Arcane: Penny Dreadfuls For the 21st Century (Volume 1) Review

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(More customer reviews)All in all, a great collection of tales imbued with a serious sense of dread, making it nigh impossible to set this issue aside. Pick up your copy today!
1. "Hazards" by Justin Pollock: A good Samaritan sees more than he could ever have expected late one night on the open road.
2. "Darnell Behind Glass" by Jeff Crook: In this particular convenience store, sometimes it's hard to tell the living from the dead.
3. "The Mine" by Jason V. Shayer: A weird western with two mischievous lads determined to uncover a local mystery--and see some dead bodies.
4. "Ricky and the Elder Gods" by S.M. Williams: A dual-POV tale between the hunter (assisted by two otherworldly, indescribable creatures) and the hunted (one very tough chick).
5. "Gingerbread and Ashes" by Jaelithe Ingold: In this well-told sequel, you'll wish you'd never wondered what became of Hansel and Gretel.
6. "Dear Management" by Tom Wortman: Hands-down the funniest tale in this issue, in which a new employee confronts the source of a horrific odor emanating somewhere above his office.
7. "In the Place Where the Tree Falleth" by Michael Lutz: A seminary student selling Bibles happens upon an ancient house where the mysterious owners believe in a new god who is not silent.
8. "Laundry Night" by Stephen Hill: Everybody loses a sock now and then; but in the bowels of this particular condominium, gruesome horrors lurk among the washers and dryers.
9. "Hello Operator" by Donny Waagen: In this surreal, absurd tale involving a phone booth and a whole lot of water, one man's journey into the afterlife becomes another man's headache.
10. "Courting the Queen of Sheba" by Amanda C. Davis: Three circus performers get way more than they bargained for when they steal a competitor's ancient corpse for their own sideshow.
11. "A Requiem for Tarsenesia" by William Knight: In this dark fantasy where music is the only defense against unseen monsters, the young daughter of an instrument maker must decide the fate of all.
12. "The Hole" by Rob Errera: In this parable, you may not learn the lesson until it's too late.

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Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do Review

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(More customer reviews)First off full disclosure: I am a Mexican born 1986 Amnesty U.S. citizen.
Growing up in Los Angeles and the interest that was put on our education I could have easily fallen into one of these jobs. From the time I was 15 (I lied about my age) and went to work for a temp agency along side other Mexicans that were here illegal or legal and uneducated. They would send us to the worst jobs, for instance a dog food company that had all the same characteristics of the chicken plant the author described. The one difference was I threw up after each shift because the smell was so nauseating. It was actually this job that made me choose education over sweat.
Happy Chicken (this made me laugh) I applaud you for putting your money where your mouth is. Instead of just saying "Illegals" like the majority of America, you brought light that it is not just illegals that are being taken advantage of. It's every person citizen or non citizen that walks through the doors of these companies that care only about their shareholders. Please don't assume that I am anti Capitalism because I love profit as much as the next guy but not at the expense of workers, especially docking them for having to take their kids to the doctor or no sick days.
Read the book get a first hand insight to what really happens at these kinds of jobs.


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Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit Review

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(More customer reviews)I will never look at a supermarket tomato the same way again. Never mind that I'll never eat another one -- ever -- after reading this book. Author and food writer Barry Estabrook takes us on a journey to discover why those perfect-looking tomatoes piled up on supermarket shelves are so oddly tasteless, and believe me, the answer isn't very appetizing. Flavor, though, is the least of his concerns. The big story here is the human suffering -- right under our noses -- that we unknowingly perpetuate each time we pick a tomato up and put it in our shopping cart. It took courage to sniff this story out. Estabrook is clearly a pro in his field and deserves a great deal of credit. The writing is engrossing and at times hilarious, all of which makes the heartbreak a little easier to stomach.

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Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point?Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurants.Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a who's who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents' medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years.Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well as an expose of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

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The Young Trailers Review

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(More customer reviews)Altsheler was a prolific author of boy's adventure series whose works are all in the public domain and ought to be reprinted in paperbacks. The Young Trailers series is set in the Kentucky woods about the time of the American Revolution. The author's great gift is to keep the exciting incidents coming, one after another. Virtually all of the action takes place outdoors, and a sort of nature mysticism pervades, without softening the adventure. Indians are treated with great respect, though the advance of the white man is regarded as good and inevitable. The heroes, however they may sympathize with their own race, are themselves more attracted to the outdoor life of their adversaries, and regret its passing. It is worth noting that in The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow reveals his familiarity with the series, by comparing a relationship to that between Henry Ware (hero of the Young Trailers) and the Wyandotte chief Timendiquas (who does not appear until a later book in the series.) Those of us who, as boys, had the great good fortune to find an Altsheler series in our local public libraries remember these works with reverence.

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The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / General; Juvenile Fiction / General; Juvenile Fiction / Historical / United States / General; Juvenile Fiction / People

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