From Vines to Wines: The Complete Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Your Own Wine

As an avid home winemaker, I was thrilled to find this book. It doesn’t get bogged down in long technical descriptions and pages of history. Instead, with sections like “Problems in the South”, it gets right into what will and will not work for your home winemaking efforts.

The intro has a glossary of terms and a basic overview of winemaking which is very helpful for those new to the fun. Tables list which kinds of grapes work best for different regions, so those who are planting vines have a best-case scenario laid out for them. Clear instructions tell how to plant the vines, how to prune them, what a trellis looks like, and even harvest details. Read more…

Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson, Book 3)

Once again Mercy gets tangled up in trouble. The action starts when she agrees to help Zee and Uncle Mike sniff out the murderer on the Fairyland reservation to end a debt she owes the fey for helping her end the vampire demon from the last book.

Mercy determines that the murderer must be a human man named O’Donnell who works as a security guard at the Fairyland Reservation. This is puzzling news to Zee and Uncle Mike since no human should be able to kill the fey like O’Donnell managed to. Uncle Mike and Zee go to talk to O’Donnell but when they get there their suspect is already dead and the human police Read more…

Domino: The Book of Decorating: A room-by-room guide to creating a home that makes you happy

In this instance, you honestly can judge the book by its cover, as this one is as informative as it is beautiful. “Domino” by Deborah Needleman, Sara Ruffin Costello, and Dara Caponigro is ‘the’ decorating book to own.

It starts by explaining the eight steps to getting started, including floor plans, finding inspiration, and budgeting. All types of rooms imaginable are covered by separate chapters, each ending with a beautiful example of a room from one of the actual authors’ homes. The Decorator’s Handbook section in the back is a great Read more…

Facebook Marketing: Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business

This book is not about social media marketing per se. It is not going to tell you how to leverage social media in order to grow your business. You will have to read other books on that subject. And the coverage on that topic is expanding and changing as I write this review. What this book is about is the Facebook platform that can be used as a marketer’s tool when practicing social media marketing. It tells us about User Profiles, Facebook Groups, how to create Web pages within Facebook, hosting events on Facebook, and other things that one can take advantage of at Facebook. Read more…

Into the Forest

Jean Hegland gives us a provocative novel about a family who lived far on the out skirts of a northern California small town surrounded by second growth redwood forest. The two girls, Eva, 17, and Nell (the protagonist) 16, explored the forest in their younger years, heeding the many warnings of their mother to beware the many perils lurking in the woods. As they became older, their interest in playing in the forest waned, replaced by Eva’s commitment to ballet and Nell’s advanced self-education to prepare for matriculation to Harvard.

Unfortunately, their mother’s untimely death heralds the collapse of their society as they know it. Political and environmental catastrophes create anarchy on a local and Read more…

Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time

Twitter Power is a great book that covers everything I wanted to know, and needed to know (without realizing it) about using Twitter in the best ways possible. I joined Twitter a while back, started tweeting and looking around online at the other tweeters, and really started to wonder just what in the heck all the Twitter hype could possibly be about. Sure, it’s cute to be able to send micro-blogs of up to 140 characters length out to the world, so what’s the big deal? Well, Joel Comm’s book opened my eyes, and I now know what the big deal is! I’m eagerly pressing on with his suggestions and guidance, and after just a few days of implementing what he teaches in his book, it’s starting to work, and work well. Read more…

Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle

This book is spot on about the life of a junior person at an Investment Bank. As they said, you can change the name on the door but the stories are the same. My wife read the book first and I basically laid out for her practically every topic they’d be touching on before she’d get to it.

For anyone considering investment banking as a career, you really must read this book to understand exactly what you are getting into. (The same is true for the spouse/prospective spouse of an associate.) Although, I should warn you that by reading this book before getting into the business, it’ll remove one of the main self-motivational tools that we all used to deal with it day in and day out, the “They really need me here because I’m essential to the Read more…

The Tourist

Writer Olen Steinhauer has some fun with his spy terminology. A “tourist” is a black ops CIA agent who travels the world on a tourist visa. “Tourists” work directly for a “tour guide” at the “department of tourism.” Clandestine operations are reported to Langley in “tour guides.”

The day before 9/11, a CIA embassy officer goes missing while trying to make an expensive purchase of some valuable intelligence information. The Department of Tourism, fearing the worst, sends a “tourist” to locate the missing CIA embassy operative. Read more…

Watchmen

Is Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” the greatest comic book ever written? Quite possibly so. “Watchmen” is a self-contained story that follows two generations of costumed superheroes over several decades of their history (the story spans from the 1930s to the 1980s). Moore’s characters are truly unforgettable: the violent Comedian, the Batman-like Nite Owl, the disturbed Rorschach, the dazzling Ozymandias (known as “the world’s smartest man”), the sexy female crime fighter known as the Silk Spectre, the godlike Dr. Manhattan, and more. Much of these characters’ lives are lived in the shadow of the Cold War and possible nuclear Armageddon (a particularly resonant theme for those of us who remember that era). Read more…

How to Brew: Everything You Need To Know To Brew Beer Right The First Time

This book serves several purposes well. For the absolute beginner who is anxious to brew his first batch and to brew it right, this book helps give him a good shot at succeeding. And for the beginner with a little more patience, who wants to really understand all of the basics, including the how-and-why of all aspects of brewing, the ins and outs of the ingredients, etc, before making his first attempt, this book serves that purpose well, too. The book is so full of great information that you’ll probably find yourself referring back to it Read more…