Nonfiction Lover

Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe by Robin Kerrod & Carole Stott is a flat-out gorgeous book.  I picked it up because the front cover was eye catching and because my inner child still wants to grow up and be an astronaut.

And I fell in love with it from page one.  I have always been a huge astronomy fan, starting from when I would take long walks with my father out in the desert. We’d look at the different constellations, with him giving me info on each one.

So it’s not surprising that I’d be interested in a book about the Hubble telescope.  What is surprising is how much I learned from the book, and how much I enjoyed reading it.  Some of the pictures taken by Hubble are jaw dropping.  Spread over two pages, they are colorful, gorgeous snapshots of deep space.

The pictures are the best part of this book, but that’s not to say that the text isn’t interesting.  The book was loaded with everything from black holes to pulsar stars, and the history behind each discovery.  I felt as if I had taken an in-depth astronomy class by time I finished reading the book.  Even better, it wasn’t dry, boring facts, just thoroughly engrossing reading.

I was really excited to find a site online that allowed me to download a picture from the inside of the book.  Now granted, this picture isn’t one of the larger ones, and it isn’t as colorful as some of the other pictures, and it’ll definitely lose something in translation (from the book to the website to my computer to my website to your computer - whew!!) but at least it gives you an idea of what the book offers.

Isn’t that a cool picture?  One of the things that I was excited to find out is that none of the pictures in the book were “touched up” to provide brighter or more eye-catching colors.  All of the pictures were published exactly how the galaxies look in outer space.  I had no idea our universe was so colorful!

So whether you’re a homeschooling mom who wants to do a section on space, or just someone with even a mild interest in astronomy and the universe, you really need to pick this one up!  I honestly cannot think of a single thing to change about it.  I enjoyed the book from beginning to end.

A rare 5 out of 5 stars for Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe.  Kudos to Robin Kerrod and Carole Stott for a job well done.

Havs

For any readers of young adult paranormal books, Lois Duncan is probably a very familiar name.  She produced such hits as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Hotel for Dogs (another book that is being produced into a movie - this one is coming out in January of 2009.)

I don’t happen to be one of those people - I had heard the name Lois Duncan before and vaguely recognized it, but as far as I can remember, I haven’t read one of her books before.  I saw the book, Who Killed My Daughter? by Lois Duncan while doing check-in on Friday, and was instantly intrigued.  I don’t read true-life murder mysteries by writers like Ann Rule, but I figured that since this was a true-life murder mystery written by the mother of the victim, it would make it more interesting to me.

So I came home with it, and figured that since I was so tired, I would take it into the bedroom with me and read it until I fell asleep for my afternoon nap.  Two hours later, I was wide awake, and thoroughly engrossed in the story.  Unlike most true-life murder mysteries you can find on the bookshelf, I knew that this one ended on a question mark.  Here’s a quotation from the book flap:

Our teenage daughter Kaitlyn was chased down and shot to death while driving home from a girlfriend’s house on a peaceful Sunday evening.  Police dubbed the shooting “random.”  But to our family, the circumstances didn’t add up to “random,” especially after we made the shocking discovery that Kait had been keeping some very dangerous secrets from us…

After spending two years investigating Kait’s death, our family has managed to accumulate enough information to form a fragmented picture of what may have happened to her, but the jigsaw puzzle still lacks the few key pieces that could nail the identity of her killers.  It is my hope that reading Kait’s story will motivate potential informants to supply us with those pieces.

The shooting happened July 16, 1989, and the book was published in 1992.  I read the book knowing that it was solved now - after all, this book was old, and there was no way that it could still be an unsolved mystery.

I was wrong.

I finished the book Friday night at 1:00 in the morning.  It had made me so paranoid and freaked out (not only was this some wild stuff, but it was true wild stuff, and there are some really bad people in this book!) that I went around closing all the blinds in the house, convinced that the Vietnamese mafia was outside of my house, watching me.  Nevermind that I’m in Idaho, and as far as I know, there is no Vietnamese mafia for hundreds of miles.  I was convinced they had it out for me.

I then jumped online, happy to finally be able to find out “whodunnit.”  I had made myself wait until I finished the book before I looked, because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by knowing the ending before I got to it.  I was shocked and a little mad that there wasn’t an ending to be found.  Not mad at Lois and her family, but mad the police force for not figuring it out. It’s almost 20 years later, and still no arrested killer? It seemed impossible.

