I absolutely LOVED Skinny Bitch. It goes outside the norm by using biting humor and profanity to get the point out. Whether you agree with its humor or not, you won’t be able to help but keep reading it. I must also warn, it is quite gruesome. There is an in-detail discussion about the cruel fate of big industry beef and poultry, enough to make you think twice before biting into that big steak that was once Betsy the Cow.

There are a couple points within Skinny Bitch that I have to disagree with. As a student who is currently working on becoming an N.D., the authors talk about different organic snacks that can be used to substitute for the toxic chemicals that are passed off as food these days. Though these organic snacks, such as cookies, are less processed and don’t contain artificial ingredients, they still contain a tremendous amounts of sugar and can be classified in the category of organic junk food. They will still spike your insulin levels creating havoc on your system. So, if after reading Skinny Bitch, you feel compelled to go out and replace your Nabisco Oreos with its organic counterpart and eat the whole box because of the fact it is organic be prepared to tip the scales because you WILL gain weight.

The other point I would like to dispute is the position that meat is bad for everyone. This book lays out the horrors of eating meat while trying to disgust its reader into becoming a vegan. I feel that meat is alright, given a few conditions. The first one is that it agrees with your body. Not everything is compatible with everyone. Some people say they feel healthier when giving up meat. Others feel worse. I am one of the ones that feel worse. My body doesn’t do well with wheat and grains, but i am not presumptuous enough to preach to everyone that grains are unhealthy. They are just unhealthy for me and a few select others. The second condition is the source of the meat needs to be from a known source such as a local farm. Grass fed beef has a lot more health benefits than grain fed. I would NEVER condone eating meat from your local grocery store without knowing where it came from. Factory farming is disgusting.

Overall, I recommend that the average American pick up a copy of Skinny Bitch. Especially the ones that are living on the standard American diet.

For cooking information you can also check out Skinny Bitch in the Kitch: Kick-Ass Recipes for Hungry Girls Who Want to Stop Cooking Crap (and Start Looking Hot!).

In the midst of children, husband, and a house, I have found solace. It comes in the form of a book, and it is wonderful. It is…drum roll please… The Crafter Culture Handbook by Amy Spencer! I cannot believe how jam-packed this book is with awesome crafts, tips for making money, and inspiration text about the need for local shopping and recycling for sustainability. The The Crafter Culture Handbook is a perfect companion to Amy Spencer’s subsequent book, DIY: The Rise Of Lo-Fi Culture, which highlights the rise of underground music producing and such.

The cool thing about The Crafter Culture Handbook is that there is something for everyone. It covers everything from crochet to tech crafts, all in the spirit of using old to make beautiful new. Actually, here are the categories for your perusal:

• Needlecraft
• Vintage
• Electronics
• Spa and beauty
• Home decor
• Knitting
• Paper and ink

I mean seriously, if you have ever had the itch to make handmade, you will find plenty to work in here. Take the techie section for example. There is a project to use a vintage typewriter to create a one of a kind keyboard for you home computer for crying out loud! I’d buy the book just for that! Not to mention the t-shirt deconstruction, no-machine sewing projects, bags, jewelry; you name it. All of the projects are beautifully made with amazing colors and chic twists on girly-vintage goods.

True to it’s political-social protests through craft, Amy Spencer compiled this book with the same grassroots ethos. Through a post on the great online zine, Make:, you can see how the book is simply a compilation of like-minded enviro-crafters. In fact, if you need a comparison, The Crafter Culture Handbook is as eclectic as the Make: sister zine, Craft:.

Anywho, I have little bookmarks all over the book for gift and house ideas, as well as a couple projects perfect for crafting with the kiddies. At such a decent price for all of the projects and inspiration, you might as well check out the book. Whether its for the craft, the environmentalism, the writing, or the profiles of other artists, you can’t go wrong with The Crafter Culture Handbook.

Who ever said womyn weren’t bad ass? Wally Lamb surely has found a way to capture the ballsyness of broads - and in their own words. Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution (Testimonies from our Imprisoned Sisters) and I’ll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison are inspirational books written by the womyn in a writing workshop in York, Connecticut. And these ladies aren’t eating bon-bons and cooking for their hubbies. In fact, some of them wrote about stabbing their hubbies. These womyn were in the only womyn’s state penitentiary facility. I’ll Fly Away is the second installment of Lamb’s collection of biographical writings from the girls, following the success of Couldn’t Keep it to Myself

I had first encountered Wally Lamb in what I call my White Oleander phase. It was the time in pop-culture when, for at least a week or so, people wanted to read about womyn - as long as they were suffering. Most of this was fueled by the rising popularity of book clubs among womyn and token men. At any rate, I loved White Oleander: A Novel, by Janet Fitch, and, in the natural progression of the Oprah induced White Oleander episode, I moved on to She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb. I loved this book, and could even associate with the lead character Delores’ experiences in young adulthood. But alas, I was young and impressionable - and shocked when I found out the author was a man! Looking back, the novel may have been better suited in the teen fiction section, as the dramatized extenuating circumstances are enough to make me gag now that I have grown up problems.

