Sprenzy Shopping Blog: Category Books

Dog Whisperer With Cesar Millan

Chuck — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:07:00 -0400

One of my favorite TV shows right now is the Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic channel. The star of the show is Cesar Millan, who is a…

“Renowned dog behavior expert and New York Times best-selling author Cesar Millan is one of the most sought-after specialists working in the field of dog rehabilitation. From bullying Chihuahuas to timid great Danes, Cesar has an uncanny gift for communicating with dogs and seeing the world through their eyes.

Cesar has been called “a Dr. Phil for dogs,�? and for good reason. His amazing rehabilitations of aggressive, scared, lazy, compulsive and jealous dogs—and the families that are usually in the dark about how their own behavior contributes to the dogs’ quirky traits—captured the national spotlight when his National Geographic Channel (NGC) series Dog Whisperer premiered in 2004. On Friday, September 7, 2007, at 8 p.m. ET/PT, Dog Whisperer returns for a fourth season with a record 35 new hour-long episodes.”

Every time I watch an episode, I’m amazed at how Cesar can instantly control unruly and badly behaving dogs. I could have used Cesar’s advice and tips when I was helping my parents raise their cockapoo, Champagne. Champagne was an adorable dog but she was extremely excitable and despised other dogs.

I have no doubt that if we had read Cesar’s Way - The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding & Correcting Common Dog Problems, before bringing Champagne home, she would have been a more calm and balanced dog. If you are thinking about getting a dog, I definitely recommend reading Cesar’s book or watching his TV show. Previous seasons of the Dog Whisperer are available on DVD. And here’s a video of Cesar in action…

Man in the Middle by John Amaechi

Chuck — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 18:03:00 -0400

I read the Man in the Middle by John Amaechi recently and thought it was a very good book. Here’s the book description…

“Man in the Middle chronicles John Amaechi’s extraordinary journey from awkward, overweight English lad to jet-setting NBA star. Along the way, he endured endless obstacles to his hoop dreams—being abandoned by his father, being cut from his first college team, recovering from a life-threatening injury, playing for abusive coaches, and losing his mother – while also protecting a vital secret that could have ended his career: John Amaechi was gay.

Now in this poignant and intimate memoir, Amaechi takes us into the hypermasculine world of professional sports and into the very center of his soul. As tender as it is brutally frank, Man in the Middle follows him from the rough streets of Manchester to Penn State (where he first achieved basketball stardom and began to recognize his sexuality) to the cities (Orlando, Houston, Salt Lake City) and countries (Greece, France) in which he played. A moving story of adversity and diversity, Man in the Middle is a testament to the power of one man’s convictions and to the universal desire to make the world a better place.”

I admit that I’m a little biased about the book because I’m a Penn State alumnus. During my senior year in college, I watched Amaechi play at Rec Hall. So, I’ve always been a John Amaechi fan, since he is one of the very few Penn Staters to make it to the NBA.

Nonetheless, the book is a good read, regardless of your alma mater or sexuality. Ultimately, it’s just an inspirational story about a clumsy, overweight English boy overcoming adversity to achieve his goal of playing in the NBA. I think all of us can relate to conquering obstacles to achieve a goal.

One of my favorite excerpts from Man in the Middle is…

“The NBA locker room was the most flamboyant place I’ve ever been. The guys flaunted their perfect bodies. They bragged of their sexual exploits. They primped in front of the mirror, applying cologne and hair gel by the bucketful. They tried on each other’s $10,000 suits and shoes, admired each other’s diamond-studded rings and necklaces. It was an intense kind of camaraderie that felt completely natural to them but was a little too close for my comfort. As I surveyed the room, I couldn’t help chuckling to myself: And I’m the gay one.”

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Chuck — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 02:00:42 -0400

After reading Khaled Hosseini’s epic first novel, The Kite Runner, I was greatly looking forward to his second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns. The new novel does not disappoint and I actually enjoyed it even more than The Kite Runner.

The novel is again set in Afghanistan and provides the reader with a glimpse of the societal turmoil in this war torn country. I really enjoyed the book because it interweaves historical events and tries to depict Afghani life during the past 30 years. After reading Hosseini’s books, I definitely have a better understanding of Afghan political history. Like The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a highly recommended novel.