Which is how Lois and her family feel about it too, I’m sure.  Six months after the shooting, on New Year’s Day of 1990, Lois’s husband said, “I thought they would have arrested the murderer by now.”  Little did he know he’d be saying that 19 years later…

You wouldn’t believe everything included in this book: Vietnamese mafia, insurance scams, drug cartels, psychics, frighteningly real (and accurate!) dreams, and the most inept police force you’ll ever meet.  If you asked this police force to add 2 + 2, I have no doubts but that they’d come up with the number 7, and then defend that answer within an inch of their lives.

If you’ve heard of this case before, or if you’ve already read Who Killed My Daughter?, you’ll want to check out the family’s website, Who Killed Kait Arquette? and read through the different links on there.  There are quite a few updates on there, like the fact that part of the inept and stupid police force has been convicted of felonies, and have been exposed as “rogue” cops.  That really doesn’t surprise you after reading the book.

There is also a cool section where you can read and post comments, and Lois Duncan will respond to those comments personally.  I put a comment up on Friday night/Saturday morning, and Lois had already responded to my comment by Sunday afternoon.  She is very on top of that board and responds quickly to each and every comment.

But the coolest part was the excerpts section - apparently, Lois Duncan is writing a sequel called, The Tallykeeper and might publish it also without an answer of “whodunnit.”  If she does, you can be sure that I’ll read it quickly and write up a review for it on here.  The excerpts alone made me breathless and sent my heart racing.

My only real problem with Who Killed My Daughter? was the psychics readings.   I’ve always been a skeptic when it comes to that kind of thing, but then again, so has Lois Duncan.  She was sort of dragged into it at first, but by the end, she had become very reliant on what they said.

I didn’t mind that so much (I don’t have to believe something or be thoroughly convinced about its validity in order to enjoy a book) but instead my problem lay in the readings themselves.  Here’s an excerpt from one of the psychic readings:

 There will be this that will show that she will have had some kind of connection to these two suspects and that they know her.  There is something about them which will cause her to recoil as if there will have been some kind of other encounter at another time.  They will seem to have some way to fear that something is known about them by her and thus now by others.  This will seem to put a fear into them they will still be under the containment and control of the questioners and can be asked questions even if there is not fully know the meaning of the questions even by the questioners.

Come again?

Some passages make more sense, and some make less sense.  I found myself skimming the psychic readings after a while, because the stuff like above doesn’t make sense to me.   Perhaps I’m a little slow, I don’t know, but it seems rather convoluted to me.

Other than that, it was one of the most gripping books I have read in a very, very long time.  I simply could not put it down.  I think anyone who has even the slightest interest in true-life murder mysteries should pick this book up.

I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Lois - I hope you find the killer soon.

Havs

I picked up The Complete Guide to Attics and Basements by Black and Decker because we were looking at finishing off the attic in our home.  We own a Craftsman-style home built in the 1920’s, and we thought that it would be an easy way to add on square footage.

Well, I’m so glad I picked this book up because it’s saved us a whole lot of time and money.  We found out from reading it that converting our attic isn’t possible.  After reading the requirements for the ceiling height in bedrooms, we crawled up into our attic and measured.  We barely hit 7 feet at the ridgeline, and according to this book, your ceiling has to be at least 7′6″ over 50% of the floor. We don’t hit 7′6″ anywhere, let alone over 50% of the floor, darn it.

We were going to hire someone to come in and look at our attic to give us some ideas on how to best finish it off, and I’m sure such a trip would’ve cost us several hundred dollars.  That’s obviously not going to happen now.  Apparently, reading books really can pay off, literally!

Even though this book spelled the end of one of our plans, I still enjoyed it.  I was very grateful that it was clear, easy to understand, well laid out, with lots of illustrations and examples.  I enjoyed the first section, where there were lots of pictures to give me fun ideas, and then the second section, where there were step-by-step instructions on how to do a wide variety of projects, from adding drywall to your basement walls to installing baseboard heaters.It is focused more on giving you a broad overview of the process and ideas rather than a manual with intricate instructions.

