Several people of various religious faiths recommended The Bad People Stole My God to me. This short memoir by Doug Phillips recreates his personal spiritual revelation.

Doug Phillips as a lifelong Catholic, former altar boy, married in the church, and the whole nine yards finds himself at a crossroads when faced with unanswerable questions. He does what any logical person does; he researches his subject, but doesn’t like the answers he finds.

Phillips writes in a conversational style when many pop culture reference. Warning if you are looking for some warm spiritual fuzzies this is not the book for you. Phillips wrestles with personal issues with high degree of insight and profanity. Grammar-wise, it’s not perfect, but still readable.

The Bad People Stole My God is a thought provoking read. I would recommend it.

I cook. I'm no chef but grew up in the kitchen (well, not just the kitchen, our house did have other rooms.) Unlike most of my friends who were banned from their own kitchens, I was never chased out, or told go play outside. I was sent to get a chair from the breakfast room to stand on, handed a spoon to stir or a knife to chop, or sent running back and forth to find gadgets, ingredients or dishes, or set to doing whatever else needed doing. It was always a family enterprise. Among the Joy of Cooking, Settlement Cookbook, Gourmet, Craig Claiborne's Southern Cooking in my kitchen library are my grandmother's and mother's cookbooks written in indecipherable scribble scratch scrawl. My brother never touched a cookbook but had an immense appetite for steak, and could be found at any time of day or night turning a rib-eye on the griddle or broiling on the gas grill on the patio. My ex had an obsession with grilling, smoking meat and fixing bbq, but in Memphis you can expect nothing less. My father never cooked, not even heating water for tea, though he did wield a mean coffeepot. I didn't pick up How to Cook like a Man by Daniel Duane as a gift for a male cook, but purely as another cookbook to expand my reach. I didn't notice the rest of the title, A Memoir of Cookbook Obsession.

To be clear, the book is not quite a cookbook, though it certainly mentions enough recipes, menus, cooks and restaurants. A Memoir of Cookbook Obsession pretty well describes it—an eight year chronicle of Duane stepping out of the mold of his father's generation and dividing the labor to become the family cook in the household of two writers. The restaurant and shopping landscape of California is something of a presence. The book is more than a chronology; it traces Duane's search for meaning through the unlikely medium of cookbooks.

I was not disappointed, even though there aren't actual recipes. Duane follows a recipe like no one I know, faithfully measuring every quarter of tsp. of salt, every shake of pepper. I have to confess that except for my Aunt Minette the gourmet, the people I know don't shop for every item in a recipe. Except for holiday cooking, if it's not on the grocery list or on sale, it never makes it home. Pedantic recipe-following is almost a backward revelation for me. Even though there was a handy acrylic holder in my childhood kitchen, where a cookbook could be held open hands-free, protected from enthusiastic drips and ingredient splashes, recipes were only a general guide. Food always accommodated my father by leaving out mushrooms, cut back on sugar because of my grandmother's diabetes or added a drop of vino for my mother's love of Julia Child. And in my own kitchen, I always randomly accommodate the gaps in my pantry. No baking soda? There's always baking powder and vinegar; no white sugar? use brown sugar or jelly or honey; no oil for baking? use applesauce.

But Duane is fixated on the written recipe, a strange and rigid mindset for the offspring of a couple of California hippies. His writing style is more Thomas Wolfe than journalistic. "...commanded that I should never cook slavishly, rigidly following a recipe and thoughtlessly adhering to the measurements it gives . . . trust your intuition and your taste but . . . for a man lacking both intuition and taste, recipes qualify as oxygen: they make life possible, if and only if one lives and breathes by them." This is his beginning. He takes on the philosophies of various chefs whose books lead him down their garden paths from his starting point of two alternating dinner recipes, and the pre-marriage contents of his refrigerator: "whole wheat tortillas and recycled yogurt containers carrying precooked black beans, rice, salsa and guacamole, so that I could whip out a vegetarian bean burrito for every day's lunch." It's a journey that is perhaps less than restful for his wife, whose patient preference for simple food gets stuck on the back burner, while Duane explores an infinitude of intricate dishes and elaborate meals.

Though this is not a cookbook, How to Cook like a Man is a memoir that will appeal to cooks, to men who love food, to would-be gourmets, to cookbook collectors, to anyone pushing the boundaries of recipes off a page and into real life. It will make vegetarians shake in their boots, but inspire carnivores who would want to do a marathon comparison of the best restaurant steak Las Vegas has to offer, or who ever filled a home freezer with a hundred pounds of every part of a cow with the intent to cook and like Anthony Bourdain, eat it all. It will appeal especially to those who are re-writing their own ticket, memoir and philosophy readers wrestling between the notion of following in someone's footsteps or forging a unique and personal itinerary.

