"The Big Book of Slumber" is a beautifully illustrated goodnight-book in which various animals go to sleep. I was a little surprised that they all seem to go to sleep in human-like ways, in beds, with sleeping bags etc., but I guess that makes them more relatable. My 2 1/2 year old absolutely adores the pictures and wants to talk about all the animals. He's asked for the book several times when I got it, so that's always a clear win! I couldn't help but wonder what the rhymes are like in their original language. I think with a great translation, you don't necessarily notice that you're not reading the original, but here I sometimes did find the wording a little bit unusual. No big deal though, my son's love for the book and the beautiful pictures make up for that.

A cute picture book about two birds and their migration. The rhyming story covers all the basics about migrating, with beautiful pictures. It says age range 4-8, but I think it's suitable for younger kids, too - my not-yet-3-year-old already likes looking at it!

A picture book about a cat chasing a mouse, with a fresh take on opposites: The same thing can seem big or small, long or short etc. depending on who looks at it. I like the concept and the illustrations (in 3 black/ white/ orangey-red). The text consists of simple questions like the one in the title - nothing wrong with that.

I received an unbound early reviewer copy of this book, which unfortunately is not really suited to reading this with my almost-2-year-old. He loves to turn the pages himself, but this thing just falls apart. So I can't really comment on how well he likes this book, which is a shame. Personally, I think the book might be more suited to even younger kids.

I really like the large, colorful illustrations of this picture book - they are so beautiful that they would work well as a picture on the wall of a kid's room. The text is brief and poetic - on each page, the narrator wishes for something that the animal depicted on the respective page can do or has (e.g., "the feather-light steps of a tiger as it explores the silence", "the forest of thoughts of a deer listening in the woods"). This is a translation from Italian, which to me (a European living in the US) made the book more attractive, as it seems like a lot of what's on the market here is originally American - so I welcome the opportunity to bring something different to our mix of picture books. The Early Reviewer copy I received was not yet bound, which is understandable in an advance copy but means that I cannot really comment on whether my kid likes the book (he's too young to deal with loose pages). The book seems likeable enough, though.

A cute little board book in black and white. I really like the drawings of Checkers, Dot, and their pets Stripsey and Spot. This would make a great baby shower gift - I would have propped that up in front of my baby when he was still an infant. I'm sure he would've loved the high-conrast pictures even more then. Text-wise, this is nothing special - a few simple words on each page, like "Say hello to Checkers". But the cute graphics make up for some of that, and my 15-month old was immediately interested in looking at the book when it arrived.

When I requested an early reviewer copy of this book, I was hoping to find a collection of influential or famous diagrams, and to learn from them about what makes a diagram successful. Maybe my expectations were just off, but I found this book disappointing. It's not even a collection of diagrams by its own definition of what a diagram is. Cave paintings? Rosetta stone? An artist's rendition of a bridge? Not really diagrams. So, my first criticism is that there are lots of non-diagrams mixed in.

The collection spans the ages from the cave paintings til today, and while I can see that many of the depicted things/ ideas etc. may have changed the world, I really doubt that the depiction had something to do with it in each and every case. I see the book more as an illustrated collection of 100 influential ideas, concepts, etc., which may be interesting in its own right, but different from what the book set out to do. Each idea/ concept is given two pages with text and illustration. I think some of the illustrations would be better viewed in a larger format, as detail is not always clear - again, more of a downside to the reader interested in the diagrams themselves than in the general ideas they depict.

Sure, there are some diagrams in this book that really are diagrams and that were influential in the way they present information or ideas, and the reader can learn from studying those. But overall I think this book is not as suited to this purpose as its title suggests. "An show more illustrated collection of 100 influential ideas throughout the ages" might be a more accurate title, and with expectations adjusted accordingly, readers are less likely to be disappointed. show less

A cute picture book about super heroes. On each lefthand page, a question about suer heroes is asked, such as "Do super heroes make capes with blankies and string?" or "Do heroes always eat their carrots and peas?". The righthand page gives a rhyming answer, such as "We can turn blankies into most anything" or "Open your mouth for the airplane, please?". Questions and answers cover common topics for toddlers, from food to bedtime. Each page has colored illustrations of the respective scene. I love that the super heroes depicted are boys and girls, with a super hero teddy bear also included for good measure. The end of the book encourages children to be their own heores. The book comes with four stickers, two with the teddy bear super hero, two with "hero" and space for a child's name. I recommend this book to all parents of little super heroes!

