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Salt Sugar Fat | Michael Moss

By on May 20, 2013 in Book Reviews, Culture 1

The entire processed food industry—that behemoth which generates hundreds of billions of dollars in annual sales—can be summed up by the way they manipulate and market three simple ingredients: salt, sugar, and fat.

Michael Moss has done a painstaking amount of research, interviewing current and former food industry insiders and visiting (and even tasting the products of) food research labs. The result is this book: a narrative which shows how the simple human need to eat has generated a war between corporations trying to win the taste buds of consumers.

This book is stuffed full of interesting stories and facts:

  • Philip Morris, the tobacco company, has acquired General Foods and Kraft (among others) and uses its marketing savvy to deflect obesity concerns the same way they deflected cancer concerns for years.
  • Salt isn’t just used for taste. It covers the metallic and rotten taste of processed food.
  • Through extensive research, food scientists determine the precise amount of sweetness (the “bliss point” ) to generate the greatest desire in consumers.
  • While humans lose their desire to eat more sugary foods after a certain point, that reluctance is undermined when sugar is mixed with fat.
  • Sugar and fat are interchangeable ingredients. A product can be marketed as “low fat” or “low sugar” by lowering the offending ingredient and replacing it with the other.

Moss has won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting—a skill highlighted in this book. His writing is compelling, shocking at times, but fair. He never sounds preachy or unreasonably biased.

If you’re concerned with what you put into your body, this is a book worth reading.

Souls on Fire | Elie Wiesel

By on December 24, 2012 in Book Reviews, Culture 0

Sadness.

Every time I set this book down after reading a chapter or two I was filled with an odd sense of melancholy mixed with frustration, but above all, sadness.

Hasidic Judaism, one of the branches of Orthodox Judaism, began in 1700 with the birth of Israel Baal Shem Tov. In Souls on Fire, Wiesel paints biographic sketches of the major figures in Hasidism, filling the chapters with stories, parables, and larger-than-life personas.

My biggest surprise was the cavalier attitude that the Hasidic masters had towards God. Instead of approaching God in reverence, some of their attitudes were stunningly arrogant! Take Israel of Rizhin for example. On approaching God in prayer he said, “I am not a slave come to ask favors of the king. I come as a counselor to discuss matters of state” (158).

The thing that had the greatest impact on me was the constant longing and despair at the non-arrival of the Messiah. The pages are filled with Hasidic Masters stating how if only [insert condition here] then the Messiah would come. Their extreme boldness plays a role here, too. Some of the Masters believed they could make force the Messiah to arrive if only …

Perhaps because of this unfulfilled longing for the Messiah, “all [of the masters], to varying degrees, struggled against melancholy” (106). Instead of reading about the life of “Souls on Fire,” I learned about the lives of smoldering wicks trying to maintain hope in the face of an apparently uncaring deity. I’m unsure how much of this attitude is true of the Hasidic Masters themselves and how much is imposed by Wiesel—a man who has endured more than anyone’s fair share of suffering (see: Night).

In the end, my Christian narrative—that the Messiah has indeed arrived and was largely unrecognized by his own people—added a level of pathos that made the book difficult to read.

What Canadians Think | Darrell Bricker & John Wright

By on November 19, 2012 in Book Reviews, Culture 0

Ipsos-Reid is synonymous with Canadian statistics. In What Canadians Think, Bricker and Wright from Ipsos-Reid draw from the statistics they have collected to paint a clear and light-hearted picture of what makes Canadians Canadian.

Bricker and Wright fill the book with curious stats on all aspects of life. Have you ever wondered what the most popular after-school activity is? Piano and Swimming lessons are tied at 16% each with Soccer a close second at 15%. What about the odds by which a Canadian woman is more likely than a man to be on a diet—2.5 to 1. What percentage of Canadians know the first line of our nation anthem? Brace yourself—only 37%!

One of the more interesting things this book illustrates is how different Quebec is. On stat after stat, Quebec’s numbers were radically different from the rest of Canada. (British Columbia was the second most out-of-step province.)

The biggest problem with a book like this is its date. It was published in 2005, which makes the data over 8 years old. Part of the fun I had while reading was trying to guess where our country had moved in the years that followed this book’s printing. When it came to topics like the Internet, the lack of relevance was comical.

