Rating: 5/5 Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). This book is required reading. If you care at all about your health, if you are diabetic or obese, if you just need to decide what to make for dinner, you...

This is another guest post by my wife, Adele. Rating: 5/5 Shilpi Somaya Gowda, Secret Daughter (New York: William Morrow, 2010). After I finished this book, when I had let the whole story sink in, I felt I had finished reading a work of art. The author uses the style of jumping from one person’s perspective to...

This is our first guest post. My wife, Adele, has been doing some reading and wanted to share her thoughts with all of you. Here we go! Rating: 5/5 Lisa Genova, Still Alice (New York: Pocket Books, 2009). A wonderful and educational read! This is a story of how one Alice discovers she has Alzheimer’s and how that...

Rating: 3/5 Karl Sabbagh, Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us (Oxford University Press, 2011). This book turned out to be not quite what I expected. I thought it would be a lower-level discussion of what memory is, but instead this book is a higher-level overview of memory (childhood memory in particular)...

Rating: 5/5 Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food Justice, and Sustainability, 4th ed. (Crescent City, CA: Flashpoint Press, 2009). Everyone should read this book. Don’t let the title fool you. It’s not a book just for vegetarians. Nor is it some brutal tirade against vegetarianism. Keith was a vegan for 20 years,...

Rating: 3/5 Jila Ghomeshi, Grammar Matters: The Social Significance of How We Use Language (Winnipeg, MB: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2010). This book was mentioned by a colleague in the latest edition of the EAC magazine Active Voice . I immediately checked it out from the library. Unfortunately I have to say I was...

Rating: 4/5 Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets (Revised ed.) (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). Make no mistake, this is one daunting read. It is 450 pages of small print and excruciating detail, and the content is enough to make you just go mad with frustration. This...

Rating: 3/5 Donald D. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998. Well if you need to be reminded just how truly awesome the human body is, or need to be reminded just how illusory what we think of as reality is, this book is for you. The book attempts to explain as...

Rating: 4/5 Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (New York: Basic Books, 2008). The Lightness of Being is the type of content you might expect in a first-year honours physics class—maybe even second-year. It attempts to summarize where things are at in regards to quantum...

One thing about editing is that music can be very distracting, especially music with any sort of lyric. So, when I’m editing I do so generally in silence (or purely instrumental music if it’s a lighter text). I love it, then, when I get to the design and layout stage because I can listen to anything I want. Three CDs...