Tag Archives: non-fiction

Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook

By Lu Posted in Books, review Tagged , , , , , , , , , 12 Replies

I got Tomatoland for one simple reason: I really like tomatoes. It’s one of the few things that I can thank my former stepmother for, other than providing me with two awesome sisters. If I wanted a snack, she would always slice up some tomatoes and sprinkle them with pepper and salt, sometimes with a little mayonnaise. She introduced me to tomatoes on grilled cheese, nothing short of a revelation for little 8 year old me. My wonderful Italian mom showed me what a tomato can do cooked, my step-mother what it could do raw. It was a beautiful childhood of tomato bliss.

But with every passing year, I’m getting pickier and pickier about which tomatoes I eat. The more I think about it, the mealier and more tasteless the tomatoes that you buy in the supermarket are. I’d almost stopped buying them altogether before I read Tomatoland. Tomatoland convinced me even more that the tomatoes from the grocery store, especially the ones available in the winter, are just not worth it.

Taste is the obvious reason. Every single one of us can go to the supermarket and tell the difference between a tomato grown locally and in the summer versus one grown in Florida in the winter. Estabrook makes clear that that is because the organization that regulates the tomatoes that come out of Florida regulate for every single aspect of a tomato – color, shape, texture, blemishes – except taste.

The second problem with tomatoes grown in the winter is that, if they are not grown in a hot house, they are grown in Florida or California. The problem with growing tomatoes in Florida is that it just happens to be one of the worst places in the world to grow tomatoes. In order to do so successfully, Florida tomato growers rely heavily on dangerous pesticides and chemicals to fight off pests and diseases and to put nutrition in the soil, which is actually just sand.

And now we get to the heart of Tomatoland, the mistreatment of migrant workers, especially concerning pesticide use, on tomato farms. This was not necessarily the turn that I expected Tomatoland to take, but I was so happy that it did. This is an important cause and an important topic that everyone needs to know about. When you purchase a tomato, you are making a choice. Are you going to support the abuse and slavery of the people who pick those tomatoes? Some of the things that Estabrook talks about will horrify you, from babies being born with deformities because of their parents’ exposure to pesticides to examples of modern day slavery.

A lot of work has been done in the last 10 years to make the life of migrant workers country-wide, but especially in Florida, better. And it’s a start, but big agriculture in the United States isn’t going to listen to us unless we make them. Tomatoland highlighted the best and worst of what’s happening in Florida so that anyone who reads the book can make an informed decision about where and how they get there tomatoes.

Estabrook does a good job balancing the political with the scientific. He interviews people on both sides of the debate and shows big agriculture in a fair light in my opinion. Not a good one, but a fair one. He shows what they have done horribly wrong and what they are doing, however reluctantly, to improve it. Things are getting better in the tomato industry, but it is all because of groups of people who were well-informed and willing to take a stand. The only shortcoming of this book is that I wish Estabrook had ended with a clearer sense of what still needs to be done. I would have rather had a final chapter that projected the future for tomatoes and the industry, as well as the future for migrant workers in the US.

I truly didn’t expect to be as enthralled with Tomatoland as I was, but I found it to be an engaging and well-written piece of non-fiction that has the power to change the way people view their tomatoes. Hopefully it will convince people that the best place to get tomatoes is their own back yard.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

Desperado Penguin also has a review about Tomatoland. Do you? Link to it in the comments and I’ll add it here.

I received Tomatoland for review from NetGalley. 

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White by Daniel J. Sharfstein

By Lu Posted in Books, review Tagged , , , , , , , , 11 Replies

What we expect out of a book is not often what we get. When a book surpasses our expectations, we are excited and giddy at the thought of a book that not only didn’t let us down, but impressed us. When a book doesn’t meet our expectations, there is a lot of complex emotions, but always a lingering question: is it the book’s fault, or mine?

I feel bad turning the review of this book into an existential question about book reviewing, but I can’t help it. The Invisible Line is a book that I was so excited to read, but unfortunately, I just didn’t enjoy reading. But I also can’t say that it was entirely the fault of The Invisible Line.

Let’s talk about what The Invisible Line is: well-researched, a fascinating, worthy topic, and fairly readable. Essentially, Sharfstein traces the lives of three families that “pass” from black to white through the generations. Their descendants often aren’t even aware that they have black ancestors in their family line. Sometimes the process occurs over a generation, sometimes several. What I really gained from the experience of reading this book was the realization that what we think of as something so fixed, racial relations in the US before and after the Revolutionary war, was actually a lot more fluid. This book really did make me think and made me interested to read more, but I wish it had been more readable.