 I would suggest checking it out of the library before buying it, just to make sure it’s got what you need, and it aimed at your level of expertise and expectations.  But if what you’re looking for is ideas and some concrete tips on how to convert your attic or basement, you couldn’t go wrong with The Complete Guide to Attics and Basements.

I give it 4.25 out of 5 stars.Havs

PS If you’re on the hunt for books about remodeling, make sure to check out my review of Affordable Remodel by Fernando Pages Ruiz.  That was another great remodeling book. (You can probably tell I’ve been focusing on remodeling a lot lately!  That’s part of the joy of buying an older home…)

In honor of my starting college this week to get my associates degree in Library Science, I decided to review The Romance of Libraries by Madeleine Lefebvre. It was a book that caught my eye while searching the (library!) shelves - a nice pink, cheery color.  And who could resist a book about libraries and love?

I wasn’t disappointed - it was a fun book filled with stories about couples who met and fell in love in, at, or around the library.  Compiled by Madeleine Lefebvre, they are all true stories and some are quite heartfelt. Most of the romances profiled worked out, but a couple did not.

All of them somehow related to the library, whether it was where they met, where one of the people worked, or where they got engaged.  There were even a few marriages conducted in a library.  (I am so jealous…)

If you want a light book to read, and you enjoy sweet stories about people falling in love, then you’ll thoroughly enjoy this book.  Although libraries and books are definitely a part of the book, they don’t overwhelm it so don’t feel like you have to be a library aficionado to read it.  You might find yourself down at the public library more often though (never a bad thing).

Like all compiled stories about the same subject, the stories seemed to run together after a while, and there wasn’t really much depth to any of them (since the stories were an average of two paragraphs long).  This just meant that it’s a book you could easily pick up and put down at any time, and probably one you’d want to read in short bursts rather than all at once.

Overall, I give The Romance of Libraries 4.25 stars out of 5.

Havs

I’m not sure how to describe 1 Dead in the Attic: After Katrina by Chris Rose. It was very depressing, yet at times made me laugh and gave me hope for this world.

I guess I could start with the easy stuff: The author is a columnist at The Times-Picayune, the local newspaper for New Orleans. The book is a compilation of his daily columns, starting after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.

Some of the columns were darkly funny, some of the columns were just plain dark.  Some of them gave you a renewed confidence in mankind, others made you question how people that horrid could have lived for so long.

I can say one thing for sure: This was an eye-opener of a book.  I have never been to New Orleans, and so I witnessed the destruction on TV with horrified detachment, much as most of America did.  A few months after it happened it faded from view and I forgot about it, to be honest.  I didn’t want to, and I didn’t mean to, but life does have a habit of going on.

1 Dead in the Attic was a needed reminder that although I may have moved on, life in New Orleans didn’t, at least not in the same way.  Many people suffered through bouts of depression; some people committed suicide because of it.  I’ve never lived through anything like Hurricane Katrina, and I had never thought about what would be happening a year after the storm hit, or two years, or three.  If I had, I would have realized on an intellectual level that people would be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but I never got that far.

I’m feeling rather guilty now for my negligence, but that can’t be blamed on Rose.  He doesn’t set out to make the readers depressed.  It’s just how I reacted.

Lest you think the whole book is depressing, let me share one of the funnier columns with you.  Although Rose stayed in New Orleans after Katrina, the rest of his family went to Maryland and stayed for several months, so he would travel back and forth between the two cities regularly.  Here is a column about one such trip:

[B]efore each journey, I check with my kids by phone to see what they need from our house in New Orleans.

Of course, they need everything, they tell me.  Every toy, every article of clothing, every piece of furniture, everything that hangs on the walls, every piece of building material down to the studs.

“Itemize,” I urge them.

“Barbies,” they tell me.

“I can do that,” I tell them.

And so my chore began one afternoon, as I crouched and crawled into their secret places in our house - small, dark spaces I have never been in, places that are not hospitable to people larger than, say, a dorm refrigerator.

In the process, I discovered that there has been a population of approximately fifty Barbies living under my roof.  I did not know this.

An absurd number, I was thinking, but then I remembered that I used to collect empty egg cartons when I was a kid and I probably had a couple hundred - a closet full of them - before my mother brought the hammer down on that curious little hobby of mine.

