Showing posts with label non-fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label non-fiction. Show all posts

Monday, November 1, 2021

Feeling Lonely by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the third of three books by this author for young kids I'll be reviewing this month, which focus on difficult feelings that children may have, and may not even have a name for, much less understand, but which are an important part of life; sometimes a debilitating one, and which cover topics such as sadness, shyness, and in this case, loneliness. The book does a great job of dissociating minor, transient feelings of being alone, from a more serious condition of feeling lonely and not a part of things, even when there are others around you having fun and enjoying company.

The book is about thirty pages long and consists of a series of photographs, mostly of children, accompanied by short captions discussing the topic, asking questions, offering ideas and suggestions about what to do if you have these feelings, how to recognize them, and how to deal with them if you think you see these same feelings in others.

The captions are not overly dramatic. They're quite nuanced and very reasonable, and indicate that some people might not just be alone on occasion, but more commonly feel apart and isolated from everyone else even when there are others around. I felt this was a good approach in that it leads children to think more about their feelings and to distinguish better between something that's not a worry, and something else that might need their attention, and even the help of others.

The book is very diverse in its imagery, featuring children of all ethnicities, but for me there was a complete lack of pictures showing children with any sort of disability. While I can see how that could distract somewhat from the main topic, or perhaps even lead to some confusion, my own feeling is that it would not hurt to have shown a child with crutches or in a wheelchair or something like that. A disability might well be a root cause of feelings of loneliness, sadness, or shyness.

That was my only concern about the book. Otherwise it was wonderful, and I commend this one as a worthy read to both educate children to the problem of loneliness, which is not easy to pin down, and also to encourage those who are experiencing such feelings to open up and perhaps even encourage them to reach out and seek the help they need as well as promote awareness in other children of these conditions.

Feeling Sad by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the second of three books by this author for young kids I'll be reviewing this month, which focus on difficult feelings that children may have, and may not even have a name for, much less understand, but which are an important part of life; sometimes a debilitating one, and which cover topics such as loneliness, shyness, and in this case, sadness.

The book is about thirty pages long and consists of a series of photographs, mostly of children, accompanied by short captions discussing the topic, asking questions, offering ideas and suggestions about what to do if you have these feelings, how to recognize them, and how to deal with them if you think you see these same feelings in others. Feelings of sadness can derive from a variety of sources and this book does a great job is indicating this.

The captions are not overly dramatic. They're nuanced and reasonable, and indicate that some people might experience some of these feelings part of the time, but otherwise feel fine. In other cases, the feelings might be more pressing. I felt this was a good approach in that it leads thoughts into these areas without risking making children feel like they might be experiencing something they're really not.

Some of the children are so small in these pictures, and so perfectly-formed tiny human beings that it's really a grave pain in the heart to imagine any of them might have feelings such as those that this - and the other books - try to address, but it is a fact of life, and the sooner it's addressed, the better off we all are, not just the child who might be experiencing unaccountable feelings of sadness.

The book is commendably diverse in the imagery it employs, featuring children of all ethnicities. I did note a complete lack of pictures showing children with any sort of disability. I can see how that might distract somewhat from the main topic, or perhaps even lend some confusion, but I honestly do not think it would have hurt to have shown a child with crutches or in a wheelchair. A disability might well be a root cause of feelings of loneliness, sadness, or shyness.

That was my only concern about the book. Otherwise it was wonderful, and I commend this one as a worthy read to both educate children to the issue of sadness in young children, especially when they have been, and are going, through hell with the pandemic, and hopefully to encourage those who don't feel at their happiest, to reach out to others instead of withdrawing.

Feeling Shy by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the first of three books by this author for young kids I'll be reviewing this month, which focus on difficult feelings that children may have, and may not even have a name for, much less understand, but which are an important part of life; sometimes a debilitating one, and which cover topics such as loneliness, sadness, and in this case, shyness. I can relate since I was terribly shy as a kid. Actually maybe not terribly - I was rather good at being shy!

The book is about thirty pages long and consists of a series of photographs, mostly of children, accompanied by short captions discussing the topic, asking questions, offering ideas and suggestions about what to do if you have these feelings, how to recognize them, and how to deal with them if you think you see these same feelings in others.

The captions are not overly dramatic. They're nuanced and reasonable, and indicate that some people might experience some of these feelings part of the time, but otherwise feel fine. In other cases, the feelings might be more pressing. I felt this was a good approach in that it leads thoughts into these areas without risking making children feel like they might be experiencing something they're really not.

