Twelve Black Code Monkeys

SAMS Teach Yourself … in 24 Hours series of books is designed to give a first, somewhat basic understanding of a subject, and Scott Mitchell’s Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours is no exception. This book will probably be fine for anyone who is comfortable with computers, and has used a basic set of office programs to create documents, presentations, etc. You do not need programming experience. Those with extensive programming experience would best be served with something more advanced.My background is web development, but I chose this book for a few reasons. One is that it got some good reviews on Amazon.com, and no really bad ones. Secondly, I bought it knowing that I would be taking a week-long training course in ASP.Net 2.0 in a few weeks. I wanted a book that was easy enough that I would have a good chance of completing it in a couple of weeks, and I also didn’t care if I got the most in-depth understanding of the subject. As long as I got some familiarity with it, that would be good enough as a foundation should the class go at a faster pace than my brain can process information!

Generally, what I have found is that there are three or four basic types of computer book. You have books geared towards absolute beginners which walk you through every little step, every mouse click, over and over again ad nauseum. Then you have books geared towards programmers, which are written in such a way that if you don’t have a formal knowledge of this subject, you will probably eventually get a lost. Of course for those without any programming experience or knowledge, these books will quickly go over one’s head. Most of these books are about a particular facet of a programming language or environment, but some are exhaustive studies of everything, almost to the point that they are reference books themselves. Finally, there are reference books, which sometimes double as instructional texts as I intimated, and sometimes are simply streight-forward information about the various features and functions of a given language or system.

Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours, of course, fits into the first category - that of one geared towards beginners. I often wish there were books that kind of bridged the gaps between beginners and more experienced programmers, and occasionally there are, but they are few and far between. What I have in mind is something that walks you through some fundamentals at least initially, but soon stops repeating the same steps, challenging you to remember them yourself, and also getting into some of the more advanced aspects a little. Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours doesn’t do this. That being said, it’s still a good book for what it’s for. You just need to understand it’s target reader so that if you have experience programming, you can just skip the repetitive parts, or parts that you already know (control structures, conditional statements, html markup, etc.).

Like many in the field of web development (at least those of us who’ve been at it for close to 10 years or more), I came to it without formal study. When I started, there were no books on html, let alone classes on it. Through the years I taught myself how to program in more sophisticated ways using Perl, then Cold Fusion, JavaScript, and ASP. But while I understand how to use all these tools to create dynamic websites, I’m not sure if I have the same “programmer mentality” that I see in others who mastered C++ or Java in college, high school, or even earlier! In my opinion there’s a kind of middle-tier market out there of those of us who came to programming in adulthood, too late to substantially effect how our brains work. We can understand programming, but are not “native speakers.” We can program, but books written “for programmers” can still start to sound like Greek if we don’t concentrate hard and perhaps reread some sentences a few times!

In any case, Scott Mitchell’s book is a good start for anyone like myself, or those who are just starting out in the field and want to gain some familiarity with what .Net is about. It will take you through many of the things you will do as a developer in creating dynamic sites - including connecting with back-end databases, form validation, file uploads, site navigation, and more. You will not get much understanding about the Visual Basic or C# languages used to manipulate business logic or to do more advanced stuff with data binding, etc. But for me at least this was a good primer before going on to read more advanced books and reference guides about ASP.Net 2.0. I think it created a great “bridge” between my familiarity with plain old ASP and what I know is going to be a much more powerful and deep environment to program websites in.

The other nice thing about this book is that it comes with Microsoft’s “Express” edition of their Visual Web Developer 2005. This is basically a paired down version of the Visual Studio software that is used by professionals not only to build ASP.Net websites, but also to develop stand-alone Windows applications. However, this will let you develop any ASP.Net website and test it locally on your machine - it comes with a version of Microsoft’s SQL Server Database, and a web server. You can easily take the files you develop on it and upload them to a hosted server on the internet or a corporate intranet server behind a firewall, etc. You can download this software for free from Microsoft, but it’s nice having the CD that you can use to do a quick install and avoid having to go find it and download it from MS’s site, especially if you don’t have a fast Internet connection.

Assassination Vacation is the latest book by author, columnist, and public radio personality Sarah Vowel. It is about the three U.S. presidents who were assassinated within 40 years of each other, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Sarah takes us on her “pilgrimages” to various sites relating to not only these unfortunate presidents, but also to their killers and co-conspirators. Along the way, we get to learn a great deal about the circumstances in which they were shot, as well as the often interesting events after those shots rang out.

