bogen.org

The book, Twinkie Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats by Steve Ettlinger, certainly has a certain primal draw to it, even for someone doesn’t regularly eat Twinkies.Many foods eaten by Americans these days have ingredients in them that we can barely pronounce. In most cases, even if we can pronounce the ingredient, we have no idea of the ultimate source of the same or the processes needed to transform raw material to finished product (riboflavin, anybody?). Twinkie Deconstructed documents Ettlinger’s journey to not only demystify the function of these ingredients in many products, but also their ultimate source and the processes necessary to turn them into something used by the food industry.

As his guide down the rabbit-hole of industrial food production, Ettlinger chooses the ingredient list for the humble Twinkie. The ingredient list becomes the structure of the book’s content as each ingredient gets a dedicated chapter.

Many of these chapters are quite interesting. For instance, flour is often enriched with iron to fight anemia. The iron added to flour is either microscopic flakes of a substance that is essentially rust with a better marketing program, or a substance known as ferrous sulfate. The two ultimate sources of ferrous sulfate are iron mines in northern Minnesota and petroleum from the Gulf of Mexico. The petroleum is refined in the south, where a byproduct (sulfur) is turned into sulfuric acid. That acid is then shipped north to a plant where it is used to perform a specific process on finished steel sheeting made out of that northern Minnesota iron ore. The iron/acid slurry is run through another series of processes to separate the ferrous sulfate from the acid. The ferrous sulfate is finally shipped off to be added to flour which appears in all manner of modern convenience foods.

Unfortunately, the story of most ingredients in modern processed and convenience foods is drearily similar. Something is grown and harvested; mined out of the ground; or pumped out of a well. That something is then subjected to a variety of heavy industrial processes, usually involving all manner of highly toxic substances (chlorine, acids, benzene, acetone, etc.); massive machinery; carefully controlled temperatures; miles upon miles of plumbing; and a few trips via rail car or semi. Finally, the substance is included in a food for what it brings to the taste, texture, or shelf-life of the final product.

By the seventh or eighth chapter, you almost wish for a change from that pattern, but a reprieve is not to be found and the book slides headlong into monotony.

If you’re living in a fantasy land where the ingredients for your food are all grown on farms and harvested by suntanned, hard-working farmers, this book will likely serve to provide an unwelcome window into the heart of the industrial food business. Otherwise, it’s best read as a reference book. You simply identify an ingredient on a package somewhere, find it in the index, and look up what it does and how it’s produced. Trying to read this cover to cover is otherwise a difficult and tedious task.

If you’re at all a fan of comic books or Saturday morning cartoons, Austin Grossman’s novel Soon I Will Be Invincible should be high on your reading list.Grossman’s approach to a subject that has been explored countless times is different and engaging. He chooses to focus much of his attention on two different individuals: the supervillain Dr. Impossible and the cyborg hero, Fatale.

In my mind, Dr. Impossible is the star of the book. His bottomless desire to take over the world is true to form, but the trials and travails that he follows on his most recent attempt are interesting. More fascinating are his views on the world of villains and heroes as seen from the villain’s perspective. Grossman even manages to get across the idea that perhaps superhero groups and supervillains are simply yet another example of the cool kids from high school picking (superheroes) picking on the nerdy kids (supervillains).

Fatale is also interesting for her perspectives on superheroes from one who has only recently reached that plateau. Particularly revealing are scenes away from the public eye like the one of the New Champions meeting in their clubhouse kitchen late at night.

Through these characters Grossman really plumbs the depths of the genre in new and refreshing ways. When Dr. Impossible is forced to change out of his costume behind an Applebees dumpter so that he can catch the bus we get a totally different perspective on what supervillains might go through before they get back on their feet after being out of circulation (i.e., in jail) for a while. Fatale’s hero worship (even though she is now a hero herself) is an interesting rumination on what it might be like to suddenly find yourself in the daily company of those who you once idolized and perhaps still do.

Soon I Will Be Invincible is a great book and you will do yourself a disservice to skip it if you’re at all familiar with superheroes and supervillains.

Tom Chaffin’s book, Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah is the story of ironic success of the Confederate commerce raider Shenandoah during and after the Civil War.Despite the reviews you may read elsewhere, this book is not a gripping page turner. Well, if you find page upon page detailing the drudgery of a sea voyage in the mid-nineteenth century gripping then maybe those reviews are accurate after all. The Shenandoah may have accomplished some interesting things, but very little of what it did was dramatic or filled with danger.

The ship goes months and months without ever firing its guns in anger. In fact, the ship was designed to prey on largely defenseless merchant vessels and to stay far away from actual naval vessels of the US Navy. Unless you find piracy or privateering exciting when the victims are defenseless and never put up a fight, you won’t find much action in the pages of this book.

