The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

When I started The Omnivore's Dilemma, I was warned that it might turn me vegetarian. I figured that nothing could do that. If Fast Food Nation couldn't do it, nothing could. I seriously considered it though for a few chapters here and there after reading even more about factory farming, the copious amounts of corn and soybeans grown to support the food habits of Americans, and the slaughter of animals. Then Mr. Pollan sums up the book with The Perfect Meal, a meal harvested, hunted, and grown by him and shared with others. He sums it up with such a lovely thought. It's not just what you eat, but being conscientious about where it came from. Thinking about what it is you are eating, and celebrating it, enjoying it, be responsible for it.

The bulk of the book walks through three types of meals: the corn-fed beef meal, the organic and sustainable farm meal, and the hunter/gatherer meal. What I like about Mr. Pollan is that he thoroughly pokes about at all of the theories. Corn and corn syrup and corn-fed beef, the farming industry and how it has changed over the years. Organic farming and the fallacy of big organic. The spiritual aspect of being a responsible eater.

Michael Pollan has several more books that related to the topic of food and responsibility. I am adding them to my reading list because frankly, he has made me think about what I eat, and done so in such a way where I never felt preached to or talked down to. I too want to eat responsibly, and enjoy every bite.

Rating: 5 purrs...thanks Matt for recommending this one.


- Posted using BlogPress from Bruce

It All Changed In an Instant & Not Quite What I was Planning by SMITH Magazine

I was very intrigued by the idea of the six word memoir. How do you tell the story of your life in six words or less? It seems impossible, even though Hemingway seems to have done pretty well at it. ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn." ) Apparently, you can in fact tell a whole heck of a lot in 6 words.

SMITH Magazine gathered various 6 word memoirs written by famous and not-so-famous people in these two books (and I think there are a few more published) - Not Quite What I Was Planning and It All Changed in An Instant. I found them simple, devastating, hopeful, everything you expect in the story of a human being. I must admit my favorite is the title of the first book - "Not quite what I was planning." Sums up a life perfectly, and it's really left up to the reader to determine if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

"I still make coffee for two."

"So would you believe me anyway?" —James Frey

Joan Rivers, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Sedaris, and more contribute. It's really a quite lovely read, but I found it such that I couldn't read more than a few at once before it felt too trite. I am intrigued on what my 6 word memoir would be. I should think on that.

Rating: 4 Purrrs

Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield

I think I found this book via my QPB membership. It's more than likely. I seem to find the best books there. Love Is a Mix Tape is probably one of the sweetest, saddest books I have read in a long while.

In LIaMT, Rob Sheffield tells the story of how his love of music blossomed and how that love of music brought him to Renee, the woman he loved, married, and watched die in his arms one night after about 5 years of marriage. He tells the story using each chapter to show why a certain mix tape was important, the songs that were on it, and why it was even made.

I wondered how gimmicky that would feel after a few chapters, but it didn't feel gimmicky at all. Instead I found a love letter to music, the act of loving a song enough to give it to someone else, to add it in between other songs in order to change it, make it your own, and a love letter to the person we meet that we know will change our lives for the better, forever. Not only could I tell that Rob Sheffield loves music, but I could tell that he loves Renee, even now. It was and is a beautiful story. Anyone who has ever made a mix tape knows the magic in it, and Rob brings that magic, the joy the two of them shared, making tapes together, to the reader.

I got through reading maybe the first 2 chapters before I went into Steve's office and said, "This book - you have to read it. It's like it was written for you by you." I can appreciate it, but Steve, as a true music lover, will be able to get it in a way I can't.

Rating: 5 Purrs for telling the story of two people, so different and yet so right for each other. For making a very sad story into one of love and living.

Closing out the year...

I never did finish up all of my reviews from the movies and books I watched last year, and instead of writing them all out I'm just going to go with the abbreviated version.