The book is very diverse in its imagery, featuring children of all ethnicities. I did note a complete lack of pictures showing children with any sort of disability. I can see how that might distract somewhat from the main topic, or perhaps even lend some confusion, but I honestly do not think it would have hurt to have shown a child with crutches or in a wheelchair. A disability might well be a root cause of feelings of loneliness, sadness, or shyness.

That was my only concern about the book. Otherwise it was wonderful, and I commend this one as a worthy read to both educate children to this problem, and to encourage those who are shy to perhaps find ways out of that shell of isolation.

Hit Makers by Derek Thompson

Rating: WORTHY!

Though the two books are unconnected, I think of this in the same light as The Song Machine by John Seabook which I favorably reviewed a short while back. This audiobook, read by the author, tells the same kind of story, but its reach is broader, going beyond music to movies, apps, and novels as well, but it's much more about how some things become popular while others do not, than it is about exactly what mechanics went into constructing something that's likely to become popular.

That said, its breadth extends only to the US borders - like there's nothing outside that's worth considering - and the book is very shallow on it's claim that it discusses "The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction." There's no science here. There really can't be - at least not yet, because liking or disliking something is such a whimsical, personal, popularity-based, and ultimately insubstantial thing that even crowd-sourcing it is unreliable. If you go into this as a business student, perhaps hoping to pick up some valuable marketing lessons, this book won't help you.

The book begins a hundred years ago and moves through art and design, to movies, particularly Disney, and to novels, looking at, for example, the "50 Shades of Gray" (barf!) phenomenon. The only sure conclusion is that nobody knows anything, least of all the people in the various entertainment industries who are paid the big bucks to find and promote successes. As often as not, you'd have as much success tossing a coin to decide as you would trusting these over-paid guys to make a competent prognostication. They have failed repeatedly. To give just two examples: over signing the Beatles to a record label, and over signing JK Rowling to a publisher.

Recently I was watching a Netflix show called "The Movies That Made Us" which looks at various popular movies and talks about how they got made, and in a recent season, this show looks at horror blockbusters, specifically, in three different episodes: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street. I'm not a horror movie fan, but no-one can deny the success of all three of those movies and the franchises they spawned, yet not a single one of them got any backing from a major stuido, all of which thought the movies would flop.

The same thing happened to the "50 Shades" novel. It was fan fiction to begin with, based on the Twilight novel, but once the author realized it was becoming popular, she pulled it from the fan fiction site, changed it to make it an original story, and self-published it. The rest is history - but the publishing world took forever to realize what was going on! Of course, not everyone has that success, and such authors seem to be rather one note. Meyer never really left her Twilight years, and James is really only one shade. Even Rowling hasn't managed to repeat her Potter success, and it's arguable whether she could have made a decent living as a writer were it not for her pre-existing fame derived from the Potter novels.

So no, there's no scientific pathway to sucess. This would have been a different book had there been any such path, although there are enough ideas explored, and possibilities sprinkled throughout this book that it does offer some sort of potential - albeit by no means guaranteed - pathways to explore at least. I enjoyed it and learned a few things from it, so I can commend it as a worthy read.

Atom Land by Jon Butterworth

Rating: WARTY!

I usually like to favorably review science books that I read, because I usually enjoy them and I learn something. Once in a while my instincts fail me and I end up with a book that didn't do the trick. This, I am sorry to report, was one such book.

Now you can try to make a case, if you wish for books about physics and in particular about sub-atomic physics (see what I did there: sub-atomic - particular?!) to be poor choices for listening to in audiobook form, while commuting, but I disagree. I've enjoyed a variety of non-fiction books, including some pretty heavy (for a layman) science books, and not felt like I've missed anything critical. I can't say the same for this book, which I felt took the wrong approach - or maybe it wasn't so bad an approach, but it was definitely one with which the author became far too enamored, for I felt that his attachment to the metaphor he'd chosen, took the book slowly downhill and made the concepts a lot denser than they needed to be.

On top of that, there are things in books that don't translate well to audiobooks - especially things in science books. I don't want to be read a formula that I can't see, nor do I need a fraction to be quoted to a dozen or more decimal places with a host of tedious zeroes, much less several in siuccession. It's just annoying.

