Three Stars

This book helped me finally understand the difference between baking powder and baking soda. As someone who bakes regularly, this should be something I already get. But the thing is, I mostly just bake recipes other people share; I’m not good enough to be able to sort out my own. I don’t know the best ratios of liquid to dry ingredients, so I can’t just sub things in and out.

I really appreciated that the book has a generous introduction before diving into recipes. The authors talk about the history of biscuits and how different flours in different parts of the U.S. yield different feels to the biscuits. They offer advice for storing and measuring flour and, as mentioned above, the different purposes baking powder and baking soda fulfill in a recipe. They also dive into different types of fat to use (butter is yummy, but you’ll get a lighter biscuit if you use shortening or lard), and different options for liquid (I’m looking forward to using yogurt in one of the recipes).

Finally, and most importantly, the authors take you through the actual preparation of the dough, and include two types of kneading and eight (!) different ways to shape biscuits, depending on the consistency of the dough and the look you are going for. They also discuss some common ways the home baker can totally screw the pooch. It’s helpful.

They then dive into the recipes, broken out into easy biscuits, traditional biscuits, embellished biscuits (I’m so excited to try the black pepper ones), biscuit relatives (cheese straws!), tomorrow’s biscuits (i.e. what to do with leftovers), and desserts. They also include some recipes for things you want to eat WITH biscuits, like compound butter or chocolate gravy. And they include a recipe for refrigerator biscuits so you can make dough ahead of time and just add liquid and bake up as you have time. There are many I want to try out, which I think is a sign of a pretty good cookbook.

Three Stars

More like 3.5, but since that isn’t an option, let’s go with three. This is a lovely little book; I just had a challenging time really getting into it. It has everything I love: food, France, humor, even liberal political leanings, Surprisingly though, I had to force myself to finish it, but I am definitely happy that I did.

I believe this book served as the basis for the “Julia” part of the film “Julie and Julia,” where a blogger takes on the recipes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking while we learn what life in France was like for Ms. Julia Child. I think it’s universally agreed that everyone liked the parts of the film that focused on Ms. Child (played by Meryl Streep) and would have preferred a film just focused on that. I agree, and think the book is so rich with description that there is plenty for multiple films.

The book isn’t just limited to Ms. Child’s life in France with her husband Paul Child (who was a cultural ambassador in the Foreign Service); it instead feels more like a memoir focused on the last fifty-plus years of her life (she died just a couple of days before her 92nd birthday). But much of that was spent living in France (also Germany, Norway and Boston). She shares about her time at Le Cordon Bleu, as well as the process behind creating Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Volume I and Volume II).

The language is vivid, although the book feels a bit slow. However, perhaps that is appropriate. Proper French cooking takes time, and isn’t something one can just dash off quickly; maybe Alex Prud’homme (who assisted his great Aunt in writing this book) recognized this and felt that there was no need to rush the story. If you like France, or food, or have fond memories of Ms. Child’s cooking show, I think this is a sweet book to check out.

Four Stars

I will forever associate Michael Ian Black with “The State.” Even though we didn’t have MTV for long when I was in high school, I have very strong memories of watching the show and loving it. I own the DVDs (yup, actual, physical, non-Blu-Ray DVDs), and thanks to Mr. Black I can clearly describe to you what $240 worth of pudding looks like.

I now follow Mr. Black on Twitter, which is how I found out about his new book. I was looking for something to listen to at the gym and on my walks to and from work, and this one turned out to be rather perfect for that purpose.

The full title of this sweet, funny, interesting, relatable and vulnerable book is “Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (but also my mom’s, which I know sounds weird).” It’s about Mr. Black’s attempts to wrestle with his own mortality and aging body while dealing with the fact that his mother is chronically ill. There’s an entire (vividly descriptive) chapter focused on how much he hates his feet. There’s one where he chronicles his attempt to learn what diseases he is predisposed to getting. And there’s a really great chapter focused on training for and running his first 10K race.

I very deliberately chose to include the descriptor “vulnerable” because I appreciated how Mr. Black stripped down to his deepest fears (which many of us share) and was brutally honest with the reader about his attempts to sort through them. It could have been SUCH a heavy book; instead, it was light in the right places, darkly humorous in the right places, and (sparingly) just plain dark when necessary. Mr. Black read the audio version, which I think really made the book come alive.

