Comments (0) Need some new recipes in your repertoire? Check out these four cookbooks for some quick, easy, and delectable ideas.
Cooking Light: Fresh Food Fast
Southern Living Complete Quick and Easy Cookbook
Nigella Express: Good Food, Fast
-Beth
Let it Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont and the End of the Sixties
By Ethan A. Russell
Whoah! Quite a gripping and sometimes harrowing work with many of the photographs being simply stunning (and never before seen).
Reading about the Stones’ 1969 tour (with Mick Taylor & Ian Stewart on board) – Mick Jagger lamenting about being “so old” back then – is time travel at it’s best.
You get a sense of the evolving chaos from various perspectives, including photographer Ethan Russell, the band members, security man Tony Funches (who knocked out two Hells Angels and lived to tell about it) and others.
The book builds to the final concert, a huge festival held at the Altamont Speedway in northern California on December 6th. I had a really chilled, near visceral reaction to the firsthand accounts of what transpired here, with the Hells Angels providing “security” and ultimately stabbing a fan (who had a gun) to death near the stage. A detail is dropped in then a few pages later you see a photograph and instantly “get it”. A thousand words many times over, indeed.
The parallels mentioned to getting out of Vietnam by helicopter were right on as this concert was often a scene of mayhem, violence and general disorder. Not a happy scene.
Some of the photographs capture fans – some oblivious, many high, some focused on what is happening – from the stage, where the crush of humanity must have been stifling at best. The photo of a stunned looking Bill Wyman in the helicopter about to take off after the show is a real shocker, a moment in time.
The polar opposite of Woodstock, I’m not sure how anyone can argue that this event didn’t clearly “end the sixties”.
-Phil
From The Ground Up: the Story of a First Garden
by Amy Stewart
I recently came across this book and had no real intention in actually reading it but once I started glancing through it, I was hooked. It didn’t matter that the location of the garden was in California – gardens everywhere have the same enemies or challenges: weeds, animal life, too much or not enough sun, water, or good temperature.
For all of us who have looked at a bare spot of land and dreamed big only to realize the dream wouldn’t come to fruition for several years, this is the book for you. It had me thinking about all the ridiculous mistakes I made starting my garden – most embarrassing, but now so nice to know that I wasn’t alone.
- Betsy
The Norse colony in North America always fascinated me. Why not go right to the source? These documents were once thought legendary, then proved to be (at least partially) true by the archaeological record. Included in this collection of “Vinland Sagas” are the Book of the Icelanders and the Book of the Settlements, which chronicle of the colonization of Iceland; and the Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga, which chronicle the colonization of Greenland and subsequent excursions to North America.
Written in 13th century, I was afraid these would be dry and boring, but boy was I wrong. They are full of personal details and fascinating anecdotes, only occasionally bleeding into the fantastical. There’s a lot killing and a lot ice. The texts are rich enough that we are transported into another world. A world that existed a millennium ago. We learn about what the Norse wore, ate, and worshiped. Most fascinating are the tensions between the traditional religion and Christianity. The conversion of Europe to Christianity happened so long ago, it is often just a line or two in a school book, but in these sagas we have records of what that conversion was like, the tensions it caused, and how communities dealt with said tension. Did I mention the killings and the ice?
Another surprise was that the Iceland sagas we’re often more interesting than the Greenland ones. In these we find majority of material about the pagan-Christian problem. Did you know there were people (not the Inuit) on Iceland before the Norse? Did you know Iceland had a parliamentary government centuries before other European countries? This is not to take anything away from the Greenland sagas. As is pointed out in the brief notes which accompany it, the Eirik the Red’s Saga is a masterpiece of European literature.
If you have a library card, Vinland Sagas is downloadable for free from Netlibrary with no DRM-restrictions. They are read by Norman Dietz and the inimitable George Guidall.