The approach this author used was the metaphor of the world of the atom, with boats sailing from ports to other ports in the various lands on this world, and journeys by air or overland to various places within each territory. I can see why such a metaphor might appear to make sense to a writer, but just because it made sense to this author doesn't necessarily mean it will appeal to everyone or make it any more intelligible. To me, it did not. It just confused things, especially since the author himself was evidently confused, and had to backtrack more than once. That to me is poor writing, or it's poor planning or it's a sign your over-arching concept is failing you.

Some of the land names were a stretch, too - I mean Bosonia? Really? And one extended piece about the airport not being close to the city for these three particular locations, and the tedious endless descriptions of people who may arrive at one airport but be traveling to a different city were obnoxious. They really were.

I think that's about the point where I decided I had had enough. I made it about three-quarters the way through this, which was more than it deserved because I got a lot less than three-quarters of the content of the book, but in the end I'd firmly decided that I really did not want to visit this land, much less travel extensively in it. The thing is that I already have a decent layman's grasp of the ideas here, so if they made little to no sense to me, or bored me even as they made sense, then I fear they're certainly not going to reach anyone who is a complete newbie to this world. On that basis I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Sexus Animalis by Emmanuelle Pouydebat

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Subtitled "There Is Nothing Unnatural in Nature" and written with a delightfully playful sense of humor, this books explores a sampling of animal (including non-vertebrates) sexual behaviors and appendages, making for an incredible read. And I mean that literally - it's hardly possible to credit some of these things, although I have no doubt that they're true.

There's the water boatman, for example, which has - and I am stating this correctly - the loudest penis in the world, for its size. There is a fish, known o-fish-ially as the Phallostethus cuulong, that is quite ltierally, a dick head. Since there was a walrus, it would have been nice to have included a carpenter - ant, but I guess that was too much to hope for! I suppose there's nothing particularly special about the ants when it comes to this subject. There's the clownfish - and this ain't your children's Nemo. I've concluded they get their name from the clowning around they do with lines of succession, and gender changes. And the young have a brief rumspringa, too!

Oh yes. Any idiot creationists who try to claim that their god made everything to perfection just a few thousand years ago and exactly as we see it now, will have some serious work to do to supply intelligent explanations for the variety of behaviors - some of which are despicable - that their creator purportedly made. The bedbug comes immediately to mind. It's equipped with a literal weapon - it's not just a euphemism in the case of a bedbug. It's supplied with a beveled penis that stabs right through the female's exoskeleton and it doesn't matter - to the male - where penetration is made. This is only one story of such brutality. There's also rape in the animal kingdom: it's not just a human thing.

On a much more pleasant note, there is also love in the animal kingdon - at least amongst the higher species - which includes rats! There are also gay relationships and transgender changes, and masturbation, so as they say, there's nothing new under the sun and not a whole heck of a lot of difference between animals and humans - who are also animals - when it comes to sexual expression.

There is over thirty such stories of amazing variety included here: of impressive stamina and record-setting activity, along with numberous asides that are relevant if slightly off the main topic. The book made for a perverse and fascinating read and I commend it fully.

High-Protein Plant-Based Diet for Beginners by Maya A Howard

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Aimed at readers who want to pursue a healthier, plant-based diet but don't want to do it through prepackaged and preprocessed foods that have been swarming onto the market lately, this book takes a step back to the original ingredients and follows a logical and step-by-step approach to planning a week-long menu, buying the ingredients, cooking up the food, and enjoying it!

I have to say as an aside that one aspect bothered me a little, in that there seemed to be no concern expressed here over sustainability or the environment. California is the market garden of the US, and its agriculture takes eighty percent of California's fresh water. Almonds alone use a trillion gallons of water every year, and this continues at in the height of an ongoing drought, and as new laws in California have required utilities to reduce water usage by 55 gallons per person per day by 2023!

This book has, as its focus, the creation of plant-based meals, and while that's wonderful as far as it goes, I would have been happier if a word or two had been included about the advisability of, for example, using almonds to create almond milk as the severe water crisis continues. Personally I refuse to eat almonds, but maybe that's just me.

That concern aside though, the main focus here - as the title suggests - isn't just getting healthy and nutritious food into your diet, but also finding plenty of protein along with the other vitamins and minerals a body needs. The book provides ready information on the best plants for protein, and also useful tips on how to combine such foods to make a balanced diet. This information is put fully into play by means of the extensive meal plans that the book is filled with. When it comes to creating a plant-based diet from fresh produce, I do not think you could find a better book, and I commend this one fully as a worthy and useful read.