The parts of the journey where danger actually was involved (a hurricane, getting caught in constantly shifting ice floes) are told with the same dry detachment that characterizes the rest of Chaffin’s prose. Sailors washing their clothing in the rain after a month at sea gets the same treatment as the ship being almost crushed in the ice.

Despite Chaffin’s attempts to make it otherwise, the story of the Shenandoah is a story of incompetent, short-sighted, micro-managing middle management; a crew composed of mercenary sailors enticed by the promise of wealth they will never see to join an ideological voyage; and ill-defined and meaningless objectives generated by upper management. In short, the Shenandoah mirrors that of many modern corporations. If you’re looking for interesting non-fiction to take your mind off your day-to-day concerns, look elsewhere.

While at a used book store, I picked up a copy of Peter F. Hamilton’s book, Fallen Dragon. It must printed with some of the thinnest paper in the world because even though it was 630 pages in length, it measures only 1 1/4″ thick in the hard cover edition I bought.Fallen Dragon revolves around the story of a man, Lawrence Newton: his youth, his present day, and several important episodes in between. In the present day, Newton is a marine for a multi-planetary multinational where piracy, known euphemistically as “asset realization,” is the corporate norm. The economics of this system are a bit suspect, and Hamilton asserts in the book that perhaps this economical model is due to collapse and that the time of that collapse is not too distant in the future.

Hamilton litters the book with extended flashbacks that some reviewers have deemed unnecessary or extraneous. Maybe those folks read a different book than I did? Since many of those flashbacks provide detailed information that helps to inform the reader as to why the protagonist acts as he does, they seem integral to the story. The fact that Hamilton wrote them with his careful attention to overwhelming detail doesn’t make them superfluous, it just means that he wrote them in his style and you shouldn’t be reading the book if you don’t like his style.

Like Hamilton’s other books, this one is a page turner. The story draws the reader inexorably towards the ending much like a black hole sucks in all that surrounds it. You’ll be turning some mighty thin pieces of paper, but you’ll be turning them at a prodigious rate.

The book changes tack about three-quarters of the way through, and until Hamilton pulls all the strings together at the end, the reader can be left scratching their head and thinking, “Huh? What does that have to do with anything that took place in the first 500 pages??” Stick with it, however, and Hamilton offers a tidy ending as a reward. You might be left pondering the nature of paradox and time travel and Hamilton’s understanding of the same (as I was), but if you’re content to let those sleeping dogs lie, you’ll be satisfied with how the book ends.

Spares by Michael Marshall Smith is a book where the title has little to do with the main plot of the book and it’s clear that the author didn’t quite know what he was doing as he wrote it.The initial premise of the book is that when embryos are first formed in human mothers and the process of mitosis begins, a number of cells are harvested and grown artificially into a person with an identical genetic make-up to the person who the mother births naturally. This carbon-copy person is kept in a series of tunnels with no education or interaction with the outside world, except for on those rare cases when the original needs a spare body part. At that time, the carbon-copy’s body is harvested for the needed limbs or organs. These carbon-copy bodies are known as spares. That’s where the book starts.

It then shifts track radically to become your standard crime who-dunnit with a disgraced cop fighting his demons (his wife and child were murdered, of course) and attempting to right past and present wrongs. Along the way, his former partner is killed, so he gets diverted again, to solving the case his partner was working on (even though the protagonist still isn’t a cop). Along the way a number of characters typical of this style of book are introduced, as are numerous ho-hum, seen-it-before situations, including the ever popular “Protagonist Must Partner With Villain Who Probably Killed His Family And Former Partner To Right Greater Wrongs”. Did I mention that his buddies include the mid-level gangster who also runs a bar and the hooker with the heart of gold (who just happens to fall for him)?

Then, the book jumps the track again, and the protagonist is back fighting in a crazy world between worlds in a Vietnam-style engagement. Does this have any connection to the previous two-thirds of the book? Uhh, not really. That obviously didn’t stop Smith and he roars ahead into this goofy segment with abandon.

Where are the spares, the title characters, during all this? Mostly dead. They’ve pretty much been dead or ignored for all of the previous two segments.

In the end, Smith uses a hasty and silly ending in an attempt to gather all of this mess up into a bowl and make some sort of literary goulash where the sum of the whole will be greater than the individual parts. Unfortunately for the readers, he fails miserably.

Unless you’re trapped on an airport tarmac due to the corporate malfeasance of an airline, skip Spares. There are many better books out there.

On a tangential note, who are all the people who rated this book so highly on Amazon.com? Five stars?!? I’m not aware of a substance, legal or otherwise, that could mask the literary wrongs of this book.