© 2012 Allie Bates

Who has not wanted to chuck it all, and take an exploratory journey from sea to shining sea? Maybe the desire is bred into us, along with the pioneer spirit that brought us to this vast country of America. Some of us might want to walk, some ride a bike, others might tout one cause or another, or simply jog with neither cause nor destination, like Forrest Gump, running till we simply run out of steam. But when Mike McIntyre chose to embark on the journey, he did it with the intent of creating material for a book, The Kindness of Strangers-Penniless Across America; and with the specific intent of facing his fears.

One thing that is interesting about this memoir from a walk in the '90's is that it is a kind of bucket list pre-dating the concept of the bucket list. Not that he was about to kick the bucket. However it concludes (and I am not about to tell you), it may have been in his mind to get his big walk out of the way before committing himself to the girlfriend Anne he leaves behind, the one to whom he plans to return.

So here's the walk in a nutshell: McIntyre leaves his home in California, and sets out to walk/hitchhike across the country to North Carolina, to the aptly named destination (given his objective of facing his fears) to Cape Fear, NC. He ramps up his US tour by traveling without money, purely (as his title states) on the kindness of strangers.

Rather than being a stereotypical travelogue, or even a discussion of locales, this book is a scrapbook of page after page of American faces, a journalist's eye-view of those Americans who carry the author on his penniless journey one ride at a time. McIntyre's gift is in glimpsing the heart of each of his benefactors, and in doing so, portraying a unique view of a random and rather sad collection of Americans. Of course these views can not be in depth, because how can a moment in a car, or even a whole day or two spent in someone's life give a full and rounded portrait? But the result is counter-intuitive; contrary to what one might expect, these moments passing under McIntyre's eye enable his swift pen to sketch snapshots of individuals, families, even communities. These communities, families and individuals are less than affluent, and skew toward the wretched. One must remember when reading this that McIntyre's journey is deliberately plotted through communities which are not much more affluent than the penniless hobo he is pretending to be.

Here's the thing: glimpses into the lives of the providers of 78 meals do not provide an unskewed view of the country. Not everyone will pick up a hitchhiker, especially in this post-Manson world, where, rather than being a simple act of kindness, opening a car door to carry a stranger ten miles down the road is an act of dangerous stupidity. So the portrait of Americana is one somewhat tarred by circumstance, skewed to those down on their luck, those with nothing left to lose, those who are dangerously naive, or those who wear religion like kevlar vests. Furthermore, the book is written from a viewpoint that is solidly California-Liberal straining to appear objective (a fairly typical journalistic stance.) Whether or not McIntyre finds himself, he provides no more summation than one might find in a scrapbook. That does not make the cast of characters any less interesting.

I still remember a day in October when I was in second grade. My mom gave me the choice of going to school or skipping school to go to my grandmother's farm and help butcher chickens. Being a normal kid, I chose the method that would get me out of school. I had no idea what awaited me.

While I didn't actually see the chickens being killed, I did see the live pen where they were happily scratching as we drove up and then I felt their still warm insides as I pulled them out into a basin so we could freeze the bodies. I have never been the same. I didn't eat chicken for many years and I still do not favor that type of meat – or any type of meat that looks too much like what it once was.

In fact, as I get older it is harder and harder for me to eat any meat because I know what goes into processing it. We try to buy local, farm-raised meats so we know the animals had a better life, but that isn't always possible. Factory farmed meat does cross our tables, and our lips, and I regret it every time.

Tovar Cerulli's book The Mindful Carnivor is about just this delimma: someone who ate meat, then didn't eat meat, and now eats meat again. Once a vegan, Mr. Cerulli was advised for medical reasons to add more animal protein to his diet. This book is about his journey back to being a carnivore and it is a thought-provoking book that will leave you unsettled and wondering what you should do next.

From the pleasures of catching a fish, to the pain of killing animals on the hunt, Tovar discusses it all and while doing that lays plain the battle that rages within many of us between the fact of needing to eat and the desire to do so without taking our fellow earth dwellers for granted.

Oh, I know, be a vegetarian. Sure, easy answer. But because of the way many modern vegetarians eat it does just as much harm to the animals of the world as if we had eaten them directly. Humans are natural omnivores and going against that fact bring us things like highly processed soy foods and bean products that try to mimic real meats or fill our need for that type of protein.

Better than giving up the meat, we should get as close to our food as possible and treat our food sources with respect. That is really the best we can do in this life and more of us need to be doing it.

I have to caution readers that I initially put The Mindful Carnivore down because the descriptions of food preparation from natural sources (think gutting fish) put me off. Upon reflection I realized it was not the descriptions that were the problem – it was that I was hesitant to face my own qualms about where my food was coming from. I pushed it aside and picked up the book again.