Truth is, I don’t recall even the barest notion of why I collected egg cartons nor what I did with them.   I just did.  So who am I to tell my kids they have too many Barbies?

Let them be, I say.  I mean, I turned out okay, right?

Don’t answer that.

~Page 81 - 82 of 1 Dead in the Attic by Chris Rose

He is extremely easy to read; I’ve had good luck with newspaper writers in the past, and this book was no exception.  He is a talented writer.  He is frank and direct, and everything is so real that you feel as if you too lived through the destruction that Hurricane Katrina wrought upon New Orleans.

My only critique of the book was that the columns were not in chronological order, nor could I see that there was any rhyme or reason to how they were published.  It was disconcerting to see that we had jumped back in time three months for no apparent reason.  I eventually stopped paying attention to the dates of the columns so it would stop bothering me, an easy fix.

Overall, I give 1 Dead in the Attic 4.75 out of 5 stars.  And my thanks to Mr. Rose for publishing it.  I needed to read this book.

Havs

There is an old saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope proves it.

Here’s the lowdown:

A busload of college students were driving home from doing banquet work in another city when they were struck by a truck, killing five out of the nine people inside. One of the survivors, Laura Van Ryn, was thrown 50 feet and it was touch and go for a while as to whether she’d live or not.  She lapsed into a deep coma, and the family had no idea if she’d ever wake up.

Five weeks come and go, and Laura slowly made progress.  Finally, she’s in good enough shape to start talking coherently, and do things like eating, exercising, etc.  As a part of the therapy, the physical therapist asked Laura to write her name. She scrawled across the page:

W-H-I-T-N-E-Y

Turns out, in the car wreck, there were two girls who didn’t know each other very well, but who looked strangely similar. The purse for Laura Van Ryn landed next to Whitney Cerak, and the first responders to the scene took one look at the driver’s license and identified Whitney as being Laura.

So Whitney’s family had a funeral (closed casket - the parents never looked at their daughter’s body upon their own request), gave away her clothing, and in general did their best to move on, all while their daughter was really in a hospital room in a deep coma.

And then there were Laura’s parents, loving and caring for someone who they thought was their daughter, and when they noticed small anomalies like her teeth being different, they attributed it all to the accident. “The force of the accident must have pushed her teeth that way,” they told themselves.

When Laura mumbled, “False parents” and pointed to her dad, her dad got huffy and thought, “False! I put you through college and have loved you and fed you and done everything I could for you. Why are you calling me a false dad?”

It wasn’t until Whitney became mentally quicker and more agile did the truth come out. It was confirmed with dental records. That day, the family of the Van Ryn’s went home to grieve the death of their daughter, and the Ceraks were called to find out that their daughter was raised from the dead.

Overall, it was one of the most interesting stories I think I have ever heard. It’s an amazing testament to the human mind, where an entire family could spend five weeks with a complete stranger they had never met, and yet believe the entire time that it was their daughter.

So yes, it was an interesting story, but for anyone who is not a born-again Christian, the book will make you uncomfortable. Both families are born-again Christians - both fathers work as pastors. The daughters were both going to a Christian college. Every page has some reference to scriptures, singing gospel songs, praying, etc. The entire book revolves around giving praise to Jesus, having a relationship with Jesus, praying to Jesus…You get the picture.

So if you’re born-again Christian, you’ll absolutely love this book. It will be an affirmation of your testimony, and you’ll come away from it with a stronger faith than ever.

If you’re another religion, or atheist, I suggest you skip this book. The constant references to Jesus will be too big of a distraction for you to enjoy it.

I give Mistaken Identity 4 out of 5 stars. The writing style was a bit simplistic and it didn’t end up being one of my favorites, but it certainly had an interesting plotline.

Hava

PS In case you’re in the mood for some real fiction, make sure to check out a fellow Today.com blog called Fiction Book Blog.  It’s written by a coworker of mine from my local library - when he found out that you could write about books and get paid for it, he got excited and asked for the website address to apply.  Now, he’s covering the other end of the spectrum: Fiction.  If you want variety in your reviews, you couldn’t ask for a better complement to my blog than his.

