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| 08.03.2010 |
Monday Morning Book Group
First Mondays of every month at 10 am
The Omnivore's Dilemma
Michael Pollan
Next meeting:
Monday, Sept. 13, at 10 am
Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister. Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted.This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals. I'm not convinced I'd want to go hunting with Pollan, but I'm sure I'd enjoy having dinner with him. Just as long as we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota.
Review from Amazon.com
Monday Evening Book Group
Fourth Mondays of every month at 6:45 pm
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
Next Meeting:
Monday, September 27 at 6:45 pm
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.
(Review from the Amazon.com.)