Fifty Shades of Chicken

This is a first for me - writing a blog post about a cookbook.  Fifty Shades of Chicken, by FL Fowler (a pseudonym) is a take off on Fifty Shades of Grey. I had my doubts. While basically a cookbook filled with 50 chicken recipes, there are some other draws to the book.  Every recipe comes with a full color picture and step by step directions on how to make the bird. There are also several pages, interspersed throughout the book, containing some tongue-in-cheek comments about the bird and its wants and feelings.

Taken in the right light, this book was very funny. The recipes are delicious, I know because I tried several of them. If Fifty Shades of Grey was not to your liking, check out this book for the recipes.  If you liked Fifty Shades of Grey then check out this book for the recipes and the literary snippets contained in it. In either case try some of the recipes, they are both easy and delicious!

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A Sunless Sea

Monk and Orme are on regular patrol for the River Police when they hear someone screaming. Following the cries they find a young woman standing near what appears to be a bundle of rags. The bundle turns out to to be the horribly mutilated corpse of a local woman. So begins the newest William Monk novel by Anne Perry.

Anne Perry's Monk novels have a central theme to each one. The theme here is the fallout from the opium wars on the general population of Great Britain. The storyline moves, twisting between two seemingly unconnected murders. It takes the skill of Monk, Hester and Sir Oliver Rathbone to show the connection between the murders and the Opium wars. Rathbone is particularly feeling the pressure, as he represents the suspected murderer and is still dealing with the backlash from his previous case involving abused children.

While this moral overtone can sometimes distract from the story line, the Monk novels are among my favorite reads.  Chock full of historical detail and full of interesting characters, Perry's Monk, along with his wife Hester, try to keep London free from harm. They also provide a quite enjoyable read.

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The Jew of Home Depot

While reading the stories in Max Apple's recent collection, The Jew of Home Depot,  I couldn't help drawing similarities to the writing of Joseph Epstein. Both authors are from the Midwest (Epstein from Illinois and Apple from Michigan) and both come from traditional Jewish homes. Each depicts individuals struggling with what life hands them. That I compare these two Jewish-American writers and do not include Nathan Englander (What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank) is that Apple and Epstein are more universal in their themes; being Jewish is not necessary to appreciate the subtle nuances in their stories.

Take, for example, "A Loss for Words" by Joseph Epstein (Fabulous Small Jews) and "Strawberry Shortcake"by Max Apple (The Jew of Home Depot).  Both stories deal with the sad realities of aging and the struggle of children to connect with their once vibrant parents.  They also deal with the heart-breaking realities of decisions made by those children to keep their loved ones safe and comfortable.

In "Adventures in Dementia," Apple depicts a son helping his mother remember his long-dead father.  He does so in a way reminiscent of their mother-son school projects.  He calls this endeavor "Project Dad." As the narrator recalls:

But even for this son, Harold Goodman was no easy retrieval.  He had come to seem not so much a father as a business partner who had made a miscalculation by cashing out too early.  Sidney hung onto sales far beyond any statue of limitations.  yearly, Sidney granted his father the lifetime achievement award, the Yizkor memorial prayer as one rabbi after another droned out the same words, 'Our loved ones live on in our memory.' ( The Jew of Home Depot, p. 125)

In the end, Sidney consults a former Las Vegas hypnotist to reach into the inner depths of his mother's mind.  The results are as poignant as they are funny.

 Like Nathan Englander, Max Apple exposes the responsibilities as well as the hypocrisies inherent in orthodox Judaism.  As "Rachel" notes in her Goodreads review (January, 2011): "(Apple does this) without casting judgement or refuting the religion.  He handles sensitive topics sensitively and succeeds in examining ...a deeply personal subject without beating it to a pulp."  This is especially true of the title story, "The Jew of Home Depot."  In it, an 85 year old man, "surrounded by Gentles," arranges for an orthodox family to teach him Judaism before he dies.  This family of eleven leaves their life in Brooklyn to live in his home in Marshall, Texas.  What happens when these sheltered children encounter the larger world creates both the tension and the irony in the story.