On Writing by Stephen King was one of my favorite books that I read last year. I loved the insight into his process, and you can tell that Mr. King really, truly enjoys what he does for a living. Not only that, but he is very honest about his history, his addiction, and the inspiration he finds for his stories. Inspiring, funny, and just another great example of why I love to read his books so much.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey was a fun little mystery where a detective investigates the Richard III murders, believing that the face of Richard III isn't the face of a murder.

If I Am Missing or Dead by Janine Lutz is the true story of two sisters who end up in abusive relationships after a lifetime of difficult (to put it lightly) parenting by a disturbing father. One sister doesn't survive. It's depressing, it's scary as hell, but it's worth a read.

Pathology staring everyone's favorite Hero, Milo Ventimiglia, and the beautiful Laurel Holloman, (now on CSI and previously sexy L Word chef). A group of pathologists in training play "let's see who can commit the most disturbing and unsolvable murder" a la Flatliners. Lots of sex, lots of violence, kind of silly but I still liked it quite a bit.

Vault of Horror is one of those anthology horror movies. Five men end up in the basement vault of a building, brought together to tell tales. One is about vampires, another about dismemberment, magic rope, scams, and deadly paintings. This one stars Tom Baker of Doctor Who scarfdom.

The Shuttered Room stars Carol Lynley as a woman returning to the island she used to call home with her much older husband (woefully miscast Gig Young - talk about unbelievable). Come to find out, the island home of her youth is haunted by something naughty in the woodshed. This was better than I expected, much due to Oliver Reed playing the evil, inbred hooligan that is enamored with Carol Lynley's character.

And now I am free to fall behind in my 2009 books and movies.

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

As you might expect, books and DVDs were plentiful under the Christmas tree this year. People know me oh so well. 

DVDs:

• Wall-E (BluRay)
• HellBoy II: The Golden Army (BluRay)
• The Dark Knight (BluRay)
• Cowboy Bebop Remix DVD set (Whee! Finally, Bebop of my very own!)

Books:

• The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams (Thanks LibraryThing Secret Santa!)
• The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore (Thanks LibraryThing Secret Santa!)
• The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson
• I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away by Bill Bryson
• Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation by Dan Kennedy
• Rock On: An Office Power Ballad by Dan Kennedy
• Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best Loved Books by Jenny Bond
• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
• Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West by Ethan Rarick

Comics:

• Dead at 17: The 13th Brother by Josh Howard
• Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures, Vol. 1 (v. 1) by Laurell K. Hamilton
• DMZ Vol. 4: Friendly Fire by Brian Wood

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers by Mary Roach

I wasn’t so sure I could believe the hype surrounding this book. I wondered how someone can write about what happens to cadavers when you donate them to science, make it funny, sometimes laugh out loud funny, and yet still be totally respectful of the dead. Somehow, Mary Roach is able to be all of that and more.

Stiff was hilarious. Mary Roach is matter of fact from the start, using her unique and funny voice to explain all the different ways your body can be used if you donate it to science. You might think your body would end up in some Gross Anatomy class, and it might, but there are plenty of other ways your cadaver can be used. Think car crash experiments. Think military gear tests, especially bombs and how they affect the body. Think practice sessions for plastic surgeons. Think the body farm, where forensic scientists see how well and how long, and generally how you decay. Before all of that though, she includes a chapter on the history of cadavers and medical science, including body snatchers and their place in this weird sphere.

Stiff seems like it might be just a wry take on what happens to you after you are dead, but really Roach includes an amazing amount of detail in such a small book. It can become a bit heavy, but just when you think you can’t take any more, Roach digresses into some odd fact or makes some kind of comment that makes you laugh. The important thing is, she never “speaks ill of the dead;” in fact, her tone can sometimes be almost reverent. She always makes sure you understand the purpose behind using the cadavers in experiments; she wants you to know what they want to learn, and how cadavers have played an unsung role in more than just medical history.

I really enjoyed this book. In fact, I think it’s probably one of my new favorites. It really is an amazing combination – funny, serious, informative. I'm definitely going to pick up Spook, her book on the afterlife, and Bonk, or everything you always wanted to know about sex.

