Portrait Drawing for Kids by Angela Rizza

Portrait Drawing for Kids: A Step-by-Step Guide to Drawing Faces by Angela Rizza ISBN-13: 978-1641527255 Paperback: 304 pages Publisher: Rockridge Press Released: May 19th 2020

Source: review copy from the publisher.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Anyone can take a picture―but drawing a person with recognizable likeness takes practice. Portrait drawing offers a completely unique interpretation of your subject, and Portrait Drawing for Kids gives budding artists the skill set they need to draw pictures of themselves, their family, and friends. Broken down into simple, step-by-step instructions, this book will teach you every aspect of portraiture, from features of the face, to capturing emotions, to techniques like shading and highlighting. This drawing for kids book will help you take your artistic talents to the next level―beginning with a sharpened pencil.


My Review:
Portrait Drawing for Kids is an art instruction book for beginners at drawing human faces with graphite pencil. The targeted age range is 9 to 12 years old, but I think it would be most useful for teenagers and adults since it assumes a certain level of focus and observational skills. In each chapter, she taught a new concept and then demonstrated how to draw it using six illustrated steps with brief text instructions for each step. She then provided three practice pages which simply showed the six steps with no new instructions. These practice faces would be at different angles and be both male and female and different ethnicities.

The author started by looking at the basic facial shape and how the face changes when you view it from the front, side, three quarters view, etc. Then she covered eyes and eyebrows, nose and mouth, different expressions, shading and how it changes based on the direction of the light source, adding ears, necks, hair, beards, and glasses. She then had you practice by doing different activities (with explanations on how to pose or otherwise do these activities), like drawing yourself, your friends, profiles, and group portraits. She also had you look at different portrait styles throughout history and try some of those styles. Overall, I would recommend this book to beginners at drawing faces, but I was confused by why she didn't better explain how to get an individuals facial portions correct.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

Northeast Medicinal Plants by Liz Neves

Northeast Medicinal Plants by Liz Neves ISBN-13: 9781604699135 Paperback: 432 pages Publisher: Timber Press Released: May 26th 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
In Northeast Medicinal Plants, herbalist Liz Neves is the reader's trusted guide to finding, identifying, harvesting, and using 111 of the region’s most powerful wild plants. Readers will learn how to safely and ethically forage, and how to use wild plants in herbal medicines including teas, tinctures, and salves. Plant profiles include clear, color photographs, identification tips, medicinal uses and herbal preparations, and harvesting suggestions. Lists of what to forage for each season makes the guide useful year-round. Thorough, comprehensive, and safe, this is a must-have for foragers, naturalists, and herbalists in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.


My Review:
Northeast Medicinal Plants is a guide to foraging wild medicinal plants in the Northeast (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.). The author started by explaining how to gather the different parts of a plant for medicinal use (leaves and flowers, bark, roots, etc.), how to store them, and how to make a infusion, decoction, tincture, oil infusion, poultice, syrup, etc. She included some information about plant identification, including pictures to help illustrate the different terms.

The main part of the book was an alphabetically organized list of 111 plants found in the region. For each listing, we're given the common names, the Latin name, the parts of the plant used, a description of how to identify the plant, when and how to gather the plant, the medicinal uses of the different parts the plant, how to ensure a future harvest, any safety cautions, and details about how to use the plant (the proportions used in a tincture, etc.). For each plant, there was a picture of the plant (often including its natural habitat) and usually a picture or two of distinguishing details, like the flower or a close-up of the leaf. Overall, this is an excellent resource for anyone interested in gathering and using medicinal plants from this area. It's very informative and provided practical information.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

Healthy Vegan, Happy Body by Tess Challis

Healthy Vegan, Happy Body by Tess Challis ISBN-13: Paperback: 304 pages Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime Released:

Source: review copy from the publisher.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Go healthy vegan! When you have the foods you love every day, eating healthy is hassle-free. Reap the many benefits of a healthy vegan diet--extra energy, reduced inflammation, and even financial savings! Healthy Vegan, Happy Body can help you discover the uniquely satisfying flavors of a plant-based diet with recipes like Pad Thai, World’s Healthiest Mac and Cheese, and Mint Chocolate Chip Nice Cream. With go-to information on a healthy vegan lifestyle and recipes that minimize salt, oil, and refined flours and sugars, becoming a healthy vegan using vegan cookbooks has never been so easy or tasty.

Inside one of the most comprehensive vegan cookbooks, you’ll find: Make the transition to healthy eating fast and simple using the included tips to set up your kitchen with pantry essentials and nourishing staples. Find the perfect dishes for you with clearly marked labels to show whether recipes are gluten-free, leftover-friendly, fast to prepare, and more. Look for numerous recipes that eliminate salt, oil, sugar, and other processed foods, plus tips for making other recipes WFPB-friendly.


