“More Great Good Dairy-Free Desserts Naturally”
Eat your fruits and vegetables but make sure you leave room for dessert, as long as the dessert tastes excellent and is made with healthful, honest ingredients…
Imagine a cake without butter, sour cream, milk, or eggs that actually tastes rich and delicious with a light crumb and moist texture. Hard to do? Not if you’re making one of the cakes made from a recipe in More Great Good Dairy-Free Desserts Naturally by Fran Costigan, a professionally trained pastry chef who has shown the world that desserts – and especially cakes – don’t need dairy products to be truly great and absolutely scrumptious. Read more 
Gifts for Readers
Readers seem to have a special understanding and appreciation of each other. If a hundred people were walking through an airport and I had to choose five to speak to, I would unabashedly pick those who were carrying a book. If there were more than five carrying books, then I would look at the titles and choose based on what they were reading. Although I could get it totally wrong and would certainly miss some interesting people who carry books on their i-pads, kindles, and phones, there is still something that draws me to people who read the physical bound version. Read more
“A Thousand Acres”
What is a farmer?
A farmer is a man who feeds the world.
What is a farmer’s first duty?
To grow more food.
What is a farmer’s second duty?
To buy more land.
Why does a society value appearances, secrets, and hard work over basic human rights? And, what does it say about a society that condemns a victim for speaking out against a perpetrator for unspeakable crimes? These are the questions Jane Smiley seems to be asking in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Thousand Acres. Published in 1991, A Thousand Acres refers to that magic number of acreage that most midwest farmers ascribe to own – a thousand acres of rich, fertile Iowa farmland. It’s the number that sets one farmer apart from another, especially if the land has been handed down from generation to generation and is unencumbered by a mortgage. Read more
Humans of New York: Stories
Several years ago, Brandon Stanton was an unemployed college graduate struggling to live in New York City when he began photographing people on the streets of New York City. Posting these pictures on a blog he created (www.HumansofNewYork.com), Stanton created an exhaustive fascinating visual catalog of life on the streets of the city, which caused a sensation on the internet. Soon, Stanton’s first book was published – Humans of New York – but Stanton sensed there was more to this photographic journey, that there was a human story behind each photograph which led him to publish Humans of New York: Stories – showing and telling the stories of strangers on the street. Read more
“Ingredients”
If food ingredient labels make your eyes glaze over, we hope that this book will open them instead.
Steve Ettlinger and Dwight Eschliman (of Twinkie, Deconstructed and 37 or So Ingredients fame) came together to create a book –Ingredients: A Visual Exploration of 75 Additives & 25 Food Products – that is both appealing to the eye and the brain. Noting that “almost everyone eats processed foods,” the authors set the reader at ease by pointing out the word “processed” needs to be considered with care because we often forget that processed food also includes the freezing, cooking, baking, drying, and pickling of food – processes that get a bad rep when additives (especially those with complicated hard-to-pronounce names) are added. Read more
“Purity”
Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?
In Jonathan Franzen’s newest novel Purity, the author introduces the reader to Purity (“Pip”) Tyler, a 23-year old recent college graduate with $130,000 in student loan debt living in a squatter’s house in Oakland, California. Distancing herself from the mother who raised her in the Santa Cruz mountains, trying to find her biological father, and employed in a dead-end job, Pip is all but disillusioned about the world and the impact she will make on it. When offered an internship to work for the Sunlight Project – an organization that prides itself on leaking government secrets – in Bolivia, Pip takes a leap of faith, quits her job, packs up, and moves to South America. Read more
“Bettyville”
Everyday it becomes more apparent to me, and I think to her – a woman who still calls the refrigerator an “icebox” – that her world is gone and she is standing almost by herself now, the only one who remembers how it was here, wondering half the time what it is that people are talking about.
George Hodgman, a 54-year old magazine and book editor who recently lost his job returns home to Paris, Missouri (population 1,246) to care for his fiercely independent but ailing 91-year old mother. Struggling to take care of himself and Betty, George is frustrated, angry, and sad because he can’t quite figure out the road map that both and he and his mother are trying to navigate (“Betty and I are both crossing bridges we would rather avoid”). Read more
“Truth and Beauty”
She couldn’t see that no one else was perfect either, and that so much of love was the work of it.
Lucy Grealy (1963-2002) was 39 years old when she died of a heroin overdose in a friend’s apartment in New York City a few days before Christmas. Sad, lonely, and depressed, Grealy endured three decades of both physical and emotional pain before taking her life. A talented poet and writer, Grealy’s most recognized piece of work was “Autobiography of a Face” (1994) which recounted her experience with cancer of the jaw and the resulting disfigurement caused by dozens of surgical procedures both intended to save her life and reconstruct her face. Read more
“The Men’s Club”
Brotherhood is exclusive, not universal.
35 years ago, men rarely sought out each other’s company outside of a sporting event, a bar, or a bachelor party. While women were leaning on each other and seeking camaraderie in Mommy & Me events, book clubs, and aerobic classes, men went to work, fulfilled family obligations, and briefly escaped to society sanctioned events which did not generally include meeting at one of their homes for a men’s club get together. So, when a group of seven men – a retired professional basketball player, a tax accountant, a lawyer, two psychotherapists, and two college professors – come together to form a men’s club – “a regular social possibility outside of our jobs and marriages,” there is curiosity and reluctance to take a road less traveled, as depicted in the fictional novel, The Men’s Club. Read more
“The Wife of Martin Guerre”
…when hate and love have together exhausted the soul, the body seldom endures for long.
While scouring the shelves described as “classics” in an independent bookstore (Mac’s Backs-Books on Coventry) in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, I discovered The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis (a poet and writer who lived from 1899-1998). On the back cover of the book were the words: Read more
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