Books I liked, 2006
Aside from the books mentioned earlier in this blog, here are a few other books I read this year that I'd recommend:
Kamp, David. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. New York: Broadway Books, 2006.
Very entertaining history of how the American palate changed in the last 50 years. Lots of inside dirt on the restaurant reviewers, cookbook authors, chefs, and merchandisers (Williams-Sonoma, Dean & Deluca) who've influenced what we eat in restaurants and buy in grocery stores. There are even a couple of pages on Odessa Piper of Madison's L'Etoile. I liked the book for all the "oh, that's how that came to be" moments it provided me with: where the Moosewood cookbook came from, how Dean & DeLuca got started (and why it's a big deal). Kamp places each of these names in context, and he has lots of juicy details (on Chez Panisse and Alice Waters, for instance). Also, Kamp gets off some funny lines.
Matthias, Rebecca. MothersWork: How a Young Mother Started a Business on a Shoestring and Built it Into a Multi-Million Dollar Company. New York: Doubleday, c1999.
Kind of my "sleeper of the year." This business autobiography won't win any literary awards. But advise anyone with dreams of building a big company to read it. Matthias is an entrepreneur at heart, and she was looking to start some kind of business, around the time she had her first child. During that first pregnancy, she could not find business maternity clothes. So that's the concept she built her business around--first a mail order maternity wear business, and eventually retail. She had never started or run a business, much less a clothing retailer, but her husband had started and run a tech company. Mostly, though, she learned by doing.
(I found myself using her "yellow pages chain" technique last week. You need to find a business that does something. You look in the yellow pages under the category you think might work. You call a place, and if they don't have/do what you're looking for, you ask them for suggestions of other places. And you continue this till you get what you're looking for. Sounds very simple, but I rarely did it till I read this book.)
Matthias ended up having clothes made for her stores, and I found the info about the garment industry interesting. I liked learning how she advertised and marketed too. Eventually she (and her husband, who got into the business pretty quickly) ended up with retail stores, and entered the world of franchising. Finally, they took the company public. At the end of each chapter describing her experiences, Matthias has a list of tips and lessons learned. Her tips section on an IPO explained an IPO in a way I could understand!! For that alone the book was worth it.
What I liked most about the book is how honestly it portrayed the hard work of starting your own business. I recommend it to anyone considering starting a business. Matthias and her husband didn't draw a salary for years. They had their warehouse and inventory damaged by fire. They raised three kids as they built their business. They had trouble getting financing. This book covers that and lots of other aspects of mail order/retail business.
Hirshenson, Janet and Jane Jenkins. A Star Is Found: Our Adventures Casting Some of Hollywood's Biggest Movies. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006.
This was just fun. It's not all that well-written: it tries to be a kind of exploration of the casting process--following the casting of one bit part in A Beautiful Mind--but mostly it's fun to read why certain people did or didn't get which parts. These women have cast a variety of movies over the years, working with a-list directors like Francis Ford Coppola (post-Godfather) and Ron Howard. Among other films, they cast The DaVinci Code, Mystic Pizza, The Outsiders, and the three lead kids in the Harry Potter franchise. It's fun to read about how they cast some actors in their first major roles (there's a cute story about Julia Roberts's audition for Mystic Pizza. I especially liked the descriptions of casting smaller parts and extras. The authors describe several tiers of actors, with examples, from extras and bit players on up through the mega-stars. There are different casting procedures and considerations for each. This is one of the things that made this a better book than another casting book I read this year, How They Cast It: An Insider's Look at Film and Television Casting (Rob Kendt; Los Angeles, CA: Lone Eagle, 2005). Kendt's book did have quite a bit on television casting, and a fun chapter on casting the kids in School of Rock. Both are quick reads.
Biank, Tanya. Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives. New York : St. Martin's Press, 2006.
Biank is the reporter who broke the story (ie pointed out the trend) of four Army wives near Fort Bragg each murdered by their husbands during a single 6-week span in 2002. That prompted her to write this book covering a year in the lives of four other Army wives whose husbands were stationed at or near Ft. Bragg. I'm not entirely comfortable with Biank's style--there are some scenes she describes as if she had witnessed them, when one hopes, for discretion's sake, that she hadn't. But it was a compelling read. The wives profiled are an interesting cross-section: wife of an officer, wife who also has a son in the military, a wife who is herself in the military. Biank spends just as much time profiling Fayetteville (North Carolina) and its relationship with the military personnel around it as she does profiling the women.
There's never been enough attention to how families support and are affected by a spouse's/parent's military career. With an all-volunteer military, fewer people overall have direct experience with the military, but as the war in Iraq drags on, this will change. This is one window into the military world.