Those who like this book are probably shaking their heads at me, because Sharfsteins book reads more like a novel sometimes than a piece of history, but that was exactly my issue. In the same way that I wonder when I am reading historical fiction how much is true and how much is made up, I couldn’t get past some of the additions Sharfstein added to the narrative. Take this passage for example:

Gideon Gibson rode alone through the perpetual twilight of the woods on a Sunday. In the thick forests of the South Carolina backcountry, light hit the ground scattered and split, filtered through leaves and pine needles as through a cathedral’s stained glass. Sunbeams swirled with dust and gnats in the torpid August air. When Gibson reached his destination, one man was waiting for him, as agreed. In the open they would have taken shots at each other. But here they could meet quietly and alone, as equals and gentlemen. (13)

While I can appreciate the beauty of that passage, how, exactly, does Sharfstein know what the light looked like? He mentions in the Introduction that he relied on letters and historical accounts for much of his atmospheric information, but I just wasn’t convinced by it. I’m all for writing creatively and writing non-fiction in a way that is keeps people reading, but it was distracting for me. I would always wonder: where did that information come from? Sharfstein does address in his notes where he originally read about the physical details, but it seems odd coming from a very fiction-like omniscient narrator. That is not to say that I prefer completely cold, academic writing, but this way of infusing life into a book about history just isn’t for me.

The structure of the book did not work for me either. I kept getting confused by which family we were talking about and, try as I might, I could not keep the details straight. It made for frustrated reading when I was constantly going back and forth to try and figure out what had happened previously in the family’s history. I understand the inclusion of all three families, because their histories and their experiences with passing were so very different, but this book would have been much more manageable for me if it had focused on one of the families.

But these are, for the most part, personal hang-ups. I am not saying that I think Sharfstein’s book is bad, on the contrary, I think it is an interesting and valid addition to the books published on race. As an introduction to the topic, I’m not sure it was a good place to start, but it certainly got me interested in reading more about race relations in the US. His writing style is not for me, but there are plenty of people who do love this kind of writing.

I’m really interested to see what the rest of the reviewers on this tour think of The Invisible Line as I’m pretty confident that I will be in the minority here. It is a good book and if you are interested in this topic and already know something about it, I highly suggest you pick this up.

Special thanks to TLC Book Tours for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Previous stops on the tour: My American Melting Pot

Because I am confident that there are other people who would like this book a lot more than I did, I’d like to pass my copy on to another reader, so they can review it on their blog. If you are interested in reading and reviewing The Invisible Line, please leave a comment and I will randomly select a winner in one week.

Harry Potter Changed My Life, Too: Harry, A History by Melissa Anelli

By Lu Posted in Books, review Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 11 Replies

Let’s start this post with a sad story, okay?  It’s a sad story that has a happy ending, so don’t worry about that, but this story begins in a sad place.  Middle school is bad for most people, but I had a particularly torturous time.  Kids were just so mean.  I was a chubby kid, who loved to read, who didn’t listen to cool music, who had horribly uncontrolled frizzy hair.  I didn’t know how I was going to make it through middle school and was  terrified that, if anything, high school would just be worse.   I read constantly, just to escape the world I had to live in every day.  I would hide books in my textbooks during class (and get made fun of for it).

Then, somewhere in the middle of seventh grade, Harry Potter came along.  No, Harry Potter didn’t help my popularity or make my time at school easier, but it gave me something better.  At first, Harry Potter was just a pure escape to a world as complete as my own that I could get lost in.  Then, it gave me my first online community.  Though Regular Rumination is my first blog, I’ve been an active and proud member of online communities since 1999.  I immersed myself in Harry Potter, from fan fiction to fan art, and no longer was going to school so unbearable when I knew that I had the books and plenty of people to talk with about them just a click away on the computer.  Harry Potter brought me out of a particularly dark time in my life.  I crave the feeling I got from reading through the first three Harry Potter books and wish I could anticipate a book as much as I anticipated Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, probably my favorite book of the series (tied with The Prisoner of Azkaban).

So when Amanda of The Zen Leaf linked to her review recently of Harry, A History by Leaky Cauldron webmistress Melissa Anelli, I knew I had to read it.  I frequented The Leaky Cauldron regularly when I was in the throes of Harry Potter fandom, but didn’t know much about the creator or its history.  I would call this book a memoir, rather than just a history of Harry Potter.  It’s more like a combination of the two, because while there is quite a bit of information about the Harry Potter phenomenon, it is also Melissa Anelli’s personal experiences with Harry Potter and the way being a part of the HP fandom changed her life.