Sarah Vowel has written several books, and this latest one repeats some of the same themes of American history that her previous book, A Partly Cloudy Patriot, started. Vowel is a self-proclaimed “history geek” and also presidential-assassination-obsessed. A lot of what she wrote about in the past was about personal experiences, and that is what she talked about on the radio as well. In this book, too, there is a lot of this. It’s not just an historical text, but also partially an autobiographical journey with Vowel to various places of historical significance where she interacts with the tour guides and other tourists, and also the friends that she drags grudgingly to almost every one.

I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). If you’ve ever heard Vowel speak, you know she has a very distinct voice. You may have even heard her without knowing - she played Violet (the daughter) in the animated movie The Incredibles. It’s high and nasaly, which you would never think would be something you’d want to listen to for 7 hours, and yet at least some of us find this voice strangely hypnotic. I’ve heard her speak a couple of times in DC, once as part of a live This American Life, and a second time as just herself. The second time, she was late. She doesn’t drive, and so was taking the train up from her home in New York City. The train lost power. The woman handling the show was talking to her on her cell phone while she was rushing from the train station in a cab and actually put the phone up to the microphone. Sarah managed to keep us laughing and still did a great job once she got there in person. It’s a testament to her appeal that 99% of the audience stayed over an hour after she was supposed to be there for her to arrive. The book is available in print as well, of course.

Vowel’s dry humor runs throughout Assasination Vacation, catching on oh so many ironic twists of history, so many outlandish actions or quotes that they seem downright hilarious sometimes. She also repeatedly pokes fun at herself for her peculiar geekiness about historical minutiae, her morbid fascinations, and her various allergies and phobias. The book contains not only her own voice, but also that of a number of others - actors, writers, comedians - who ad a little spice to the mix. They recite quotes from the principal characters - presidents and assassins alike. Included are Steven King, John Stewart, Conan O’Brian, and Brad Bird (whom I think was my favorite as Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau).

While I enjoyed listening to the book, and believe I picked up some knowledge from it, I’m afraid that as with most books about history, I will soon forget many details (if I haven’t already). Even with the fairly narrow subject matter, there are still lots of facts involved with each assassination, not to mention a bunch of background information about the lives of each president and their various family members, friends, colleagues, and of course their assassins and co-conspirators. Also included is information on the wars, scandals, and other events that took place before or during the time of a given president. Of course Vowel makes a lot of this stuff more memorable by adding her own humor and passion for the subject, which makes it more memorable, but I still think many of the details will slip away despite this. Then again, this isn’t a history text, but more a kind of biographical/autobiographical journey through a few singular parts of history, as well as a journey in the present day to some of the odd memorials and museums for both the presidents and the assassins - ranging from the high reaches of the Adirondack mountains to Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas, a small tropical island 70 miles west of Key West, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Caribbean.

That being said, while I certainly enjoyed Assassination Vacation, I personally preferred A Partly Cloudy Patriot. Either book is a great listen from my viewpoint, and this latest one kind of follows from the last. I also think that this book might grow on you and slowly infect you with at least a little of that same geeky obsession for these assassinations that Vowel has herself. Then again, while I’m a geek, I’m not much of a history geek, and so I’m not sure I’ll have the dedication (or time) to devote to something as relatively arcane as 19th Century U.S. presidential assassinations!

This latest book from George Carlin consists of many, many short riffs about language, skits involving lots of profanity and potty humor, and commentary about various things that for the most part just piss Carlin off. I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). The audio book is over 7 hours long and is read by Carlin himself. The book is available in print as well, of course. I’ve found that Carlin is great in short doses, and so I found myself only listening to 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, etc. Maybe the longest listen was an hour. I find some of what Carlin has to say very insightful, and some of it is also very funny, but not all of it, of course. A lot of what he has to say is also meant to be fairly offensive. You can tell that Carlin is trying to push buttons mostly with a lot of his shtick. For example, there’s a lot of what could be deemed as sexist jokes, but there are also parts of the book where Carlin talks about how women are superior to men in most ways and are also crapped on throughout the world for the sole reason that they aren’t as physically strong.

