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Category: Nonfiction

"Who Owns the World" by Kevin Cahill

[ 0 ] February 25, 2010

Reviewed by Caleb S.

Who Owns the World was not exactly what I was expecting. I thought the book would be a narrated almanac or a list of facts followed by the author’s interpretations of the stats given about land ownership across the world. Instead, we are presented with the author’s poorly disguised agenda. 

If you skip Part I Overview and Analysis, the rest of the book is an interesting almanac with lots of information and usually a quick piece of trivia about each country. However, if you actually read the first section, Cahill has a grand view of ‘what is wrong with the world’. Namely, too much land in the hands of too few. He starts off with a tirade about the U.S. Government owning approximately 33% of the country and takes pot shots at people like Ted Turner for personally owning 1.8 million acres. 

Cahill later makes a big deal about the Queen of England owning 1/6 of the land surface of the entire planet. He starts by blurring the ‘Crown’ with the ‘Queen’ and then claims she owns all of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and several other smaller countries as well as 60% of Antarctica. While the Queen is one of the richest land owners on the planet, it comes from her personal wealth not ‘owning’ entire countries.

Cahill seems to believe that the world is in the trouble it is in because too many people do not have land of their own and that something should be done about this. He never gives any suggestions on what should be done or how he thinks this utopia should come about, but that doesn’t deter him from whining. 

So to sum up Who Owns the World, land equals wealth and the poor are poor because they don’t have any, and by reallocating the land we will make everyone richer. Of course, Cahill ignores the fact that not all land is equal (he estimated that Canada was worth about $5,000 an acre on average across the entire country), and many uses of land for cost effectiveness and efficiency require larger tracts of land. Which would produce more wheat – a 500 acre field or 100-5 acre plots with houses and paths for travel? You’d be lucky to graze 2 cows on a 5 acre lot in many of the Western states, but where would you get your water? 

Overall, while the author had a book of facts (which were interesting), he was rather ignorant of the real landscape. While I agree with his assessment for the very narrow list of countries in Africa and Asia, his general disdain is rather ignorant in my opinion.

Caleb is a software engineer and amature woodworker living in southern Minnesota. He has more hobbies than he has time or money for, and enjoys his quiet time reading.

This book was provided free of any obligation by Hachette Book Group. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Review: Abandoned and Forgotten: An Orphan Girl’s Tale of Survival During World War II by Evelyne Tannehill

[ 1 ] February 23, 2010

Reviewed by Scott B.

In an essential supplement to published accounts of World War II, Evelyne Tannehill tells her tale from the perspective of a German civilian during and after the conflict. Born Evelyn Rapp in January 1936, Eva (her family’s name for her) recounts the brutal life that was her fate in the German province of East Prussia – part of Poland ever since the end of the war – from her earliest memories to her departure for the United States just after Christmas of 1951, about three weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday.

Abandoned and Forgotten is the story of three years in the life of an orphaned girl and the experiences that emotionally scarred her for life.

Eva’s family ran a farm in the village of Niederhof, next to the village of Steglitz, a short train ride from the decent-sized city of Elbing (now Elblag) near the Baltic Sea. She was the youngest of five children of a German mother and German but naturalized U.S. citizen father. After the rise of Hitler and his serious shaking of the war sabers, her father attempted to flee to the United States by virtue of his citizenship. After some debate, he finally decided to move the family in 1938. By that time, Hitler had closed the borders and it was too late.

This sealed their awful fate.

The harrowing account is divided into four sections and an epilogue. “The Germans” is the wonderful childhood experienced by Eva with her family, complete with storybook holidays and summers at a cottage on the Baltic Sea. “The Russians” is synonymous with a life of hell, terror, and rape for the East Prussian Germans who were not able to flee the approaching Russian soldiers hell-bent on revenge. “The Poles” brings only a slightly better existence to the local Germans and a life of discrimination and de facto indentured servitude. “The New Germans” tells of repatriation (finally in the fall of 1947)—not always happy for the now orphaned Eva—and reunion with her aunts and an uncle in the American sector of West Germany.