Rating: 5 Purrs for someone who can write,

“It’s just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver. Get involved with science. Be an art exhibit. Become part of a tree. Some options for you to think about.
Death. It doesn’t have to be boring.”

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

Part of my latest horde:

• The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke - I loved Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell so we'll see how this one goes.
• Gatsby's Girl by Caroline Preston
• The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig
• The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey - Another Richard III mystery. 
• The Post-Birthday World: A Novel by Lionel Shriver
• The Nymphos of Rocky Flats: A Novel by Mario Acevedo - Vampires & nymphomaniacs. I couldn't pass it up. 
• My Lush Life by Douglas McEwan - Highly recommended by my wine bar guy. I had to pick this one up at Half Price. 
• The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor - I love Flannery O'Connor's short stories. 
• E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings - I've always liked e e cummings, but lately I have become borderline obsessed. 
• The Best of Roald Dahl by Roald Dahl
• Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories by Roald Dahl
• Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America by Eric Nuzum - I loved his book  The Dead Travel Fast, so I thought I would check out his earlier book on music censorship.
  

Ah vacation...

Vacation - the days where you can read a million books, take a million pictures, relax...

Well, I didn't quite get a million books read, and maybe not a million pictures, but I did read a whole heck of a bunch (I was only gone a week or so) and took so many pictures it's going to take me weeks of cropping, etc., before I can get them all posted.

I took about twice as many books as I actually read on my trip last week, which is pretty normal. My goal was to take things I wanted to read, even if I had read them before many times. I took some new stuff too, but I took some old favorites to revisit because I can never seem to convince myself to re-read things when it's "regular" reading.

What I read while I was gone:

• Bare Bones by Kathy Reichs - I picked these up because I love Bones. While the characters in the book are quite different from the TV Show, I still enjoy the dual mystery and forensics detailed in this series. I didn't think this was nearly as good as some of the former entries in the Temperance Brennan series of books. Here Dr. Brennan is trying to take a vacation with the hunky cop from Canada, but instead she find a big cache of bones that might be bear and might have some human there too. The investigation, death threats, and gore ensues. There's a lot of detail about endangered species here and you can't help but think that it's a topic close to Ms. Reichs' heart. I'd recommend it if you like forensics and want a pretty detailed look at the science.
  
• The Dispatch by Bentley Little - I like Bentley Little. His books are like horror cotton candy. They are tasty, fun, easy to eat up, but sometimes they give you a stomach ache after. This one is a bout a guy who writes letters. The letters he writes end up making things happen, and someone notices and wants to use him for something not so ethical. It's not his best work. I'd recommend The Walking or The Collection (short stories) first.
• The Maul and The Pear Tree by P. D. James and T. A. Critchley - A non-fiction work about the Ratcliffe Highway murders that took place in the early/mid 1800's. The book was very thoroughly researched, but the story felt sort of dry. Not nearly as engrossing as P.D. James' mystery stories. It's nice on a completist's perspective to have read this too, but I think I'll stick to her fiction from now on.
• The Mummy : or Ramses the Damned by Anne Rice - I can't help it. I love this book. Always have, always will. Julie's dad dig's up Ramses' tomb, only to discover he's an immortal. An immortal who fell for Cleopatra. Chaos ensues. Romance blooms. Things blow up and people die. Seriously, it's not Pulitzer Prize material, but I love it anyway. It's my favorite Anne Rice book, ever.
• No Escape by Heather Lowell - It's a romance/thriller/mystery. I know. So sue me.
  