I would say a majority of the book is about language and specifically about euphemisms, which Carlin finds repugnant, because they “water down” the language and make a lot of things “meaningless” by couching them in kinder sounding words or phrases that don’t impart truth or real meaning. There’s a lot of truth to this, but Carlin does belabor the point, and after a while I was starting to say, “Ok, I get the point already!”

He also has a lot of these little “skits” where he will make up a conversation among a couple of people. Some of these are funny, some aren’t. A lot are graphic, gross, “dirty” or in various ways the opposite of “political correctness.” As I said, he definitely is out to try to offend just about anyone.

There’s also some insightful stuff about politics, the irony of various political issues, how politicians are constantly trying to deceive us, and a lot of times doing so by use of language.

Of course there’s a lot about various things, not all language-related, that simply piss Carlin off. Some of these are just silly and obviously not to be taken seriously, some are things that most of us would probably find annoying, or at least will once Carlin enlightens us as to why they are so dumb.

I’ve mainly seen Carlin in some older stand-up routines, a couple of movies, and one other book, Napalm and Silly Puddy, so I don’t know if I’m familiar enough with his stuff to comment on how this book compares to earlier work. It was an interesting listen, one with some laugh-out-lound moments, no doubt, but also some interesting thoughts, and a lot of expounding on random stuff that made it a bit repetitive. I wonder if for books like this, a very strategic audio abridgement might actually make it a much more solid listen?

David Sedaris is a humorous writer and speaker who got his start on the radio. He really gained recognition with his reciting of his writing on the public radio show This American Life. He subsequently has come out with a number of books and also writes articles for The New Yorker.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is Sedaris’s penultimate book (his latest being Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules). I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). Sedaris’s books, in my opinion, are best listened to rather than read. He has a unique, high-pitched voice with a slight hint of an accent from a childhood spent in North Carolina. As with his brand of humor, I’m sure his voice is something of an acquired taste, as most “unusual” things are. But in addition to the voice itself, the comic timing, intonation, impersonations, etc., all are helped greatly by this author who is used to performing for audiences be they radio or live theater audiences. Of course, you can still buy the book in print if that’s more your cup of tea.
Most of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is about Sedaris’s odd family. Stories about them are accounted both from his childhood and adulthood. Sedaris is gay, and often makes fun of his clichéd feminine proclivities growing up. Even so, this oddness seems to pale in comparison to the personalities of some of his (heterosexual) brothers and sisters. Possibly it’s because we are all used to these clichés by now from TV and movies, but even so, the Sedaris clan all seem to be exceedingly odd. One can scratch ones head and wonder a bit about this, but then most families have their oddities, and sometimes that accounts for most of the family! Of course Sedaris makes even the most bizarre and repugnant characteristics cutely funny ones.

A few of the stories Sedaris relates are about his current life with his partner in France, and while I loved his stories in “Me Talk Pretty Some Day” about his trying to learn the French language, and just trying to make sense of French culture, in this book, I preferred the family stories to these. The main exception to this was his relating how he uncovered the Dutch version of Santa Clause and how bizarre he seemed compared to the U.S.
version. This particular story, as well as one or two others, was taken from recordings in front of a live audience, as opposed to the rest of the book, which is your normal, studio-produced audio book.
In the end, if you love Sidaris, you’ll probably love this book, and if you hate him, you’ll hate this book. If you’re unfamiliar with him, here is a selection of audio featuring him on Nation Public Radio.

This was the first book I’ve read of Pat Conroy’s, author of numerous books made into movies, such as Prince of Tides, the Great Santini, and Beach Music. Unlike those books, which were either mostly fictional with big chunks of Conroy’s persona thrown in to thinly veiled autobiographical works, My Losing Season is straight autobiography.

It was largely an entertaining read. It covers Conroy’s history as a basketball athlete from
the first time he handles a ball (at 10 or so) to his last game as a player for his college, The Citadel. While it’s primarily about basketball, including lots of play-by-play reporting using sports lingo which isn’t always explained but still understandable, there’s
also a lot of about Conroy’s life that has nothing to do with basketball per se - his incredibly cruel father, his discovery of literature and finding his own voice as a writer, his ordeals as a Plebe at The Citadel, and much more. I like the way Conroy mixes in some poetic flourishes into hid descriptions book - kind of like dabs of florescent color on an otherwise straightforward, albeit very interesting picture.