As Ann Hodgman concludes in her beautiful review in the New York Times (January 20, 2008) "One of the pleasures of this book is that Apple makes you feel he knows everything about everything--or at least everything you know nothing about: shot putting, running a liquor store or a car-salvage operation, Chinese gymnastics, what it's like to try to sell 600,000 plastic laser swords. " His characters are three dimensional and sympathetic.  Above all, they bear great challenges with dignity and even humor, as if life itself was one great Jewish joke.

The Jew of Home Depot will put a smile on your lips and tears in your eyes as you acknowledge life's cruel twists.

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Argo (the book)

The film Argo has been nominated for (and has been winning) all kinds of awards, with a potential Academy Award for Best Picture in a couple of weeks (and the DVD will also be available in February). Having seen the Hollywood version, why not read the book that the movie was based on? Antonio Mendez, the author, was a CIA disguise master.  Disguises of both the human and the document kind.  In his spare time he is an artist.

Mendez was following the news of the embassy take over in Tehran, when the call came for him to help.  With support from a variety of people, a plan started to form.  While there were several "official" plans in the works, the one Mendez decided to push was wholly unbelievable -   get the 6 hostages out by making them part of a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a movie.  While Mendez and his group were putting together an "ex filtration" plan (passports, cover stories, travel documentation, a film company to back up any background checks,  physical disguises, the list is long),  the 6 Americans were in hiding outside the American embassy.

At first the 6 escaped to the apartments of friends. They were in 2 separate apartments and not in any real communication with each other adding to the tension. As the situation in Tehran deteriorated, they began to look for a more secure location to hide in.  Enter the Canadians.

Without hesitating, the Canadian ambassador offered the Americans sanctuary in the embassy, keeping their existence quiet.  The unqualified help from the Canadian government helped ensure the plan would succeed. The 6 Americans waited for nearly 3 months while the plan was put together. 52 other Americans were held in the American embassy for 444 days.

Everyone knows the outcome of this event, but the back story is the real story here. The book is non-fiction and therefore factual, but it reads like a spy novel and there is very little political rhetoric in it. This is a feel good book - read the book and feel good at the end.

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Destiny of the Republic

Destiny of the Republic was published over a year ago and has moved off of the bestseller charts but it's easy to see why demand for this book (and author Candice Millard's previous The River of Doubt) has continued to simmer. It is a wonderful history book that combines politics and medicine to tell the story of a man whom history remembers simply as a six-month president whose life was stolen by a lunatic.

The personal history of James Garfield is in itself enough to fill up a fascinating book. Born in poverty, he was raised by a single mother when his father died while trying to save the family farm. He returned home after working as a canal driver to a family that had scraped up enough money for him to enter college. In college he worked in exchange for tuition, eventually working his way up to become a professor. He then became a lawyer, led an infantry in the Civil War, and was finally elected as a U.S. Congressman. He was truly a self-made man.

Garfield was also a freethinker. He was progressive on the issue of slavery and had been known to have aided escaped slaves. Following an eloquent nomination speech for another candidate at the Republican Convention, Garfield was nominated to the Republican ticket as a compromise presidential candidate. It was a nomination which he had never sought for a position that he did not desire.

Unfortunately Charles Guiteau, a delusional preacher and lawyer, stole Garfield's life away by shooting him at a train station (presidents did not have security at the time - people assumed that since politicians could be thrown out of office there was no reason for an assassin to target them, with Lincoln's assassination viewed more as a war crime than a political act). The book then moves to the fascinating story of how Garfield's doctors "treated" him, which caused more harm than the actual bullet. It is speculated that had he received his wound on the battlefield and had been left alone, he would have lived. Unfortunately, due to unsanitary conditions, lack of x-ray and just plain poor knowledge and bad decision-making, the doctors left Garfield's body riddled with infection. After suffering for over two months he finally died.

Another thread running through the story is Alexander Graham Bell's invention of a medal detector that would detect exactly where in the body the bullet lay. Bell's story is slightly obtrusive in the book but it is interesting on its own.

Destiny of the Republic is filled with so much colorful history and fascinating asides that it's hard to believe that anyone would be able to put the book down and feel that it was not everything that a popular history book should be. The book has heroes, villains, geniuses and cads, and is strongly recommended for those of you wanting to learn about a part of history that you never knew you were interested in.

