![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Abundance by Sena Jeter Naslund is a historical novel about Marie Antoinette. I know rather little about Marie, so this served as a decent, if superficial, introduction. It's a first-person narration, and Marie is clueless and innocent, so she rarely knows much about what's going on around her..... The beginning (when she was a teenager first married to Louis) was interesting, and the end (with the revolution) was gripping, but the middle was slow and a little boring. I did keep reading, though. I'd give it a C+/B-.
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rivka recently wrote a post about this book, and it made me want to seek it out. Rivka's post talks a lot about how full the text is of propaganda (i.e. Western diet BAD/Third World diet GOOD, and that sort of thing), and I decided I wasn't in the mood for propaganda. So I mostly looked at the very cool and interesting pictures, and read captions and lists and sidebars, and read actual text only when I felt like it. Even without the text, this is a really powerful and interesting book. There are 30 families from around the world and each section profiles a family's diet and food habits and cooking practices. There are pictures of each family with all the food they eat in a week piled around them, and a list of that food, and what they spent on it. (I totally want to make a list like that for us now, just out of curiosity.) I found it fascinating that all 3 of the American families ate fast food at least once that week (if not multiple times), and many of the people in industrialized countries (i.e. the ones who had access to it) had too. Do people really eat fast food that often? I think I'm going overboard if I have it more than once every month or two. Huh.
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio.
rivka recently wrote a post about this book, and it made me want to seek it out. Rivka's post talks a lot about how full the text is of propaganda (i.e. Western diet BAD/Third World diet GOOD, and that sort of thing), and I decided I wasn't in the mood for propaganda. So I mostly looked at the very cool and interesting pictures, and read captions and lists and sidebars, and read actual text only when I felt like it. Even without the text, this is a really powerful and interesting book. There are 30 families from around the world and each section profiles a family's diet and food habits and cooking practices. There are pictures of each family with all the food they eat in a week piled around them, and a list of that food, and what they spent on it. (I totally want to make a list like that for us now, just out of curiosity.) I found it fascinating that all 3 of the American families ate fast food at least once that week (if not multiple times), and many of the people in industrialized countries (i.e. the ones who had access to it) had too. Do people really eat fast food that often? I think I'm going overboard if I have it more than once every month or two. Huh.