I listened to this book via my subscription to the online audio book service, Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). The book is available in print as well, of course. The narration is skillfully handled by Chuck Montgomery, who is also an actor and composer in addition to narrating many audio books.

I only have two minor quibbles with My Losing Season. The first is that about halfway through the book, I realized that Conroy loves superlatives. Everything is “the best” or “the most” of his life. Most of this has to do with a particular game standing out in some way or another, or a particular performance by himself or another player. Someone I mentioned to, said something to the effect of, “well of course he loves superlatives, honey, he’s Southern!” This was said by a Southerner, of course.

The second qualm is that the ending takes a little while to come. Conroy doesn’t just end on his last game at the Citadel, but goes on to talk about players and coaches in subsequent years. The book was written in 2002 and his last game was in 1967, so there’s a lot of ground to cover. He talks about the history of his relationship to The Citadel, about his changed relationship with this father over the years, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I was certainly interested in finding out about all of these things, but there’s gotta be over an hour, maybe two of this “afterword” stuff. I suppose when you’re reading a book, you can see clearly something marked “afterword” and you understand that it’s seperate from the book itself. But listening to it, either it wasn’t marked as such, or I missed it.

These two complaints are pretty minor and I’d definitely recommend it to most people. I know almost nothing about basketball and never watch it, but it does give you a great deal of appreciation for the game and even a desire to learn more about it - although the book is more about how the game was played in college in the 1960’s rather than how it’s played today, either in college or in the pros.

I listened to this book via my subscription to the online audio book service, Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). The book is available in print as well, of course.

For those who enjoy non-fiction, Mountains Beyond Mountains is a fascinating look at a Doctor who’s devoted his life to curing disease in one of the poorest countries on the planet - Haiti. Dr. Paul Farmer and his organization, Partners In Health, have been involved for 15 years or more not only in Haiti but in treating multi-drug-resistant TB in Peru and Russia, as well.

The author, Tracy Kidder, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Soul of A New Machine, covers Farmers life growing up, going to college, and his initial experiences in Haiti. He also covers the perspective of some of the other principles of Partners in Health, including the director, Ophelia Dahl, and others. The different personalities of these people as compared with Farmer (who it seems is a unique individual), makes for some interesting interpersonal reporting, so it isn’t just a story about a saintly doctor who came to a poor country and made everyone well.
I didn’t really know much about this book when I started listening to it, since it was one of my wife’s selections. I just started listening and thought if it was interesting, I would continue. I did. The narrator, Paul Michael, does an excellent job as usual - he narrated The Da Vinci Code, and as with that one he has lots of fun with the various accents from different nationalities in the book.

I’ve never been one to watch the commercials for charities showing all the malnourished kids. I find them incredibly depressing, and the underlying issue to be one of such huge proportions that it’s all but insurmountable. While this book was similarly depressing in some ways, it was also very hopeful. It detailed many of the improvements going on in world health, concentrating on those pushed ahead by Farmer’s group. I found myself routing them on like a sports team, even though I haven’t been a real sports fan since I was a kid and following the New York Yankees in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

As for Farmer, his life sometimes does seem at times to be that of a saint. On the one hand you admire everything he does, but on the other hand you sometimes wonder if he’s actually human. While he’s someone you would might want to emulate, his selflessness, courage, and dedication are so superlative as to be almost unatainable, at least by most of us.
It’s probably a great listen for when you might be feeling a bit sorry for yourself, and realize that there are so many people who are living in such wretched conditions that you should be grateful to live in a country where all your creature comforts are taken care of - even if you happen to be within the poorest 10% of us. On the other hand, it also could induce a lot of guilt for not wanting to devote your life, or at least a fair chunk of your time and money, towards helping those who are so less fortunate for the simple reason that they were born in a horribly poor and mismanaged country…

I only recently discovered Wil Wheaton’s blog, and although I haven’t read every entry since, I have read a good number. He’s a good writer, but I’m not always in the mood for his sometimes very sentimental stuff about his family. Nevertheless, I was very interested in reading more about his time growing up on the set of Star Trek The Next Generation and Stand By Me, and so was happy to receive Dancing Barefoot, which is a collection of short pieces that got axed from Wheaton’s full-sized book, Just A Geek.