Five Stars

The estate of Notorious B.I.G. gave permission to use chapter titles inspired by his lyrics. That’s pretty fantastic. More fantastic? This book. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an impressive woman who I wish I knew more about when I was younger. She is tougher than I am, that’s for sure, and she’s spent her life quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) breaking down barriers. She writes opinions that recognize the humanity of our fellow citizens, and pens deliberate dissents that point out when the majority on the court get it so very, very wrong.

The book is made a bit in the style of the Jon Stewart book from years ago; it’s in hardcover, it has a lot of great pictures, and its chapters are short enough that you can digest them in pieces, or enjoy them all in one long sitting. Included are excerpts from her rulings and dissents, annotated (my favorite one was simply “burn”) with the assistance of legal scholars.

Ms. Carmon and Ms. Knizhnik were able to speak to Justice Ginsburg for this book, so it provides what I think is a real feel for who the Justice is not just as a member of the Supreme Court, but as a woman in this world. It isn’t as dense as a traditional biography, but that’s not its purpose. It has a very clear point of view, and it is one that I really appreciated reading. My husband is reading it next (he actually bought it, for the feminist book club we’re participating in this month), and I hope to either pass this copy along to others or, more likely, purchase it and gift it to my friends in the coming years.

2 Stars

Here’s a thing I’m going to attempt to not do again: buy an audio book written and read by an author who is not a humorist or comedian. This is not a slam on Ms. Barrymore’s writing skills; it’s just that I think that this wasn’t in a format that was conducive to really getting a lot out of this totally fine selection of memoir-esque essays.

I appreciate that Ms. Barrymore didn’t spend a lot of time in the book focused on the aspects of her childhood that those of us who remember it would consider ‘salacious.’ She mentions in passing the reason her mother sent her away, and expressed profound understanding of her mother’s strengths and weaknesses in raising her, and she speaks of her years as a child actor, but that isn’t the primary focus of the book.

In fact, nothing in the book was really bad and nothing was really good. At times the audio version felt a bit like listening to a novel or a radio play, and that wasn’t always a good thing. Some of the stories were very cute, and I get the sense that Ms. Barrymore is very self-aware. Yes, she does come across as a bit of a hippie, and there’s a whole lot of sincerity, but there’s also a bit more … wit (that seems mean)? Sarcasm? I’m not sure. But more of whatever that is than I was expecting. It’s not just loads of flower language and talk of the healing power of crystals.

I genuinely feel that I would have enjoyed the book much more if I had read it and not listened to it. Reading it would allow me to absorb each essay and hopefully get more out of it than the audio version. Yes, it was at times funny to hear the voices (and screams) punctuating some of her stories, but it didn’t have enough to really keep me engaged. So, audio book: 2 stars. But I’m betting that the visual version would get at least three.

2 Stars

This book raised some questions about what we should expect from biographers. Are they merely relating details of the life of a person, or should they provide more of a commentary on that life as well? Is what we might consider to be ‘neutral’ reporting actually just reinforcing the status quo? By not dwelling on the more questionable parts of a subject’s personality, is the biographer acting in an appropriate manner, or are they implicitly giving their approval by not spending more time examining those characteristics?

Robert Ripley is the subject of this biography. You’re likely familiar with the “Believe It Or Not!” brand; there was a TV show about it in the 80s, and there are Ripley’s museums in San Francisco and NYC. Mr. Ripley started as a cartoonist in the early 1900s, eventually travelling the world to visit over 200 countries, collecting information about parts of the world that were extremely foreign to people in the U.S., especially before the frequent use of photography or radio programming. This straightforward biography follows Mr. Ripley from his birth in Santa Rosa, California through to his death in New York nearly 60 years later.

The author, Mr. Thompson, is a fine writer. I hesitated a bit in the beginning, distracted by other books I received as gifts for Christmas. However, I sped through the second half of the book today, finishing it up as the Texans got destroyed by Kansas City in the playoffs. It’s written well, and I think maybe five or ten years ago I would have strongly recommended it for anyone interested in learning more about this particular figure in U.S. history.