After her mother’s death in the summer of 1945, Eva’s search for love and acceptance dogged her for the rest of her life, and she was not able to find it—anywhere—except when she eventually married for the second time.

Evelyne’s prose is extremely simple but quite functional—and readable. She shows complete honesty in her accounts of the motivations, actions, and characters of other people—and of her own.  Only photographs of the people and places featured in the narrative are missing from this very poignant and often painful tale.

Please visit the Abandoned and Forgotten website for more information.

Scott, now a copy editor by trade, is a once-and-future Latin teacher. He pursues his passions for brain plasticity, jazz piano, and golf in southeast Massachusetts. He lives alone with Cicero, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Ella Fitzgerald.

This book was provided free of any obligation by Author Marketing Experts, Inc. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Giveaway: "The Moon Looked Down" by Dorothy Garlock

[ 0 ] February 17, 2010
Giveaway

Read our review of The Moon Looked Down by Dorothy Garlock, and enter to win 1 of 5 copies of the new paperback edition! Courtesy of Hachette Book Group

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This giveaway is open to U.S. and Canada residents only. Deadline to enter is midnight on March 14th.

Giveaway copies were provided free of any obligation by Hachette Book Group. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Blog Tour & Giveaway: "The Wives of Henry Oades" by Johanna Moran

[ 0 ] February 14, 2010
Please join Johanna Moran, author of The Wives of Henry Oades, as she tours the blogosphere with TLC Book Tours!
Reviewed by Jennifer J.

Henry Oades, husband and father, has just accepted a promotion within his bank and uproots his family from London to New Zealand. Promising his wife Margaret the post will only keep them in New Zealand for two years, Henry is already anticipating the future opportunities his new job will bring him. Due mostly to his work, Henry has an easier time adjusting to their new life. Margaret, who keeps house and raises their four children, is homesick for the life they left behind.

While Henry is away on errands, the Maori tribe seeks revenge for a public flogging of one of their royalty. Henry returns home to find his dogs slaughtered, home burned, and his family missing. For months, Henry searches the wild of Wellington to find any clues about his missing wife and children. Finally able to accept that they are lost to him, Henry journeys back to America to begin a new life.

Several years after losing his wife and children, Henry is now a successful dairyman and has taken young widow Nancy as his wife. Just as Henry’s wounds are beginning to heal, Margaret and the children appear at his doorstep. Both Henry and Nancy welcome Margaret and the children into their home and make the best of their strange new arrangement. When the townsfolk learn that Henry is legally married to two women, they are faced with charges of bigamy.

Debut author Johanna Moran has beautifully captured a haunting tale of loss, friendship, and marriage in The Wives of Henry Oades. I found it fascinating that this novel was based on a true story. Moran fleshed out the story, adding colorful details about the daily tasks a wife would perform in the late 18th century. Both Nancy and Margaret are strong characters, able to form a friendship with one another.

I had expected there to be more conflict between the wives. Instead, Margaret was more of a mother figure to Nancy and helped her care for her daughter. Margaret, in my opinion, too easily accepted that Henry had moved on and no longer had feelings for her. I anticipated some of his feelings for Margaret would come rushing back to him, but they seemingly did not. In Henry’s position, I am not sure I would have been able to choose one wife over the other. Moran handled the outcome of the trial and his marriages as skillfully as she could. The novel seemed to just end, but each of the characters’ stories was wrapped up to my satisfaction, with the exception of Margaret.
Please visit Johanna Moran’s website and follow along on her blog tour. 

Jennifer graduated from the University of Utah with a BA in English. She occasionally dabbles with her own fiction writing, particularly with the Young Adult and Paranormal genres. She currently resides in Utah with her husband and daughter.

Giveaway
I have 1 copy of The Wives of Henry Oades to give away, courtesy of the publisher.