• Sunshine by Robin McKinley - Robin McKinley, one of my favorite authors of all time, writes a vampire novel. It's an interesting take - Rae, nicknamed Sunshine, likes to bake things. She's the Queen of Cinnamon rolls. She wants to just do that, but when some vampires kidnap her, she remembers what her Grandmother taught her - how to transmute objects. When she decides to save the life of Con, the vampire chained to the wall (she's supposed to be his lunch but he won't eat her), her life will never be the same. What I like about this book is that Con isn't a sympathetic, romantic vampire, at least not that much, and definitely not for most of the book. He's flawed, not really all that handsome, and Rae doesn't really find him attractive. In fact, she thinks something is very wrong with her for even helping him. I've read this before, and I picked it up again because of my sister-in-law getting me hooked on all of these Sookie Stackhouse vampire novels and those Twilight books. This one was much more complex and a completely different voice. I highly recommend it - and please Ms. McKinley, write the darn sequel.
  

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

I love birthdays. It's like Christmas for my book and DVD libraries.

• Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
• Falling Man by Don DeLillo
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
• The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

I just love Half-Price Books and their 20% off sale.

• The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
  
• Brimstone (Pendergast, Book 5) by Douglas Preston
  
• Dance of Death by Douglas Preston
  
• Dark Angels: A Novel by Karleen Koen
  
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan
  
• Diamonds Are Forever, You Only Live Twice, Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming
• The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Other Stories by Charles Dickens
  
• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  
• Still Life with Crows (Pendergast, Book 4) by Douglas Preston
  
• A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York by Timothy J. Gilfoyle
  
• Collected Poems 1947-1997 by Allen Ginsberg
  

The Executioner Always Chops Twice: Ghastly Blunders on the Scaffold by Geoffrey Abbott

I picked this book up from my paperback book club and I think this might be the very first time I was disappointed. The Executioner Always Chops Twice seemed like it might be a quirky list of mishaps and goofs, but instead it was a pretty dry collection of whoopsies and gore.

Geoffrey Abbott knows his stuff  - he is a former Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London. The problem is he reports in such a way that it becomes almost tedious to finish them all. There’s a ton of stories in here (I think 80 to 90, somewhere in there), some illustrations to help with the imagination, and plenty of gore to aid in the nastiness. Not only are there amusing last words and whoops I missed your necks accidents, there are pretty detailed accounts of how executions are performed.  I think the real problem wasn’t a lack of interesting stories or last words, I think it’s that after 50 or so, it just gets to be a challenge to get through them all.

On an interesting side note, I had an up close look at a botched hanging last month when we stayed the night in a historic, haunted hotel in Clayton, New Mexico. The Eklund has photos of the whoopsie hanging of Black Jack Ketchum – you can see him caught, noose around his neck, on the platform, and beheaded because the noose was tied in one of the ways Mr. Abbott describes. It was a bit gruesome to see photos, but hey, I had to look.

I don’t know that I would recommend The Executioner Always Chops Twice to anyone looking for a laugh, but it can be darkly comedic for a while. It’s just that after about 30 examples, you get immune and it gets a bit depressing and then a bit boring.

Rating: 3 Purrs for lots of historical and background information but some hisses for needing some comic relief – off with its head with a flamingo croquet mallet

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson

I loved Erik Larson’s book, The Devil in the White City. I thought it was an extremely well-written, engrossing non-fiction account of building the Chicago World’s Fair and the reign of the serial killer, Dr. H.H. Holmes. When I heard that Larson had another book out, I knew I had to give it a try just to see how it fared.

This time around in Thunderstruck, Larson tells the parallel stories of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless telegraphy, and Hawley Crippen, murderer. Marconi’s struggle to succeed in creating wireless telegraphy is intriguing, but also a little hard to warm up to because of the subject himself. Marconi was not a humble man, and kudos to Larson for not glossing over that fact. The parallel story of Crippen is also interesting in its own. It is an excellent picture of an ordinary, mild-mannered man driven to a rather heinous murder to be free and happy with the woman he loves. His story, to me, was the more interesting one, but then again, it could be because murder interests me more than scientific invention.

