Grillo Center Labyrinth

Grillo Center Labyrinth
Meander and Meet....designed by George Peters and Melanie Walker of Airworks For more information contact Susan at susan@well.com

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Saturday Morning Walkers - July 13, 2008

Hi everyone!

We had a lovely Saturday morning walk - Barb, Cass and I walked around Wonderland Lake - we even ran into Janet, Dan and Peaches (their dog!). Christie and Chris joined us for breakfast at Lucky's Cafe.

Book Report:

Cass is reading a memoir that I read several years ago - Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican

Washington Post Book World
"Santiago is a welcome new voice, full of passion and authority."

Review for ISBN 0306814528
"Stylistically fluid and finely detailed...cinematically recalls her past and her island culture." Los Angeles Times)

Product Description

Esmeralda Santiago's story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity. In this first volume of her much-praised, bestselling trilogy, Santiago brilliantly recreates the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years and her tremendous journey from the barrio to Brooklyn, from translating for her mother at the welfare office to high honors at Harvard.

About the Author

Esmeralda Santiago is the author of two highly acclaimed memoirs, The Turkish Lover and Almost a Woman, which was made into a film for PBS's Masterpiece Theatre. She has also written a novel, America's Dream, and has co-edited two anthologies of Latino literature. She lives in Westchester County, New York.

Cass also recently read a book that she highly recommends - The Shadow of Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

From Publishers Weekly
Ruiz Zafón's novel, a bestseller in his native Spain, takes the satanic touches from Angel Heart and stirs them into a bookish intrigue à la Foucault's Pendulum. The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax's novels. The man calls himself Laín Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax's novels. As he grows up, Daniel's fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind femme fatale with a "porcelain gaze," Clara Barceló; another fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermín Romero de Torres; his best friend's sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. Officially, Carax's dead body was dumped in an alley in 1936. But discrepancies in this story surface. Meanwhile, Daniel and Fermín are being harried by a sadistic policeman, Carax's childhood friend. As Daniel's quest continues, frightening parallels between his own life and Carax's begin to emerge. Ruiz Zafón strives for a literary tone, and no scene goes by without its complement of florid, cute and inexact similes and metaphors (snow is "God's dandruff"; servants obey orders with "the efficiency and submissiveness of a body of well-trained insects"). Yet the colorful cast of characters, the gothic turns and the straining for effect only give the book the feel of para-literature or the Hollywood version of a great 19th-century novel.

For those of you don't know, Cass is a high school Spanish teacher at Fairview High here in Boulder - she has started a Spanish language book group that meets at the Boulder Public Library and these are just two of the books they have read.

I finished our book group selection for this month - Higher Authority by local author and former psychologist, Steven White. I'm not usually a mystery reader but this makes for a good summer book. It is pretty revealing about what Mormon life is like in Utah.

From Library Journal
Attorney Lauren Crowder recommends a Salt Lake City lawyer for her younger sister, who has accused her former boss, an impeccably Mormon woman with high political and church connections, of sexual harassment. Crowder assists a private investigator in gathering information on the potentially explosive case, but murder intervenes: someone kills the P.I. and the former boss. Crowder then calls upon boyfriend Alan Gregory (Private Practices, Viking, 1993) to outmaneuver the ubiquitous, corrupt tentacles of the Mormon church. Much background research supports fine prose, subtle characterization, and intricate plotting. A good selection.

Chris is reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. This personal account of Kingsolver's family's effort at eating home-grown and local food was also recommended to me a while ago by Karen.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Nina PlanckMichael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field—local food and sustainable agriculture—is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food—in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling—demands teamwork. (May)Nina Planck is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Bloomsbury USA, 2006).

Oh, I just thought about another book that Libby had with her when she was here last week - Eat This, Not That! by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding. It is a pretty revealing nutrtional look at what we're actually consuming when we go out to fast food and popular chain restaurants.

Product Description

Eat what you want, when you want--and watch the pounds disappear!
Americans spend more than $400 billion a year eating out, and behind each burger, turkey sandwich, and ice cream sundae is a simple decision that could help you control your weight—and your life. The problem is, restaurant chains and food producers aren't interested in helping you make healthy choices. In fact, they invest $30 billion a year on advertising, much of it aimed at confusing eaters and disguising the fat and calorie counts of their products.

