Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss My rating: 5 of 5 stars This exhaustively and impressively researched exposé on the food industry reads like good investigative journalism with an element of suspense thrown in. While I think most people know that processed and pre-packaged food isn’t good for you (for the most part), it’s quite another thing to learn how deliberately bad it is.
Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book was a bit of a mixed bag for me. It started off strong and rather compelling with a case study about innovative personal fitness (not PE) classes at a few high schools that were almost an experiment to see if exercise had any effect on students’ academic performance. […]
Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life by Elizabeth George My rating: 5 of 5 stars This turned out to be one of my favorite writing books written by a bestselling author (Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird being tied for my favorite). She caught my attention early on when she described herself as mostly left-brained (like me) and her subsequent need […]
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was a fantastic read that tells the story of Louie Zampirini, a World War II airman who epitomized the Greatest Generation. Zampirini, the son of Italian immigrants, spends his childhood engaged in shenanigans and petty theft. He later converts his talent for running away from the scene of the […]