From Publishers Weekly…

“Afghan-American novelist Hosseini follows up his bestselling The Kite Runner with another searing epic of Afghanistan in turmoil. The story covers three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny through the lives of two women. Mariam is the scorned illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, forced at age 15 into marrying the 40-year-old Rasheed, who grows increasingly brutal as she fails to produce a child. Eighteen later, Rasheed takes another wife, 14-year-old Laila, a smart and spirited girl whose only other options, after her parents are killed by rocket fire, are prostitution or starvation. Against a backdrop of unending war, Mariam and Laila become allies in an asymmetrical battle with Rasheed, whose violent misogyny—”There was no cursing, no screaming, no pleading, no surprised yelps, only the systematic business of beating and being beaten”—is endorsed by custom and law. Hosseini gives a forceful but nuanced portrait of a patriarchal despotism where women are agonizingly dependent on fathers, husbands and especially sons, the bearing of male children being their sole path to social status. His tale is a powerful, harrowing depiction of Afghanistan, but also a lyrical evocation of the lives and enduring hopes of its resilient characters.”

And here is Khaled Hosseini discussing his new novel…

Moloka'i - A Dazzling Historical Novel

Chuck — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:42:00 -0400

I read a great book recently called Moloka’i by Alan Brennert. “This richly imagined novel, set in Hawaii more than a century ago, is an extraordinary epic of a little-known time and place – and a deeply moving testament to the resiliency of the human spirit. Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far-off lands like her father, a merchant seaman. Then one day a rose-colored mark appears on her skin, and those dreams are stolen from her. Taken from her home and family, Rachel is sent to Kalaupapa, the quarantined leprosy settlement on the island of Moloka’i.

Here her life is supposed to end – but instead she discovers it is only just beginning. With a vibrant cast of vividly realized characters, Moloka’i is the true-to-life chronicle of a people who embraced life in the face of death. Such is the warmth, humor, and compassion of this novel that few readers will remain unchanged by Rachel’s story.”

“Alan Brennert draws on historical accounts of Kalaupapa and weaves in traditional Hawaiian stories and customs…. Moloka’i is the story of people who had much taken from them but also gained an unexpected new family and community in the process.”

For an in-depth review of Moloka’i, check out the review at MostlyFiction. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and it makes me want to visit Hawaii again. Okole maluna!

The Road - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Chuck — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 02:37:00 -0400

The Road by Cormac McCarthy recently won the Pulitzer for fiction. I read it earlier this month and couldn’t put it down after starting it. It’s a chilling and suspenseful book.

“Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it’s not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that’s the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy’s previous work.”

I don’t want to give away anymore of the story, but I highly recommend reading it!

Increase Your Mental Fitness With New Challenges

Chuck — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 03:47:00 -0500

Recently, I watched Wordplay, a documentary movie, which features “Will Shortz, NY Times Editor and NPR Puzzle Master, and his brilliant, entertaining and often hilarious contributors as well as surprising celebrity fans. Wordplay takes us through the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament where almost five hundred competitors battled it out for the title “Crossword Champ” and showed their true colors along the way.”

The movie is extremely entertaining and I have a new found respect for the crossword phenoms. The A division competitors can solve the New York Times Sunday puzzles (hardest day) in 4 minutes. That is simply amazing!

Besides being in awe of the elite level competitors, I realized that I don’t exercise my brain enough. I have always been focused on physical fitness but have neglected mental exercise. From a recent NPR article…

“It’s called “use it or lose it” – the belief that exercising your brain will keep your memory and thinking skills sharp as you age, and maybe even ward off dementia and Alzheimer’s.”

“Gatz believes that you should start challenging yourself mentally when you’re younger, rather than waiting for old age to take Italian or piano lessons.”

So, before I “lose it”, I’m including more mentally challenging exercises to my everyday routine. My first goal is to do a crossword puzzle every other day. As a crossword puzzle newbie, I’m easing into it before I make it an everyday event. I’ve already signed up for a year subscription of the New York Times crosswords and tackling the Monday puzzles (easiest). It takes me 40 minutes to an hour to do a Monday NYT crossword. Hopefully, I can progress to the harder puzzles in the near future.