A large bulk of the book revolves around Star Trek. There is a recounting of when Wheaton meets one of his idols, William Shatner, for the first time, when Shatner was directing Star Trek V on a set next to where they were filming The Next Generation, which Wheaton was in. Shatner was apparently a real asshole to Wheaton, who was then just 15, and henceforth is known in what Wheaton writes as William Fucking Shatner, or WFS. Another story is about a Star Trek convention in which Wheaton participated in September, 2001 in Las Vegas to celebrate Star Trek’s 35th anniversary. It was a fascinating look at the Con experience from one of the actual performers, as opposed to a fan or objective observer. Wheaton pulls no punches, neither towards himself nor towards some of the more disturbing fans. One thing that Wheaton is good at is giving you his very personal perspective on things.

I am often amazed that even now after 15 years of getting beaten up by some of his fan base, he still hasn’t hardened into a pompous jerk or a recluse. Instead, he seems just as if not more sensitive as he recounts he was growing up. He wears his heart on his sleeve, so to speak, and is still hurt by those who display insensitivity. He still manages to be self-conscious about his identity as Wesley Crusher, despite proving himself over and over to be much more than that poorly written character. Of course he talks about this in his blog, but it’s something that he seems to have to continually remind himself and his readers.

I for one never despised his character the way some did. I felt the first two years of The Next Generation, in comparison to the rest of the series, were just not all that well written in general. I loved them all the same when I first saw them, but compared to later seasons they just seemed “cheesy,” kind of along the lines of the olds series, but just updated with better special effects. I was much more annoyed with Marina Sirtis’s character Troy, who seemed to only be there to have a large set of breasts on the bridge and whose comments about a foe’s emotional state seemed ridiculously obvious to anyone with a brain. But apparently some of the nuttier Star Trek fans who can’t separate reality from fantasy, took their hatred for the character Wheaton played and projected it onto the actor himself. This is ridiculous to begin with, but the fact they took out their anger on a 15-year-old kid is despicable, and apparently those wounds still haven’t healed for Wheaton and we get the sense they never will heal fully. In that respect I do have one thing in common with Wheaton, since I was teased and ostracized relentlessly as a kid for being short, chubby, and socially awkward.

One of the stories in Dancing Barefoot is about Wheaton going to his recently deceased aunt’s house for the last time, a house he went to on countless occasions. It’s a very heartfelt story about how this wonderful woman was going to be missed terribly. This was reminiscent for me in a couple of ways. Firstly, my wife’s aunt died just before we started dating, and she was a woman who was central to her entire family. Her home was where people would gather. Her death took a horrible toll on my wife and others who loved her dearly. Her house sat vacant for at least a year until it was finally bought by one of her nephews and is in the process of being renovated. The day after receiving Dancing Barefoot (and having finished the entire 115 pages of it), it so happened that we were going up to visit my own uncle and aunt in Orangeburg, NY. They had just sold their house that they had owned for somewhere around forty years and are moving into a condo in a retirement community. They wanted us to come and see the house for one last time and since we were more than happy to honor the suggestion. This is a house that I spent countless Passovers and Thanksgivings at, hanging out with my aunt Evelyn, uncle Nat, and various cousins, 2nd cousins and extended family. I remember one occasion where my uncle gave me a driving lesson around the neighborhood, and of course all the food. The ritual passover meal was not complete until my uncle had spilled wine on my grandfather, which we always suspected was a diversionary tactic that would help him hide the matzoh. The bus rides home from the house clutching my stomach in agony from all the excess food I’d eaten because it was so delicious I couldn’t stop when I was just full. I took some final pictures of the house and my uncle and aunt, so I thought I’d share them here:

Dancing Barefoot is a quick and interesting read, and gives one a flavor of Wheaton’s writing that one can get loads of off his blog – and for free! Still, I will most assuredly pick up Just a Geek real soon.

What a cool little book this is! Although it’s only 53 pages, the information is so densely packed and insightful that it’s worth more that a lot of 300+ page books. It is from a series of books on evolutionary science and by a scholar of the London School of Economics by the name of Colin Tudge..

Tudge’s basic thesis is that early humans practiced agriculture on various levels from a much earlier time period before the Neolithic age started and current large scale agriculture is said to have started – about 10,000 years ago. However, the theory goes, this was done on an occasional basis to supplement their hunting and gathering – a kind of safety net of sorts. However, once the ice age ended, this decreased the amount of habitable land, forcing humans into smaller areas and the resulting competition for a more limited food supply drove them to using agriculture less as a “hobby” and more for survival. This then became a vicious cycle as agriculture provides more food and thus fuels population growth, which than requires more foods and so on.

