Currie is unconcerned, however, with his own lapses in knowledge; his book derives almost entirely from his own estimable...
A lightly researched but helpful practical handbook for raising meal worms.
This guide springs from Currie’s quarter-century of experience raising meal worms. As it turns out, the squirmy little beasties are not worms at all; in their most common manifestation, they are the larval form of the insect tenebrio molitar, better known as the darkling beetle. According to the author, meal worms are remarkably easy to raise–all it takes is a modest-sized container with smooth, vertical sides, a few handfuls of grain bedding and some basement space far from relatives with queasy stomachs. Once fully developed, meal worms can serve either as bait or as pet food for certain lizards, birds and small mammals. Perhaps the most surprising–and even delightful–thing about Currie’s guide is the author’s own obvious enthusiasm for his diminutive subject. He exudes youthful excitement when he tells his reader of the South American countries in which meal worms are served with rice as food, and he gives a sly wink as he explains that when fishing, meal worms are his own secret weapon. Further, it is with little irony that he describes setting up a starter farm in his study as a “conversation piece.” For all its gusto, however, Currie’s guide is a bit thin on information. For instance, in one chapter on feeding practices, he suggests giving the worms chicken mash, though he admits he doesn’t know what chicken mash is. A later chapter on using meal worms as pet food is only a page long because, as Currie explains, he has not owned many of the animals that supposedly thrive on the nutritious larva.
Currie is unconcerned, however, with his own lapses in knowledge; his book derives almost entirely from his own estimable experience raising meal worms, and he gives his reader no reason to doubt the efficacy of his methods.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 76
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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