If knowing thyself is the key to collective enlightenment, then Bricker and Wright are leading the way there.

The Information Diet | Clay A. Johnson

By on March 5, 2012 in Book Reviews, Culture 0

What would the world look like if information sources—television, websites, newspapers—had an ingredients label on them like our food has?

In The Information Diet, Clay Johnson examines the link between the obesity epidemic and information gluttony. The parallel is interesting. For example, just as it’s healthier to get food straight from the source, it’s better to get our information closer to the source. It’s time we stopped eating junk information that just reinforces our beliefs, and began to understand and filter data for ourselves.

This topic interested me immediately since I’ve been reflecting on Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. While Johnson acknowledged his debt to Carr, his analysis of the information differs. Carr, in line with the work of McLuhan, argued that the medium is damaging our attention spans. Johnson argued that it’s our fault as consumers. This sounds a little naive to me. I think of the analogy to nicotine addiction. To be sure, the smoker is responsible for their actions but cigarette manufacturers and marketers surely share some of the blame!

Johnson wrote this book for highly addicted info-consumers. In his chapter on “Attention Fitness,” he suggested training your mind like a runner trains his body. Set an interval timer for a five minute interval followed by a one minute break. Do your best to focus for five minutes straight before flaking out for a minute. You can grow your attention span from there. I would suggest there are some underlying psychological or physiological issues that should be dealt with first for people who can’t focus on something for more than five minutes.

My only real problem with the book was the bait-and-switch marketing. The full title is: The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. It would be more accurate to call it: The Information Diet: How Becoming Better Informed will Help You Become a Better Political Citizen. I understand that Johnson’s background is politics and you write what you know. That said, it felt disingenuous to get to the final chapter of the book to find an essay on how the United States government doesn’t have enough politicians to represent the needs of its people.

In the end, Johnson’s argument was very thought-provoking. If you’re curious about why and how to reclaim your attention span from time-sucks like Facebook, Twitter, and the television, The Information Diet is an excellent source of … well … information.

Disclaimer: A review copy of this book was provided at no cost through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer’s program.

Born to Run | Christopher McDougall

By on November 7, 2011 in Book Reviews, Culture 0

“It simply makes you want to run.”

I bought this book because of that blurb from Outside Magazine on the inside of the cover.  They’re absolutely right. After all the chapters are read and all the information is digested, the desire to run sticks with you. McDougall has written some strong motivation here.

Born to Run is a collection of narratives thrown together into one perfectly balanced package. There’s the meta-narrative about the author who sought to discover why he couldn’t run very far without injury. This question led him to the reclusive Tarahumara tribe that live in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. Their running ability is legendary—what’s their secret?

From the Tarahumara, McDougall branches out into ultramarathon culture, introducing the reader to a diverse cast of hard-core distance runners. One of these runners is a devoted bare-foot enthusiast.

Compelling tangents such as Mexican drug-runners, the nefarious role of Nike in running injuries, and the human ability to run down wild game round out the package.

This book is equal parts travel, adventure, science, and sport. If you run or have ever thought about starting, enjoy this book!

Player One | Douglas Coupland

By on September 19, 2011 in Book Reviews, Culture 0

This book started off very promising.

I’ve read almost everything Coupland’s written—certainly all his fiction. Like an band that’s been around for a few decades, he’s become a bit predictable. I keep reading him for the flashes of penetrating cultural insight he manages to describe so perfectly.

Player One started off with a string of metaphors that only Coupland’s mind can produce. Here’s an example:

Warren — her highly anticipated date — is wearing the bland politician’s smile of someone who knows that the bodies in the car trunk are, indeed, dead.

Unfortunately, after the second chapter, the characters started to feel like all the other characters in Coupland’s Novels. The moment that turned the book for me was when he used a long sentence from a previous work verbatim:

What separates humanity from everything else in this world — spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss, and Mount McKinley — is that humanity alone has the capacity, at any given moment, to commit all possible sins.

It’s a fantastic sentence … the first time you read it. Coming from the mouth of a second character in an unrelated book is just a little sad.

I’m not sure if Coupland will be able to extract himself from the role he’s typecast himself in. Right now he’s like REM and U2. A brilliant world-altering artist who needs to explore a new direction.