There are few books written that have the potential to be almost universally popular. Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog by John Grogan is one of those books.When I brought a copy of the book home from the library late last week, Sarah almost immediately grabbed it off the coffee table and started devouring it. Soon after, she revealed that my sister, Amy, also had finished the book recently. I picked the book up on a whim after seeing it on a table at the library. The picture of the dog on the front cover drew me in and the words inside ensured that I took it home.

Grogan is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and telling stories is his primary skill. He uses that skill to its utmost in this book as he relates all the antics, successes, and failures of his family’s life with Marley, a 100 pound golden lab with far more brawn than brain.

This book is one of the few books that had me laughing out loud page and page. It’s the rare book that makes me laugh out loud even once; at times, Marley and Me had me laughing so loud and so hard that I had trouble reading. For page after page I would chuckle, chortle, guffaw, and hoot with glee at Marley’s delightfully rambunctious and often brain-dead antics. The Grogan family’s equally naive expectations and complete lack of experience with a wild beast only added fuel to the fire.

If you’ve ever owned a dog of any temperament or breed, I highly recommend Marley and Me. Even if you’re not a dog owner, the skill displayed by Grogan in telling the story makes this book a delightful read. In short, get this book and read it. You’ll thank me later.

Unlike Michael Perry’s classic book, Population 485: Meting Your Neighbors One Siren At A Time, his latest book, Truck: A Love Story is a merely adequate effort.Truck marks the time through a year spent restoring an old International Harvester pickup truck that had been rusting away in Perry’s back yard for the last twenty years or so. It’s a nice idea, but it isn’t really the central focus of the book, and at at times, it seems as though Perry is straining to tie together the truck restoration with whatever is going on in his life. The use of the truck’s restoration to track time seems even more meaningless when you realize that his brother-in-law does most of the heavy lifting for the restoration.

Perry helps out with the restoration, but because his help is minimal, the truck often is relegated to a paragraph or two at the end of the chapter.

Since his last book was so well received, Perry now spends a non-trivial amount of time on the road attending readings and meetings editors. This invariably leads to discussion of the differences between life in small-town Wisconsin and New York City. However, we already know that most people who live in those quite disparate places live different lives. We’re not necessarily seeking validation of that fact. What we’re seeking is what made Population 485 interesting: Perry’s examination and revelation of the complex and deep lives led by ordinary people.

In the end, Truck: A Love Story is tolerable reading, but it doesn’t break any new ground and it won’t displace any books from your mental list of the Top Ten Books of All Time.

Ruth Reichl was the New York Times food critic for six years in the mid to late nineties. Her newest book, Garlic and Sapphires ia a humorous and interesting look at her stint at the Gray Lady.Reichl was recruited away from the LA Times to be the NY Times food critic in 1993. One of the first things she realized was that she couldn’t go to most restaurants as herself because she would be too quickly recognized. As such, she was forced to adopt elaborate disguises to ensure that she was treated just like most everyone else who walked in the restaurant door. Garlic and Sapphires is as much an examination of what is means to disguise oneself as it is a memoir of her time in New York.

Reichl adopted a series of disguises, complete with wigs, make-up, shoes, and clothes that fit the part so that she wouldn’t be so easily identified. Each disguise was different–the stunning blonde, the nearly invisible little old lady, Reichl’s mom–and each seemed to invest her with a different personality. In her book, she discusses how people treated her differently depending on which disguise she wore and how this makes her feel.

In addition, she recounts what makes a restaurant worthy of four stars, and what dooms a restaurant to a lousy one star rating. During her time at the Times, Reichl reviewed many ethnic restaurants and gave them two or three star ratings, something the previous critic would never have condoned. This break from tradition gave her critics no small amount of ammunition to use against her. In their minds, the only good restaurant is an old-school French restaurant.

In addition to a discussion of restaurants, Reichl discusses the food they serve. If you don’t usually think about what a particular herb brings to a dish, Reichl may open some new doors for you. She also describes how certain foods ought to be prepared so as to not be over or under done and how many restaurants get it wrong.

Finally, Reichl provides recipes in each chapter of the book that are germane to the contents of that chapter. Not all of the recipes are trivial, but none of them are so fussy that they couldn’t be made at home by an experienced cook.

While this book isn’t one that I would normally pick-up and read, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an interesting and entertaining book. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys eating and wants to see the world from the food critic’s point of view for a while.

Mavericks of the Sky: The First Daring Pilots of the US Airmail , by Barry Rosenberg and Catherine Macaulay, is an engaging and enlightening account of the earliest days of the US Airmail system.The pilots who flew for the US Airmail system in its earliest days were some of the bravest men alive. These were men for whom the word courage was invented. Navigation was primitive at best in those days. Radio in the cockpit was unknown. The parachute hadn’t yet become standard issue. Cockpits were open to the elements. Planes were made of wood and fabric. Flying at night and in fog was often deadly. Airplanes routinely had less than thirty miles per hour separating their stall speed and maximum cruise speed. Statistically, pilots met their death in just under two years of service with the US Airmail. In short, these were men who faced every obstacle thrown at them by man and Mother Nature and who climbed back into the cockpit again and again to deliver the mail.