I can recommend two novelizations of the same material. The first, William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, focuses on Eirik the Red’s daughter Freydis and her role in founding of the North American colony. This is the first of Vollmann’s Seven Dreams sequence which explores the European conquest of the North American continent. It includes ink drawings by the author and contemporary accounts of his travels through Greenland.
The second is the award winning Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard de Boucheron which imagines what the dwindling Norse colony on Greenland must have been like in the 14th century. You can read my original review here.
For those not book oriented there is Severed Ways, Tony Stone’s dreamy yet realistic portrayal of two Vikings stranded in Newfoundland. Even if your not interested in the Norse, this is one of the best, truly independent, American films I have seen in recent years.
None of these titles are for the squeamish.
- Bryan
Fiction, Movies, Nonfiction
| 
Bryan, classics
Born to Run: a Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen
by Christopher McDougall
You don’t run. You hate sports. You should read this book anyway. Not focusing on running celebrities or ego-maniac endurance athletes, McDougall profiles the Tarahumara tribe of northern Mexico. With a cultural tradition of ultra-distance running (i.e. 50-100+ miles), the Tarahumara are some of the best runners in the world and seem to do so simply for the joy of it. He compares the Tarahumara with a handful of American ultrarunners who have a similar approach, and, you guessed it, are some of the best in world. People who choose to run 50-100+ miles are kind of nuts. Born to Run is a kaleidescope of lovable whack jobs (in this it shares some resemblance to John Waters’ recent Role Models). We meet Zen kickboxers, self-declared Victorian sports experts, and sex cultists. One such turned-on-tuned-in-dropped out runner, “Caballo Blanco” dreams of organizing a race between the Tarahumara and like-mined Americans. The story of the race is an inspiring as best sports tales without devolving into the pity fest cliches which ruin so many other true life sports stories.
A significant portion of Born to Run is a lot of science about human physiology and nutrition. McDougall aims to prove we are literally born to run. Many of the ideas are controversial within running circles. McDougall makes a good argument but definitely presents only one side of the evidence. I’m neutral towards the science. Much of the nutritional evidence is backed up in Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald, though said book is coming from a diametrically opposed philosophical direction. I don’t know if we were born to run. I’m not an evolutionary biologist. Isn’t it obvious though our lifestyle and food choices have sky-rocketed rates of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease? As was pointed out in the 1970s when running exploded with popularity, running helps prevent the aforementioned diseases. An uninterested reader could skip these passages and stick to the dramatic narrative about the race and larger-than-life racers.
As someone who has ran until I hallucinated and loved it, I loved this book. An ode to the joy of running, this book will not only inspire you to run more and have more fun doing it, but motivate you to get off your tukhus and accomplish other goals you thought were impossible.
- Bryan
Nonfiction
| books, Bryan, Nonfiction, sports
Candyfreak: A Journey Through The Chocolate Underbelly of America
by Steve Almond
For grown up fans of Willy Wonka, this memoir of a candy lover is a mouth watering Valentine of a book and an ode to America’s independent candy makers which are finding it more and more difficult to survive in today’s world of corporate giants like Hershey’s and Cadbury. A lifelong candy fiend, Almond claims to have eaten candy every day of his life and professes that there are 3 to 7 pounds of candy available in his household at all times.
Traveling around the country visiting local candy companies, Nashville’s own Standard Candy Company, maker of the famous Goo Goo Cluster is featured. Did you know this local company makes its bread and butter manufacturing various nutrition bars and candy bars for other companies and only makes their signature candy bar 10 days a month? Also featured is the Idaho Candy Company’s Idaho Spud, first created in 1918. It is a marshmallow like confection made of agar, a seaweed product, flavored with maple, sprinkled with coconut and rolled in cocoa to look like a potato.
Almond’s writing style is hilarious and if you get a hankering for any of the unique confections he describes there’s a list of handy websites offering these goodies for sale so we can all savor the joy.
- Phyllis
Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
Often brilliant, insightful, humorous, poignant and certainly unflinchingly descriptive, this book was a rewarding read. I learned much about the lives of young, ambitious Chinese girls leaving their home provinces to find work in Dongguan or Guangdong assembling electronic parts or working on handbags in crowded, hectic factories.