Larson’s attempt this time didn’t really grab me the way his other book did. I think it could be a number of things: Marconi was not a likable character, and neither were the other men who were competing with him to succeed with inventing successful wireless telegraphy. (I will say the intrigue that comes up with the German government was an interesting tidbit though.) Hawley Crippen was a mild man, beaten down by an irresponsible, slovenly, and careless wife. It was hard to have any respect for him either. In fact, his life sounded down-right horrible. The book really takes off once you get to the part when Crippen’s wife turns up missing and the police investigation begins. Then you can clearly see why Larson decided to integrate these two stories into one book. Marconi’s tenacious quest to create wireless telegraphy enabled the police’s hunt of Crippen and his mistress to cross the ocean, and kept journalists and readers appraised much like we are now while watching O.J. drive around in his white SUV.

Overall it was a decent book, but not quite up to the excellent The Devil in the White City.

Rating: 3 ½ Purrs for what this book could have been

Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes by Emily Craig PhD.

I found Teasing Secrets from the Dead while digging through the stack of true crime books at Half-Price books. When I saw that Kathy Reichs, writer of the Temperance Brennan books and forensic anthropologist herself, wrote an introduction to this book, I decided to pick it up and give it a try. It wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed paying full price for it.

Emily Craig started out as a medical artist, drawing detailed anatomy pictures for a medical laboratory. She describes how that interest led her to switch her career path to forensic anthropology, and gives you a short section on how her training and study went. She describes the difficulty of marrying fact and intuition, of the long hours of study, and of the differences in forensic anthropology and forensic pathology. Later she describes her work as a full-time employee in Kentucky, and they types of work she does there identifying remains most often found in the back country areas. She is candid about the difficulties of matching remains with missing persons, and definitely rips those CSI blinders off. It’s a lot harder to do this job than TV might make you think. It’s gruesome work, so I don’t recommend eating while you read.

Craig’s tale becomes really interesting when she gets into the chapters on the Branch Davidians in Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the World Trade Center attacks. In Waco, she is the scientist who reconstructed David Koresh’s skull, and before that, the one who reconstructed the skull that showed not all the cult members died because of the fire (she found evidence of a bullet hole). In OKC, she helped rebut claims that the real bomber died in the explosion by identifying that the true owner of an extra severed limb did in fact belong to a victim who was inside the building. Her chapter on the World Trade Center was devastating and emotional, and you can tell the difficulties faced by those workers will never be truly understood by anyone not there to share their burdens. In fact, it is the one chapter where it doesn’t feel like Dr. Craig is bragging.

That is the one thing I had an issue with when reading this book. Dr. Craig’s tone was almost condescending and self-involved, especially when describing the “intuition” side of things. Another thing that was not fun to read– the constant descriptions of maggots. Seriously, yuck. Other than that, it was interesting to get a factual account of how someone becomes a forensic anthropologist and the difficulty of being in that profession.

Rating: 3 1/2 Purrs

Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz

True crime is one kind of nonfiction I can tear through. Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise was engrossing on a level most true crime doesn’t reach. It’s probably because Terri Jentz lived through this crime, kept it as part of her, and finally, took the case up to find that man who trespassed upon her campsite and tried to kill her. The story is gripping, her search for truth engrossing, and her journey is told with a true voice. It’s the best nonfiction I have read in awhile.

When Terri Jentz was a college kid in 1977, she and a friend began a cross-country bike tour. Their goal was to follow the year-old Centennial bike path across the United States. They made it just over a week. Eight days in they stopped for the night in Cline Falls, Oregon. That night, a cowboy brutally attacked them, driving over their tent with his truck and attacking them with an ax. It was a cruel, unprovoked attack, and both girls barely survived.

Nearly 20 years after the attack, Terri decides to return to the scene of the crime, a community that has taken the attack into itself and its memories. The “two girls from Cline Falls” have been in their minds for 20 years, and the community wants answers as much as it wants to hide the truth. Jentz won’t let them hide anymore. With some new allies, she tries to uncover the truth after such a long time, facing the difficulties of the criminal justice system and the inner workings of the small towns surrounding Cline Falls. Eventually, she finds some sort of truth and healing in the process.

Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise is similar to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in that it closely resembles a report, a true life, cleanly written report of a truly horrible crime. It is one that makes no sense and truly haunts the people involved, even remotely. The difference is Terri Jentz is that girl from Cline Falls, and it is her story.