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This giveaway is open to U.S. and Canada residents only. Deadline to enter is midnight on March 5th.
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"The German Mujahid" by Boualem Sansal

[ 1 ] January 28, 2010
Reviewed by Erin N.
“’Tell me, imam, if you had power over the earth, where would you begin the genocide?’  ‘…you round the kaffirs all up into camps…you gas all the useless ones…the rest of them, you divide into groups based on their skills…and you work them till they drop.  Anyone who disobeys, you gas them…it’s been done before.’”


Malrich Schiller left Algeria when he was young to live with an uncle in an Islamic controlled ghetto in France.  Following his father’s death, Malrich is faced with a crisis of consciousness when he discovers that his German father was in fact a Nazi whose training led him to gas millions at Auschiwitz. Having escaped justice by fleeing to Algeria after WWII, he converted to Islam, married an Algerian woman, and eventually died at the hands of Islamic Fundamentalists in the Algerian civil war.

The journey of self discovery is further complicated by the suicide of Malrich’s brother, Rachel. Following the murder of their parents, Rachel returned to Algeria and was the first to discover their father’s deep, dark secret. Having decided to keep this information from his younger brother, Rachel is eaten up with guilt over what his father has done. His diary, bequeathed to Malrich on his death, details what Rachel has learned about their father’s history and why he feels he needs to atone for those sins. The diary starts Malrich on his own path, but with differing results.

The German Mujahid is the first novel to compare the Islamic jihad to the Holocaust during World War II. The protagonist, Malrich, is faced almost daily with requests that he join the jihad in his neighborhood, forcing him to draw correlations between his own experiences and the indoctrination his father faced in Nazi Germany. Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, no matter what the dogma, and the results are invariably the same. Boualem Sansal is himself an Algerian living in France, was inspired by Primo Levi and based this novel on a true story.

Erin fell in love with the written word as a small child and subsequently spent most of her life happily devouring literature. She works as a freelance news, marketing, and technical writer. Erin lives just outside of Cleveland, Ohio with her husband, children, and grandchildren.

This book was provided free of any obligation by Europa Editions. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Review & Giveaway: "Blast Off!: The Surefire Success Plan to Launch Your Dreams into Reality" by Allison Maslan

[ 0 ] January 27, 2010
Reviewed by Vera (Luxury Reading)

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Allison Maslan, author of “Blast Off!”. All opinions are 100% mine.

In her new book Blast Off!: The Surefire Success Plan to Launch Your Dreams into Reality, Allison Maslan uses her years of experience as a life coach, entrepreneur and homeopathic physician to teach readers how to overcome self-created roadblocks and live a life they can enjoy and love. Blast Off! is separated into sections to tackle various aspects of your life, from career and financial wealth to relationships and physical appearance. Along the way, Allison introduces various tools to assist you in working through the book and reaching your goals. One such tool, and my personal favorite, is the “mini feats” approach where you can create incremental 5-minute feats that move you towards your goal, instead of tackling everything at once.

Blast Off! truly benefits from the breadth of Allison’s experience in reaching for her dreams, and the personal stories she shares in each and every chapter. While some of the concepts may seem vague in any other context, Allison’s stories ground them in reality and provide you with a reference point in achieving your own dreams. With ten years of marriage under her belt and a business that was running her ragged, Allison decided she had to give it all up and pursue her true passion – to be a homeopathic physician and help others. With no help from her ex-husband or her family, she went through a period where she was struggling to make ends meet and could not even afford a cup of coffee. One sentence that got me laughing was when Allison thought about applying for food stamps, but did not think the welfare agency would take her seriously if she pulled up in the Lexus she was still driving.

I found Blast Off! inspirational and felt that some chapters made me look more clearly at the excuses I’ve been making while putting off one task or another. For example, in the chapter on Soulful Living, Allison starts off by listing some justifications people give to avoid making a change. I’m sure many of us are guilty of putting off writing a book until we have some free time, or going to the gym until after we’ve lost some weight. Allison then makes suggestions on letting go of some of the to dos that do not fit into your big picture of your life, and truly focusing on and being involved in doing the tasks that matter. I found myself nodding my head a lot while reading chapters like this one and saw many parallels to my own life. While not every aspect of the book may be relevant to everyone, I think that most will find the general message of Blast Off! empowering and eye opening.

