Another review!

A couple of years back I bought two low cholesterol cookbooks at a used book sale; one of them was put out by the American Heart Association. But since it was written in 1989, it was before the invention of "trans fats". So I decided to spring for another.

I didn't want the Kindle version for $9, nor the paperback for $13. I went all out and bought the hard covered book for $26. If I'm going to use it much, the paperback will have a hard time surviving 5 years, and I find it hard to just flip through e-books and read them, especially cookbooks, where I want to flip back and forth. Just give me a real book and a pad of post-its, thank you.

So I got this last Wednesday, and spent about 6 hours reading it. This is a huge cookbook, at around 700 pages. Maybe 450 to 500 pages are recipes, and the rest is verbiage about healthy eating and so forth. It's nearly twice the size of the earlier version which I have, with many more recipes, but it does lack some very vital information which was in the earlier version, such as how saturated fats translate into cholesterol in the body, and recipes for things like lowfat mayonnaise, and how to replace staples of life with healthier alternatives. This book, for example, instead of telling you that you can beat nonfat evaporated milk for a good whipped cream substitute, tells you to use the nonfat whipped topping from the freezer case at the supermarket (which tastes like vaseline to me). These are some serious flaws.

The recipes seem to rely upon really amping up the spices to make up for the missing salt; also, many, many, many of their recipes call for bell peppers, to which I am allergic. If lots of peppers are vital for flavor, I'm kind of sunk. However, I have tried a couple of their recipes, and those were pretty good. If you're not a fan of spicy hot food, be very careful with the use of red pepper flakes, which also seem to be a staple of this cookbook.

Overall, this cookbook does a pretty good job of telling you how to cook heart healthy meals. Long and short of it: Good, but not great.

Here and gone

This was an interesting on the edge of your seat book to read. Right from the beginning the reader knows what is going on. The people that don't know are the other characters in the book. A woman, Audra, is trying to get herself and her children away from the clutches of an abusive husband and father. After traveling for four days, she and her children are pulled over by a cop in a very deserted part of Arizona. He arrests her and sends her children off with another cop. When she gets to the jail and she asks where her children were taken, he looks at her and says, "What children?". The rest of the book is Audra trying to keep her sanity when trying to tell the FBI what happened to her children while they just want to tell them where she dumped their bodies. It is a story that you root hard for Audra because you know she is right, but things just don't seem to be going her way.

This is the story that in many ways people have been dealing with for years. Back years ago, a family could make a request to their doctor that a woman, many times, be put in a mental asylum and she is admitted to rot there for years. Once locked up in such a place, nothing they do or say will get the keepers to change their minds and release them. Many divorce cases in the child custody issues, can be settled in favor of the first one to get to tell their story or file charges. Then there are the depraved people of the world that will do anything to earn a buck and those who will pay any amount so that they can get their jollies. The author does an excellent job of showing just how bad the anguish can be when you know you are innocent and no one believes you or is willing to stick up for you. There may be references to things in the book that may turn off some potential readers, but at the same time these sorts of things happen, so you need to choose whether or not you want to try to read the book. I can't say more without getting a spoiler alert charge on me. I'm just glad that as I mentioned before, from the beginning of the book, we see and know what is going on. The surprises are all on the actions of other characters.

The tea planters wife

I loved reading about the country Ceylon and the description was very good of the trees , lakes , people etc. Reading about the history of the country before their independence was very interesting , however I thought the book was a little two drawn out . All the emotions became a little tiresome .