Outliers | Malcolm Gladwell

By on May 23, 2011 in Book Reviews, Culture 0

Some people see the world differently. Instead of accepting long-standing assumptions they challenge accepted knowledge. Instead of admitting coincidence, they search for patterns where none were expected. Malcolm Gladwell is one of these people, and Outliers is the fruit of his labour.

In Outliers, Gladwell looks for the true causes for success underlying Hollywood-style rags-to-riches stories. Here are some of the questions he tackles:

  • What roles do inherent genius and practice play in a success story?
  • Why are the majority of successful hockey players born in January and February?
  • Was Bill Gates’ wild success with Microsoft due to his brilliance, luck, or something else?

He even asks some questions that makes politically correct society squirm:

  • How did a disproportionate number of Jewish immigrant descendants become lawyers?
  • What role did Korean culture play in their (former) horrible airline safety record?
  • Why are people of Asian descent better at math?

If you want to look deeper at what makes a modern hero, this book is a fascinating and sometimes quirky guide.

The Guinea Pig Diaries | A. J. Jacobs

By on March 28, 2011 in Book Reviews, Culture 0

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you always told the truth (“Does this dress make me look fat”)? What if you outsourced your entire life—including arguments with your wife—to a call centre in India? Well, wonder no more. A. J. Jacobs has vicariously performed the sort of experiments on himself that we would never have the courage to try!

Jacobs has made a career out of experimenting on himself. His first book was the fruit of reading an entire encyclopedia. His second book recounted his year of Biblical fidelity. His current book, The Guinea Pig Diaries, collects a variety of different shorter experiments into one volume.

This is a funny book: not the sort of “funny” you’d pick up off the humour shelf at Chapters, but genuine intelligent laugh-out-loud funny. Jacobs doesn’t pull out of character when life gets awkward—he follows his experiments through to the end (and makes appropriate apologies after).

If you’ve read his earlier works, you’ll know the punishment his wife has had to endure. Jacobs listened to the emails of sympathy for his wife, and concluded this book with a month of doing absolutely everything she asked him to. That final essay alone is worth the price of admission.

Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites… | Bradley R. E. Wright

By on November 15, 2010 in Book Reviews, Culture 0

As the title suggests, Wright decided to set the story straight on Evangelical Christianity. Too many statistics are misinformed and misinterpreted. A sociologist familiar with the proper use of statistics, Wright provides the reader with up to date stats and interpretation.

Did I mention that he’s genuinely laugh-out-loud funny? Here’s my favourite quote:

At this point, allow me to interject that there is a crucial distinction between extramarital sex and extra marital sex. One is committing adultery, the other represents a better-than-average week, and they have very different consequences.

At times the sheer volume of stats and graphs became overwhelming. This isn’t a criticism—it’s the nature of the book. This is a volume worth pondering by anyone frustrated with the negative views of Evangelical Christianity portrayed by the media, and indulged in by ourselves.

Disclaimer: A review copy of this book was provided at no cost through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer’s program.

The Rage Against God | Peter Hitchens

By on November 2, 2010 in Book Reviews, Culture 0

Peter Hitchens will likely sell a lot of copies of this book because of his brother, famed atheist Christopher Hitchens (I’ll be honest, that’s why I snagged a copy). Fortunately, this book stands well on its own.

Peter uses autobiography and argument to make this point: Societies founded on atheism fail spectacularly. Having lived as a journalist in the Soviet Union, he witnessed the results of Lennin’s failed enforced-atheism. Upon returning to England, he was shocked to see the culture he was raised in degenerating in similar fashion.

A major pillar of radical atheism is the premise that religion causes suffering. This book undermines that pillar and actually proposes the opposite. Most wars fought in the name of religion are not really religious, but ethnic wars with religious labels. The worst suffering is found in atheistic societies.

I’d like to believe his argument but there’s one big hole unaccounted for. He nowhere accounts for the role that government style has to play in the situation. Can he really say that theistic societies are more civil than atheistic ones, or is it simply the case that democratically governed societies are more civil than communist-run states?

My last quibble is the way this book was marketed. The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith is not the main point of this book. A more accurate title would be The Rage Against God: Why Societies Founded on Atheism Fail. He really said very little about how his atheism led him to faith.

While I didn’t agree with all of his ideas, the overall argument of the book has certainly forced me think. What more can you ask for in a book?

Disclaimer: This review copy was provided free of charge by Zondervan.

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