Rating: 5 Purrs, for telling a true story even when it uncovered her own warts.

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devestating Plague of All Time by John Kelley

I have always been fascinated by outbreaks. My favorite book is The Stand. I love plague movies like Outbreak and 28 Days Later. After reading books by Anne Benson called The Plague Tales and The Burning Road, both very good books on their own, I decided I wanted to know more about the real history of the Black Death and y pestis.

In The Great Mortality, John Kelley traces the full history of the Black Death, from its origins in Mongolia through the trade routes of Europe. He talks about the variations the plague took, from bubonic plague that had the trademark bubo, bruise like splotches on the body, and bad odor, pneumonic plague that spreads directly from person to person though coughs, and includes coughing up blood and constant vomiting, and septicemic plague, that causes extremities to become black and hard as coal. He talks about what made the medieval world so easy for plague to spread and what helped stop it after thousands died. (Estimates say numbers of a third to 60 percent of the population.) Not only does John Kelley trace these facts, he includes stories of people who lived during the plague times, straight from their own journals and letters. He talks about people who stayed by friends and family to help them, and those who ran and hid. He talks about the Flagellants, who whipped themselves sin the name of God to “save” others from plague and he talks about the rampant anti-Semitism that ran through the world before and along with the plague.

Overall, the most interesting thing I found was how John Kelley traces how the culling of the population due to the first round of plague (and the two others that followed) helped usher in a new age of development. Suddenly, the laborers were in demand, food was plentiful, and the hierarchy of the serfs and nobles was breaking down. While the plague was devastating and destroyed thousands of lives and wiped whole families out, it ushered in a new hope for all those left behind.

It's an interesting look at a world forced into change and the nasty little bug that spured it on.

Rating: 5 Purrs, for making something that could have been terribly dry into something intriguing and informative

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and The Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak

Ever since I was a girl, I just loved Nancy Drew books. I started off reading my mother’s original printings that she picked up during her childhood, and from there, I was hooked. Nancy Drew is probably the reason I am still hooked on reading as an adult. In Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and The Women Who Created Her, Melanie Rehak writes a behind the scenes history of Nancy Drew and her creators. She asks why has Nancy Drew survived through the Depression, World War II, the sixties upheaval, feminism, and still captured the hearts and minds of girls throughout all of these changes in our social structure. Who created her, and how did they influence the world of our girlhood?

Melanie Rehak introduces us to the Stratemeyer clan, the creators of Nancy Drew and many other childhood 50-cent novels beginning in the early 1900s. Edward, the father, began writing stories like the Bobbsey Twins and developed the idea of Nancy Drew, but his daughter Harriet carried on the dream of Nancy Drew way into the 1980s. The Stratemeyer clan hired ghostwriters to work on their novels based on detailed outlines; Mildred Wirt Benson was hired to write the first Nancy Drews. Mildred created the character of Nancy, and she used much of her own character to build Nancy. After awhile, Mildred broke off her association with the clan, and other writers took over, including eventually Harriet Stratemeyer herself.

Harriet protected Nancy Drew through the years, including protecting her basic character during the1960s and forward, when publishers wanted her to be sexier and boy-crazy. Then came trouble in the business, and a big question over which author was the real creator of Nancy Drew. Melanie Rehak digs through all of the history to bring out the truth. She never judges and presents an equal side for each woman involved. She even follows the history of Nancy into the 80s and 90s, into the new Nancy Drew Files, the new novels I remember from my teenage years.

I loved this book. Not only did it bring back wonderful memories of Nancy Drew (I actually found copies of all the books and the Nancy Drew Files and added them to my Amazon Wish List), I found another series I remember from my aunt’s childhood that unexpectedly was written by Mildred Wirt Benson. I found out more about the girl who captured my imagination and the vibrant, intelligent, and forward thinking women that created her and formed so many girls hopes and dreams throughout the 20th century. Melanie Rehak wrote with passion but never overstepped and made judgments. If you ever loved reading Nancy Drew, or knew a girl who did, you should read this book.