Either way, She’s Come Undone was good enough to make me dive into Lamb’s next book, I Know This Much Is True. Though the writing was as eloquent and easy as Undone, Wally writes much better as a womon than a man. I can just picture him as the skinny, “Am I gay?” confused, too-nice-for-his-own-good kid, macrameing in the corner of gym class, thinking of the tribulations of periods and pads. For whatever reason this is, I Know This Much Is True was an awkward account of a stereotyped macho male: stubborn, selfish, emotionally inept. Though this is a fitting description of men, even I was rolling my eyes at the meat-head generalizations.

Moving on to our penitentiary books, however, becomes another story (book humor, get it?). Here it’s not Lamb, it’s the ladies. Stocked with street experience and a world of little regard for censors, these womyn pack the emotions all over the pages. The stuff that makes people uncomfortable, the stuff that makes life seem more scary, the stuff that idiotic men and womyn like to pretend doesn’t happen; this book reveals it all. Most of these womyn have been abused and neglected by society, men, and their families. The short stories portray the undeniable fact that us with ovaries often get left in the dust. Sure, the whole entire human race might be dependent on our reproductive purposes, but the day man learned how to pinch our nipples like a radio receiver, we became worthless. Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away are perfect reminders of what desperation can do, and what crap womyn find themselves having to go through just to end up in prison.

When one reads a medical thriller written by a Harvard MD such as Dr. Robin Cook, one would expect that the story would be credible and in some ways realistic. Invasion, written in 1997, is neither. True, the book is a science fiction novel, which suggests that perhaps a certain element of fantasy may play a part; however, it is not with the fantasy that I find fault, but with the plot and several concepts of the work.

The story is a mix between the all too common “aliens infiltrated our world millions of years ago and are back from more” and “the population of the world unwittingly turns into zombies before a problem is realized” themes. With several books and movies sharing the themes, such as Cell: A Novel by Stephen King, 28 Weeks Later / 28 Days Later and the later created book by Steve Niles, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and later as a movie starring Will Smith, some such as myself might be getting a little worn of the same old song. To give Dr. Cook credit, his book was published in 1997, meaning he can claim that he was one of the first in today’s time to write such a novel. I would give him that credit were his novel a bit more worthy of credit.

The premise of Invasion is simple, though it is made to seem much more convoluted due to Dr. Cook’s authentic use of medical terms. Basically, a race of super intelligent aliens came to Earth millions of years ago to inject a latent virus into the DNA sequence of Earth’s primitive creatures. Every few million years they come back, activating the virus with a protein delivered by a needle hidden in a little black disk. Creatures that are not fit to handle the virus are destroyed (such as the dinosaurs). Creatures who can handle the virus are cured in hours and join a hive-mind that is concerned about the rain forests. The “aliens” are simply the occurrence of the virus in a host, much like the Stephen King novel Dreamcatcher. Throughout the book, those who are too smart to touch these little black disks that sting people who do touch them try to figure out how to kill the virus.

Every few pages, there is an action sequence in which the protagonists run from the zombies, who grow in number and organization. Despite the millions of people who become zombies, including the President and all the members of his cabinet, all of them seem to be able to fit with room to spare into a 5 acre farm where they do work to create an inter-dimensional gateway. And all the while, no one, including the media, notices that everyone seems to be turning into rain-forest saving zombies.

Eventually the protagonists, losing every single lead they have, contact a man over the internet (a magical place where everyone has a screen name that is internet-wide), who turns out to have access to a complete U.S. military virology laboratory. There they find a vaccine very quickly, cure a soon-to-be zombie, and also find that the common cold drives the virus out of the victim in foamy goop from the eyes and mouth. They find a super-cold and drive it to the aforementioned farm, coughing the virus around and running over the bad guy who now looks like an alien. All of which happens in the last 20 pages or so of the novel.

It may sound interesting, but I’d rather you attribute that to my writing skills rather than the book itself. All in all, the “master of the medical thriller” should stick with the medicine and lose the aliens. There were simply too many parts of the book that either made little sense or carried on too long, and the ending seemed like an afterthought where the author got too tired to keep writing about the story.

For a good book mixing a world-wide plague with fantasy thrown in, I’d recommend The Stand: Expanded Edition by Stephen King. If you want to read a book about zombies, try I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. It has one of those quick resolution endings as well, but has zombies throughout the entire book.