I do not know a great deal about prehistoric anthropology, only a few main ideas, but Tudge explains things succinctly but clearly enough that I was not lost in the least. Others whom I’ve lent the book who had read much more than myself still got a great deal out of it. It does leave you wanting more, but I suppose is where one can start one’s journey or simply add a bit of an insiteful theory to one’s knowledge

This book, by a journalist (Mary Frost), not a doctor or nutritionist, is a sort of review of various books and a few articles surrounding nutrition and nutrient supplementation. Although I enjoyed reading it, and it certainly made me think about whether the vitamins I sometimes take are really helping me or not, there are also a few problems with the book which tarnish what otherwise might have been a great resource.

 

Lets go through some of its strengths first. It is very straightforward and is not very technical, but also doesn’t gloss over things so much so that the reader feels insulted. It covers fairly wide ground and references some of the well known sources of information or opinion in the field of nutrition, including Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price, Empty Harvest, by Dr. Bernard Jenson and Mark Anderson, Protein Power by Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades, and Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution by Dr. Robert Atkins. So in this way it is a good introduction to many of the ideas contained in these books. The ideas are mainly about how eating traditional diets (that which our hunter-gatherer forebears) is much healthier than the over-processed diet that modern humans consume. Attached to this is the idea that modern farming techniques have polluted both the plants and the animals that eat them (both of which are consumed by the public) with harmful chemicals and depleted them of natural nutrients.

 

I can’t complain too much about the content of this book, since I come to it already with opinions that are very close. I am a big fan of the Eadeses’ Protein Power and the philosophy of eating as much of my food from organic sources, including free-range or grass-fed meats, raw dairy, etc. The new information for me in this book was the contention that many vitamins sold in stores are produced in the lab from otherwise inedible substances such as coal tar. The production converts this, but the criticism is that the conversion does not account for 100% of the original materials, which are potentially harmful. The Eadeses actually touch upon another issue involved in nutrient supplementation, but Frost adds some information that the Eadeses cover other parts of. What I’m referring to is the notion that vitamins are not one chemical, but actually groups of compounds that act together symbiotically. The main part of Vitamin C may be Ascorbic Acid, but there are many other “cofactors” that allow it to do it’s job more effectively. If one consumes only one or even just a few of the cofactors and not all of them, the body cannot regulate its levels of that main compound and there is a danger of it rising to levels that actually cause harm.

 

So, what is my problem with this book? Perhaps it is a minor one, but it is a bit nagging for me because I feel like this book could have been much better. The one thing that jumps out immediately is the actual look of the book. It looks like it was published 30 or more years ago, or by a very substandard press. In fact the publishers are The International for Nutrition and Health. Unfortunately they have produced a “book” that looks pretty amateurish. The type is not just oversized, but in many different sizes. It has so many quoted, bulleted, bolded, italicized and indented entities that these stylizations lose any and all meaning. Frost also refers to her “upcoming book” at least half a dozen times. Going Back to the Basics of Human Health was published in 1997 and I still cannot find ANY other book by Mary Frost other than this one. Although she references some authoritative sources, if you look in her bibliography, you will quickly see that probably 80% of her references are to 3 sources. I really think this book could have been a great resource itself if the author had included more of a variety of articles and studies, and if the typesetting hadn’t been so poorly done.

Another thing that bugged me was that Frost makes several references to a source of more naturally produced vitamins, and while it’s helpful to have this information, it creates the appearance that the book is merely an advertisement for the product. I’m sure that there are other suppliers that provide similar products but they are not mentioned. I’m also sure that there are some nutrients that can be had in a form that is produced in a lab (minerals, for example, like magnesium perhaps), but this is never pointed out. In other words, in such areas there doesn’t seem to be any balance, but rather just a sales pitch, albeit not a egregiously cheesy one.

