Pros: A cornucopia of ideas and inspiration for those who want to make a difference
Cons: Brief tonal confusion at first, and obviously there are no easy, one-size-fits-all answers
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Review book provided courtesy of the publisher
Journalist Katherine Gustafson spent a lot of time reporting on food and environmental issues. Unfortunately, she found that these issues tend to be depressing, and after a while people don’t want to hear about them any more—we all have a limited tolerance for bad news. So she set about looking for good news to counter the bad, or as she likes to say, “hoperaking” to counter the muckraking. Back and forth she went, examining businesses, farms, and initiatives that struggle to find a new way to bring healthy, organic (or close to it), well-treated food to those who want and need it.
, but examines and explains historical accounts in a way that gives the reader a much greater insight into who Cleopatra might really have been and what her real political goals were.
is the memoir of a woman who discovered she had a particularly slow-growing, and difficult to treat, form of cancer. It took me until halfway through the book to fully realize that unlike a Hallmark movie, this book wasn’t necessarily going to have a happy ending, and I had to flip to the author bio at the end to at least reassure myself that Ms. Host was still alive at the time the book was published. There’s something very raw and tough about realizing that this person you’ve grown in some ways very close to over the course of such an intimate book is still facing something so difficult.
, a wonderful organized collection of both best-of-the-blog photos (with snarky commentary) and additional material that never made it into the blog.
