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This post written by Clint Peppers: A Story of Hot Pursuits
by Amal Naj
[cover name=peppers]
Amal Naj grew up in India, so you’d think he’d be okay with hot peppers. However, he really didn’t like spicy food until he was in college in Ireland and started to miss food from home. From there, he went on to be a hot pepper junkie. If you really love hot food, this is probably a book for you. Peppers: A Story of Hot Pursuits is a collection of pepper facts and stories.
This book covers a lot of pepper-related topics. It includes some of the history of peppers around the world and how they have been used as medicine. It also includes some science – Naj hangs out with a number of biologists who study peppers. Two chapters cover the rather bizarre story of McIlhenny Company, the people who make Tabasco sauce. Naj also describes some of his pepper-related travels, such as his visit to Hatch, New Mexico, which is probably the hot pepper capital of the United States, or the Andes mountains in Bolivia, where he joins in the search for the the original wild pepper.
This book came out in 1993, so some of the facts, especially where people talk about the science of peppers and how they are used in medicine, are probably outdated. There is no mention of the Naga Jolokia (the ghost pepper), either. Habaneros are as hot as this book gets. I also noticed that this is not the easiest book to read, although it’s not that bad. The author sometimes uses larger words when shorter ones would work just fine, and sometimes the science sections get bogged down by long lists of names. As long as you know to expect it, you should be fine.
Also, if you want to read more about Tabasco sauce, you might want to check out this series of articles from 2004.
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Where to Find It
[linkplus name=”Peppers” url=”http://csul.iii.com/record=b12113516~S0″]
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This post written by Clint Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist
by William R. Maples and Michael Browning
[cover name=deadmendotelltales]
If you like CSI or other shows like that, you might want to check out Dead Men Do Tell Tales. William Maples was a forensic anthropologist (someone who studies human remains to try to find out the cause of death and other things like that) and he talks about many different cases he has worked on. Some of the more famous ones include examining the remains of the Elephant Man, seeing if the 12th President of the United States, Zachary Taylor, was poisoned, and flying to Ekaterinburg, Russia, to tell whether nine skeletons there are those of the last members of the Russian royal family.
If you are uncomfortable reading about suicide, murder, or decomposing bodies, you should skip this book. I don’t think Maples goes out of his way to gross anyone out, but he is talking about dead bodies. On the other hand, if you’ve ever wondered how you can identify someone after they have been cremated, how you tell if someone was murdered or committed suicide, how you tell if a skeleton is from a man or a woman, or how you tell which particular brand of saw was used to dismember a body, this might be the book for you.
This is not a textbook. It is more like a biography that focuses on interesting cases Maples has had. He talks about his early life, how he got into forensic anthropology, as well as stories about his work and some general information about forensic anthropology. You get enough of the details to understand the big idea, but Maples mostly focuses on the story. You won’t learn how to do any of the stuff they talk about on CSI, but you should get a better idea of what they are talking about.
If you want to read some of the book online, you can do that thanks to Google Books.
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This post written by Clint Finding Nouf
by Zoë Ferraris
[cover name=findingnouf]
Sixteen-year-old Nouf ash-Shrawi, a member of a wealthy family in Saudia Arabia, goes missing three days before her wedding. Her brother, Othman, hires Nayir al-Sharqi to find her. Nayir usually works as a guide, leading the rich and famous through the desert, but he accepts this job. He never finds Nouf, but a week and a half later, someone else finds her body in the desert. According to the medical examiner, Nouf drowned in the desert. Nayir finds this a little suspicious, so he decides to continue his investigation. He ends up working with Othman’s fiancee, who is a lab technician in the medical examiner’s office. Nayir has a traditional view on how men and women should interact, and working with a female lab technician makes him very uncomfortable at first. As the story continues, though, Nayir’s views change, and the two work together as a team.
If you want, you can read some of this online through Google Books.
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This post written by Clint Thin
by Lauren Greenfield
[cover name=thin]
Lauren Greenfield is a photojournalist who focuses on social problems in the United States. In Thin, she introduces us to residents of the Renfrew Center, a treatment facility for women with eating disorders. In addition to photographs, Thin includes personal narratives, journals entries, and essays by medical and sociological experts on eating disorders.
You can read some of it online through Google Books.
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This post written by Clint Sleeper Code
by Tom Sniegoski
[cover name=sleepercode]
Tom Lovett suffers from a rare form of narcolepsy that causes him to sleep for days at a time. At least, that’s what he thought. Then Tom discovers that he, and other people with his condition, are secretly being trained as assassins while they are “asleep.” Sleeper Code and its sequel, Sleeper Agenda, describe Tom’s attempt to escape the group that is training him and take some control over his own life and mind.
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This post written by Clint Unwind
by Neal Shusterman
[cover name=unwind]
Unwound is set in the future, when parents who get tired of their children can have them “unwound,” or dismantled for their organs. Connor, Risa, and Lev are teenagers on the run from the law. If they can survive until their eighteenth birthdays, they will be free. Otherwise, they will be unwound.
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