Food Matters, by Mark Bittman

Food Matters, by Mark Bittman. Simon & Schuster, 2009. 

Mark Bittman mixes statistics on the consequences of eating meat with diet advice, a  rant on big food, and 75 recipes. His advice: eat less meat and more plants, fewer refined carbohydrates, and no junk food; nothing particularly new there. I tried a half dozen of the recipes, all were OK, but none knocked my socks off. The "Almost No-Work Whole Grain Bread" was probably the best; it made a dense loaf with no kneading required, by rising for 24 hours. 

Maus: A Survivor's Tale

  

Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman. Pantheon, 1987/1992.

Maus I - My Father Bleeds History 
Maus II - And Here My Troubles Began

This is a graphic novel - the first one I became aware of, though there were certainly predecessors. It tells two stories: The inner story is the story of the author's father living as a Jew in Czechoslovakia and Germany during the Nazi era. It tells of his life in the early Nazi years and how he survived the concentration camps. The second story wraps the first, and is the story of the father's current life and the author's relationship to his father.


The story is compelling; the art is first-rate, with little touches of humor (Jews are mice, many non-Jews are pigs, Nazis are cats).

Transformation, by Robert A. Johnson

Transformation: Understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness,
Robert A. Johnson, HarperOne, 1993.

Johnson uses three myths to talk about masculinity: Don Quixote represents simple consciousness, living in the inner mythical world; Hamlet represents "modern existential life"; and Faust represents man moving to enlightenment. There's a sub-theme of the idea of 3 moving to 4 representing a move to complete consciousness. It's a thin volume (105 pages), but interesting material as usual for Johnson.

Six Thinking Hats, by De Bono

Six Thinking Hats, by Edward De Bono.

It's easy to fall into a particular pattern of thinking. De Bono proposes a method where various thinking styles are associated with hats of different colors: white (data), red (intuition/emotion), black (pessimistic), yellow (optimistic), green (new ideas), and blue (process). By explicitly applying different perspectives, you can nurture an idea to fruition, and you can get a fuller picture of the consequences of it. While I don't think the whole thing is as amazing as the author thinks, it is a useful reminder to help broaden your thinking.