Your Birthday Book: A Keepsake Journal

I just love the idea of this birthday book. I am looking forward to filing it with all the wonderful memories I have of my son and one day giving it to him.Buy Your Birthday Book: A Keepsake Journal!

The Pregnancy Countdown Book: Nine Months of Practical Tips, Useful Advice, and Uncensored Truths

This book is cute to flip through, but it is not really organized in a way that makes it entirely useful. There is a few pages of information on every week of pregnancy, but not enough to make me pick it up every week to see what was going on with my body. Overall it appears to be an interesting coffee table book, not much of a must have reference book.Buy The Pregnancy Countdown Book: Nine Months of Practical Tips, Useful Advice, and Uncensored Truths!

The Juicing Book: A Complete Guide to the Juicing of Fruits and Vegetables for Maximum Health (Avery Health Guides)

I purchased a new juicer from Amazon and this book was a suggested add-on. I needed recipes and Amazon usually offers reliable products. So I fell for the come-on and orderd this book. It turned out to be cheaply published and poorly written pseudoscience about foods and health and offered only a few recipes, none of which was worth looking at.Buy The Juicing Book: A Complete Guide to the Juicing of Fruits and Vegetables for Maximum Health (Avery Health Guides)!

Blue Book of Gun Values: 29th Edition

Good quality validation, description of values for guns....will prove useful as we determine the value and proper distribution of items my Brother acuired over some 75 years while sport shooting and hunting from North America ( ++ Alaska ), Africa & Mexico.Buy Blue Book of Gun Values: 29th Edition!

Richard Doyle's Fairyland Coloring Book (Dover Pictorial Archives)

I got this for my granddaughter, but when I showed it to my daughter she wanted one for herself. When I showed my mom, she wanted to color in it. We are all looking forward to giving it to the 7 year old, then we can color in it too! We will be using colored pencils and I recommend you use them also. This is the kind of coloring book that encourages blending of colors and shading to get a "grown-up" picture. Great for anyone. And I did buy books for the adults as well.Buy Richard Doyle's Fairyland Coloring Book (Dover Pictorial Archives)!

The River Cottage Meat Book

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and use it as reference often. However, the title, "MEAT," set in type that dwarves litterally every other title on my book shelves, implies a kind of comprehensiveness that the book does not deliver.

I'm not complaining that there are no recipes for Tibettan yak or rattlesnake. I'm talking about something more general. As most know, Fearnley-Whittingstall is a huge proponent of artisinal, natural farming. It's a great cause, and an approach worth supporting, but I believe mindless adherence can lead you into a couple of quagmires.

First is an idealogicall / political one, which is beyond the scope of this review, and probably also beyond the scope of the Meat book, although it needs to be acknowledged: we don't have enough pasture land on Earth to feed 6 billion people, or even 3 billion, using artisinal methods. It's a terrible truth, but it means we need to think in terms of reforming our broken industrial agricultural system, not just abolishing it (or worse, ignoring it).

Second, and more to the point, is the very complex subject of beef. Fearnley-Whittingstall talks in terms of pastured, grass-finished beef to the exclusion of all others. This reinforces the false dichotomy that cows are either grass fed/artisinal/good or corn fed/industrial/bad.

Well, it just doesn't work like that. I've been researching top quality beef for many months, and have found (and tasted) a whole world of variations. There are cattle raised on pasture land their whole lives but have their diets supplemented with grains during the last months of their lives. There are cattle who spend their lives in large pens, away from pasture, getting fed controlled mixtures of cut grass, hay, alfalfa, corn, and barley. There are the famous cattle of Kobe who get fed god-knows-what (but it includes barley and beer).

All these approaches yield delicious, first rate beef. All are artisinal. All raise healthy, happy cattle. And all are ignored by Fearnley-Whittingstall's book. I happen to like his style of pasture raised beef--If raised well (not a given) it produces fresh herbal flavors, that vary with season and terroir. But this beef is only sometimes my first choice. It lacks the marbling, succulence, and deep "beefiness" that can be produced in meat that's been fattened with grains.

So what? My concern is that some complex issues, ones that matter to anyone concerned with the planet or with good eating, get overly simplified in the book. It still owns a place of prominence among my shelves, but I'm looking for a more comprehensive reference to fill in some of the (big) gaps.

What else? Recipes? They're there if you you're looking for a recipe book, and I trust they're fine examples of country meat cookery. I suspect, though, the unique value of this book is as a reference on buying meat and understanding its sources and all the steps from farm to table.Buy The River Cottage Meat Book!

The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

Wonderful! I love to drive and listen. Wish it was available on CD.Buy The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel!