Brent

I may be able to listen to other Richard Brown narrations, but not when it requires quoting a distinctive person from history. In volume I Frederick Davidson did a masterful job of channeling Churchill. It was as if all of Churchill's early life was "on the mic". I believed I was listening to Churchill himself. Unfortunately Brown cannot pull it off, and it is a let down. As great as Manchester's writing is I don't think I can put myself through Volume II wishing I was listening to Davidson every time WSC is quoted. If you like Richard Brown's voice then get this Book. It's incredible history.

This book gave me a near complete view of where our food comes from. I've heard many of the stories - tidbits here and there about hormones in our meat and antibiotics in our milk - but this book filled in all those gaps and then some.

There's no one "tidbit" to get from this book. It's loaded with interesting info about our foods. From corn-based everything, to self sustaining farms, to the mysteries behind mushrooms this book covers it all.

Being the judicious person I am I'd like to read something from a counterpoint and I intend to do that. I would say that Pollan was very evenhanded in this book. I'm quite sure that he is something near an evolutionary atheist, but he treated those of differing views with complete equality. The Christian farmer was not portrayed as an closed-minded buffoon as most east coast based journalists would do. Pollan even defended this farmer against one of his elitist colleagues. I give him credit for this.

This book is meant to be about food, the history of food sources and how it becomes our food. I understand that there must be some talk about the purpose and function of various organs or components of all the species involves. Pollan spends much time describing the evolution based development of these organisms. I don't mind this, but if he is going to devote so much ink to this belief I'd like to see him be just as judicious with this subject as he was with all the others. Maybe some ruminating about the implications of intelligent design along some about evolution.

Interesting, Habit Changing

I bought this title to learn about sleep, and I did just that. I now go about my life with many of the lessons learned from this book affecting my daily planning. I enjoyed some of the history behind sleep science and knowing that we are in the infancy of field.At times the author would descend into what he believes social policy should be around sleep. I could do without these distractions and some of his covert political partisanship. If you can ignore these policy statements there's lots to learn about sleep in this book.

If you like biographies of interesting people this fits perfectly. I wanted to listen every chance I had. Well written, and I really enjoyed the narrator's delivery.

There's much to learn from the life of Steve Jobs, whether you loved or hated him.