In addition to gutsy pilots, the Airmail system had bullheaded administrators, never-say-die mechanics, and no small amount of luck on its side. Many of the innovations common to airplanes and air travel today can be traced to those introduced by the US Airmail system by these same people. In addition, many modern aircraft companies and airlines can trace a direct lineage to people involved with the US Airmail system.

Rosenberg and Macaulay present the story of the US Airmail system in a clear and very readable manner. They use narrative and a clear timeline to keep the reader interested, rather than simply presenting fact after fact and character after character. In addition, they give interesting and sometimes relevant background about pilots and others as they enter the story. Don’t skip the epilogue or you’ll miss many of the book’s more interesting revelations.

Theodore Judson’s sci-fi novel, Fitzpatrick’s War, is a relatively unconventional take on empire, history, government, society, and love. That he covers all of these topics in just a shade under 500 pages is itself quite an achievement.The world of Fitzpatrick’s War is Earth four hundred years in the future. With one exception, the world’s societies are once again steam-driven. Zeppelins transport people through the air from place to place while steam locomotives, cars, and trucks are generally responsible for ground transportation. The technologically dominant society is an amalgam of the US, Canada, Britain, and a handful of minor geographic locales. This dominant society is known as the Yukon Confederacy.

The Yukon Confederacy is both healthy due to its trade and technology, and prone to internal collapse due to its rigid societal, political, and economic structures. The vast majority of Yukons work the land as farmers. Mobility for this class into the upper classes is almost nonexistent. Those of all classes who attend school are taught lessons only from approved textbooks and the most important subject is History. The Yukons are a people constantly looking backward.

Judon’s book is written as though it is an annotated reprint of a historical text. The annotation is provided by an approved Historian; the text is the autobiography of an individual Yukon citizen-soldier. This artificial construct never managed to withdraw into the background of the story. Frequent footnotes prevented the story from building much momentum as they introduced useless facts about extremely minor characters. I’m sure that the construct Judson chose enabled him to tell the story he wanted, but it doesn’t enhance the reader’s experience.

In addition, Judson isn’t much of a word smith. He has a serviceable grasp of the English language, but no one would ever describe his prose as witty or clever. He’s a good enough writer to keep language from getting in the way of his ideas, but not much more than that.

The themes that Judson wants to explore are the central characters in the novel. These themes joust with each other for room on the printed page, with some receiving more space than others. However, Judson’s views on these themes (the nature of empire, the power relationships in a marraige, the importance of history, and others) are all relayed to the reader eventually.

Fitzpatrick’s War is a serviceable yarn, but not one that should send you to the bookstore RIGHT NOW to pick up a copy. Instead, keep your eyes open for a used paperback copy and buy it without reservation.

Near the southwest corner of our house, a patch of dandelions has been growing and spreading over the last four years. Earlier this year, Sarah and I decided to spread some weed-and-feed on that area this fall. After reading Ted Steinberg’s new book, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, we changed our mind and the dandelions will get at least another year of life.Steinberg’s book is an entertaining and informative dissection of how Americans view and care for their lawns. As he points out early in the book, Americans spend more on lawn care every year than the GDP of Vietnam. Clearly, Americans care deeply about the health and appearance of their turf.

The ironic thing is that most people are, in fact, hurting their lawn when they slather it with fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; water it often and deeply; and then mow it close to the ground. This unholy troika combines to leave turf in a precarious situation where the failure to pursue any one of those three operations practically guarantees some sort of health crisis for the lawn. Steinberg, numerous turf experts, and state and county extension officers will tell most anyone who listens that lawns need little to no applications of chemicals, much less water than they get, and that mowing a lawn to a height at least three inches high results in a much healthier, though less homogeneous, lawn.

Steinberg covers numerous topics in the book. He discusses just how it is that the lawn came to be such a staple of American life. He dissects the unfortunate intersection of lawn care and subdivision covenants. He dissects the impact that golf has had on lawns across America. The tools and substances that American use to care for our lawns do not escape Steinberg’s notice, either.