Before I get started on today’s book review, I just wanted to give a special thanks to a fellow Today.com blogger, Michael Nolan at Frugal Living Tip of the Day.  He was kind enough to make a new header for this blog, free of charge, and I now have a header that matches the subject of my blog, instead of a generic one.  I’ve already had compliments on it!  So many thanks to Michael, and for my readers, if you’re wanting to find a great site full of frugal tips, Michael’s is well written, and well done.  Be sure to head on over there.

So on to my book review: I originally checked out A.J. Jacob’s book, The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World from the library and gave it to my father to read. I figured if anyone would understand and love the quest to read the Encyclopedia Brittanica from beginning to end, it would be my dad. I didn’t read the book myself though.

Then I checked out The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible and it came home to sit on my shelf of books-I’m-going-to-read-someday. (And no, I don’t think the similarities in the subtitles are a coincidence…)

My sister came over, saw the book, thought it looked interesting, and checked it out of the library herself (my copy of the book eventually being returned unread). She really liked it, and told me I needed to read it. So I checked it out again. Returned it unread again.

The fourteenth time’s a charm - I finally read it. Funny thing was, as soon as I started reading, I was thoroughly engrossed in the story. He has an engaging writing style - easy to read, with lots of quirky humor and strange obsessions to round out his personality. Obviously, if he’s willing to read a 32-volume set of encyclopedias, or live an entire year as Biblically as possible (up to and including eating locusts, even if they were chocolate covered) then you know he’s not your average Joe.

My sister and I discussed the book and came to the conclusion: This book is great for raising questions in your mind; not so great at answering them. Why did God say that you can’t wear clothing of mixed fibers (such a blend of cotton and linen)? Or that you can’t touch a woman while she’s having her period? Or that you’re supposed to blow a horn at the beginning of each month?

I know that Christians don’t follow these rules now, but why were they put in place originally? What do these rules do for the human race?

A.J. does try to find answers to some of these questions, although more often than not, he doesn’t succeed. He is focusing on these questions because the majority of the book focuses on the Old Testament (A.J.’s family is lapsed Jewish, although A.J. is agnostic himself). He does spend several months on the New Testament, however.

He discusses a lot of red-hot social issues like abortion and homosexuality, and also things like literalism (the idea that everything in the Bible is 100% true, vs the idea that some of it and/or all of it is an allegory), and creationism (the idea that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and that God did create the Earth in a mere six days).

Although he pretty much always comes down on the side of a more liberal point-of-view on these issues, it isn’t in an antagonistic fashion, and I don’t think too many people would get mad over his conclusions (they may not agree, but I don’t think they’d get angry at him for how he phrased his viewpoint).

He isn’t all serious - he tells some great stories that had me laughing.  He lives in New York City, and relates the following story about trying to buy some Bibles from a Christian store:

He shows me tables covered with Bibles of all shapes, sizes, and linguistic slants - from the plain-spoken English of the Good News Bible to the majestic cadence of the Jerusalem Bible.

He points out one Bible I might want. It’s designed to look exactly like a Seventeen magazine: An attractive (if long-sleeved) model graces the front, next to cover lines like “What’s Your Spiritual IQ?” Open it up and you’ll find sidebars such as “Rebecca the Control Freak.”

“This one’s good if you’re on the subway and are too embarrassed to be seen reading the Bible,” says Chris. “Because no one will ever know it’s a Bible.” It’s an odd and poignant selling point. You know you’re in a secular city when it’s considered more acceptable for a grown man to read a teen girl’s magazine than the Bible. ~ Page 9 of The Year of Living Biblically

Too true.

Overall, I thought it was an interesting look at one of the most influential books of all time, and I think that although The Year of Living Biblically may not be for everybody, it was well worth the read for me. I give it 4.25 out of 5 stars.

Now I’m going to have to go read The Know-It-All…

Havs

I have to confess: I’ve never read a single Nicholas Sparks book. I own the movie The Notebook, and only found out by pure chance a couple of weeks ago that it was based on a Nicholas Sparks book. I had no clue. I check out a lot of Nicholas Sparks books to patrons, and quite frankly, all of the titles just run together in my mind. I had never paid attention to the fact that one of them was named The Notebook. A keen eye for details, I have not.