Rating: 5 Purrs

The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill by David M. Buss

David M. Buss's goal in The Murder Next Door is to explain why normal, next-door neighbor type people murder. He has a plausible theory that normal people kill because we evolved that way. He is an evolutionary psychologist, and he outlines his theory in detail. It's too bad the theory seems stretched thin over repetitions of the same type of examples.

Buss concentrates on the next door kind of murder, and leaves out murders caused by deep rooted psychological issues, serial killers, war, mass murders and the like. According to Buss, it all boils down to survival. Humans evolved to find murder to be a viable solution to certain evolutionary issues. Bottom line, women kill to protect their children, themselves from dangerous mates and outsiders, and their viable genetic contributors (their mates) from poachers. Men kill to protect their genetic contributors (their mates, or in the case of stalkers, their perceived or previous mates), cut off others' genetic lines (i.e., stepchildren), and ensure their place in the wealth and status of the community.

Buss cites much of his own research, where he interviewed a large group of people about situations where they felt they would murder or where they would be murdered, in addition to many other sources cited in the back of the book. The interviews are interesting, and they indeed support his theory. However, I can't believe that his reasons are the be all and end all theory of why normal people kill. Pigeonholing people into strict evolutionary theories just seems too pat to me. Maybe I feel like we have evolved beyond such primitive urges, but then again, I turn on the news and sometimes it makes me doubt it.

I would recommend this book if you are interested in reading a theory about why someone like your next-door neighbor might murder you because you leered at his wife, or if you are interested in the psychology of murder. However, I would also take it with a grain of salt. It's not nearly as extensive as I was hoping, as I was looking to read more than one theory repeated with other examples. Overall, it left me hanging and frustrated, wanting more of a reason behind murder than just the protection of my mate and the insurance of good genetic continuation.

Ratings: 3 Purrs

8:55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames

8:55 to Baghdad was written because of a chance meeting Andrew Eames had while on tour in Aleppo. He discovers his hotel proprietor's mother remembers a very famous guest that stayed at the hotel many times. She remembers Agatha Christie, and Eames's curiosity is stirred. Why was Agatha Christie in Aleppo, and why was she a regular guest? What was her journey to the Middle East like? How did it influence her work? Eames sets out to answer those questions, and in the process provides a very interesting look into how much the world has changed, and how far-reaching Agatha Christie's works actually are.

Eames takes the journey to trace Agatha Christie soon after 9/11, so the journey itself becomes even more out of the ordinary. Not only is he revealing the truth behind the romantic vision we readers have of train travel and of Agatha Christie, but he also offers insights into the pre-Iraq war Middle East and surrounding areas. He meets people, lingers with them over tea, and gets them to share their stories. He does this even in Baghdad, where the U.S. is on the cusp of invading. You get a more discerning look into how people in Iraq reacted to 9/11, and more so, how these peoples' lives are everyday. In his realistic portrayals, you warm to even of some of the more aggravating characters that share his journey.

It's chance that while I was reading this book, I also listened to an old radio broadcast of Murder on the Orient Express, one of Christie's major works, and one of the works that was directly influenced by her journey to the Middle East. It made a nice foil to the early parts of the book, where Eames traces Agatha's journey to Turkey. He takes the Orient Express out of England, which due to world wars and changing politics, has dwindled down to a mirror of its former self. It is a tourist thing, with a few cars and not as much class as you might imagine due to the old 1970's movie.

Reading this book was almost like reading an Agatha Christie mystery itself. He compares each step of his journey with her life and her writings. You get a sort of mini-biography, a travel guide, a biography of her later work, and a history of the areas he travels through, all in one book. It's well worth the read if you are a fan of Agatha Christie (which I definitely am). If you aren't, I'd recommend it anyway, just because you get a glance at what life is like in the Middle East and surrounding areas, out of the mouths of the people themselves.

Rating: 5 Purrs