Daniel DiTuro and Ingrid Yang compiled a 150+ selection of Hatha Yoga Asanas in this guidebook. Each page features one pose, sorted alphabetically by the English names. The Sanskrit name of each pose is provided, a difficulty level from 1 to 10 assigned, a start position mentioned. Each page comes with extremely brief instructions on how to do the pose, plus a photo of someone in the pose.

The positives: Many poses are covered, the difficulty levels seem helpful in selecting new poses to try, and the photos are helpful in visualizing each pose. The photos feature a really diverse group of people doing yoga, which is a plus.

The negatives: My main issue with this book is that the descriptions of the poses are extremely superficial. If you've already been instruced on how to do the poses properly, say in a yoga class, this book might provide enough of a reminder to do the poses. However, I'd be extremely reluctant to try new poses based solely on the descriptions in this book for fear of injury or just getting into the habit of doing the poses the wrong way. Plus, in the yoga classes I attended so far, the single start position given for each pose in this book wasn't always the one used in class. This leads me to assume that there are multiple start positions that are possible for some poses, whereas this book makes it look like there's only one.

Overall, I think this book can be useful as a book of reference for someone who's at least somewhat experienced in yoga. I show more wouldn't recommend using it as a book of instruction. show less

This looks like an awesome cookbook for campers, canoers, and backpackers. In the introduction, it covers everything from meal planning to food hygiene in a compact, yet useful way. This section also lists useful sources for cooking equipment and basic ingredients. It even includes advice on how to make your own basic ingredients, like mushroom powder, candied ginger, or vanilla sugar.

The bulk of the book consists of recipes, sorted by breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, desserts and baked goods, beverages, and more elaborate dishes. All the recipes are vegetarian, many are vegan. Plus, many are gluten-free. Whether a recipe is vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and/or lightweight enough for a long backpacking trip is clearly indicated with a little icon next to the recipe. If you're vegetarian or vegan, chances are you already are somewhat familiar with some of the less mainstream ingredients like quinoa. Overall, I found the ingredients unusual enough to be interesting, but not too unusual to be obtained.

One thing to note is that many recipes, especially those from the dinner section, require a food dehydrator. This makes sense, as it allows you to create your own lightweight, easily preparable food. But it also makes the book more appealing to people who go on longer outdoor trips fairly regularly, and a little less appealing for those who only do one or two very brief trips a year. The book does offer a lot for the latter, too, just be aware and check the recipes before show more buying the book if you don't plan on owning a food dehydrator.

Breakfasts consist of grain-cereals based e.g. on quinoa, scones, muffins, biscuits, granola, pancakes and more, with sections on breakfast spreads and syrups added in. Many of these can be made without a food dehydrator, and in fact recipes like blueberry granola with cocoa nibs, earl grey and apple pancakes, or roasted sweet potato breakfast bread sound lovely enough to eat at home.

Lunches are mostly dehydrated salads and dips or spreads like hummus, with additional tips on what to bring for a no-cook lunch and how to grow your own sprouts on the trail.

Snacks include nut-based fare like maple balsamic walnuts with apples and dates, bars, and pulse-based snacks like roasted chickpeas for which no dehydrator is necessary, plus dehydrator fare like fruit leathers and tofu jerky.

Dinners almost all need the dehydrator. Recipes include Chana Masala, Roasted Ratatouille, and Bruschetta Pasta with Goat Cheese. Pizzas, Couscous, and bean-based dishes are plenty.

Desserts and baked goods include things that can be pan-baked on a campfire like chocolate chai fry cookies as well as recipes that can be made in an outback oven.

I really liked that the book contains a beverage section. You can learn how to make your own dehydrated almond milk powder, and how to make everything from green tea chai vanilla latte to berry white chocolate and blueberry mango lemonade. Yum!

The last section, "more elaborate dishes" is more geared towards the car camper. It's brief but useful.

Overall, I really liked the vast selection of well-sorted recipes, the helpful advice, and the overall tone and layout of the book. I'm not going on any trips this summer, nor do I own a dehydrator, so I cannot really comment on the doability of the recipes, but I'm absolutely sure I will try many of them even for car camping or at home. show less

Ben Ryder Howe writes about owning a convenience store in New York City, or, more precisely, co-owning the store with his Korean-American in-laws. By day, he works for a literary magazine, but then he also takes care of the store and lives with his in-laws. I was interested in the cross-cultural aspect of this book but found it less pronounced than expected. The deli itself is not really Korean, it just sells general convenience store stuff like coffee, beer, and chocolate bars. Howe obviously isn't Korean either, so the cultural aspect comes in mainly through his observing his in-laws and their work ethic etc. Although I would have liked to read more about the Korean part of "My Korean Deli", I found the book overall an engaging and fun read. Nothing too serious, but good entertainment.