Friday, October 22, 2021

Basho's Haiku Journeys by Freeman Ng, Cassandra Rockwood-Ghanem

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a short, but gorgeously-illustrated book (by the talented Cassandra Rockwood-Ghanem who, I was pleased to see was decently credited on the cover). I loved the dramatic cover, with Basho sweeping back the curtain of night onto a brand new day.

The book briefly follows Japanese poet Basho's travels during his later life after his house burned down. You know what they say? If life hands you lemons, throw them at the son of a bitch who unloaded them on you, but Basho wasn't like that. Instead, he saw homelessness as an opportunity to go walkabout, and he took off on a series of five contemplative trips, some of which were perilous, all of which were inspiring.

Basho did not invent the haiku, but he is credited with being, if you like, the godfather of its enduring popularity. The author, Freeman Ng, tells this whole story in haiku, which in English has come to mean a simple three-line poem, typically associated with the season, which consists of five, seven, and five syllables. In Japanese, the count is seventeen 'on' which is a unit of Japanese speech similar to a syllable. Poems like a haiku, but that don't adhere to the strict haiku rules, are more properly called a 'senryu'.

This book was a delight: nicely-written and with some truly inspiring (and amusing at times) illustrations. I commend it as a worthy read.

How Does My Body Work? Human Body Book for Kids by Sara LaFleur, MD

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Normally I'm skeptical of a book where the author lists a bunch of initials after their name. You usually see that on idiot diet books! In this case, though, I can see why she did it and it makes sense. Written by a medical doctor, this book, a STEAM tie-in aimed at middle-graders, really gets down and dirty with the deets, and with a whole bunch of fun experiments kids can do which will help illustrate the lessons learned, and just plain be fun!

The book covers all of the body's major systems, chapter-by-chapter, starting with the body's building blocks - cells, and followed by the nervous system, musculoskeletal system, circulatory system, respiratory system, digestive system, excretory system, and the endocrine and reproductive stystems.

It goes into some, but not exahustive detail: enough to give the interested reader a solid grounding without being tedious. It makes sense, is well-written, nicely-illustrated, and has a host of fun projects. I commend it as a worthy read.

Nano's Journey! by Aldo Pourchet

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a fun little children's book that is illustrated in color, and for me, as an adult, bordered on the obscure at times, but overall, I think it can teach children important facts about how their body works. Part of a projected series, this one focuses on the heart and lungs and has cute illustrations and an adventure story feel that hopefully will draw children in, they'll have fun, and maybe learn a few things along the way. I commend it as a worthy read.

Speed Reading by Kam Knight

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I was not impressed with this. I'm not saying it can't work, only that I'm very skeptical, and that what works for the author may not be universally applicable. Some of the techniques used are pretty obvious, and are probably in use by thinking readers already. Others seemed problematical, and though I tried employing them, they did not seem work for me. It begs the obvious question: if this is so good and so effective, then why isn't it being widely adopted in schools and colleges

I also did not trust the references this author gives, some of which are not to scientific studies but to some other guy's book. When I did track down one study that was referenced, it really wasn't applicable - not in the way this author was trying to claim it was. It was a controlled study in a set of school districts that used slide projections, and claimed only a modest subsequent improvement in reading and comprehension, and then only over longer texts. There was no significant improvement over the control group when it came to shorter texts, so this felt dishonest to me and made me question whether the author had actually read the study - or whether he'd just speed read it and misunderstood it because he'd read it too fast for comprehension!

There is a big difference in meeting the stated claim "Learn to Read a 200+ Page Book in 1 Hour" when applied to a simple work of fiction, and when attempting to apply that to a more complex work, or to a textbook, so I have no faith in the efficacy of the techniques described here except perhaps in some limited applications. Even the author admits his method has limitations, so on balance I can't commend this as a worthy read.

Manga Artists Copic Marker Coloring Techniques by SHIN, Maripori, Yue, Junko Kitamura, Suzu Kawana, Ramiru Kirisaki

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I'd never heard of Copic Markers before I saw this book on offer for reviewing, so naturally I snapped it up and read with interest. I do not consider myself an artist - an amateur cartoonist at best, is what I am, but I'm very interested in the art-making process and I've reviewed numerous books on the topic. I try to learn at least a little from each one, and was pleased to learn something new from this one.

This is a well-written book with copious illustrations showing the materials being discussed and the techniques used to achieve effects. There is a brief Q&A at the end, and FAQ. A lot of the illustrations are from work done by the talented and dedicated artists credited with creating this book, and some of those are really quite stunning. The techniques used, even down to the specific pens (but using only the Copic identification for the pens), to create the art are gone into in some detail.

