The Ambler Warning - Robert Ludlum
The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
A Log Way Down - Nick Hornby
Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Second Time Around - Mary Higgins Clark
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Sijie Dai
A Million Little Pieces - James Frey
My Name is Asher Lev - Chaim Potok
Our Town - Thornton Wilder
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein
Dive into Python - Mark Pilgrim
Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver
Wildlife - Richard Ford
Cracking the Da Vinci Code - Simon Cox
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Naked & the Dead - Norman Mailer
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
MYSQL Certification Study Guide - DuBois, Hinz, & Pedersen
A Box of Matches - Nicholson Baker
Fifth Business - Robertson Davies
The Underboss - Gerard O'Neil and Dick Lehr
Learning Perl Objects, References and Modules
Your Child's Self-Esteem - Dorothy Corkille Briggs
Go Ask Alice - Anonymous
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Howard's End - E.M. Forster
Anthem - Ayn Rand
Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser
An insightful read about the history and current state of the fast-food industry.
Three sections stood out to me:
1) kids. Not so much the focus of marketers to reach out to kids via mass media (although a little creepy), but the invasion of marketing into the school systems. BIllboards on school busses, classrooms, halls etc. Most disturbing is when companies provide learning materials that are used which skew the truth to make the company look good. I can deal with companies bombarding with ads because they can be avoided, but when teachers use materials provided by companies to teach the "truth" I start to feel pretty upset.
2) Treatment of Employees - the book focuses on the meatpacking industry, but also in fast food restaurants the trend is to develop "zero training" practices where everything is so automated the industry can hire the cheapest labor and interchange them at will. The slaughterhouses turn over almost all the employees every year, avoiding health insurance costs etc.
3) Slaughterhouse practices - this section is disgusting, discussions of how unsanitary the conditions are make the thought of eating beef from a major slaughterhouse sickening. In one study 75% of the sampled beef contained traces of feces. How gross is that.
Overall a good read. Eric does a good job of documenting where his information comes from in a notes section. At some points it seems like the author is only telling the most shocking parts of the story, to get the most dramatic response from the reader. Sometimes I was suspicious that the stories or facts were worst-case scenario and that in many other instances the facts would have been less dramatic.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Eric Schlosser
2001 Houghton Mifflin
Credit for Style
Thanks to emptypages for the index files and stylesheet for this weblog (called 2col) . Quite groovy.
April 22, 2003Starting this weblog might be a Stupid Idea
Here's my plan. Over the past several years I have noticed more and more that when I read a piece of information I forget the most important details. Oh I might remember a small piece of it, but forget the punch line. Say for example "It was either 80,000 or 800,000 . . .". I remember the 8, but not exactly what factor of ten.
So I'm starting a weblog, possibly more private that my main weblog, where I plan to post little pieces of information that I might want to call back on someday (assuming that when someday comes this weblog is still alive).
Update:
I was planning on starting a third weblog for reading notes, but decided to wrap both a reading log and tidbits into one weblog with two categories.
Bringing Down the House - Ben Mezrich
Living History - Hillary Rodham Clinton