This is a book to get back to over and over again while thinking about buying your first home (and then buying it). As someone who moved to the US from abroad, I found this book especially helpful because it gives a thorough overview of how buying a house works in the US, from factors that are important to Americans in a house to financing, the role of real estate agents, closing etc. I love that this book explains everything from scratch so that even a complete novice can find their way and get a good understanding of the overall process. I also especially liked that the book comes with a lot of checklists (and they even include a CD-Rom with those for your convenience). I have not bought a home yet, but am planning to and am definitely going to look at those checklists again to make sure I don't miss anything important. One thing I didn't like as much is that the chapters on financing seemed a bit superficial for my taste - you still get the basics, but I feel like some of the financial risks of financing a home the traditional American way could have been stressed a bit more. But that doesn't affect my overall rating of the quality of this book, because it might be helpful to look at other sources of information for financing anyway. All in all, I recommend this book to the first-time home-buyer in the US, and also to anyone from abroad who'd like to get a clue on how to buy a home in the US.

Women today learn to do whatever they want, to aspire to careers AND motherhood (if they want to), to have it all. And while that is a great perspective, for many women things turn out to be a little more complicated than hoped, especially for married women with children, who often find themselves picking up the majority of housework and childcare on top of their career. This can happen even to the most feminist, equality-striving women like Stephanie Staal who decides to take a feminist look at her own life. She goes back to college to re-take some classes on feminist texts that she'd already taken when she attended college earlier in her career.

Before starting this book, I had expected more quotes from the feminist texts and generally a heavier focus on what's said in them. However, the book is a very enjoyable read as it is, and might have been a heavier read if it had been what I expected. The parts I liked least are the ones where in-class discussions of the feminist texts are quoted. I often found those discussions arbitrary and somehow not as scientific as I had expected from a college class - but then again, I'm not a humanities major, nor did I ever attend a US college, and that may have to do with it. I liked the parts best where Staal describes the difference in her view on feminist texts between now and then - some texts that seemed outdated when she read them in her late teens suddenly seem much more relevant to her. I also found it interesting to read about show more Staal's personal life and how feminism relates to it. Overall, I'd definitely recommend the book to any women struggling with feminist believes and their implementation in real life. show less

This is basically a thoughtful collection of short biographies of women who, as the title says, change the way we eat. The biographies are sorted according to how that change is accomplished: by bringing farms and eaters together (e.g. through CSAs), by advocating (e.g. agains genetically modified food), by promoting local and seasonal food (e.g. as chef of a restaurant), or through urban farming. There's also a section on "the next generation of sustainable farmers". Each sections features a few women, with usually only a couple of pages (5 or so) devoted to each woman. Each section also has a brief introduction on the general topic.

This means a good breadth of coverage - so many women portraits to inspire, so many ways in which the way we eat can be changes. The tradeoff is that things aren't covered in great depth, but to me that's more a matter of individual preference than a flaw of the book. I consider myself pretty educated about food, food systems, local and sustainable eating etc., and I've read a lot of books about this, but this book definitely added something new. There's just not much out there from a feminine perspective, and so it's really refreshing to find this book.

I'd especially recommend this book to people interested in women's role in food systems, and to those looking for ideas for change.

I received this book through the Early Reviewer program, and I love it! I like cooking spicy food, and I've also grown some chile peppers before, and this book seems the perfect way to learn more about it. It starts out with presenting lots of types of chile peppers that you might want to grow in your garden (or maybe in a pot indoors in colder climates). This will surely inspire me to pick a fresh variety next growing season. Next comes information about how to grow the chile peppers you selected. This is mainly geared towards gardeners, containing information about soil quality, how to cope with pests on your crop, how to extend the season, how to start seeds, how to save seeds, and basically everything else you could wish for. There is also information about which chiles to grow in colder climates, and how to prolong the season. For those of us without a garden, there is even a short section about container gardening with chile peppers. I feel like this very thorough chapter will come in very handy when growing my next batch of peppers, especially the information about the various pests and how to combat them, which seems very thorough.