But these days, I have more questions. For example, Mr. Ripley clearly had some misogynistic tendencies, and while Mr. Thompson does mention this (which a lesser author might gloss over even further), he doesn’t examine it in a thoughtful way. The larger issue, however, that I just don’t think received enough attention in this biography, is the ethics of the entire basis for the Believe It Or Not concept: how “weird” the world is outside of the U.S. I get the sense from this biography that Mr. Ripley felt that he respected other cultures, but I’m not entirely sure that he did. He was certainly well-traveled, and developed strong affinities for certain cultures (especially China), but his cartoons at times dipped into racist territory, and his collections of curios and oddities really just seems like a whole lot of ‘othering’ of non-U.S. cultures.

And this is where those questions I posed at the start of this review come up. What duty – if any – does the biographer have to the audience to delve deeper into the subject’s actions? Is a biographer merely a stenographer, pulling together clippings and filling in the blanks, or is he or she an investigative reporter, looking deeper into the subject and placing at least some level of judgment on the actions the subject has taken throughout his or her life? I think it’s more of the latter, or at least that’s my feeling after reading this book. Mr. Thompson spends really no ink exploring whether it was ethical or appropriate for a white man to travel to Africa and bring back and display (out of context) parts of the cultures on that continent. I don’t think it’s necessarily cut and dried; Mr. Ripley’s work did expose many in the U.S. to parts of the world they knew nothing about. But I don’t think the default should be that whatever Mr. Ripley did was value-neutral, which is what this book presents.

Ms. Benincasa is the author of two YA novels and one deeply honest and very entertaining memoir. This latest novel follows three high school sophomores and one very young teacher on a high school trip to DC. My local library somehow ignored the release date (November 3), and so yesterday I got told my hold notice was up. This book was so entertaining that I started it while working out this morning and didn’t end up putting it down (for real) until I finished it three hours later.

The book moves pretty quickly – the trip to DC is only two nights and three days long, so usually there wouldn’t be a ton of time to build the characters, and yet Ms. Benincasa manages to do just that. There are at least five, and more like ten characters that we are interested in learning more about, and we get, not the whole picture, but enough to not have them merge together in a blur of teenager-ness.

The main young teacher is very idealistic, and also romantically interested in the other chaperone. Every other chapter covers her being either a bit naïve about the students in her care or concerned about her interactions with her co-chaperone. Then there is a trio of sophomore girls whose story is covered in the in between chapters, seeking to have a little bit of extra fun while on their vacation. The convention of alternating chapters could have been a bit confusing, or taken the reader out of the story, but it works here.

There are moments when I was genuinely surprised at what happened, which, considering this isn’t a mystery novel, was a pleasant twist. And the characters weren’t caricatures, which could be easy enough to do with the storyline. Some were sexually experienced; some weren’t. Some were more politically aware and socially conscious; some weren’t. Not everyone was white, and not everyone was straight.

I’m pretty sure I’m always going to enjoy what Ms. Benincasa writes, and I’m looking forward to what comes next. She also holds a special spot in my writer heart, as she signed my notebook with the below message when I went to a reading and told her I was working on a book.

Three Stars

This is very sweet, very raw, book. I’m not sure what I expected from it, but I’m happy that I bought it.

You probably know Maria Bello because she is an actress. But this book isn’t the typical memoir that I’ve been reading as of late. Instead of the story of her life, Ms. Bello shares with us her search for meaning within her life. The point of the book is to explore the labels we put on ourselves and others, and question what those labels mean.

She jumps right in, with a section called ‘Am I a Partner?’, where she examines what it really does mean to be a partner – is it your spouse? Do you have to be having sex with someone to consider them a partner? Are we limited to just one? Other sections explore religion, feminism, and resiliency.

The book offers some interesting ideas. I can’t relate to everything she says – her Catholicism and strong belief in that idea of the divine factors into many of the discussions – but I found a lot of value in her writing. It got me thinking about how I view myself and others, and where I can find strength.

Ms. Bello is so vulnerable and open, but I never felt like she was sharing too much. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a must-read, but I’m certainly glad I read it.