Peachy Reads

The Aussies have their vegemite, the Europeans their nutella, but the sandwich spread that unequivocally and perhaps uniquely defines the American palate is peanut butter.  This book tells you all you need to know about peanut butter from its humble origins (no, George Washington Carver was not its inventor) to the consolidation of the triumvirate of national brands: Jiffy, Skippy , and Peter Pan .   Did you know that peanut butter tastes more flavorful when made from Spanish, Valencia, or Virginia peanuts and not the less tasty (but easier to process) florunners ?  A major “improvement” in peanut butter production was eliminating the oil separation which still characterizes natural brands.  Unfortunately for the consumer, the solution to a creamy, more stable spread was adding partially hydrogenated oil, this being the poster child for trans-fats, the nutritional bad boy in recent years.  (The U.S. government calls standard grocery store peanut butter...

Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt , has that folksy quality that harkens back to the gentility of a bygone age.   Maybe it’s growing up in rural Georgia, as she did, that defines her character to such a degree, and comes through so well on the written page. In any case, her musings and her thoughtful prose are always a joy to read. In this book she takes on a topic that resonated with me—saving seeds to plant for next year’s crop.  Why is this so important?  Well, with hybridization and genetically modified crops, farmers (and more and more, home gardeners) no longer are able to keep and replant seeds the following season. I n fact, in the case of farmers, in most instances it’s illegal for them to do so.    Remember that prize tomato that grandpa grew when you were young?  Chances are that variety is not in any seed catalogs any more.    This diminishes plant diversity and makes agriculture beholden...

I heard the author of Going Clear being interviewed on NPR and was captivated.   What I knew about Scientology wasn’t much—its Hollywood adherents including Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, John Travolta; its science fiction writer founder L. Ron Hubbard; and the fact that Scientology seems to be a near constant magnet for controversy.   This book filled in some of the gaps for me, including the foundation of their beliefs: …Teegeeack [Earth] was a dumping ground for thetans, it became known as the Prison Planet, “the planet of ill repute.”  The Galactic Confederacy abandoned the area, although various invaders have appeared throughout the millennia.  But these free-floating thetans remain behind.  They are the souls of people who have been dead for seventy-five million years.  They attached themselves to living people because they no longer have free will.  There can be millions of them clustered inside a single person’s body.  Auditing for Scie...

I’m always fond of a good alternative history, so when The Afrika Reich came across my radar screen, I snatched it up.  In this novel Germany comes out triumphant in World War II.  Great Britain negotiates a non-aggression pact with the Nazis that allows them to retain their empire.  Africa is now primarily divided between the British and the Germans, the Nazis pursuing their racial policy, a diabolical plan of shipping Europe’s Jews to Madagascar and eradicating native peoples and transporting remaining black Africans to the region of Muspel in the Sahara. Burton Cole is an Englishman with a mercenary past.  He thinks those days are long gone when he is made an offer he finds impossible to refuse—a contract to assassinate his nemesis, a despicable Nazi in the new German African territories, whose efforts at the aryanization of the continent are stomach-turning.  Plus he has a history with Cole. So starts a nonstop thrill ride that rivals anything tha...

About two-thirds through this book I had just about decided that this might be my last Flavia de Luce novel. I do love Flavia, how could you not? She’s smart beyond her years, infinitely resourceful, indomitable, charming.   But this latest novel is just such a complex wedding cake of a mystery novel that I found it to be a just a bit overplotted.   When the church organist is found murdered, stuffed in the crypt of the church’s patron saint, Saint Tancred, Flavia jumps into action to figure out whodunnit.   Before she’s done she will have negotiated secret tunnels through the church yard (giving the vicar’s wife a fright in the process), swallowed a priceless diamond, forced her way into a manor house where she makes friends with a man-boy with webbed hands (whose father suffers from leprosy), survived an attempt on her life by a church lady and sustained burns in an ether explosion… Well, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.   There is such an extensive ...

Train stations are the cathedrals of the modern age. And there is no better example than Grand Central in New York City. Enter through the stone portals from the bustling sidewalks of 42nd Street to the main concourse and you can’t help but be awed-- your gaze will be pulled to the celestial heavens, which in the case of Grand Central are reproduced in cerulean blue on the vaulted ceiling. February 2013 marks one hundred years since the beaux arts train temple in the middle of Park Avenue emerged as an elegant gateway to Midtown Manhattan (the present edifice replaced earlier buildings). The evolution of Grand Central reflects the history of the modern city itself. At one time an open gash of dangerous rails traveled by smoke-belching locomotives burned through NYC from 125th to 42nd Street, and pedestrians and other traffic risked life and limb to cross from one side of Manhattan to the other. Nearby inhabitants inhaled the fumes of the coal-powered machines and endured the no...

I had been intending to read this novel for a bit.  I think I've read everything by Barbara Kingsolver, but I kept postponing reading this 500 pager.  It came out in 2009, but it was the opening of the new exhibit  Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting  across the street at the High Museum of Art that finally motivated me to buckle down and read it. I'm sorry I waited so long.  The history was fascinating, not only of the portrayal of the Kahlo-Rivera household at the time of their greatest fame, but of Trotsky's Mexican exile and eventual assassination, the Bonus Army riots of Washington D.C., and the Red Scare in the United States after the end of the war.  Plus there was all the cultural geography of Xochimilco, Teotihuacan, and Chichen Itza.  After reading about it, I wanted to plan a visit to Mexico City to visit the Bauhaus inspired Kahlo-Rivera house and see Rivera's murals at the Palacio Nacional....