It’s rare that paupery can be so much fun and a bracing thumb in the supermarket manager’s eye.
A clever, merry approach to feeding your family while staying on the right side of debtors’ prison.
New Zealanders and ministers of the website SimpleSavings, Lippey and Gower are believers in the artful use of scant means, and they pursue that end with a jaunty, unstoppable enthusiasm. They contend, and then go about demonstrating, that you can feed a family of four for a week with $21 (and if you have anything in the larder, so much the better). This is a challenge for one week, not every week of the year; neither Lippey nor Gower suggests that. But when the cupboard and the checkbook are nearly bare, it’s one problem off your plate to know you can feed a brood on a few bucks. The authors take you step by step through their plan: how to involve your family, how to take stock and inventory, develop shopping lists and meal plans and deal with the “minor hurdles”—“These are the underminer, the guilt tripper, the shopping victim, the sponge, the big kid, the snob and the high D.I. (disposable income).” They provide tips and tricks for meeting your goals and focus on a well-rounded diet, quality foodstuffs and healthy eating of the commonsense sort, with plenty of treats that don’t lead down the road of morbid obesity. And the recipes aren’t what you might expect for a measly $21 for the week: sausage risotto, hotpots, cream pasta, potato cakes and bean pies and stretching a chicken five ways. They address leftover ingredients, such as opened cans of chickpeas and coconut milk, curry paste and chili sauce, gelatin, oats and the dreaded zucchini (BBQ, soup, stir fry), and then step into the breach with substitute ingredients when you can’t find the one you want. When the portions seem small to you—one woman feeds her four on a pound of ground chuck one night, a half a chicken breast the next—just move on.
It’s rare that paupery can be so much fun and a bracing thumb in the supermarket manager’s eye.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466369436
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Simple Savings Intl.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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