So why did I read Three Weeks With My Brother by Nicholas and Micah Sparks? Well, I was wandering about Barnes and Noble with my husband, and for once, I was waiting for him to finish reading a book before we could go. (Needless to say, it’s usually the other way around). I wandered over to the biography section, and there was Three Weeks With My Brother. I was surprised. I hadn’t realized that Nicholas Sparks had written anything but fiction. I picked the book up and started reading.

And just loved it. I was laughing (quietly, of course - heaven forbid I get kicked out of B&N!) just a few pages in. He has an excellent writing style, which after I thought about it, realized it only made sense. The guy makes his living by writing. If his writing style left something to be desired, I rather think he wouldn’t be on the New York Times Bestseller list regularly.

I can’t testify myself that his fiction writing style is fantastic, but I can his memoir writing style. His parents were unique in their child-raising techniques, to say the least. The following is a little long, but I think captures the childhood of Nicholas and his older brother, Micah, quite well:

On the first day of kindergarten, Mom walked with Micah to the bus stop; from there forward, he walked by himself. Within a week, he told my mom that some older girls, 7th grade or thereabouts but huge to a kindergartener, had cornered him in the junkyard and taken his milk money. Then they threatened him; they said that if he didn’t bring them a nickel every day, they were going to hurt him.

“They said they’re going to beat me up bad,” Micah cried.

There are a number of ways a parent could handle such a situation. My mom could have started walking him to school regularly, for instance, or walked with him one day, confronted the girls, and threatened to call the police if another incident occurred…Not my mom. Instead, after Micah told his story, she rose from the table and…when she returned, she was carrying an old Roy Rogers lunchbox; rusty and dented, it had been her younger brother’s years before.

“We’ll put your lunch in this tomorrow, instead of a brown bag,” she said, and if they try to take your money, just wind up and hit ‘em with it. Like this…”

Cocking her arm like a lion tamer, she began swinging the lunchbox in wide arcs, demonstrating while my brother sat at the table watching.

The next day, my six-year-old brother marched off to school with his hand-me-down lunchbox. And just as they’d threatened, the girls surrounded him when he wouldn’t give them his nickel. When the first one charged, he did exactly as my mom had told him.

In our bedroom that night, Micah related to me what happened.

“I swung with everything I had,” he said.

“Weren’t you scared?”

With his lips pressed together, he nodded. “But I kept swinging and hitting them until they ran away crying.”

The girls, I might add, never bothered him again.
~Page 25 - 26 of Three Weeks With My Brother

Yup, the mother actually showed her son (a kindergartener) how to beat up a group of 7th graders, and more amazingly still, he succeeded.  The parents were big fans of the Tough Love School of Parenting.

They were…relaxed, I guess is the kindest way to put it, in their parenting style. They gave their kids BB guns, which Nicholas (they called him Nicky as a child) and Micah used with wild abandon until the sheriff came and took them away. To console the children, the parents then gave them a bow and arrow set, with real arrows. None of the wussy plastic shafts and bunted tips for them. The kids played with that until (you guessed it) the sheriff came and took that away too. They came a little too close to killing other people one too many times.

So where does the three weeks part come in? Well, in 2002, Nicholas and Micah embark on a trip around in the world, which lasts for three weeks. It’s quite an adventure, and Nicholas always starts the chapter out in present time, and then jumps back in history to their childhood. It is their autobiography, not just a story about those three weeks in 2002. And I do mean “their” - really, it’s an autobiography of the whole Sparks family, with the emphasis on Nicholas and Micah.

I cried hard and laughed a lot too - it is one of the best autobiographies that I have ever read. Even if you’ve never read a lick of Sparks’ writing and have no interest in learning more about him (hmmm…sounds familiar) if you like autobiographies, you’ll love this book. Heck, if you just love a good story, you’ll love this book.

I’m giving it a rare 5 out of 5 stars. Thanks for the amazing book, Nicky. I just might have to read one of your fiction books someday…

Havs

Today is the opening ceremonies for the Olympics in China, so of course, I had to review a book about China. China: People, Place, Culture, History was the book I chose, and I’ll admit: I chose it because it had a beautiful cover. I know there’s that old saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but in this case, that would have meant me missing out on a gorgeous book.