To my knowledge this book is not sponsored by Copic, so I had to wonder on more than one occasion why alternative tools got no mention. Not everyone has two hundred bucks to blow on a set of pens! A single marker and a refill of ink for it (so there is that) can cost ten dollars. In that way, it's possible to build up a collection over time on a sort of 'installment plan', and Copic are evidently quality pens and rank right up there, if not at the top, but they are very expensive and a big investment for a 'struggling artist' to take on. This needs to be kept in mind. There are cheaper alternatives which may or may not perform as well. I've never used a Copic, so I cannot comment on that score, which is why it would have been nice to have heard from the professionals about alternatives and the pros and cons of those versus Copics.

That said, I was impressed by how well written, useful, and informative this book was, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Rebel Girls Powerful Pairs by Rebel Girls

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is one of a series pf books aimed at younger readers, highlighting powerful, adventurous, and inventive woman - in this case pairing moms and daughters. I'd have loved to have given you a list of contents, but the app was so tightly locked-down that it wouldn't even let me copy that. Why a publisher would be so short-sighted as to want to hobble a reviewer from highlighting who's who in this book, and not even list that information elsewhere is a complete mystery to me, but I sure don't have the time to manually type all that out when I have other things I need to be doing! So this review will be short!

As the book cover says, it's 25 moms and daughters, some of whom, such as Beyoncé and her curiously-named daughter "Blue Ivy," or the Pankhursts, or the Curies, you may well have heard of. Others are much more obscure to the general reader, such as Wang Changyi and Nu Mei Mei, and Kim Yeshi (aka Pema Dolkar) and daughter Dechen, but they are no less important. All have inspiring stories to tell, and they are worth reading, so I commend this as a worthy read.

Octopus, Seahorse, Jellyfish by David Liittschwager

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Note that reviewers such as myself are allowed only an ebook version and in this case only a 16 page sample of the actual book, so it's hard to make a good judgment from this. It's not like it's a work of fiction where you can read a few pages and tell pretty quickly if the book is well-written or a piece of trash, so this review is only of the sample I received, of which only five pages were the actual book, the rest being introductory preface, contents, etc. So not much of a sample!

The second problem with getting only the ebook version is that you can't comment on the print version, nor can I say if this is ever going to be released as an ebook. I suspect not, but that's just an opinion. The problem with the ebook is that the publisher made the dire mistake of releasing it in Kindle format. I have said this many times and I say it again: unless your book is plain vanilla text (without even so much as dropcaps) it's a grave mistake to put it into Kindle format because Amazon's crappy Kindle process will, nine times out of ten, reduce it to kindling. In the Kindle version, viewed on an a standard iPad, it trashed pictures, slicing and dicing and Julienning them turning the book into a disordered jumble. The book looked much better in Blue Fire Reader and in Adobe Digital Editions.

The pictures, when presented properly, were beautiful to look at and the supporting text informative. Based on this sample alone, the book appears to be a worthy read.

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

A Quick & Easy Guide to Asexuality by Molly Muldoon, Will Hernandez

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

It pains me to have to say that this non-fiction 'graphic novel' style of a book will likely not get read by anywhere near as many people as need to read it, and especially not by the ones who have most to learn from it. It's not aimed just at the LGBTQIAP+ community, but also at everyone else. As such, and indeed like that acronym (LGBTQIAP+), it tries to be so inclusive that it risks becoming too nebulous and on one occasion led to a faux pas, but overall, it's a very worthy read for anyone who needs a sort of a baseline introduction into what can be a briar-patch topic.

The problem with this subject, asexuality, as I mentioned in my review of Julia Sondra Decker's book The Invisible Orientation: is that there's a lot of nebulousness inherent in it, and if it isn't handled properly, being vague and fuzzy around the edges can do more harm than good. That's actually why I didn't like the Decker book, a reference to which is included in this book in an all-too-brief section at the end (and in which the author's name is mispelled! It's Decker, not Decke!) My beef with this vague approach is that, in reference to the present work, it risks confirming any possible a priori reader conceptions - such as that asexuality really isn't a thing, or that it's a condition, or that it can be 'cured' with some good therapy.

For me, this book did have a positive approach which made things clear - and it reinforced those things, and typically did not undermine the message by meandering or rambling, or otherwise muddying the water, although my understanding is that the 'A' in LGBTQIAP+ refers to asexual (and including aromantic and agender) and does not refer to 'ally', as important as those are. I think this is a problem with inclusivity: in trying to get as much support as possible and inviting everyone under the banner, the community has sometimes made itself a source of disenchantment and disagreement about who exactly should be in, as it were, and perhaps risking diluting the message, which ultimately and in simple form, is that there's nothing wrong with being different.