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Care of Wooden Floors, by Will Wiles

How quickly and easily can things go from bad to way, way worse? For the unnamed narrator of "Care of Wooden Floors", a tragically funny downward spiral can start with a single glass of wine enjoyed without the requisite coaster.

Oskar, a brilliant composer, has asked the London-based narrator to housesit his beautiful apartment (where "taste and money" have met) in an unnamed Slavic country for a few weeks. The two men have known each other since university days when they were like the original Odd Couple, the narrator being Oscar, and Oskar being Felix. "A room is a manifestation of a state of mind, the product of an intelligence . . . We make our rooms, and then our rooms make us," explained Oskar as a student. For the narrator, the years that followed would bring other messy "rooms, then shared houses, then a string of one-bed flats. I have regarded them all with the same dissatisfaction. This was Oskar's gift to me," he ruminates.  (Note to self: hang up clothes piled on bedroom chair; be more vigilant hunting down dust bunnies).

As a house sitter, the narrator is deluged with notes from Oskar. In one of these, Oskar's script warns in all caps, "PLEASE, YOU MUST TAKE CARE OF THE WOODEN FLOORS." Then in softer lower-case, he explains that "they are French oak and cost me a great deal when I replaced the old floor, and they must be treated like the finest piece of furniture in the flat, apart from the piano of course." So once the narrator stains the floor with wine, can a calamity with the piano be far behind? And how will the narrator fare with caring for Oskar's cats, which run "full pelt" through the apartment? And what will transpire with the stern housecleaner he nicknames "Batface"?

But leading up to true catastrophe, the narrator spends a night out, drinking with Oskar's friend and fellow musician Michael. It's a wonderful telling of a night too fueled by drink, when the two men talk about Oskar's LA-ensconced wife and his plans to write a symphony based on the Dewy Decimal System. Does that seem to you to be an odd thing to write a symphony about? If your answer is 'yes', Michael would tell you, "You are completely wrong. It is a system for the organization of all knowledge. It is educational, dialectical. Every piece of knowledge that man knows, every fact, is given a number, given a place. . . The Dewey system arranges everything. It is the perfect muse for Oskar. He will arrange the world. A symphony of everything. A Grand Unified Symphony."

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Nine Coaches Waiting

This beautifully written book was originally published in the 1950's, but don't think it isn't worth the read because it's "old." Miss Linda Martin accepts a job as a governess for an orphaned boy in France. Philippe, the Comte de Valmy's nephew, is living with his aunt and uncle in the ancestral home. Philippe actually is the heir to the estate, but Madame Heloise deValmy and her husband Monsieur Leon deValmy are the trustees of the estate. Heloise hires Linda expressly because she is English and apparently doesn't understand a word of French. Heloise doesn't know that Linda is originally from France.

Heloise is beautiful but guarded, apparently with some health issues requiring constant medication. Leon is confined to a wheelchair after an accident. He runs the estate with loving care, as if it is actually his and not Philippe's. Leon has a son, Raoul, from his first marriage.  Raoul is running Leon's personal estate. There are problems between the father and the son. Raoul has something of a reputation as a ladies man.

On the surface things are calm in the deValmy family but Linda has some strange feelings that make her uncomfortable, such as the original nanny being fired for no apparent reason. Philippe, at 9 years old is sickly and apparently desperate for friends. The secretiveness of some of the staff starts problems for Linda with gossip that she is in love with Raoul. Philippe tries to avoid his uncle Leon, as he is apparently afraid of him.  Then the accidents start. First, someone takes a shot at Philippe, narrowly missing him, then he almost falls off his balcony when part of the stonework gives way. Linda saves him both times.

The story slowly builds. The accidents that Philippe has portend a greater tragedy in the planning. Linda's feelings for Raoul complicate the family dynamics. Everything comes to a head the night of  the party. It's a great finish.

This book reminds me of "Rebecca" by Daphne Du Maurier. A psychological thriller, beautifully written the story will not only keep you interested it will keep you entertained.

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