Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Stars: 4.5/5
Author: Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
Subjects: vegetables, farmers, local food, gardening, cooking, farmers' markets, the industrialized food market
ISBN: 0060852569 or 978-0060852566
Copyright Year: 2008
Other Comments: I would have given this book five stars if it weren't for a few comments about Christians that struck me as offensive.  Other than that, it is a plethora of information about food.  I learned a great deal about the industrialized food industry and also about the sufficient advantages of buying from local farmers and growing your own food.  This book reminds me of some of the claims Kevin Trudeau mentioned in his book Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About.  This book inspired me to visit my local farmers market and I was pleasantly surprised by my findings.  I would recommend this book to anyone.  It does include personal liberal views including themes of evolution.  However, these personal views didn't really take away from the information in the book.  And there was a lot of information!  Barbra also adds personal humor , which enhances the memoirs of her family's one year adventure to grow or buy local food.  Her husband and daughter also contribute their personal essays, which greatly contribute to the work.  I also loved the argument about eating meat, with which I generally agree.  In conclusion this work was well put together, informative, and a entertaining read.

The Glass Castle

Stars: 5/5
Author: Jeannette Walls
Subjects: memoir, alcoholic father, dysfunctional family, poverty, homless people, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, California, New York
ISBN: 9781439156964
Copyright Year: 2009
Other Comments:
The Glass Castle is a stunning memoir of a dysfunctional family and astonishing optimism and hope.  Jeannette Walls recounts how her parents were - brilliant but unfit to raise children - and how she and her siblings banded together and raised themselves.  Walls gives details of different moves their mother called "adventures", when the bills piled up too high.  She also writes about the horrible conditions of poverty from rats mistaken for opossums to leaking and buckling roofs to armies of termites and roaches.  She also tells of her parents both loving and selfish gestures toward their children and how - in the end - the children left their parents for a better life in New York.  Even after all this, their parents follow them and choose to be homeless just to be near their kids.  This is a memoir of hard work, heartbreak, and ultimately fulfillment.  I loved it - however it's not for the faintest of heart.

A Rumor of War

Stars: 5/5
Author: Philip Caputo
Subjects: United States Marine Corps, Vietnam War 1961-1975, biography, American, Soldiers, United States
ISBN: 003017631X
Copyright Year: 1977
Other Comments: This startlingly truthful and objective memoir of Caputo's experiences within the Vietnam War is nothing short of a work of art.  He tells of the miserable experiences of being a front line soldier; his terrifying run-ins with guerrilla fighters in the Vietnam jungle; the insufferable conditions the soldiers had to endure; and eventually ends the book with the end of the war.  This novel was so well written it was haunting. This is definitely an irreplaceable masterpiece that can be added to the plethora of priceless novels, biographies, and autobiographies written about the Vietnam War.