 

There is yet one other thing that makes me a bit uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s an unjustified prejudice, perhaps not. Much of the book surrounds figures who are not medical doctors. Dr. Lee, for example, was trained in dentistry. Dr. Jenson is a Doctor of Chiropractic and Dr. Weston A. Price was also dentist. Some of the tools mentioned in this book are standard for chiropractors or “neuropathic” doctors, including the “acoustic-cardiograph machines,” reflexes, and “kinesiology.” I won’t speak to the first two of these, but I once saw a demonstration of the third that impressed me as so easily manipulated as to be useless – akin to a parlor trick. Perhaps some of these tools do provide useful information and I do not want to besmirch entire professions because they do not involve going through a standard medical school (which we all know can be shamefully deficient in some areas, such as nutrition), but still there is a sense that much of the information or advice surrounding these alternative medical methodologies are questionable to say the least. The Eadeses, at least, use hard science, including many studies, scientific journals, and so forth. This gives their books an air of solidity that Getting Back to the Basics of Human Health, as well as some others, can lack. Perhaps this is the aspiring scientist in me that causes doubt, and I realize that mainstream medicine has failed in many ways due to its own arrogance and collusion with industries and government that provide a great deal of monetary influence. At the same time, though, science should be used throughout in an effort to gauge how accurate theories are and we always need to be vigilant that claims that are being made should not simply be accepted because they sound morally right or logical or make us feel better.

 

Too often, people adopt an all-encompassing ideology when it comes to health and nutrition and refuse to listen to things that might prove to be a chink in their philosophy. I believe that ones view on such matters should not be set in stone, but be a very flexible mesh that allows for contradictions. Contradictions don’t have to weaken a theory, but rather may point towards ones still not devised that present a more accurate picture of things. A continual process of honing our understanding means theories building on previous ones and not fixing all of our ideas in cement and rejecting anything that might get in the way. Instead, that kind of approach will only prevent any future progress.

 

In any case, Going Back to the Basics of Human Health is an interesting read and a good introduction to some of the ideas out there regarding a more traditional/natural diet and environment. If one ignores the poor print quality and some of the sales pitches, one can get some good and intriguing information.

The Apprentice: My Life In The Kitchen is an autobiography of a French chef turned American culinary authority is a great read. Pepin grew up in war-torn

France and from practically puberty on was in the kitchen cooking for his mother’s restaurant. Thus began a life devoted to food and the culinary arts. We read about how Pepin goes through the grueling apprenticeship process in Parisian restaurants and somehow makes it through despite self doubts and a tendency for clowning that was sometimes very risky in the face of a strict hierarchical system

But as charming as the stories around his childhood and apprenticeship are, things get even more interesting once Pepin is drafted. Due to some great luck, he ends up as the chef for DeGaul. After working for the president for a number of years, he comes back to

Paris but eventually gets bored and comes to

America, and that is where things really start to get interesting. Pepin gets to be friends with some very notary people of the time, a time when gourmets and gourmands were still a very rare bird in this the

US. Such people as Jim Beard, Craig Claiborne, Julia Child, and many others were personal friends and colleagues of Peppin’s and we get to hear inside stories about all of them.

Peppin’s career, once in the

US, explored many different paths. He managed a popular restaurant that brought French bistro food to the New York City masses, worked in the management of Howard Johnson’s when it was all about serving mass-produced but high-quality meals, he gave personal and group lessons, he worked in television, wrote books, administered cooking programs at Boston University, and much more. The story is not just about a very successful chef expanding his career, but of a French cook trained in the French style and then being flung into the freewheeling U.S. and learning to not only survive but to thrive. To take the freedom and lack of formality and new foods and regional cuisines and running with them.

Although the French are often maligned by xenophobes here as being stuck up, snobby, and rude, Peppin seems the opposite of these. He applauds Claiborne’s culinary egalitarianism, he bemoans the lack of a decent number of African American chefs at cooking schools or kitchens, he admires all the different cuisines the

U.S. has to offer, rather than pooh-poohing anything that is not haute cuisine. He recognizes the cooking of women in

France as better in many ways than the very male-dominated system of chefs that populate the finer Michelin-starred restaurants. Peppin’s sense of humor and optimism shine throughout, even in the face of seemingly tragic events that might have ended his career if not his life. One also gets to hear his love of food and cooking throughout – so many events are talked about and always the food is described in such detail and excitement.

If you like to cook, love good food, or just a good story, The Apprentice – My Life in the Kitchen is a great read. I actually listened to the unabridged audio book version of this book, which is unabridged and read by Michel Chevalier, who does an excellent job.