Blast Off! was released on January 19th, 2010 on Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble websites. It will also be available in all other major bookstores. It is sold for $24, and even less on Amazon. available on Amazon

Please visit http://www.myblastoff.com to get more information about Allison’s book.

Win a copy of Blast Off!

Two winners will receive a copy of the book, signed by Allison Maslan.

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Giveaway is open to U.S. residents only. Deadline to enter is midnight on February 18th.

Visit my sponsor: Blast Off!

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"Vigil" by Cecilia Samartin

[ 0 ] January 25, 2010
Reviewed by Jennifer J.

Ana’s happy childhood in El Salvador comes to an end when her family and many of the villagers lose their lives in a brutal massacre. Along with the other children who lived through the war raid, Ana is placed in an orphanage run by nuns and priests. One of the nuns, Sister Josepha, has a profound impact on Ana. The two become great companions and Ana decides that one day she would like to return to the United States with Sister Josepha and devote herself to God. It is not long before the guards attack the orphanage. Ana and Sister Josepha flee, barely escaping with their lives. With Sister Josepha’s help, Ana is able to enter the United States.

After graduating high school, Ana excitedly steps into the role of a novitiate. As she is preparing to take her first temporary vows, Mother Superior offers her an opportunity to experience life outside of the convent as a nanny for an affluent family. For the Trellis family, Ana becomes much more than their children’s nanny: she is friend, confidant, and beloved.

Cecilia Samartin glides between the past and the present, with Ana narrating the past. Eventually past and present meet, and Ana herself provides the novel’s conclusion. Unlike an unreliable narrator, Ana is fair in her assessment of the action in the story. Even when describing those who could be considered the “villains”, Ana is forgiving and compassionate to their plights.

Vigil is one simple woman’s extraordinary journey of surviving death and discovering healing through faith in God, family, and love. Samartin, who is professionally trained as a psychotherapist, has expertly weaved the best and worst qualities of human nature into her characters. Samartin draws from her extensive knowledge of relationships to create the intricate bonds that form between Ana and the entire Trellis family, including the long-time housekeeper, Millie. She explores the power of forgiveness and redemption, and shows that even joy can be born from the most tragic of circumstances.

Jennifer graduated from the University of Utah with a BA in English. She occasionally dabbles with her own fiction writing, particularly with the Young Adult and Paranormal genres. She currently resides in Utah with her husband and daughter.

This book was provided free of any obligation by Washington Square Press. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Friday Cravings

[ 1 ] January 15, 2010
So my pick this week is once again from PaperBackSwap.com! I’m finding it to be quite a treasure trove. Perhaps I should change the name of this column to PaperBackSwap Finds…
Have a book that you’re craving to add to your collection? I’d love to hear from you! The books do not have to be new or upcoming releases. Leave a link to your own post in the comment area and link it back to Luxury Reading. If you don’t have a blog, just list the book and the author.
Pick of the Week
It is 1950 in glittering, vibrant New York City. Lucia Sartori is the beautiful twenty-five year old daughter of a prosperous Italian grocer in Greenwich Village. The postwar boom is ripe with opportunities for talented girls with ambition, and Lucia becomes an apprentice to an up-and-coming designer at chic B. Altman’s department store on Fifth Avenue. 
Engaged to her childhood sweetheart, the steadfast Dante DeMartino, Lucia is torn when she meets a handsome stranger who promises a life of uptown luxury that career girls like her only read about in the society pages. Forced to choose between duty to her family and her own dreams, Lucia finds herself in the midst of a sizzling scandal in which secrets are revealed, her beloved career is jeopardized, and the Sartoris’ honor is tested.
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