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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.