This disagreement has been running through the movement for decades and in a variety of forms though. People have asked, 'should the community only by gay and lesbian, and other persuasions, orientations, statuses (or however you want to term them) should be under a different banner?' Others might argue that LGBTQI should be in but the 'A' not included, and so on. In short, it's a bit of a mess. Frankly, for me, there are much bigger battles to fight, and these relatively petty skirmishes are not helpful. This is precisely why these various groups need to work together. Maybe once the big battle is won, those disagreements will not seem so important.

But I liked this book. I like that it keeps it simple and straight forward, to reduce the risk of confusing issues and confusing people. It was short and well-written by Molly Muldoon, and it was decently illustrated and diversly-drawn in grayscale by Will Hernandez, so it's very much an own-voices publication. That doesn't mean everyone will agree with how it was written here, but it does mean it's another source of information. It has a light tone and is very informative. It sends a positive and clear message, and I considered it a worthy read.

Thursday, October 7, 2021

Off-Grid Living for Beginners by Emma Nora

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from a review copy I received from the author for which I thank her.

I enjoyed reading this author's Raising Backyard Chickens even though I have no desire to raise backyard chickens. Similarly, I enjoyed this one, too, even though I do not plan to go off-grid. I just like learning about alternative lifestyles!

This book is a very general introduction to the pleasures and pains of off-grid living, and though a bit disorganized and sometimes repetiive in parts I felt, it does give you a really good overview of how to disentangle yourself from the regular life that most people lead - at least in so-called 'first-world'civilizations. Of course there are many communities throughout the world that are off-grid whether they like it or not.

But if you're thinking of leading that lifestyle, this is a great place to start. It takes you through all the issues and pitfalls in a short read (about 120 pages) that will get you thinking along the right lines for a successful transition. It also includes an extensive reference section listing other works that can provide more - and more detailed - information.

The book is divided into eight chapters, the first of which exhorts readers to consider and understand why they might be thinking of living off-grid. Chapter two talks about learning from the mistakes of others, and chapter three discusses how to prepare yourself for off-grid living before you actually start any move off-grid. Four discusses acquiring a suitable property and the questions you need to answer when considering purchasing land, and five taks about options for building a home on the property, for which there is a variety of solutions. Six goes into the transition to, and integration into, your off-grid lifestyle, and seven discusses how you might make a decent living in your new status. Eight discusses making the most of this life. In short - the whole thing is covered in a general outline with pointers, hints, tips and resources for further reading.

The book doesn't go into excessive detail. This is aimed to open your eyes to the challenges you will face. It will give you a good grounding and get your brain focused on what's important, and what needs to be resolved. On that score, one thing I felt was under represented was medical care. In the US, medical care isn't free, and if you go off grid, unless you still retain some sorrt of regular employment, you will go off insurance as well as off grid. Simultaneously, you will by this new choice of lifestyle be potentially more vulnerable to sickness and injury if you're out working the land in all kinds of conditions, perhaps using farm machinery, so this I felt was not covered adequately, but I think the author thought of everything else!

One thing that felt a bit off was on the one hand talking of disconnecting from a life that can very easily be harmful to the environment and integrating into a more eco-friendly lifestyle, but on the other hand, and at the same time we're talking about felling trees and burning the wood as fuel, and this is one surefire way to remove a carbon sink (the tree) at the same time as we're putting the CO2 from that tree back into the atmosphere. But of course you have to balance that against an assortment of other choices you've made which may well be placing less of a burden on the environment precisely because you're off-grid. I felt that a word or two about that balance would have been nice.

I encountered one or two grammatical issues which were minor and understandable. The first I noticed was when I read about the kind of home you might choose to live in. It said, "The eco capsules are more adventitious..." and I felt that was the wrong word. I think the author meant 'advantageous'. In a similar case, I read, "The soil the house is built into is isolating," and I think the author meant 'insulating'. Later I read, in a discussion of clean water, 'drinking water and potable water - but these are the same thing. Potable means it's suitable for drinking. Bu you know, we've all been there!