Aside from the books mentioned earlier in this blog, here are a few other books I read this year that I'd recommend:
Kamp, David. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. New York: Broadway Books, 2006.
Very entertaining history of how the American palate changed in the last 50 years. Lots of inside dirt on the restaurant reviewers, cookbook authors, chefs, and merchandisers (Williams-Sonoma, Dean & Deluca) who've influenced what we eat in restaurants and buy in grocery stores. There are even a couple of pages on Odessa Piper of Madison's L'Etoile. I liked the book for all the "oh, that's how that came to be" moments it provided me with: where the Moosewood cookbook came from, how Dean & DeLuca got started (and why it's a big deal). Kamp places each of these names in context, and he has lots of juicy details (on Chez Panisse and Alice Waters, for instance). Also, Kamp gets off some funny lines.
Matthias, Rebecca. MothersWork: How a Young Mother Started a Business on a Shoestring and Built it Into a Multi-Million Dollar Company. New York: Doubleday, c1999.
Kind of my "sleeper of the year." This business autobiography won't win any literary awards. But advise anyone with dreams of building a big company to read it. Matthias is an entrepreneur at heart, and she was looking to start some kind of business, around the time she had her first child. During that first pregnancy, she could not find business maternity clothes. So that's the concept she built her business around--first a mail order maternity wear business, and eventually retail. She had never started or run a business, much less a clothing retailer, but her husband had started and run a tech company. Mostly, though, she learned by doing.
(I found myself using her "yellow pages chain" technique last week. You need to find a business that does something. You look in the yellow pages under the category you think might work. You call a place, and if they don't have/do what you're looking for, you ask them for suggestions of other places. And you continue this till you get what you're looking for. Sounds very simple, but I rarely did it till I read this book.)
Matthias ended up having clothes made for her stores, and I found the info about the garment industry interesting. I liked learning how she advertised and marketed too. Eventually she (and her husband, who got into the business pretty quickly) ended up with retail stores, and entered the world of franchising. Finally, they took the company public. At the end of each chapter describing her experiences, Matthias has a list of tips and lessons learned. Her tips section on an IPO explained an IPO in a way I could understand!! For that alone the book was worth it.
What I liked most about the book is how honestly it portrayed the hard work of starting your own business. I recommend it to anyone considering starting a business. Matthias and her husband didn't draw a salary for years. They had their warehouse and inventory damaged by fire. They raised three kids as they built their business. They had trouble getting financing. This book covers that and lots of other aspects of mail order/retail business.
Hirshenson, Janet and Jane Jenkins. A Star Is Found: Our Adventures Casting Some of Hollywood's Biggest Movies. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006.
This was just fun. It's not all that well-written: it tries to be a kind of exploration of the casting process--following the casting of one bit part in A Beautiful Mind--but mostly it's fun to read why certain people did or didn't get which parts. These women have cast a variety of movies over the years, working with a-list directors like Francis Ford Coppola (post-Godfather) and Ron Howard. Among other films, they cast The DaVinci Code, Mystic Pizza, The Outsiders, and the three lead kids in the Harry Potter franchise. It's fun to read about how they cast some actors in their first major roles (there's a cute story about Julia Roberts's audition for Mystic Pizza. I especially liked the descriptions of casting smaller parts and extras. The authors describe several tiers of actors, with examples, from extras and bit players on up through the mega-stars. There are different casting procedures and considerations for each. This is one of the things that made this a better book than another casting book I read this year, How They Cast It: An Insider's Look at Film and Television Casting (Rob Kendt; Los Angeles, CA: Lone Eagle, 2005). Kendt's book did have quite a bit on television casting, and a fun chapter on casting the kids in School of Rock. Both are quick reads.
Biank, Tanya. Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives. New York : St. Martin's Press, 2006.
Biank is the reporter who broke the story (ie pointed out the trend) of four Army wives near Fort Bragg each murdered by their husbands during a single 6-week span in 2002. That prompted her to write this book covering a year in the lives of four other Army wives whose husbands were stationed at or near Ft. Bragg. I'm not entirely comfortable with Biank's style--there are some scenes she describes as if she had witnessed them, when one hopes, for discretion's sake, that she hadn't. But it was a compelling read. The wives profiled are an interesting cross-section: wife of an officer, wife who also has a son in the military, a wife who is herself in the military. Biank spends just as much time profiling Fayetteville (North Carolina) and its relationship with the military personnel around it as she does profiling the women.
There's never been enough attention to how families support and are affected by a spouse's/parent's military career. With an all-volunteer military, fewer people overall have direct experience with the military, but as the war in Iraq drags on, this will change. This is one window into the military world.
posted by Beth at 9:20 AM
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