My Review:
Healthy Vegan, Happy Body is a vegan cookbook that focuses on healthy, tasty recipes. The recipes used minimally-processed, whole-food, plant-based ingredients. She started by talking about how to make plant-based foods that are tasty and fulfill your nutritional requirements. She also talked about the health benefits of eating this way and some basic vegan cooking information, like making nut milk and cooking grains or beans. She didn't use white flour or refined sugar and generally used minimally processed ingredients. She did use some high quality, healthy oils to add flavor, but she didn't use excessive amounts of oil, salt, or sugar. I found a lot of recipes that I'm interested in trying that look both healthy and tasty.

Most of the recipes served 4 to 6 people and took around 20-60 minutes to make. Almost all of the ingredients in the recipes should be easy to get. She included 13 recipes for smoothies, juices, and shakes; 16 recipes for breakfast; 16 recipes for snacks and sides; 15 recipes for salads; 12 recipes for soups and stews; 13 recipes for rolls, tacos, and wraps; 16 recipes using noodles or rice; 9 recipes for special occasions; 15 recipes for deserts; and 14 recipes for staples (sauces, dips, seasonings).

The recipes provided the preparation time, cooking time, how much is made, ingredients, instructions, cooking and substitution tips. Each recipe was labeled with one or more of the following: 30 minutes or less, plan ahead, gluten-free, leftover friendly, nut free, wfpb (no salt, oil, or refined sugar). Each recipe included "per serving" information on calories, fat, carbohydrates, fiber, protein, sodium, and iron. There were only two or three pictures of finished recipes per each section of recipes.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

The Victorians by John D Wright

The Victorians by John D Wright ISBN-13: 9781782745884 Hardcover: 224 pages Publisher: Amber Books Ltd Released: May 14th 2018

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
The Victorian era boasted the glory of the Empire and the grandeur that Empire afforded, it saw huge technological advances in civil engineering and transport, mass urbanisation and social change, as well as still-treasured literature and the most popular sports that we play today. But it was also a time of great poverty, of mass child labour and prostitution, of the Irish Potato Famine and British concentration camps in the Boer War, of the boom and bust of the California Gold Rush and slavery being fought over in America, of sexual hypocrisy and rigid class differences.

The Victorians explores the Victorian world from its cholera epidemics and asylums to its workhouses and chimneysweeps, from the Opium Wars to London’s opium dens, from the gangs of New York to convicts bound for Australia, from body-snatchers to freakshows, from the British in Afghanistan to the American Civil War, from imposters claiming fortunes to women pretending to be men. Included are the lives of such colourful figures as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, the Elephant Man and Jack the Ripper, and the world that inspired Dracula, detective stories and the character of Sherlock Holmes. Expertly written and using 180 photographs, paintings, and illustrations, The Victorians reveals that behind the splendour and the facades was a world of poverty, disease and hypocrisy.


My Review:
The Victorians provides an overview of the Victorian era along with many photographs and illustrations from the time. If you're already familiar with the Victorian era, you probably won't find much new here. However, this is a good overview of the time period for those unfamiliar with it. The focus was mainly on England and America, but other countries were mentioned if something notable happened there, like a great fire that destroyed most of the city. The author covered things like wars, new technologies, notable crimes and criminals, popular literature or entertainment, city life, women's issues, slavery, and more. The illustrations and photographs from that time period were interesting and helped give a sense of the time. I'd recommend this book to those interested in an overview of the main issues of the Victorian age.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

The Botanical Kitchen by Elly McCausland

The Botanical Kitchen by Elly McCausland ISBN-13: 9781472969453 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Bloomsbury Absolute Released: April 28th 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Elly McCausland guides readers through cooking with botanicals, looking at their culinary history and diverse uses over the years. Weaving through this compelling text will be 90 delicious recipes including relishes and bakes, salads and soups, noodle bowls and breads and everything in between, offering unique and insightful flavour pairings. With chapters including fruits (tropical, Mediterranean and orchard), leaves, flowers, seeds and berries, this beautiful book places botanical ingredients at the fore and showcases exactly how plants can transform your food.


My Review:
The Botanical Kitchen is a cookbook using bought ingredients, some of them potentially hard to find. For some reason, I thought the focus was going to be more on the leaves and flowers (like how to prepare and use them) than on recipes that happen to throw in some herbs, spices, seeds, fruit, or flowers. She did spend a couple of paragraphs on each of the focus botanicals explaining how to know when a fruit is ripe, where to find some of the more exotic ingredients, some cooking tips, and some history of the fruit or herb or a personal recollection about using it. I'm an American, so I will point out that her recipes use milliliters and grams and her oven temperatures are in Celsius. She also referred to some ingredients in a way that will be unfamiliar to Americans (like linseed instead of flaxseed or rapeseed oil instead of canola oil).

Her recipes note how many it serves or makes, and many recipes included a full-color picture of the finished dish. She included some recipes for salads and such or meat dishes (fish, duck, pork, chicken, beef, etc.), but there were also a lot of recipes for tarts, crumbles, cakes, cookies, and ice cream. She used a lot of dairy.