China: People, Place, Culture, History was definitely meant to be a coffee table book. Large, with a woven red cover and gold lettering, it’s an eye-catching book. But coffee table destiny or no, this book was crammed full of beautiful photos, great history, and interesting information. It’s thick (355 pages) and so chock-full of information, it could take a dedicated reader several weeks to get through the whole book.

It starts out focusing on geography by publishing a single photo spread out over two pages.  The first whole chapter is set up this way.  Some of the vistas were breathtaking, and some of them reminded me of Idaho, which is strange, because I never associated that kind of geography with China.

I guess with a country as large as China (it is roughly the same size as America) you’re going to have a lot of variation in geography. I had just honestly never thought about it, and imagined the whole country to be one large bamboo forest interspersed with lots of rice paddies and huge cities. Boy, was I wrong!

To accompany the photos, there was a small paragraph that explained the photo, and a Chinese poem that somehow related to the picture. It was a fun way to start off the book, and I felt like I had had a great visual tour of China.

China: People, Place, Culture, History then switches to history, and gives a timeline for important Chinese dates, a section lasting 45 pages. Although dry historical dates and facts tend to be boring, they did a great job of spicing it up with photos and sidebars with more in-depth information.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how well done the book was - I looked and realized that the book was written by DK Publishing, the same company that does the Eyewitness Series for kids (I reviewed the Titanic: Discover the Luxury of this Famous Ship by them.) I had thought DK Publishing only did kids’ books, so that was fun to see.  After realizing that, I started to pay attention while at work, and realized that quite a few “coffee table books” have been done by DK.  I somehow missed that along the way…

China also covers people, culture, and architecture in their own sections, with enough information on each that you’ll feel like a grad student in Chinese culture by time you’re done. For any homeschooling families who reading this and are interested in studying China, I highly recommend that you check this book out of the library (or buy it) and make it a large part of your studies. I think all of the photos will help keep even the younger kids interested.

Overall, I give China: People, Place, Culture, History 4.5 out of 5 stars. Great job, DK Publishing!

Hava

PS My coworker said that the Chinese chose to start the Olympics today because 08-08-08 is considered to be a “lucky day” for the Chinese.  I have no idea if that’s true or not, but it is a pretty cool date, regardless.

I hesitated when I first saw this book doing check-in - it looked funny, on one hand (I sped-read the backside, and it seemed like something my Handsome Older Brother would write, quite frankly) but on the other hand, “Poo Bomb”? Seriously? That was pretty crude and yucky, and I don’t tend to like a crude sense of humor.

But in the end, I picked up and brought home The Poo Bomb: True Tales of Parental Terror by Jeff Vogel, and I did read it. I ended the book much the same way that I started it: With mixed feelings.

Yes, there were some pretty funny spots, but overall, I just didn’t appreciate the swear words (LOTS of swear words!!) or the yucky sense of humor. I honestly wish I hadn’t picked it up. I almost didn’t review it on here (now I have to actually claim that I read this book!) but I finally decided in the end that I needed to review it, just so that others could decide for themselves.

It’s a 921, which means it’s an autobiography. Jeff Vogel chronicles the first year of his daughter’s life in a journal - week by week, he goes through what she learned to do and what funny things (he thinks) happened that week (like the Poo Bomb diaper, or her spitting up on other people, etc). Even being childless like I am, I could relate to some of it, and I laughed pretty hard in parts.

Here’s one section that was particularly funny to me, mostly because basically the same thing has happened to my husband and I multiple times:

George and Sharon Vogel - My Parents
My parents. Good, decent people. Who wanted grandchildren. A lot. I soon realized that we had to be very careful talking to them. Actual conversation:

Me: Mom, we got great news.
Mom: Mariann is pregnant!
Me: Uhhh, no. We got a new bedroom set.
~Page xvii of The Poo Bomb

Yeah, I definitely relate.

I do have to say, I feel really sorry for the daughter. When she grows up and people find out that her father wrote a book about her as a baby, forget Prom or Homecoming or anything else remotely sociable. No guy is going to want to go out with the “Poo Bomb Girl.” Lots of pity there.

There are simply funnier people out there (like Dave Barry) and certainly less crude books out there for you to enjoy. I would say that the average person ought to skip this one.

In the end, The Poo Bomb only gets 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Hava
Who can’t believe she’s actually claiming to have read this book…