Cooked by Michael Pollan

This week for Book Beginnings on Fridays and The Friday 56 I've selected Cooked by Michael Pollan.


Beginning:
"The divine scent of wood smoke and roasting pig finds you as soon as you make the turn onto South Lee Street, the main artery threading this faded little town, even though the GPS says its source is still half a mile away."

Mmmmmmmm a salivating start!



Page 56:"Cooking, according to the hypothesis, is not merely a metaphor for the creation of culture, as Levi-Strauss proposed; it is its evolutionary prerequisite and biological foundation."

I'm also curious how decisions are made about book covers.

I understand that different countries have different covers if a different publishing house gets the rights for the book.

The US cover provides consistency between Pollan's backlist - they all feature the white cover with a piece of food artistically arranged in the middle.

I'm not sure why we have a different cover in Australia.

Do eggs speak more to us culturally than pasta?
Are Allen Lane planning on re-releasing Pollan's backlist with new covers to match Cooked?
Why does the Australian cover give such prominence to the 'New York Times No 1 Bestseller' tag, but the US one doesn't mention it all?

I wonder....

Book Beginnings on Fridays and the Friday 56

This week for Book Beginnings on Fridays and The Friday 56 I've selected Kaz Cooke's Girl Stuff: Your full-on guide to the teen years.

Beginning:
This book is designed to be your friend through the teenage years - it will tell you the whole truth and let you make up your own mind about things. It doesn't care if you're in the cool group, or whether you need new pants, or about something that happened three months ago that still makes you blush.

Page 56:
You don't really need to feel too disgusted at the prospect of the teen years being leakier, oilier, sweatier and smellier (not to mention the whole once-a-month period palaver) because luckily you can be in control of it.


Girl Stuff was first published in Australia by Viking in 2007.

Ever since then it has been a huge hit with teenage girls and their parents alike for presenting all the facts in a fun, easy to read, no nonsense way. In recent years I've read lots of boy stuff (only natural since I have two stepsons) but felt it was time to check out the literature available for girls.

I wish I'd had this book when I was a teenager. Even though I grew up in a family of girls, so much was left unsaid. The whole puberty thing was mysterious, embarrassing and something to be got through as quietly and as stoically as possible.

Thank goodness times have changed!

Book Beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56

This week for Book Beginnings on Fridays and The Friday 56 I've selected Michael Pollan's 'The Omnivore's Dilemma'.


Book Beginnings:
Air-conditioned, odorless, illuminated by buzzing fluorescent tubes, the American supermarket doesn't present itself as having very much to do with Nature. And yet what is the place if not a landscape (manmade , it's true) teeming with plants and animals?


The Friday 56:
And then of course there's the corn itself, which if corn could form an opinion would surely marvel at the absurdity of it all - and at its great good fortune. For corn has been exempted from the usual rules of nature and economics, both of which have rough mechanisms to check such wild, uncontrolled proliferation. In nature, the population of a species explodes until it exhausts its supply of food; then it crashes. In the market, an oversupply of a commodity depresses prices until either surplus is consumed or it no longer makes sense to produce any more of it. In corn's case, humans have labored mightily to free it from either constraint, even if that means going broke growing it, and consuming it just as fast as we possibly can.