The Mindful Carnivore is a necessary and relevant book on being a human that eats. If you eat, you should read it. Even if you are vegan or vegetarian. It is that important. 
 
Reviewed By Shawn Marie Mann
© February 2012

Daily, we are all watching the caliber of the American Dream lessen, learning to hobble our dreams with lead shoes instead lifting them to the sky with wings. As our economy tanks, and politicians are only making it worse, people are losing their jobs, companies folding left and right, it is frightening to think that when these same things happened in Germany, it set the stage for Hitler's political party to launch a scapegoat campaign. How, we wonder, could people have let it happen? How is it possible for a society to turn on its own? It is just too awful to believe that mankind is capable of such inhumanity, that not only could it happen but that it did happen—a terrible facet of history that can not be swept under the rug. This history must be taught. We assure children that horror stories are not real. So how does one tell a child about the Holocaust?

Perhaps it is best told by books like Eva Mozes Kor and Lisa Rojany Buccieri's Surviving the Angel of Death. It is autobiographical, Eva's own story about herself and her twin Miriam, about how they came from the small town of Protz Romania, to be subjected to the horrors of Dr. Joseph Mengele in Auschwitz. The Mozes were a farm family in their obscure little village, a family that had no reason to leave the safety of their comfortable farm until it was too late. In this book, we are able to wear Eva's shoes, and see firsthand what it was like for the twin sisters as society slowly turned against them, until the Nazi's finally came for them, relocated them in a Simleul Silvanei ghetto, put them in a cattle car, destroyed the rest of their family, and turned them over to the experimental ministrations of the Doctor of Death himself.

The story is hard to take because of what it is. What stands out is the fortitude and strength, the drive to survive that got them through their impossible ordeal. And yet, the story is gently told, with understandable language and the simple perceptions of a ten year old child. It is paced in such a way that we understand why the Mozes stayed until it was too late, expressed in undramatic language. Where some words may be unfamiliar to the young reader, context clues and sometimes an appositive definition is seamlessly woven into the writing. There is no austere voice pontificating, no flag-waving, no patronization, and no condescension talking down to the young reader. There is simply the one-on-one storytelling, a matter of fact presentation of what happened. But what you will most take from this book is a sense of the fortitude of the human spirit in the face of the most ghastly circumstance.

I could say it was a gripping, or touching or riveting, or tell you about how I read it in one sitting. Maybe it is more of a testament to this book that the night that I finished reading it, I dreamed I heard my long dead father's voice talking to me (as Eva dreamed her family spoke to her) from an inanimate object the size of a bar of soap.

This matter-of-fact memoir written for the children's ear is a personal history because we so clearly hear the voice of the survivor. Thumbs may give us dexterity, and our mammal brains give us complex thoughts unavailable to the rest of the animal kingdom, but what truly makes us human is compassion—that trait of sympathy born of the ability to wear someone else's shoes. It is a good thing that there are books like Surviving the Angel of Death that enable us to embrace that compassion, and learn from survivors like Eva not only what lies in our history, but also what forgiveness is.

Growing up, I always assumed I was headed for college. Even though both of my dad's parents served in the Navy during World War II, the military never crossed my mind as an option. When I came across Parris Island: A Woman's Memoir of Parris Island by Lisa Cordeiro, I began to wonder "what if?"

Parris Island: A Woman's Memoir of Parris Island is an interesting behind the scenes look at Marine Corps boot camp. Ms. Cordeiro describes her experiences as a female recruit during that intense 13-week boot camp. Her story is free from politics. It isn't a pro- or anti-military agenda-waving piece. Instead, it's a personal story about the author's experience and personal growth. Ms. Cordeiro lets readers into her head, so they can experience her transformation as they read about her struggles and triumphs.

Ms. Cordeiro's descriptions are good and sometimes repetitive, as boot camp itself was. By the end of the book, the readers get to know Ms. Cordeiro quite well. However, her fellow recruits are less vivid than her friends and family back home. This is probably the case because the recruits are only ever described in relation to an anecdote while the friends and family are woven throughout the book thanks to the many letters they wrote.

I have mixed feelings about the use of letters within the book. I do like the fact that they are included because it helps juxtapose where Ms. Codeiro came from and the outside world to where she is, mentally and physically, in boot camp. However, the sheer quantity of the verbatim letters proved so distracting at times that I started skipping them entirely. I didn't get the inside jokes and the grammatical errors were too disjointed from the rest of the story. After all, I picked up this book to read about boot camp, not drunken parties in Boston.

Reading Parris Island didn't make me wish I could go back and change the path I took, but I am glad Ms. Cordeiro allowed me to go to the island with her. For anyone considering the Marines, or someone just curious about boot camp, Parris Island: A Woman's Memoir of Parris Island is a good place to start.