The author details the various fleeting accomplishments, relationships, ambitions and the social stratas involved in the lives of a few girls like Min and Chunming, who you will come to know quite well.
Chang has a knack for letting scenes speak for themselves – “On weekend afternoons, the Hopeful Computer Training Center was crowded with workers sitting at computers learning Word and Excel. (A sign outside advertised, in English, Microsoft Worb.)” She takes you on hilarious side trips into hyped up etiquette training sessions and inane adventures of an “Assembly Line English” training academy along with the fun involved at the Donnguan Making Friends Club.
Underneath this interesting, personal and often twisting travelogue through Chinese cities is the author’s own homecoming to her ancestral hometown of Liutai.
The book ends with an interesting look at Chunming, ever trying to reinvent herself, venturing into direct sales in the area of health foods. You’ll get an inside view of a company sales convention and the goings on there.
Be prepared to learn and laugh too.
Phil
Check out Haunted Nights: a History & Lexicon of Horror (book list)
Many folks like to be scared and the endurance of the horror genre proves that although this literary category has never quite achieved the credit given other brands of fiction, it isn’t going away anytime soon. From fireside legends and ‘The Castle of Otranto’ to postwar science-fiction films and the ‘Twilight’ series, our collective nightmares and the figures that inhabit them have had an interesting history, often overlapping and merging with other genres to create something new. These books should help familiarize you with the idea that being afraid of the dark can be quite enjoyable.
- Ben
Nonfiction
| Ben, lists, Nonfiction
Wicked Plants: the Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother
and Other Botanical Atrocities
by Amy Stewart, with illustrations by Briony Morrow-Cribbs and Jonathon Rosen
The moral of this story, boys and girls, is: never, ever run willy-nilly through the garden putting vegetation in your mouth! What doesn’t kill you can make you itch, twitch, vomit, or go crazy. Seriously, I knew that Johnson grass was a pest, but I certainly did not know that its new green shoots contain enough cyanide to kill a horse. I swear I will never go outside again without wearing garden gloves.
This fascinating little book is a compendium of nightmare plants, including some very common garden friends such as lenten rose, hydrangea, lantana, and Carolina jessamine. Don’t eat these things. And remember when we were hippies and wore those necklaces made from beautiful seeds and berries? When it started going around that the red berries were poisonous, we all thought it was a conspiracy to make us dress better. Turns out those red berries were the deadly seed of the rosary pea, native to tropical Africa and Asia. Yikes.
Wicked Plants is wonderfully designed, beginning with its printed cover. Inside are beautiful etchings from Briony Morrow-Cribbs and macabre little drawings from Jonathon Rosen. The pages are printed with an all-over schmutz, as if the book has been previously handled by a gardener. Although it suffers from the lack of an index, it’s small enough to be thumbed through when you need to know the name of the Australian stinging tree, a mere brush with which can cause unbearable pain for up to a year (dendrocnide moroides, common name gympie gympie).
As for Nancy Hanks Lincoln, she died of milk sickness from drinking the tainted milk of cows who had been grazing on white snakeroot. –Pam
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
By Allison Hoover Bartlett
I’m sure it’s no stretch of the imagination to believe that someone who works in the library loves, not only books, but books about people who love books. So I was excited to pick up The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett. Knowing that someone else can get as crazy-obsessed as I do about a favorite author or series makes me feel all toasty inside.
And then there’s this guy Gilkey. He loves books, but not because of their stories. He seeks out particularly rare books, and then he steals them. Not for their resale value and not because of any sort of nostalgia. John Gilkey steals rare books because he wants other people to think he’s smart and wealthy and cultured. Plus, he thinks he deserves them.
Kinda makes you want to punch him, right? I know, I know. But at least there are men in the world like Ken Sanders, who make it their mission to stop guys like Gilkey. This book tells the tale of Sanders, Gilkey, and the books that came between them.