The popular 2-4-D herbicide, which conveniently kills broadleaf plants while leaving grasses untouched is a product of World War II. It was originally designed to be sprayed on the enemy’s food crops, which would then wither and die and help to force the opponent to surrender. The chemical may never have been used in that way, but plenty of American homeowners can attest to the chemical’s potency. Unfortunately, almost no studies have been done on the long-term effects of repeated exposure to the chemical. Of course, the industries responsible for producing, selling, and spreading 2-4-D vigorously deny that their pesticide could cause harm to humans. And yet, when I think about a chemical that was designed to defoliate the ground in order to make an enemy’s life more difficult, the first one that comes to mind is Agent Orange, and we all know the story behind that supposedly safe substance. 2-4-D may predate Agent Orange by several decades, but does that make it necessarily safer?

Since 2-4-D is the primary ingredient in weed-and-feed, I decided that I could learn to live with a a few dandelions. After all, Ira does like to eat them in the spring.

The lawn mower industry does not escape Steinberg’s notice in this book. The industry itself clearly does not have consumers’ interests anywhere near their hearts. Conveniently enough, Congress has been convinced (bribed) of the exact opposite. In fact, thousands of people lose fingers, toes, and sometimes their lives every year due to design and safety flaws present in both riding and push mowers. For isntance, one is 50 percent more likely to be injured or die while operating a riding mower than while operating a push mower. Most of this increased risk is due to the fact that there is no government standard at the state or Federal level that must be met by a riding mower before it can be sold to the public. Instead, there are some reasonably loose voluntary standards created by the industry that, conveniently enough, are not difficult or expensive to achieve.

American Green is an excellent book that everyone who cares for a lawn should read. You may not necessarily agree with everything Steinberg says (his section on the dangers of leaf blowers was a real reach), but you have to acknowledge the work that went in to the creation of this highly-footnoted, yet entertaining work.

Erik Larson’s latest book, The Devil In The White City is an attempt to tell two true, differing, but linked, stories in one book.The first, and more interesting, story is that of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition which was held in Chicago. The Exposition, also known as the Fair, was the United States’ answer to the previous World’s Fair held in 1889. Given the widely acknowledged success of the Paris Fair, the Chicago Fair had to be a stunning success in nearly all areas. And, since most of the money was being fronted by local businessmen, it also had to turn a profit.

It took time for the nation to settle on a site for the fair and the selection process didn’t finish until 1890 which gave the city just a bit over two years to transform a wind-swept grassland on the shores of Lake Michigan into the most compelling wonderland the world had ever seen. This seemingly impossible task was assigned to the architecture firm Burnham & Root, a Chicago firm of no small renown. Burnham & Root, in turn, recruited many of the top architects of the day to their cause. In addition, they managed to persuade noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead to design the grounds for the Exposition.

The trials and tribulations faced by the nation, the architects, the contractors, and the citizens of Chicago to make the Fair come to life were numerous and seemingly intractable, in many instances. And yet, through sheer force of will, the Exposition was created and judged a wild success by all who attended it and many who didn’t.

The second story that Larson tells is that of Dr. H. H. Holmes, an alias used a noted serial killer who operated out of Chicago during the years leading up to and the Exposition and during the Fair itself. Holmes killed an unknown number of people, but the guesses range from a figure in the low twenties to 200 or more. Holmes was a particularly deranged individual, but not much is known about him. Larson’s strict adherence to information gleaned from primary sources is laudable, but in telling the story of Holmes, it hurts him. Since so little is known about Holmes, his victims, his motivations, and his methods, the story of Holmes seems like so much gratuitous fluff shoe horned into the book to sell copies. Yes, Holmes was evil, but his connection to the Fair is tenuous at best.

The story of the Fair, a gleaming white city lost forever into the mists of time and memory, is far more compelling than that of a sad little sociopath. The Devil In The White City suffers from the inclusion of the second with the first. While the story of Holmes could not be told without the inclusion of the Fair, the Exposition itself was magnificent enough to stand on its own without the stain caused by the actions of one, unrelated, individual.

Danny Wallace, the founder of the Join Me movement, found himself at a juncture in his life. He could continue living his life the way he had been for quite some time, staying in at night and watching television. Or, he could embrace the word Yes, and see where it could take him. Yes Man is the story of just where Yes took him.Wallace makes a pact with himself to say “Yes” to most anything for a year. This doesn’t include obvious criminal questions like, “Will you rob that back over there?” or incredibly stupid questions like, “Will you give me all your money?” However, it does include questions like, “Would you like to come to my party on Thursday?” even if said party is three hours from his home and will most likely be populated with incredibly boring people. If you ask him if he’d like to go out for a curry on a rainy Friday night when he’d much rather be at home on the sofa, he’d say “Yes.”

This book explores both the power of Yes to take us where we haven’t gone before, but also the power of No to keep from going to those same places. Wallace discovers that Yes is a powerful word that can create change in his life whether or not he seeks it. Many of the changes in Wallace’s life are both positive, and long-lasting. While using Yes so indiscriminately Wallace’s personal and professional lives both take a turn towards the unexpected yet positive.

