Dearie:
The Remarkable Life of Julie Child by Bob Spitz
Book Review by Heather Gruenewald
I knew a bit about Julia Child prior to
reading this book, from what I'd gleaned from the anecdotes in the book Julie
& Julia, the Smithsonian exhibit of her Cambridge kitchen in DC, and an
exhibit about her State Department work at the Spy Museum in DC. I actually
found this biography to be fairly riveting most of the time (which is not
typical for a biography/autobiography), and her life was clearly far more complex
than what I'd previously known. In her own way, she had feminist tendencies in
regards to women's role in the workplace and society in general, but she was
also a product of her times, as evidenced by her lifelong struggle to learn how
to accept homosexuals.
As a humorous aside, this book made me hungry constantly, as well as inspiring me to cook and bake more at home, and do more experimentation. She was incredibly passionate about food and savoring the pleasures of it, and I now better appreciate how she single-handedly revolutionized food in our country for the better. As I recently learned in Gallo Be Thy Name, that family revolutionized the wine industry in the US, and she was the equivalent heavyweight for food. I was also impressed at her openness to accept new styles of cooking and techniques later in life, and I laughed out loud at Jacque Pepin's stories of their battles regarding technique.
I read most of this book when we were recently on vacation in Paris. Ironically, we stayed on the Left Bank, in the vicinity of her and Paul's first apartment there. I was looking at Parisian eating from her vantage point as we dined out at various restaurants, and how we Americans still have a lot to learn about the French way of cooking, baking, and enjoying the end result.
As a humorous aside, this book made me hungry constantly, as well as inspiring me to cook and bake more at home, and do more experimentation. She was incredibly passionate about food and savoring the pleasures of it, and I now better appreciate how she single-handedly revolutionized food in our country for the better. As I recently learned in Gallo Be Thy Name, that family revolutionized the wine industry in the US, and she was the equivalent heavyweight for food. I was also impressed at her openness to accept new styles of cooking and techniques later in life, and I laughed out loud at Jacque Pepin's stories of their battles regarding technique.
I read most of this book when we were recently on vacation in Paris. Ironically, we stayed on the Left Bank, in the vicinity of her and Paul's first apartment there. I was looking at Parisian eating from her vantage point as we dined out at various restaurants, and how we Americans still have a lot to learn about the French way of cooking, baking, and enjoying the end result.
Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek
across the Pacific by Christine R. Yano
Book Review by Tina Poquette
Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek across
the Pacific by Christine R. Yano is an anthropologist’s analysis of Hello
Kitty’s popularity in Japanese culture and here in the United States. This book is the culmination of 7 years of
research via interviews with Hello Kitty’s parent company, Sanrio, ardent fans,
and detractors. She reveals many layers
to fandom of the cat-without-a-mouth from children, to adult women, to gay men,
to the underground counter-culture.
Hello Kitty celebrated 40 years this year. She is a multi-billion dollar global
enterprise. In addition to toys and
clothes, you can find her on almost any domestic item for the house. Another area of popularity for the company is
Omiyage, the Japanese custom of gift giving upon returning from a trip. You can find Hello Kitty tchotchkes with any
major tourist destination on it – ready for you order and have delivered to
your doorstep for distribution to your friends and co-workers upon your return.
Christine Yano explains how Hello Kitty is the
antithesis of Barbie (though there was a Barbie with a hello kitty back pack –
Sanrio is not above a money making opportunity). She lives in both the cute and cool culture
and bridges them like no other character.
Even if you are not a Hello Kitty fan, you may find this book
interesting at an academic level. I do
recommend it.
Shoe Addicts Anonymous by Beth Harbison
Book Review by Jessica Mattis
Getting ready for a vacation? I recommend
this national bestseller as a light-hearted quick read. As the selector
of this book for a summer month in 2014, I enjoyed this “fun beach read”.
The premise of the book is that four different
women with quite different backgrounds meet on a weekly basis on Tuesday nights
to talk about their shared passion --- love of shoes. As the club
advertisement states, you must have the same shoe size as the club organizer --
7.5, so you can swap and share pairs of shoes with other shoe addicts!