All of that has changed with EAT THIS, NOT THAT!. This book puts the entire food industry under the spotlight, and arms you with the savvy tricks and insider information it takes to eat well no matter where you are. With EAT THIS, NOT THAT! you're the expert in every eating situation, from the frozen food aisle to your favorite fast food joint to your local sports bar. You control your food universe—and lose the pounds you want--because, unlike every other customer, you'll know the smart choices to make—instantly!

EAT THIS, NOT THAT! is jam-packed with secrets the restaurant industry doesn't want you to know. For example:
• Burger King doesn't want you to know that a BK Big Fish® Sandwich and fries have a whopping 1000 calories—nearly half your daily caloric intake! (Fish is usually healthy, but not this kind. Find out why with this book.)
• Pizza Hut doesn't want you to know that a standard pizza in Italy contains 500 to 800 calories, but the same meal at Pizza Hut can top 2,100 calories! (You'd need to ride a stationary bike for more than three hours to burn off this mistake. Instead, eat all the pizza you want by making smart choices. EAT THIS, NOT THAT! shows you how.)
• Macaroni Grill doesn't want you to know that a single serving of their Grilled Teriyaki Salmon has more than three times your daily allowance of sodium! (Cut your risk of high blood pressure by making smart choices at the same restaurant. You'll find them inside.)

If only you knew the industry secrets, you could eat at any of your favorite restaurants—or chow down on everything from the company vending machine to your kids’ Halloween buckets—and know that every decision you made was smart, healthy, and the best possible choice for you. For example, did you know:
• At McDonald’s, an Egg McMuffin® is actually a healthy choice, with just 300 calories. (The Hotcakes pack more than double that amount!)
• At Krispy Kreme, all you need to do is order the Very Berry Chiller instead of the Mocha Dream Chiller, and you'll save 500 calories! (Do that once a week and you'll drop more than 7 pounds this year—without trying!)
• At Chipotle, you can cut 570 calories out of your Chicken Burrito just by ordering it as a bowl (without the tortilla) and asking them to hold the rice. (Same great taste, but with 94 fewer carb grams!)
• Choosing a cinnamon roll at Au Bon Pain over Cinnabon will save you 463 calories and 20 grams of fat!
• In the freezer section of your local supermarket, a turkey pot pie from Swanson’s has 610 fewer calories than a turkey pot pie from Pepperidge Farms.
• In the produce aisle, you'll get twice the vitamin C—and nine times as much vitamin A—simply by picking red bell peppers over green ones. (Who said eating healthy was difficult?)

And that’s why EAT THIS, NOT THAT! is going to change everything. It’s time to level the playing field. We're all tired of sneaky calories adding to our waistlines, and having to starve ourselves or spend hours on the treadmill trying to burn off the damage. Now—for the first time—you're in charge. With this simple illustrated guide to thousands of foods--along with the nutrition secrets that lead to fast and permanent weight loss--you'll make the smartest choice every time!

Website of the Week: http://www.bookbrowse.com/bookclubs/index.cfm?fuseaction=diy_guides - tips on how to lead discussions for book groups

Podcast of the Week: http://www2.oprah.com/spiritself/oss/guest/oss_guest_jkabatzinn.jhtml - Oprah's interview with one of my favorite teachers, Jon Kabat Zinn on mindfulness and meditation.

Vocabulary Word of the Week - Epicureep·i·cure (p-kyr)
n.
1. A person with refined taste, especially in food and wine.
2. A person devoted to sensuous pleasure and luxurious living. See Usage Note at gourmet.

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[Middle English, an Epicurean, from Medieval Latin epicrus, from Latin Epicrus, Epicurus, from Greek Epikouros

Cooking and Dining Report:

Nothing much to report this week! Jack was away for several days, so there was some eating out and much grazing!

I had a lovely dinner out with Sondra on Tuesday night at The Cork - they had a fantastic Ravioli with Swiss Chard.
I had another lovely dinner out with Janet at Dolans - we both had the Panko Breaded Fish (can't remember what it was) - it was just ok (not too memorable) but the company was great!


Quote of the Week - this is something that Eckhard Tolle says in A New Earth - not sure it was originally said by someone else but it is worth sharing:
"Worrying pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose"

Have a great week ahead - I've got some interesting recipes to try this week so I'll share them with you next time.

Love,
Susan

1 comment:

Mindy Kittay said...

Love your Blog! I ran across it because I have a google alert for the Boulder Public Library and since you mentioned it in your post it sent me the link. I love books (I'm a librarian), and I love to eat! I'm not sure which I love more. Also, I live in Boulder so if you ever want another "walker" (I like to walk too!), I'd love to join in. Mindy