In the hands of a lesser author, this story would not have been nearly so amusing and interesting. Fortunately, Wallace is a gifted writer with a sharp sense of humor and a keen eye. If nothing else, the stories of his missteps and battles with a Nemesis will surely cause one to laugh out loud more than once over the course of the book.

Yes Man isn’t likely to make the anyone’s list of life-changing books. Nor is it likely to make any lists of great literature. However, it is an interesting, insightful, and amusing look at the choices that we all make everyday using the words “Yes” and “No”.

Before Benedict Arnold became a traitor to the American Revolution, he was an ardent Patriot. Among his heroic acts in the early Revolutionary era, was his leadership of an assault on British Canada. This assault is detailed in Thomas Desjardin’s book Through a Howling Wilderness.In the early days of the Revolution, before the Declaration of Independance was even a glimmer on Thomas Jefferson’s eyes, the many of the Colonists were actively engaged in revolutionary activities. These included the early assaults on Fort Ticonderoga and Saint Jean in Canada which were carried out by the Green Mountain Boys and led by both Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen. It was the success of these early assaults that convinced George Washington to field an army to march north into Canada and take Montreal. Arnold, for his part, wanted to lead that force. But, when he was denied, he formulated a plan of his own to lead a second army through the wilderness of what is now Maine and target the Canadian city of Quebec.

Desjardin’s book focuses on the successes and failures of Arnold’s expedition as it left Massachusetts and traveled north and west across Maine and into what is now Canada.

Suffice it to say that the journey wasn’t easy. Like many expeditions that have been chronicled in recent years, Arnold’s group was under-informed, under-equipped, and underfed. The journey was much, much longer than Arnold expected it would be. The equipment that the group had was either inadequate, prone to easily break, or quickly lost. The army generally was underfed as their food supplies quickly turned rotten or were lost along the way.

In addition to these problems, Arnold made one of the classic mistakes of leading any sort of expedition into new or generally unexplored lands: he left to late in the season. As a result, when the remnants of his army finally arrived in Quebec, they found themselves assaulting the city in the midst of a late December blizzard; with just one small, mobile cannon; guns that generally would not fire due to wet gunpower; and a force just over half the size of the defenders behind the walls. In addition, Arnold’s men were so desperate for clothing that they were wearing captured British Army uniforms, and moccasins stuffed with straw for boots.

Desjardin does a good job depicting the battle for Quebec. He describes the important forces at hand and the officers that commanded them. In addition, he attempts to describe what the principals might have been thinking based upon what they knew at the time and what they learned later. It is reasonable to say that America might today hold Canada as a series of states if an officer in the Colonial Army’s quartermaster’s corps had ordered an advance instead of a retreat during the assault on the city. He does not make that point, but he leaves enough hanging threads for the reader to tie them together and weave their own conclusions.

Desjardin covers the trek through the wilderness in some detail, but it is clear that his strong suit is the description of the battle around Quebec. At times, it is as though he is slogging through his notes and sources that describe the slog through the wilderness and that he can’t wait to get to the battle itself. In all fairness, however, it is possible that men engaged in paddling and portaging boats; hiking through swamps; avoiding starvation; and generally trying to stay alive may not have been overly conscientious about writing in their journals. Perhaps he doesn’t have nearly as many journals on which to draw.

This isn’t a very long book, just 207 pages. If you decide to read the book to find out why Benedict Arnold turned traitor, you may be disappointed as Desjardin just skims that topic as he maintains his focus on the expedition and its men. However, if you want to learn about the march through an unforgiving wilderness that just about netted the Colonists the entirety of British holdings in Canada, this is a worthy book.

Richard K Morgan’s newest novel, Woken Furies is a truly solid work of cyberpunk noir.Returning to the world of Takeshi Kovacs, Morgan produces his most satisfying book since 2004′s Altered Carbon. Woken Furies is full of dark alleys; highly augmented soldiers; heartless criminals who turn on friends for a handful of nickels; and the sort of hard hearts and heavy drinkers usually found in Dashiell Hammett novels.

In Woken Furies Kovacs is forced by circumstances to join with a group of deComs to avoid certain criminal elements seeking his head on a platter. The deComs are a team of mercenaries hired by the government to clear hostile and self-aware military hardware out of a geographic area. The deComs are highly augmented, tightly woven, and very good at what they do. Unfortunately, not all is as it seems with the team Kovacs joins and soon, a member of the team is overcome in the heat of battle leading to a near disaster for the team of soldiers.

This starts the book hurtling down a track not unlike an unlit rollar coaster tunnel that twists and turns such that you can’t see the light at the other end. All you know is that, eventually, the tunnel will end and you won’t be where you started. The dips, twists, and rises until then are completely unknown and can’t be seen until you’re well into them.

