Rebecca Reads

When I decided to start posting reviews of a few books at the same time, I still intended to write the reviews as I go as I did for my math and science reviews the other week. Although I wrote a separate review for the cookbook memoir I read by Emily Franklin, once I read [...]

I needed to sharpen our kitchen knives, so I found a book to help me along, specifically, An Edge in the Kitchen: The Ultimate Guide to Kitchen Knives by Chad Ward.
Overall, I liked the information I read. I got excited about my kitchen knives! But when I went to try and sharpen my own knives [...]

In some respects, I miss the point of Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food.
Alice Waters is the original proponent of seasonal, local, and organic foods. But because I grocery shop for a family on a budget, I can never justify going “organic.” I also live in Chicago suburbia, which means that there are about [...]

Tom Ang’s Fundamentals of Photography is aptly subtitled “the essential handbook for both digital and film cameras.” As a very amateur photographer, I was fascinated by the technical explanations for photography: how cameras work, how light is best captured, and how to process photographs appealingly. While I will never again photograph using film cameras, I [...]

What do you eat in one week? What does a typical American eat? What does a typical Brit eat? What does a family in the Darfur Refugee Camp in Chad eat? What do the people of the world eat?
These are the questions that photographer Peter Menzel seeks to answer through his coffee table book of [...]

When we found out in early 2007 that a little bundle of joy would be joining our family, we headed to the bookstore. Alexander Tsiaras’s lovely coffee table book, From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, came back home with us. I loved pouring over the graphically enhanced photographs of babies in the womb, imagining [...]

I was looking for a nonfiction picture book for my son at the library the other day when I saw Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference by Lynne Truss. I enjoyed the grammar guide (Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation) by Lynne Truss so this caught [...]

With the advent of digital cameras, any person can take a photograph. Now we must ask, What makes that person a photographer? In Masterclass in Photography, we find some guidance as to the essential elements in a photograph and how to produce an appealing photograph. As a very amateur photographer myself, I find Michael and [...]

We found out two weeks ago that we’re moving back to the USA (from Australia) next month. I began the process of searching online for an apartment we might want to rent. Our former home was one bedroom: we are now a family of three. That won’t work.
Lo and behold, I found that buying a [...]

The Chef’s Craft in Every Kitchen?
I have mixed feelings about Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen.
The Elements of Cooking is one-part opinionated essays about cooking (pages 1-50) and one-part alphabetic encyclopedia of opinionated “essential” elements to cooking. There are things I liked about both parts and other [...]