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Reviewer's Choice
Finding Joy Through Food
Chiang Ching and Yanan Li
New Song Media GmbH
https://www.newsongmedia.de
9783910769106, $59.99 Paperback/$12.99 eBook
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Joy-through-Food-Culinary/dp/3910769101
Finding Joy through Food: A Culinary Memoir, with Recipes comes from an actor and dancer who, isolated during Covid, reinvented both herself and her relationship with food. Thus, this culinary memoir isn't just a recipe collection with a few memories attached, but represents a total reinvention of perceptions about not just food, but life. Yanan collaborates with Chiang Ching to provide important and revealing visuals that also move beyond the usual photos of finished dishes to incorporate the views of the author, ingredients, and the rivers and currents of life and death that move through those times and Chiang Ching's life.
These artistic, reflective renditions add further depth and dimension to the dishes, many of which are not the standard Chinese fare found in common cookbooks, but represent remakes due to ingredient substitutions or choices such as mushrooms, gleaned from the author's mushroom hunting activities on her private island. Such bites of life, such as Egg-Tofu with Minced Garlic and Squash, are accompanied by slices of life and connections formed against the backdrop of pandemic isolation, juxtaposing memories of the past with revised present-day situations from isolation efforts.
Draped in the clothing of a recipe collection and memoir but embedded with personal connection and reflection, Finding Joy through Food is not just about food's connection to life, but discovering new ways to reconnect with family and friends during times of crisis. These artistic visuals, appealing recipes, and even more appealing, life-affirming efforts set Finding Joy through Food apart from any other, showing how to find joy not just in food, but revised approaches to life.
Libraries seeking books that capture pandemic experience and survival traits alike will want to welcome Finding Joy through Food into their collections, highly recommending it to readers seeking more than a recipe collection alone. With its eye-catching photos of food and life engagement, Finding Joy through Food is a standout well worth its price tag. It can be gifted to anyone struggling to adapt to new circumstances by tapping into the inherent joy of not just surviving, but thriving.
The Photography Shelf
The Camera at War
Hilary Robets
Ilex Press
www.ilex.press
c/o Octopus Publishing Group
https://www.octopusbooks.co.uk
9781781579657, $49.99
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Camera-War-years-weaponising-photography/dp/1781579652
If only one history or photography book representing war were chosen for a collection, it should be The Camera at War: 150 Years of Weaponising Photography. This archive of images gathered by former Imperial War Museum curator Hilary Roberts follows some 150 years of war journalism, with specific attention on how images can be manipulated for a desired reaction in the viewer. This focus on how photos of war can be used to boost morale of soldiers and nation and how they can be distorted and changed should be on the reading lists of any aspiring documentary photographer. Far more than just gathering a collection of war imagery, The Camera at War provokes more thought-provoking insights and discussions into how photography can be used to enhance, spread, or alter the truth.
The Cookbook Shelf
Clodagh's Happy Cooking
Clodagh McKennz
Kyle Books
c/o Octopus Publishing Group
https://www.octopusbooks.co.uk
9781804193372, $29.99
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Clodaghs-Happy-Cooking-Healthy-Recipes/dp/1804193372
Clodagh's Happy Cooking features a hundred healthy, easy recipes for improving mood and focuses on balance of ingredients and nourishment that encourages maximum joy from both cooking and eating the results. From an author-invented Daily Happy Juice and Almost-Instant Orange Scones (which can be made in just ten minutes) to the cheery color of The Power Soup with Power Seed Sprinkle, made from spices, beans, cabbage, and a sprinkle of sunflower, pumpkin, and sesame seeds, Clodagh's Happy Cooking is an appealing collection of delicious old and new recipes. It promotes hearty fare and an ease of preparation that cultivates joy in cooking and eating.
Full of Beans
Amelia Christie-Miller
Kyle Books
c/o Octopus Publishing Group
https://www.octopusbooks.co.uk
9781804192979, $26.99
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Bold-Beans-Full-Delicious-Recipes/dp/180419297X
Full of Beans: Delicious Beany Recipes to Obsess Over joins many other bean cookbooks on the market, but with a few differences. It gathers recipes by the Bold Bean Company that expands the bean cook's repertoire with such innovative recipes as Carlin Pea Stroganoff, Mediterranean Cod, Chorizo and Red Bean Stew, and Smoky Kimchi Beans with Crispy Tempeh Crumbles. These dishes and others are designed not just for the newcomer to bean cookery, but also for those who have bean cooking basics down pat, and are looking for innovative new bean dishes. Bright color photos accompany a wealth of bean recipes that won't be found in competing bean cookbooks, making Full of Beans a winner that succeeds in increasing bean cooking's possibilities.