Unlike his previous Kovacs novel, Broken Angels, the literary devices that Morgan uses stay hidden behind the curtain in Woken Furies. The writing and plot seem less forced in this novel. Events and dialogue fit together better without some unpleasant literary spackle holding the whole mess together. In short, this is a much better novel.

Woken Furies is a novel that Morgan can truly be pround of and that I can recommend to those seeking an excellent contemporary science fiction novel with shades of classic detective fiction.

Marion Nestle’s book, Food Politics, is 469 pages of truth that the food and supplement industries hope you never read.Nestle is a world reknowned professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health. Her books are one facet of her multi-pronged assault on the food industry in the battle for the American stomach. Nestle’s basic food advice always boils down to this:

• Eat less
• Move more
• Eat fruits and vegetables
• Eat locally produced and prepared foods

According to Nestle, the basis of any plan for a healthy lifestyle boils down to those four simple rules. She doesn’t rule out junk food or sweets, just don’t make those items the cornerstone of your life.

A big part of Nestle’s mission is debunking food industry claims–claims that are often disingenuous. She has a unique ability to pare away the layers of obfuscation and misdirection and get to the core of the issue. Take her dissection of this common product: “No matter what their labels say, margarines are basically the same — mixtures of
soybean oil and food additives. Everything else is theater and greasepaint.” She has been threatened with lawsuits by various food industry lobbying organizations, but her rebuttals are often so pointed and truthful that the industry lawyers know that if they tried to drag her in to court that they would not only lose, but they would raise her profile.

In Food Politics Nestle not only goes after the food industry, but also those organizations and individuals that should be acting as counter-weights to industry cash. She exposes how nutritionists and and nutrition organizations, including the much-heralded Tufts Nutrition Navigator, are on the take from the food industry. In the case of the Tufts Nutrition Navigator, Kraft (a.k.a. Philip Morris), sponsored the site. It certainly seems as though it might be hard to offer truly objective advice on food when your primary sponsor is a food company.

If you’re truly interested in the straight dope about what you’re eating, and what you should be eating, Food Politics is for you. It will most likely affect the way you think about food, food industry regulation, and even the structure of our government. However, that is what all good books do. They make us think about the world in new ways.

After buying a copy of the book quite cheaply, I was delighted to so thoroughly enjoy Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.The subject of the book is the famous 1972 chess match between Bobby Fisher and Boris Spassy in Iceland. Unlike many other books that cover the chess games themseles, this book covers the personalities of the men playing the games and the circumstances that surrounded the match.

Mention Bobby Fisher to nearly anyone familiar with his name and they will most likely a strong and immediate reaction. One of my co-workers described him as a “world-class flake.” Unfortunately, such a reaction is probably unfair to Fisher. He is undeniably difficult to interface with as a person. His sense of morals is clearly underdeveloped and when they were handing out social graces, Fisher wasn’t just at the back of the line, he was in another line altogether. What Fisher did, probably better than anyone else at the time, was play chess. All of this leads nearly inexorably to the conclusion that Fisher is most likely a savant. He plays chess like a brilliant grandmaster, but runs the rest of his life like an 8 year-old kid.

Spassky is something of an unknown to many people. While he was a product of the Soviet system, he was a Russian at heart. It is important to understand the difference between a Russian and a Soviet because they are not the same thing. Russians are born in Russia and they may or may not be believers in the Soviet way of life. Soviets, on the other hand, could be born in any former USSR state as long as they advocated the advancement of the Soviet agenda. The Soviets pushed the idea of chess as a measure of their society’s superiority over other societys and economic systems. As such, there were extensive programs setup to identify and develop latent chess talent all across the Soviet Union. This system helped to create a long line of Soviet grandmasters that held the world title for many, many years. Spassky, being a Russian, was not interested in imbuing the game of chess with the Soviet agenda. He loved the game for what it was.

Edmonds and Eidinow repeatedly cover just how the governments of the two superpowers viewed the match within their inner circles. While much of the world looked at the game as a lone American rising up to challenge the Soviet dominence, ample evidence is presented to support the idea that the two governments did not much care about the match in the larger geopolitical sense. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, many previously hidden records were opened to the authors. They mined these records to reveal many interesting behind the scenes facts about the participants in the game and their respective governments. Actions taken by the KGB during the match are discussed, as are accusations by Spassky’s team there were psychotropic drugs or mind control devices hidden in Fisher’s chair.

Bobby Fisher Goes To War is an excellent and compelling book about the great chess match in Iceland. The authors’ extensive research and interviews with many of the principals of the time, along with their accessible and well-constructed prose, really bring the work to life.