The "botanicals" she focused on were apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, quinces, figs, apricots, dates, oranges, lemons, bergamot, mango, pineapple, papaya, banana, grapefruit, persimmon, lychees, pomelo, gooseberry, strawberry, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, black currants, red currants, blackcurrant leaves, tea leaves, banana leaves, lemon and lime leaves, basil, thyme, rosemary, lemongrass, and other herbs, saffron, rose petals, chamomile flowers, lavender flowers, vanilla beans, elder flowers, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, cardamon, and nutmeg.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

Survival Tips by Clive Johnson

Survival Tips by Clive Johnson ISBN-13: 9781782749790 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Amber Books Released: April 14, 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
With a total of 150 expert survival tips, Survival Tips gives you the basic skills to keep going in any situation. Tips range from using an ice axe and sheltering from the wind, to finding fresh water and building a protective shelter. Survival Tips explains how to stay safe in every environment, from the sub-zero landscape of the Arctic to the scorching suns of the tropics. Topics covered include: edible plants and animals, finding water, celestial navigation, surviving at sea, constructing shelters, hunting and trapping techniques, making fire, and more. Illustrated with more than 100 black-and-white illustrations.


My Review:
Survival Tips provides a series of brief tips about how to stay safe in a variety of landscapes (desert, snow, jungle, etc.) and how to deal with different emergency situations. This book is not comprehensive, not really survival training, and wasn't necessarily about unexpected emergency situations. For example, it started off with advice about what to carry in your survival kit when going hiking. The water survival tips assumed that you had been on a yacht equipped with a survival raft, so you can grab canned goods, a can opener, and water before getting into the raft. The author did have an illustration showing how to lash a raft together from wood, but a YouTube video showing these techniques in action would be more helpful and comprehensive.

The tips were generally only a few sentences long. He'd tell you how to find water, what animals and plants are edible, and what animals and plants are dangerous. However, you already have to know how to identify these plants and animals for this information to be useful. He also gave commonsense advice and advice that you probably would be given by instructors if you were going hiking in a snowy, mountainous area or visiting a desert area. He also gave some information about first aid, but much of this ended with evacuating the person to a hospital as fast as possible. Even if you had this book on hand in a survival situation, I didn't feel like the information was complete enough to help you survive. Since I learned how to do first aid, use maps, make fires, etc., in Girl Scouts and from my parents, I didn't really find much of this information useful.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

Heart, Breath, Mind by Leah Lagos

Heart, Breath, Mind by Leah Lagos ISBN-13: 9781328604408 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Released: May 5th 2020

Source: ARC review copy from the publisher through Amazon Vine.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Leah Lagos, PsyD, BCB is an internationally known expert in biofeedback and sport and performance psychology. In this book, she shares with readers for the first time the same program that she uses with top athletes, CEOs, business leaders—anyone who wants and needs to perform at their best. What makes her scientifically proven 10-week program unlike any other is that she recognizes the link between heart rhythms and stress to create specific, clinically tested exercises and breathing techniques that allow you to control your body’s physical response to stress. She pairs this training with cognitive-behavioral exercises to offer a two-tiered process for strengthening health and performance, enabling readers to respond more flexibly to stressful situations, let go of negative thoughts and emotions, and ultimately be more focused and confident under pressure.


My Review:
Heart, Breath, Mind talks about combining HRV biofeedback or resonance breathing along with visualization techniques to train your body to switch from a state of stress to relaxed much more quickly. I've previously heard some information on HRV and was told that a breath pattern of 5.5 seconds inhale and 5.5 seconds exhale creates resonance breathing, but she stated that "the standard rate that works for most individuals is to inhale for four seconds and exhale for six seconds with no pause in between.... The magic ratio here is 40:60 – you spend 40% of each breath inhaling and 60% exhaling." She never explained why this was a magic ratio; you just have to take it on faith. However, breathing in that ratio does not feel comfortable to me but the 5.5 seconds inhale and 5.5 seconds exhale does. This special breathing is the basis of her method, so I wish she spent more time explaining why this is the "magic" ratio.

Anyway, she started the book by describing the benefits of resonance breathing and how she discovered the benefit of combining it with visualization techniques. You do not need to have an HRV biofeedback device to do her technique, but she does talk about several devices if you want to get one. Each day for 10 weeks, she has you breathe for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening following a breath pacing app set to her resonance breathing ratio. The first week is learning to breathe at that ratio, and the second week is learning belly breathing. Weeks 3 through 10 each introduce a new visualization technique that you can use to switch between a stressed state back into a relaxed state. The goal is to find one or more techniques that you find easy to use that will help you deal with stressful situations.

The author was not always clear when describing a technique. For example, she said to identify how your heart feels. I thought she meant physically only to later realize she meant what emotion are you feeling. However, the visualization techniques seem reasonable and doable. She wasn't clear about if these visualization techniques would work with a different ratio of resonance breathing. I'd be more inclined to commit to her system if I found the four seconds in and six seconds out breathing to be comfortable and calming, but she describes many people that she's worked with where this breathing technique has been very successful.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.