It is my understanding that doing puzzles (crosswords, scrabble, sudoku, etc.) is good for the brain, but only exercises a portion of it. Just like physical exercise, you wouldn’t just workout your biceps and nothing else. So the key is to cross-train your brain by varying activities that will stimulate and challenge your mind in new and different ways, such as learning a new language, playing a new instrument or taking a drawing class.

I have had becoming fluent in French on my to do list forever. Learning to play the guitar is also on my list. Which one should I do first? Man, deciding which new challenge to try next is making my brain hurt!

Related Resources:

Wordplay: The Official Companion Book - for those who enjoyed the movie and want more background info on the crossword craze.

American Crossword Puzzle Tournament - the official crossword tournament site.

Building Mental Muscle: Conditioning Exercises for the Six Intelligence Zones by Allen D. Bragdon and David Gamon - “is one of the most stimulating books ever written about how the brain works and how you can maintain, even increase, your own mental ability. It will help you develop skills in six important areas: Memory, Emotions, Language, Math, Visualization, Executive Planning & Social Interaction.”

Spellbound - if you enjoyed Wordplay, you may also like Spellbound, which “is the extraordinary documentary that follows eight teenagers on their quest to win the National Spelling Bee competition.”

I Hate Valentine's Day

Chuck — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 01:04:00 -0500

Well, I don’t hate Valentine’s Day. Hate is such a strong word. Let’s just say I’m not a fan of February 14th. If you are truly dreading V-Day, I would pick I Hate Valentine’s Day by Bennett Madison to help guide you through the day.

“Finally there’s no shame in hating Valentine’s Day! Whether we’re single, dating, married, or divorced, the dreaded February 14 arrives each year to ambush our self-esteem. No other twenty-four-hour period convinces otherwise happy folk that they’re in fact social pariahs. But now comes protection from the ritual onslaught of Whitman’s Samplers, saccharine cards, and suffocating expectations.

I Hate Valentine’s Day is a bitingly funny guide to getting through the Big Day painlessly, including tips on: People and places it’s best to avoid Ways to take your mind off being single How to score an emergency date Alternative ways to celebrate the holiday – or obliterate all thinking Crossing the minefield of gift-giving Romance for the unromantic Running into the ex Last-resort measures It’s only one day. Tomorrow it’s just dead flowers, empty calories, and a wicked champagne hangover.”

For a more sarcastic view, check out The Anti-Valentine’s Handbook by J. More…

“The mushy sentiment, the lousy candies, and the pressure of finding a date make February 14th a day that many wish didn’t exist. This pocket-sized companion to Flirtology will help lovelorn readers laugh their way through the most brutal of holidays. Learn which movies are best for a night alone (Love Stinks). Identify signs that a date isn’t going well (“HELP ME” written in his mashed potatoes).

Discover why having a date can be worse than not (four words: better looking ex-girlfriend). Skip the heartache. Make this book your V-Day companion!”

Thankfully, I don’t have any heartbreaking Valentine’s Day experiences to share. Sure there were lonely days in high school when I was a shy and slightly awkward teenager but no tragic events to recount. I’ve been a serial monogamous since my college days, so fortunately I have been rarely alone on Valentine’s Day.

My dislike of V-Day stems from the over-commercialism of the day. I don’t like being pressured by marketers and their ads to express my love and affection for my girlfriend on February 14th. I also hate the fact that flower prices are super inflated on V-Day. I’m a firm believer of expressing your appreciation and love for your significant other every single day instead of just one arbitrary day in February.

I have no problems with going out for a romantic dinner or giving boxes of chocolates and flowers. I actually enjoy doing all of these things but not on V-Day when I feel forced to do so. Thankfully, I have a girlfriend who feels the same way. It’s all about how you express your feelings and affection the other 364 days of the year.

Maybe I’ll make individual molten chocolate cakes next Wednesday for my girlfriend because it’s Wednesday, when we allow ourselves to eat dessert (that’s a story for another post), not because it’s Valentine’s Day.

Read This! 2006 Book Award Winners

Chuck — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:34:00 -0500

Last year, the only books I read where business books. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the only things I’m reading these days are blogs, magazines and online newspapers. I’m pretty well informed on most topics, but there’s something special about reading a really good book.

I love finding a book that completely captivates me. One that I can’t stop reading at 3:00 AM or one that I don’t want to end. Some books that I put in this “captivating” category were Blindness by Jose Saramago, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

So for 2007, one of my resolutions is to read more books that aren’t business or work related. Looking for good books to read, I found last year’s major book award winners and listed them below.