Given Up For Dead: American POWs in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga is the latest book by Flint Whitlock. It tells the story of Americans captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge.Whitlock’s book revolves around the story of American POWs who were mistreated by the Germans after being captured during the Battle of the Bulge. Whitlock chooses to avoid discussing the intelligence failures and the like that lead up to the Battle itself. Instead, he focuses on the inadequate training that many of the soldiers and their units received prior to deployment. After the Battle commences, he shifts gears to discuss what happened to the men captured by the Germans.

In short, the Germans treated the POWs only slightly better than they did Jews, Gypsies, and the like. They generally didn’t kill them outright, but they didn’t go out of their way to prolong the life of the Americans either. None of that comes as any real surprise, however. That the Germans mistreated people during WWII is practically a given. It almost would have been more surprising to learn that they treated prisoners of war well.

Whitlocks seems to be hamstrung by a lack of material in this book. It’s almost like he took a subject that could be easily serialized in a magazine and stretched it to book length. Several times while reading the book, I found myself mentally urging Whitlock to move on already as he had covered this particular bit of ground before. Once you read about how the Germans made bread with sawdust and served it to the captives, you don’t need to read it again and again and again. Sawdust bread. Got it.

Ultimately, any compelling story hidden in Flitlock’s writing is buried beneath what feels like pages and pages of filler. Given Up for Dead lacks much of what made Whitlock’s previous novels memorable. This particular book is perhaps best suited for those trying to flesh out their collection of WWII history books.

Tobias Bucknell’s relatively recent post about why he loves science fiction got me thinking about why I read more science fiction books than any other fiction genre.Anyone who believes that science fiction is about space ships, laser, time and/or faster than light travel, teleportation, and other technological oddities either has never actually read a SciFi (hereafter, SF) book, or they didn’t read a good one. For those people, here is the secret of good SF:

SF is about people, ideas, and the consequences of those ideas. SF is a giant laboratory in which writers and thinkers experiment with the effects various philosophies, politics, and objects have on people and society.

Want to see the effects of a wildly corporatized society in which like tends only to associate with like? Are you interested in how memes are passed from person to person and where a meme stops and a virus begins? Read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Are you curious about where the real world ends and the virtual world starts in a society that has fully immersive entertainment technology? Try Joe Haldeman’s Old Twentieth. Can a society of ideas triumph over a society of technology? Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series may shed some light on the problem. What, exactly, is the definition of life? Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker saga is an interesting examination of the answer.

SF gives authors a place to operate that isn’t bound the rules of history or modern society. History can only be rewritten so much before it is no longer true to some sort of consensus about what actually happened. Modern society can only be twisted so far before it fails to resemble itself.

The future, on the other hand, is the vast unknown. Societies built entirely of corporations can exist there without creating cognitive dissonance in the reader’s mind because such a setting does not conflict with any known facts. Entirely immersive entertainment techonologies exist in the future of SF, giving us an option to explore the consequences of that technology now, before we are confronted with it.

I read SF because I enjoy the ideas explored by the authors writing in the genre, not because I’m a huge fan of laser, space ships, and aliens.

Glyn Williams’ book, The Prize of All the Oceans is an interesting in-depth look at Commodore George Anson’s voyage around the world and his capture of the Spanish treasure galleon in 1743.The hardships routinely endured by seamen and officers of the Royal Navy in the 18th century would make the most arduous modern military service seem like a relaxing vacation by comparison. Scurvy, exposure, lice, typhus, minimal rations, back breaking labor, and the constant threat of death were the life of a Royal Navy seaman in the 18th century.

Anson left England with 1900 men on five ships. He returned with under 500 men on one ship. Many of the men who returned to England had not started the voyage with Anson (they were pressed into service along the way), and so the death rate is even higher than it appears. Tellingly, only four of the dead were casualties of enemy action. The vast majority died as a result of malnutrition and disease.

The officers and seamen suffered through unimaginable hardship and deprivation on the journey and yet, somehow, were able to capture a ship in the heart of Spanish territory that contained fabulous weath mined from Spanish South America.

Williams’ book is a balanced look at the voyage and its hardships. He generally steers clear of hyperbole and is careful to note the agendas and tone of various sources. His book is clearly a synthesis of the original sources as he works mainly from Royal Navy records, logbooks, and journals kept by those involved. Williams seems more interested in discovering the truth of what happened than idolizing or demonizing Anson. He covers the numerous, draw-out legal battles that wound their way through the English courts in the years following the journey. He even goes so far as to point out what various indviduals seemed to learn, or failed to learn, from the journey in the years after their return to England.

The Prize of All the Oceans is an accessible and enjoyable examination of history long past. The long, dangerous nature of sea journeys at the time is exposed in all its unfortunate detail by Williams’ work.