Rating: 5/5 Wayne Gisslen, Professional Baking, 5th ed. (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2009). I love this book! This is a textbook used in cooking schools. It’s perfect if you really want to learn how baking works from the ground up. I love, love, love it! Not only does it have all the standard recipes, it goes...
Rating: 5/5 Shirley O. Corriher, BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking with Over 200 Magnificent Recipes (New York: Scribner, 2008). Awesome, awesome, awesome! Corriher goes through all the main categories of baking: cakes, meringues, pies, cookies, and breads. She goes through all the ingredients, the...
Rating: 1/5 Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts (New York: Gotham Books, 2011). Well I don’t know what I was expecting, but apparently it was more than I got. I ended up skimming through the book in an hour or so. Nothing really jumped out at me. There’s some biographical information on the various font...
Rating: 5/5 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). I really, really enjoyed this book. This is not a manifesto. It’s an honest-to-goodness anthropological history of money, debt, and everything that goes with it. What I love about the book is how it builds. After going through all...
Rating: 5/5 Robert Atwan and Anne Fadiman (eds.), The Best American Essays 2003 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003). What I am loving most about these essay collections is the diversity. To use a Gumpism, “it’s like a box of chocolates.” There were a handful that I ended up skimming (toffee or peanut butter), and...
Rating: 5/5 Anne Fadiman (ed.), Rereadings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). Well I’ve decided that Anne Fadiman is pretty awesome :) I’ve also decided that the “essay” as a genre is pretty awesome too. I don’t know why I’ve had so little exposure to it so far in my life, but there it is. I’m glad I found it...
Rating: 5/5 Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays by Anne Fadiman (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007). Another delightful read. While not as intentionally hilarious as Ex Libris , it certainly has it’s guffaw-inducing moments. She’s a tremendous writer and succeeds well at creating vivid...
Rating: 3/5 John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988). Numeracy (critical thinking in general, really) is a topic I read about fairly often (e.g., here , here , here , here , here , and here , plus others that never made it to the blog). Certainly not...
Rating: 4/5 Robert Lomas, The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century: Nikola Tesla, Forgotten Genius of Electricity (London: Headline, 1999). This is an excellent non-academic biography (no source notes) of Nikola Tesla. I knew of Tesla, but it was nice to read his story from beginning to end. Lomas is obviously...
Rating: 1/5 Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (New York: Viking, 2007). Wow. This book is the perfect example of how writing style can totally obscure (nay, all but obliterate) an otherwise sound and fascinating message. I found this book...