The Jane Austen Recipe Book
Robert Tuesley Anderson
Hamlyn
c/o Octopus Publishing Group
https://www.octopusbooks.co.uk
9790600639800, $12.99
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Austen-Recipe-Book-Afternoon/dp/0600639800
The Jane Austen Recipe Book is a collection of recipes for picnics and afternoon teas that's inspired by the works of Jane Austen, and will make the perfect gift for any literary cook. Fiction readers well know how food-infused are Austen's scenarios. This pocket-sized hardcover uses those descriptions to create some seventy Regency-era recipes suitable for modern times. Dishes include seeded oat crackers (Dr. Frederick Wentworth's Ship's Biscuits), Cassandra's Lobster and Asparagus, and sumptuous Strawberry and Lavender Shortcakes. Chapters are introduced with black and white illustrations. No color photos, but the easy recipes don't require them. The Jane Austen Recipe Book stands out as a fun attraction for its literary connections to Austen's novels even without color displays of finished results.
The Biography/Memoir Shelf
Champagne Girl in a Budweiser Family
Suzanne Weerts
https://www.suzanneweerts.com
Independently Published
9798999497901, $5.99 eBook
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Champagne-Girl-Budweiser-Family-Stories-ebook/dp/B0FQWJP2C7
Champagne Girl in a Budweiser Family: A Memoir in Stories is a memoir told in vignettes that chronicles the culture and trials of coming of age in the 1970s South. These tales from a simpler era held underlying, streamlined guidelines for girls of those times - which was all fine and good until a family experienced a rebel in their midst. Such was Suzanne Weerts, who details the music, atmosphere, and pastimes of a family in bygone times: "Daddy and Mom have made buckets from Maxwell House coffee tins with wire coat hangers, and we each grab one off the handlebars and begin filling the cans with blackberries, the dark purple juice dripping down our arms. Mom knew this would happen so she made sure we dressed in our oldest clothes."
The memoir helps readers understand the 1970s milieu from the perspective of both a child's eye and the seasoned hindsight of an adult writer. It captures moments of kindergarten, play, friendships, and fitting in (or not): "This was a tragic, heartbroken, miserable-but-supportive bunch, yet what were we supposed to say when they got to us? They were all one-upping each other with stories of flying plates and brandished weapons. We might have participated in a food fight with Planters Cheez Balls after over-indulging on some Boone's Farm Tickle Pink at the Lake Johnson dam, but no one got hurt. We didn't belong here."
From secret societies and buckets of fried chicken to learning to fire a gun at a party, recovering from emotional and physical setbacks, and interacting with the greater world outside of the town she was born in, Weerts presents her life as snapshots of experience that draw readers into the backdrop of her world and young wisdom. Libraries seeking memoirs that hold a firm foundation of place in general and the South in particular will welcome how vividly Champagne Girl in a Budweiser Family depicts the emotional growth and forays of not just the author, but everyone around her. Embellished with descriptive interactions and the satisfaction of humor juxtaposed with life lessons, the story embeds philosophical and social reflection in a simple, fun read that is hard to put down and filled with thought-provoking reflections: "Time flies and bands break up./Flashlights lose their juice./Friends lose touch./People die."
The Fantasy/SciFi Shelf
Baen Books
www.baen.com
Two new Baen titles are solid picks furthering the careers of notable writers, and are highly recommended for libraries that have enjoyed patron interest in prior books.
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Jungle-Shadows-Path-Book-ebook/dp/B0FBMNRV3Y
John Ringo works with Casey Moores in Welcome to the Jungle (9781668072899, $28.00), an explosive story of Michael Edwards, who was raised in a dangerous inner city and has developed streetwise smarts combined with unusual abilities to survive his world. All these influences saved him once: now he's back in New York City to claim his inheritance, facing down The Society, an evil force which runs most of the world. Used to not just surviving, but winning, can teenage Michael pose a formidable threat to such a pervasive, powerful enemy? Nonstop urban action makes this story a winner.
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Challenges-Worlds-Honor-Weber-David/dp/1668072955
David Weber's Challenges: Tales From the Earliest Days of the Star Kingdom (9781668072950, $30.00) adds the eighth book to the Worlds of Honor series and is especially recommended for prior fans, offering a collection of new short stories by Weber, Marisa Wolf, and other Baen authors. Combat action and top characterization run hand in hand as Honor Harrington and others face the People's Republic of Haven and other forces, learning how to both ally with them and defy them in unusual ways. Both are action-packed winners.
James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief
Diane C. Donovan, Editor
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