recommended.

author: James Bradley
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2010/03/03
date added: 2010/03/10
shelves: history, non-fiction, politics
review:
Excellent book — uses the far east trip of (at the time Secretary of War) Taft and Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice as a structure to talk about American involvements in Asia in the late 19th & early 20th century. It’s not pretty. Amazing use of primary sources to show the specific elements of racism and imperialism at work.

The author got interested in the subject after writing a book about his father’s experiences in WWII, and so a large portion is devoted to the Americans’ encouragement (development?) of imperial ambitions in Japan, and when push came to shove and the Japanese fought the Russians, how the Americans were quick to go back on whatever they’d said to the Japanese. He also makes the explicit connection — as the Japanese did — between the Monroe Doctrine in the Americas and the Japanese’s view of their dominance in Asia.

A similarly large section covers the Americans’ colonization of the Philippines (and Hawaii as well) — the same combination of confidence & naiveté that you see again in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. You’d think we could learn from the disasters of the past, but apparently not.

Highly recommended.

author: David A. Kessler
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2010/03/10
date added: 2010/03/10
shelves: business, health, non-fiction, politics, psychology, science, self-help
review:
Not to be totally corny, but if you only read one book this year, this would be a damn good choice. Former head of the FDA, a guy who’s also had his own struggles with food and weight, examines the psychology of eating in our current food landscape.

"Conditioned hypereating" is how he describes it, encompassing both overweight and not: the obsession with food, the difficulties in resisting hyperpalatable modern foods.

The science stuff is fascinating, the section on food company research is terrifying, and there’s some excellent concrete advice in the last section. I really needed to read this after putting back on some (not a lot) of the weight I lost a couple of years ago.

author: David A. Kessler
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2010/03/10
date added: 2010/03/10
shelves: health, non-fiction, politics, business, psychology, science, self-help
review:
Not to be totally corny, but if you only read one book this year, this would be a damn good choice. Former head of the FDA, a guy who’s also had his own struggles with food and weight, examines the psychology of eating in our current food landscape.

"Conditioned hypereating" is how he describes it, encompassing both overweight and not: the obsession with food, the difficulties in resisting hyperpalatable modern foods.

The science stuff is fascinating, the section on food company research is terrifying, and there’s some excellent concrete advice in the last section. I really needed to read this after putting back on some (not a lot) of the weight I lost a couple of years ago.