In the same section I read that the author considered "25 gallons per person" (of water) was a good working figure, but there was no time-period associated with this. Obviously 25 gallons a day is way too much, and 25 gallons a year not enough, but I don't know if this was supposed to be over a week or a month or what! In that same section, I read, "...overall you will need to filter and purify what you want to drink. You will need to boil and filter the water you want to drink." which is repetitive. But as I said, these issues were few and far between and were not importnat when compared with the value of the overall message.

I commend this as a worthy read.

Thursday, September 16, 2021

The Song Machine by John Seabrook

Rating: WORTHY!

Read nicely by Dion Graham - although I could have done without his singing and his attempts to portray a woman speaking - this audiobook looks at how hit songs are made. It covers a wide variety of topics and a lot of the history of hit-making, but its focus is largely on the last few years, and I have to say there seems to be a strong bias toward recent solo female artists, for some reason, and I mean bias in coverage, not in praise.

One problem with the coverage is that it's very tabloid - we get sketches with some detail here and there, but never anything in any real depth. The author writes for a magazine and for all I know these chapters are merely a collection of articles he wrote which have simply been shuffled together for this book, but the result - however it came about - is like a bubblegum song version of the music industry - light, shallow, frothy, without too much musical depth.

For all that, I was entertained and informed by it, but there were times I wanted better, less shallow, and less one-sided coverage than I got. It felt like he was trying to keep the hit-makers happy and cared little for the singers. On the other hand, I must confess I have little regard for those who can only sing. I much prefer an artist who can write and play, as well as belt out the finished song, but those people get scarce coverage here.

It's bothering that an older white guy who seems very retro in his social attitudes, is so up in the business of female artists of color, often denigrating them in the process, while seemingly fawning over the record producers - the ones with the real power these days, who are also all guys, often white guys from Sweden. Apparently this system works because we read that 77% of the profits in the music business go to 1% of the artists. This explains a lot of very rich artists these days, but whether that's what the world wants or needs is another matter. It's disturbing that far less than 1% of the songs that are out there in any given year are the ones that bring in nearly all the revenue.

The book also covers the changing landscape of hit-making from when a talented artist wrote, played and sang their own material to the modern era where hits have become as much science as art, and where as many as half-a-dozen or more exerts are brought in to craft various portions - even tiny ones - of what's essentially a scientifically-designed song. The bulk of the book is about that latter part, and there's heavy coverage of white producer "Doctor Luke," who admittedly has generated a lot of hits.

Of course not all hits are made that way and I wish this book had covered a wider variety of songs, producers, and artists than it does, but it was nevertheless an interesting story as far as it went, and certainly an educational one for me. That said, coverage of the topic is in many ways almost random and quite spotty, and it's largely of the reporting kind - there's no real analysis of the material going on here, and as is often the case in works of fiction produced in the US, this non-fiction book produced in the US is pretty much all USA all the time. It really doesn't recognize that there are other places in the world - except in process of mentioning the Swedish producers who have influenced US music. That said, the US music business is a huge portion of those billions I mentioned earlier.

From the nineties to the twenty-teens, world-wide revenue from the music business plummeted from almost thirty billion dollars to about half that. This book examines the reasons for that slide, not least of which is of course Napster and subsequently its business replacement, Spotify. Apple's iTunes did the same thing back then to music, that Amazon has since done to fiction, which is crashing the price of a work down to 99 cents. So was it Napster which did the damage, or Apple's rock-bottom prices, or both, along with other causes? Probably a mix.

Of course the problem with putting out an audiobook of this nature is that it begs to have the songs - or at least snippets of them included for listening, especially if it's a song you may never have heard, even if you've heard of the song. Why that wasn't done I do not know, but in a sort of a 'review' book like this, I doubt it was a copyright issue. You don't need to include all of the song, and fair use certainly should permit a snatch of some music when you're actually writing about how it came to be.

But then this book is what it says it is: it's about the hit-makers, not the hits, so I guess you take it or leave it, but with these caveats, I commend it as a worthy listen. If you have access to Netflix, there's a very short series on there titled 'This is Pop' which has nothing to do with this book, but which covers some contingent topics and which makes a great companion listen, broadening your scope a lot.

Monday, September 6, 2021

The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman

Rating: WORTHY!

Subtitled "Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul" this audiobook goes into some detail - often quite nauseating and gruesome, be warned, but at other times highly amusing, and then at others downright depressing to think people were once so ill-educated and poorly informed. It's read admirably well, given the subject matter, by Susie Berneis.