Reviewed By Cam Robbins
© April 2009

Wddings. What beautiful things to see. How lovely is a bride on "Her Day". But what if it isn't exactly "Her Day"? What if her betrothed wants it to be "His Day"? Come explore the magic and wonder of what an overbearing groom can do to sabotage his wedding and pretty much his marriage. Learn what to watch for and how to, not only cope with, but repel disaster in Craig Bridger's Surviving Groomzilla (A Bride's Guide).

Mr. Bridger may have been writing this entertaining book for the fun and laughs but he has produced a useful tool for planning, from start to finish, that most joyous of days. It includes many tips and pointers for making the wedding the beautiful gathering it is meant to be. I noticed a few details that I had problems with in my own wedding. Where was this book when I needed it?

Whether you are planning your wedding or just need a bright spot in a dreary day, Surviving Groomzilla (A Bride's Guide) is a perfect companion, unlike some of the grooms described within. Recommended reading for all women and perhaps most of the Groomzilla's to be.

Reviewed By MargeAnna Conrad
© January 2009

I’m a writer, and it’s a sign to me that I haven’t been writing enough on paper when I start writing in my head. I finished reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and I’ve been formulating my impressions while driving, walking, and in the in-between moments of everyday life. There is much to think about and to digest. Like Ms. Gilbert, I too am on a spiritual journey, though mine is focused at home. I've lived in another country for extended periods so I can attest to the life-changing shifts in perception that come with moving out of one's culture zone.

Eat, Pray, Love is a first person account of Elizabeth (Liz) Gilbert’s spiritual exploration over a year of her life. We learn about her life, the crises that lead up to this search, and the exploration itself. She starts out as a 30-something woman in the midst of a divorce, crying and sniveling on her bathroom floor and comes out the other side of the journey a self-possessed, self-contained woman, comfortable in her own skin and comfortable with her relationship with God. We follow her journey as she eats her way through Italy, prays her way through India, and learns to love in Indonesia (Bali, to be exact.)

I had a love/hate relationship with this book. I loved it in the beginning and hated it about a third of the way through. It grew on me, and I spent the better part of a day finishing it because I was loving it again. It was a bit self-indulgent at times, but since it’s a book about herself, it kinda has to be. That’s what happened to me, somewhere towards the end of Italy; I just had to put the book down for a few days with a giant ugh. I thought I had wasted my money, but now that I’ve finished it, I know I have’nt. I will go back and re-read it looking for examples of practices that I might want to incorporate in my life, or at least to try for a bit, such as the writing/journaling to herself (Liz asked and answered her own questions while free writing and gained valuable insights) and some of the mantras for meditation.

I thought it was amazingly well-written. Ms. Gilbert has a wonderful sense of imagery. I love her analogy when Loneliness and Depression came to visit like two thugs in the night as she walked home.

Should you bother reading Eat, Pray, Love? I think so. I didn’t want to initially, but since it was for my local book club, I broke down and read it. Now I’m glad, because I wouldn’t have read it on my own just based on the blurb. As someone on a spiritual journey, I’ve learned much about my own journey by reading about Ms. Gilbert’s journey. You will too.

Reviewed by Susan
© October 2007

Autobiography or autobiographical fiction -- one could split the proverbial literary hair to no end. It comes down to this: words on a medium (preferably one that can show the words) reveal in some format the soul of said Writer/Artist/Human. In many ways, it is the ultimate self-portrait, control fetish, and ego pleasure. Damaged gives a romp and rough ride of what a sensitive soul of the artist and author can be like. It also shows what it takes to survive.

That, of course, is the cynical point of view. Not all autobiographical writings are such things, however. Some bring forth certain ideas, clarify some questions, or more often than not, tell the reader some detail about whom they are reading and gain a response of some kind. Even an unresponsive behavior is a response. But in the case of Jack Slutzky's creation, Damaged, I gained insight not only into a fascinating man but a personal mentor and former instructor of mine.

The language and settings are raw and written with broad strokes of color. As it is with the man, there are few, if any, nuances. It's all right there, in your face as you read it. If you are looking for poetry of words, subtle phrases, soaring climaxes and panoramic historical drama, move on. But if you want a right there, right now, blunt look at one man's human condition, you've come to the right book. As former student, reading about my teacher's sexual exploits caused this very prim student to squirm. But I got over it, and soon decided to simply see him for the mystery and mastery of his element he always seemed to be.

Shakespeare may have written of the tangled webs we weave, but  Slutzky's Damaged shows, more often than not, it is the dance around the sledge-hammered potholes of life that really tells the tale.

 
Reviewed By: Nancy Louise
© September 7, 2007