A lot of this wasn’t necessarily new to me, but I was quite a bit younger than Anelli when all this happened, so it was interesting to see a lot of events that I remember from a more adult perspective, because a lot of it is clouded in my adolescent memory.   The book begins with Anelli’s story of how she became involved in HP fandom and how she became editor of one of the post popular websites for Harry Potter news and ends with the culmination of all that work with a post-Deathly Hollows interview with Rowling.

What I loved most about this book was how much Anelli’s own excitement about Harry Potter reminded me of my own and how I could relive a little of that through her.  It has made me go back and reread all my fan fiction (some of it laughably bad, some of it actually pretty good, if I do say so myself).  It has made me want to reread all of the books, for the umpteenth time.  I want to feel all of that again, all the joy and sadness and community that is Harry Potter.

I’m sorry if this post seems more like a collection of my own experiences with Harry Potter, but that is kind of what this book is like.  Yes, the book is specifically about Melissa Anelli’s experiences as webmistress of The Leaky Cauldron and the Harry Potter phenomenon, but in turn that leads to you talking about your experiences and remembering where you were when all this was happening.  Part of you wants to be the biggest Harry Potter fan out there, you want to love it more than the next person, but the rest of you wants to share everything you love about it with everyone you know.

I did learn some things from Harry, A History, such as I had no idea how big Wizard Rock had gotten since I stalked Harry and the Potters website for news about a library tour date that was close enough for me to hitch a ride to (it never happened!).  Or how intense the Hermione/Harry and Ron/Hermione shipping wars actually got. I went back to read my fan fiction to determine which ship I belonged to, but I wrote mostly fan fiction about the previous generation, so Harry’s parents.  So I really don’t remember! I don’t think I ever saw Harry and Ginny getting together, but I was ultimately happy they did.  I loved having an inside look into the movie premiers and the interactions Anelli had with Rowling were amazing and I’m so jealous.  I’d love to get to meet her, as I imagine anyone who has read the books would.

And those were just the topics that struck me.  There’s so much here, that even the most seasoned and knowledgeable Harry Potter fan will find something to love here, if it’s only another way to relive that experience all over again.  Anelli does such an amazing job capturing that joy.  Like this!  This makes me so happy:

At Leaky, we were always hearing from people who had been taught to love books through their love for Harry.  We also  heard from dyslexic children who’d fought to overcome their disability in order to read Harry and by doing so realized they could overcome dyslexia almost entirely.  Priscilla Penn, a Leaky reader, told me that her niece, Kaitlin, had a substandard reading comprehension level before she started reading Harry Potter in late 1999.  By the next year her grade level had been brought to normal, and she was enthusiastic about reading.  The same happened for Kodie, a late-teen juvenile delinquent from Terre Haute, Indiana, who was illiterate before he discovered the series; his foster mother Shirley Comer, a nurse, had started reading Harry Potter to him while he was in a juvenile rehabilitation center.

“Now, he wants me to bring him any kind of book on mythology, or Star Wars books.  He even tackled Lord of the Rings,” Shirley said.  She even found him a book on psychology that was appropriate for his comprehension level.  ”It’s helping him understand himself a little better, and that’s something that I would never have thought he would have been able to read and enjoy.” (160)

I also got a little reassurance that I wasn’t the only one who felt a certain way about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

“So far, Harry had become a whiny bastard and had shouted down everyone who had ever been good to him in his life.  Nothing was magic and happy and enchanting anymore.  Harry was arrogant and prideful and petulant, and kept doing and saying things before thinking, and, in general, had turned into someone I had little interest in spending eight hundred more pages with.” (163)

But eventually, and it took me years to get to this point, I really appreciated what Rowling did to Harry in book 5.  I was that lucky group of kids that got to grow up with Harry.  I was 11 when I started reading the books and I was 18 when they ended.  I was an emotional, whiny 15 year old when I was reading about Harry being a whiny, emotional 15 year old in Order of the Phoenix.  Maybe I saw too much of myself there?

Not only am I eternally grateful for the way Harry Potter changed my life, I’m thrilled that it changed other people’s lives as well and I’m so happy that Melissa Anelli committed that joy to paper.   So if you love Harry Potter, if you want to experience all that again, then read this.

So go read this!:  now| tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve exhausted your TBR

A Chair, A Fireplace & a Tea Cozy, The Zen Leaf and Shooting Stars Mag all wrote posts on Harry, A History also.  Did you? Let me know in the comments and I will add your link to this list.