The sad, but in hindsight and with historical distance, amusing thing about the nobility of yesteryear, is that even as they had people to taste their food to catch would-be poisoners, these idiots were in fact slowly poisoning themselves by employing dumb-ass makeup containing lead and arsenic, and adding things to their diet for medicinal purposes, which were also actually poisons.

Herman's well-written book travels through history from ancient times to modern, reporting on various historical personalities, dignitaries, and royalty who had encounters with one poison or another in one way or another, from belladonna to plutonium, some of which survived, others who succumbed slowly or rapidly. This author has done her research, and it shows without being tedious.

The book is fascinating and very educational, especially if you're thinking of writing your own historical novel involving someone's untimely demise! Which I am not, but you might be! I highly commend this book as a worthy read.

The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes

Rating: WORTHY!

It came to my attention this morning that I never reviewed this book which I read some time ago and found fascinating, so here we go! Note that this book offers no support for young-Earth creationism or for the Biblical mythology. Eve is used loosely and I wish it had not been, but authors don't always think up the best titles for their books - or worse, they're pushed into choosing misleading titles by their publisher for the sake of boosting sales.

The book is all about mitochondrial genetics. Mitochondrial DNA comes to us only through our mothers. It is separate from the main complement of DNA that we have, and was probably, at one point way, way back, a bacterium that got inside a cell and thrived there. Since it is part of the cell, it comes from the mother's ovum. It is not found in sperm, so this is a matriarchal lineage that can be traced back genetically and can tell enthralling tales of ancestry unavailable to us via other means.

The book focuses on modern European lineages, all of which can be traced back to seven founding groups. note that this doesn't mean that there there were only seven women alive back then. There was never a point where there was one Eve, either. There were many, many more women alive, but only these seven had their mitochondrial DNA lucky enough to survive the ages through to modern times. This means that a heck of a lot of DNA has been lost! We should mourn that.

The groups are referred to as haplogroups, scientifically, which in a very rough sense is somewhat akin to a sub-species or a tribe, but these only very rough approximations. Humans are all the same species, but even within a single species there can be many subgroups. The author attaches female names to each of these sub-, or haplogroups, the initial letter of which is taken from the alphabetical letter by which the haplogroup is known to science. The author gives his fictional the names as follows:

  • Helena
  • Jasmine:
  • Katrine
  • Tara
  • Ursula (Haplogroup U5, excluding subgroup K)
  • Velda
  • Xenia

TO BE COMPLETED!

Saturday, September 4, 2021

Raising Backyard Chickens by Emma Nora

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I'm no more planning on raising chickens in my yard than I was pigs, but just as with that book, I read this one out of curiosity, and I was not disappointed. It's a fun book, full of useful and even unexpected information for anyone planning on producing their own eggs. Of course, you will need a chicken for that; God knows I've tried without one and I've never got it to work!

Don't be put off by the cartoon cover: this is a serious book and contains lots of useful information, along with tips and nested hints, and you won't have to shell out a lot to buy it..... Unfortunately it seems to be available only on Amazon, a corporation I refuse to have anything to do with for a variety of reasons, so I guess the yolk's on me as they say.

The chapters are as follows:

  1. The Basics of Raising Backyard Chickens
  2. The Science of Raising Chickens
  3. Training Your Chickens
  4. All About Eggs
  5. Special mention - Chicks!
  6. Learning to Source the Best Eggs
  7. Maintaining the Pecking Order
  8. Grooming

It oughtn't to be necessary to remind readers that chickens are living and sensitive animals which will require frequent attention along with attendant watering, feeding, and cleaning. They require safe and comfortable housing and close observation for potential health issues. It is not a part time job or to be approached with an amateurish state of mind. It's essential anyone planning on engaging in this pursuit should read a good book on the topic, and preferably more than one, and be prepared to put in the hard work. If you don't, you will have egg on your face....

There are issues you may not have considered if you've been idly thinking about getting a few chickens for the back yard: such as considering local bye-laws and your neighbors, and there are concerns that even were you cocksure about this, you may not have had these make it through the chicken mesh of your mind, such as bullying among chickens, as well as potential problems introducing new birds to an established flock, and so on. If you plan on selling the eggs, or you plan on exhibiting your chickens, there are tips to help you make those plans fly, too. It even teaches you how to pick up chicks - although that might not be exactly what you had in mind....

I personally have no experience raising chickens, so I can give only my opinion, but I'm no dumb cluck, and it seemed to me that this book was competent, serious, appropriate and a great place to start. It felt like it would get a person well on the right path to having success with this project and so I commend it as a worthy read.