Interesting sidebar: I also learned that I can never, ever be a rare books dealer. Why? Because once I’ve tracked down some highly-sought after, highly-priced copy of some highly-prized work, the last thing I’m going to do is sell it to somone else – I don’t care what kind of profit I might turn. I want to keep it because it’s MINE!!! (Is that a little selfish? See, I told you I couldn’t share…)
So, boys and girls, the moral of this story is Don’t Steal Books. Instead read about someone else who tried.
‘Til next time…
Amanda
I am freaking out at the impending end to my beloved TV show Lost. What could possibly take its place??? Books?? (Just kidding, a little library humor thrown in for free.) If you’re in the “so sad to see Lost end” camp like me, here are my suggestions to work through your grief and move on.
Fiction, Movies, Nonfiction, TV
| Crystal, lists, Movies, science.fiction, TV
Get Crafty
Check out books on Hipster Crafts
Crafty hipsters have to start somewhere. What better place than the library to learn how to make your own wares. Find books on sewing, knitting, decorating, and more on our book list.
Nonfiction
| art, Beth, lists, Nonfiction
April is the month for Earth Day, Earth Hour, and even Earth Week. So we’ve decided to celebrate for the whole month! You can do your part by taking small actions to reduce power consumption, save water, and reduce waste. Take Mayor Dean’s Environmental Pledge.
Borrow a book or media item from Nashville Public Library instead of buying a new one. Check out these books to learn more ways you can help:
Green Titles (for Adults)
Green Titles (for Teens)
Green Titles (for Children)
This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk
By Steve Waksman
Waksman demonstrates the formal give and take between metal and punk. He successfully illustrates that within the music itself there was always a dialogue between the two as opposed to the malignant verbal snowball fight took place within the media starting in the late 1970s. Not that said dialogue was always as hot and heavy as a teenage makeout session. In early chapters Waksman contrasts ideological strains by comparing artists: the Runaways vs. the Dictators; Iggy Pop vs. Alice Cooper. The word “grunge” appears nowhere on the book’s cover, yet Seattle’s finest is Waksman’s great synthesis.
Waksman’s own unsaid ideology is that even in rock, that most populist of mediums, there is an underground, critically fecund history that differs from the mainstream narrative. The underground hidden channel is where new forms are born and therefore the specimens that get canonized are made. Waksman knows that the critics that know best wrote in zines not magazines. Another emerging thesis: any label that released Black Flag’s My War, Minutemen’s Double Nickels On the Dime, and Husker Du’s Zen Arcade all in the same year has a claim to best rock label of the 1980s (or maybe any other decade for that matter). The label: SST Records. The year: 1984.
Nonfiction
| Bryan, heavymetal, punk, rock
Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music
By Greg Kot
The music industry is broken. The labels know it. The artists know it. Consumers definitely know it. Greg Kot knows it, and he seems kind of happy about it. In his book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, Kot catalogues how different musicians found ways to go over, under, around, and through the majors in order to find new paths to fans and profitability in the Wild Wild West chaos of the digital frontier.
Most of the stories Kot included were familiar, but he also introduced, at least to me, a few new artists, such as Girl Talk, who are making some high-quality music—even if it is a mash-up of other unlicensed samples.
Here is the best music quote ever:
“[The album is not dying.] What’s dying is the idea of only the crappiest crap, made with the crappiest intentions, with the crappiest production, to entice the most airtime on the crappiest giant chains of radio stations, bought and paid for by crappy labels and dictated by some crappy, contemptuous, lowest-common-denominator projecting programming executive from his crappy polling printouts in some crappy office somewhere, to ensure we all swallow the same crap all over the country at the same time, and then placing that one slice of crap on a longer disc with a bunch of even crappier crap. That is the concept that is dying. Amen.”
– Jack Rabid, editor of The Big Takeover
Amen, brother. Let’s get back to the business of making great music and let the bottom line take care of itself.
- Amanda
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