Each main character woman feels they can never have
enough pairs of shoes, so becoming friends with other shoe addicts is an
attractive idea. This book got me curious on how many pairs do most women
own? “The average woman
owns 20 pairs of shoes but only regularly wears five of
them, a study has found. And nine in ten admit
having at least one pair they have never taken out of the closet.”
How do you compare?
And since one of the
characters was struggling with debt from her shoe addiction, it made me curious
to the amount of money females spend on shoes. According to Glamour, “the average woman will buy 469 pairs of shoes in her
lifetime with an overall price tag of about $25,000--or $53 per pair.” Wow!
The shoe addict club offers a safe place for the
women to bond. Each woman has a life trial unlike what the others are facing
– overwhelming debt from shoe addiction, emptiness in life from a controlling
husband, battling agoraphobia, and a nanny job with the family from hell.
There is an aspect of one of the four characters struggles that a reader can
relate to. The shoe addict members remind each other to keep putting one
foot after the other while working through challenges!
While it’s not a serious novel, the message of
female friends helping each other triumph over their problems is a positive
reminder of why it’s time to pick up the phone and reach out to a girlfriend
you haven’t talked to in a while. Maybe she needs your listening ear, or
at least a pair of your shoes. What are you waiting for?
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Book Review by Ashley Lesser
Since we've had some fun reading (or re-reading as adults) children's
literature on occasion, I thought I'd choose Coraline as a way to introduce our
book club to Neil Gaiman's writing. It's a modern fairy tale in the tradition
of Alice in Wonderland, Roald Dahl, and the original Grimm stories. The
heroine is an independent kid, curious and a bit bored, often left to her own
devices because she's new to the neighborhood and her parents are busy most of
the time. While exploring, she discovers an "Other World"
behind a sealed-off door in her family's flat. On the surface, everything is
just a little better there -- the food is tastier, there are all kinds of
entertainments, and she has an Other Mother and Other Father to dote on
her. But when she returns to her own world, she finds that an evil spirit
threatens everything she holds dear. It will take all her cleverness and
courage to save herself and return to her ordinary life. There's a light
creepiness to the story, but most of the suspense comes from the way that
Gaiman masterfully develops the plot. Like all the best fairy tales,
there's a sweet lesson in the end. In typical Neil Gaiman style, much of
the fun is in the details and wonderful turns of phrase. The sardonic
Cat, who dispenses advice while claiming to be above human affairs, is the best
literary feline since the Cheshire. It's a short read, so give it a
try! If you enjoy it, Neverwhere is a fantasy written for adults, but
with a similar pace and style. If you're up for a denser read, there's
always his mythological opus American Gods.
"An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught
Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything" by
Chris Hadfield
Book Review by Ashley Lesser
"An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What
Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for
Anything" by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is equal parts
autobiography and unconventional personal development book. As the
latter, it was refreshing: the lessons were not the usual ones, both because
becoming an astronaut is a rare achievement and because the environment of
space defies the ordinary. There's lots in there about the value of
habits, preparation, and "expeditionary behavior." Even
familiar tropes ("enjoy the journey, pay attention to the little
things") were given new context (astronauts spend only a miniscule
fraction of their careers in space... if you don't like the daily work of
astronaut training, you'll never get there). Finally, Hadfield himself is a
great example of the dogged pursuit of long-term goals: when he decided as a
child watching the Apollo 11 landing that he wanted to be an astronaut, Canada
didn't have a space program yet!
I'd been a space buff as a kid in the early 1990s,
but my interest trailed off as the Shuttle neared retirement with no
replacement in sight. This book was a great way to reconnect. The
three missions of Hadfield's career (a 1995 rendezvous with Mir, the 2001
installation of Canadarm2 on the ISS, and his long-duration stay on ISS in
2012) tell the story of the transition toward a post-Shuttle space program with
greater international collaboration. As much as I'd like to see the US
have its own launch vehicle again, the space program in its current iteration
is inspiring.
Hadfield himself is a great advertisement for space
exploration, making great use of YouTube to answer kids' questions and share
the experience of space with us earthbound. He's also a musician!
If you missed them in 2012, here are two YouTube videos (one referenced in the
book) worth watching:
In the words of a YouTube commenter, "This
is why we sent this guy to space; he made it interesting again."
If you enjoyed the autobiographical portions of
this book, try Moon Shot by Deke Slayton, one of the original seven astronauts.
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