Now assuming you picked your peppers and grew them successfully, chances are many will be ripe at the same time. What do you do with them? From freezing to pickling, canning, drying to making your own chile powders or even juicing your peppers, there are many techniques outlined in this book that you can use to preserve your bounty. This show more section includes specific recipes which sound well enough explained to be able to follow them. About the last third of the book is about cooking with chile peppers. Here you'll find recipes from the more traditional (salsa, curries) to the more daring (desserts and cocktails with chile peppers, I'm sure I'll try some of those).

All in all, this book really contains a wealth of information about all things chile pepper. The book also looks really nice, it has lots of pictures of the various pepper varieties and the recipes. This would make the perfect gift for any chile-lover. So far, I've only read some of the chapters in this book - I may update this review when I've grown some peppers and tried some of the recipes, but that will take some time, so I thought I'd share my first impressions first! show less

This is a beautiful coffeetable book: Large in size, and full of short texts and lots of awesome colorful photos from all over the world. If you like to travel, you will probably enjoy just looking at the photographs in this book.

But the pictures are not what this book is mainly about: You will find famous tourist attractions from all over the world listed according to categories such as Historical (e.g. Pompeii), Great Journeys (e.g. Camino de Santiago), Natural Wonders (e.g. Niagara Falls), Cities (e.g. Amsterdam) and so on. For each tourist attraction, the book suggests a less crowded but equally awesome alternative: Herculaneum instead of Pompeii, Pilgrimage to Rome instead of Camino de Santiago, Iguacu Falls instead of Niagara Falls, Delft instead of Amsterdam etc. The suggested alternatives are sometimes geographically close, but sometimes on entirely different continents. I recommend that you look closely at what is similar about the suggested alternative before choosing a place to visit. For example, while Herculaneum and Pompeii are close in almost every respect (geographically close, both document Roman life as it was before the same disaster struck both cities), other places will differ in many regards. For example, Iceland and Yellowstone National Park may both be good places to see a geyser, but if you're interested in Yellowstone's wildlife, I don't know whether Iceland would be a good alternative. Similarly, I love Amsterdam and I'm sure Delft would lack show more many of the characteristics that I like about Amsterdam. And I might be able to gamble both in Reno and Las Vegas, but if you go to Reno, you will miss out on the architecture of the Las Vegas strip.

For each place recommended in this book, there is a description, pictures, a map and a little info box with practical stuff like where to eat and stay. In my opinion these info boxes could have been left out because the main value of this book is not in providing concrete travel advice (you would almost certainly want to get a guide book to the place you pick from this book anyway).

I see the value of this book mainly in providing interesting suggestions about where to travel to next - independent from the more popular alternatives. The book really leaves you yearning to travel, and many of the places presented in it are probably ones you wouldn't have thought to visit before reading the book. It might also be worth looking at this book if there is a place you absolutely want to visit but if for some reason you have difficulties traveling there (too far away, booked up etc.). In that case, you may find the next closest thing in this book.

Summing up, I recommend this book to anyone who likes to travel and flip through a beautiful collection of interesting places around the world, or to anyone who is looking for inspiration as to where to go next. show less

Are you as fascinated with the vast array of self-help books as I am? Having moved from Germany to the US, I couldn't help but notice that there are so many, and on such a big array of issues - from organizing your wardrobe to finding love! Despite my fascination, I remain doubtful about this literature. Do they work?

Intrigued by this issue, I was absolutely taken with Jennifer Niesslein's book. She seems to be leading a fairly normal life (husband, kid, dog, house, full-time job, etc.), but decides to see whether she can improve all of that with the help of self-help literature. For two years, she conducts a series of experiments on her house, finances, marriage, mothering, health, spirituality, and her social skills. She does not buy into the expensive self-help talks and seminars (which I found very likeable). Instead, she focuses on a couple of popular books for each area, supplemented by real-life advice from her friends and family.

Her journey through the world of self-help makes for an absorbing and often hilarious read. Niesslein shows lots of humor and good sense while trying the various experiments. She remains critical of the advice offered in the self-help books, and gives really smart comments on many of them. Good and bad aspects of trying self-help are brought up, and it becomes clear that, while e.g. having a somewhat more organized house may be nice, there can be serious downsides to looking into oneself all the time.

I enjoyed reading the book very much. show more It inspires the reader to think about the benefits and pitfalls of using self-help, while being very entertaining. I would strongly recommend it to anybody who's fascinated by self-help books, and even to critics of this literature. show less