2006 Man Booker Prize - The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - “Kiran Desai’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard , was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep.”

2006 National Book Award Winners:

Fiction: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - “On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman–who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister–is really an identical impostor.”
Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan - “The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage.”
Poetry: Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey - “Published in installments across several decades, Mackey’s two epic series—one called Mu, the other Song of the Andoumboulou—bring the attitudes of free jazz and the reverberating patterns of West African ensemble music to the goals of the American encyclopedic long poem à la Charles Olson. The mysterious, even hermetic, new verse extends both of Mackey’s epics, even (as his prose foreword explains) merging them, so that they form one enormous text describing a mystical quest.”
Young People’s Literature: The Pox Party (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. 1) by M.T. Anderson - “Set against the disquiet of Revolutionary Boston, M. T. Anderson’s extraordinary novel takes place at a time when American Patriots rioted and battled to win liberty while African slaves were entreated to risk their lives for a freedom they would never claim.”

2006 Pulitzer Prize:

Fiction: March by Geraldine Brooks - “In the classic American novel LITTLE WOMEN, the father is more of a presence than a character. He’s serving in the Union Army at the beginning and comes home to recuperate from illness later on. Author Geraldine Brooks has taken the patriarch of the March family and spun an entire story. It is set in the Civil War, and flashbacks help flesh out the back story of his philosophical growth.”
Nonfiction: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins - “Forty years after Kenyan independence from Britain, the words “Mau Mau” still conjure images of crazed savages hacking up hapless white settlers with machetes. The British Colonial Office, struggling to preserve its far-flung empire of dependencies after World War II, spread hysteria about Kenya’s Mau Mau independence movement by depicting its supporters among the Kikuyu people as irrational terrorists and monsters. Caroline Elkins, a historian at Harvard University, has done a masterful job setting the record straight in her epic investigation, Imperial Reckoning .”
Biography: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - “delve deep into J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and deliver a thorough and devastatingly sad biography of the man whose very name has come to represent the culmination of 20th century physics and the irrevocable soiling of science by governments eager to exploit its products.”
History: Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky - “All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines–and beyond.”
Poetry: Late Wife by Claudia Emerson - “a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems.”

I’m actually going to start with The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It was recommended to me by my significant other who recently read the book. She told me it was a great book about “a journey of a man and his son in a postapocalyptic setting.” It’s also a short read to get me back into the book reading habit. I hope I can put it in the “captivating” category!

The New Best Recipe - The Only Cookbook You Need!

Chuck — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 16:27:00 -0400

If you could only have one cookbook, The New Best Recipe is the one to have. This cookbook is great for the aspiring chef or baker in your home. There are over 1,000 recipes that cover everything from angel food cake, chicken parmesan and rack of lamb to zucchini bread.

The New Best Recipe is written by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated. They also produce the TV show America’s Test Kitchen. In both Cook’s Illustrated magazine and the TV show, the editors and chefs are “renowned for their obsessive dedication to finding the best methods of American home cooking.” This cookbook is much more than a listing of 1,000 recipes.

Each recipe is tested using different ingredients, cooking methods and equipment. The folks at America’s Test Kitchen explain their rationale for the recipe that gets into the book, which they determined to be the best recipe after extensive testing. They also provide tips and advice on proper cooking/baking techniques. You’ll get advice on brining poultry, butterflying chicken, cutting stew meat and everything else in between.

The editors also explain the food science behind cooking such as, “how brining works to ensure juicy meat and why butter should be added before dairy for the silkiest mashed potatoes.” I’ve tried dozens of recipes from this cookbook and each dish I’ve prepared has always been delicious. Below is a picture of some pot roast I made a few years ago. Had I known I was going to post the picture one day, I would have given more thought to the presentation.

I particularly enjoy the dessert recipes in this book. The thick and chewy chocolate chip cookies, brownies and individual fallen chocolate cake recipes are a staple in my dessert offerings. If you are looking for pretty photographs or personal anecdotes, this book may not be for you. However, if you like to learn about proper technique, choosing the appropriate cut of meat or ingredient and using the right equipment then you are going to love The New Best Recipe!