101 Places To Not See Before You Die, by Catherine Price

Rating: 3/5
235 pages
2010
Publisher: Harper Collins ebooks
Source: Library ebook

Description: From the Grover Cleveland Service Area to the Beijing Museum of Tap Water to, of course, Euro Disney, "101 Places Not to See Before You Die" brings you lively tales of the most ill-conceived museums, worst theme parks, and grossest Superfund sites that you'll ever have the pleasure of not visiting. Journalist Catherine Price travels the globe for stories of misadventure to which any seasoned traveler can relate--including guest entries from writers such as Nicholas Kristof, Mary Roach, Michael Pollan, Rebecca Solnit, and A. J. Jacobs--and along the way she discovers that the worst experiences are often the ones we'll never forget. (From Goodreads)

Trapped Under the Sea, by Neil Swidey

Rating: 5/5
407 pages
2014
Publisher: Crown
Source: LibraryThing Early Reviewers

My copy is an uncorrected proof.

Description: In the 1990s, Boston built a sophisticated waste treatment plant on Deer Island that was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. The state had been dumping barely treated sewage into the waterfor so long that Boston had had America's filthiest harbor, with a layer of "black mayonnaise" coating the sea floor. Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as "beach whistles." But before the dumping could stop, a team of divers had to make a perilous journey to the end of a 10-mile-tunnel, devoid of light and air, to complete the construction. Five went in, but not all of them came out. (from the backcover)

A Year At The Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey, by Kevin Murphy

 

Rating: 3/5
372 pages
2002
Publisher: It Books
Source: Library eBook

Description: Kevin Murphy, who played Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000, spent 2001 seeing a movie a day, in all types of different venues, circumstances, and countries.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, by Mary Roach

Rating: 4.5/5
327 pages
2013
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Source: Library book

Description: Science writer Mary Roach explores the human digestive system and gets answers to questions you probably never would have though to ask in the first place.

The De-Textbook, by Cracked.com

Rating: 3/5
207 pages
2013
Publisher: Plume
Source: LibraryThing Early Reviewers

Description: It’s Cracked, but true. You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News was a New York Times bestseller and has already returned to print seven times. Now, the writers at the Internet’s #1 most-read humor site have created a dementedly hilarious textbook parody. By the time we were out of school, we’d learned that spinach is full of iron, there are three primary colors, and we have five senses. Unfortunately, these and most of the other “facts” we crammed into our heads are simply not true. The De-Textbook is here to erase it all—easily, painlessly, and hilariously. (From LibraryThing)

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, by Reza Aslan

Rating: 4/5
272 pages
2013
Publisher: Random House
Source: Library book

Description: From the bestselling author of No God but God comes a provocative & well-researched biography challenging long-held assumptions about Jesus. (From the dust jacket)

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Edited by Peter Boxall

Rating: 3/5
Publisher: Universe
960 pages
2010
Source: Library

Description: A list, with brief descriptions, of one thousand and one books, that the contributors to this volume feel everyone should read for a well rounded literary experience.

The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, by Marilyn Chase

Rating: 5/5
Publisher: Random House
276 pages
2003
Source: Library Book

Description: “San Francisco in 1900 was a Gold Rush boomtown settling into a gaudy middle age. . . . It had a pompous new skyline with skyscrapers nearly twenty stories tall, grand hotels, and Victorian mansions on Nob Hill. . . . The wharf bristled with masts and smokestacks from as many as a thousand sailing ships and steamers arriving each year. . . . But the harbor would not be safe for long. Across the Pacific came an unexpected import, bubonic plague. Sailing from China and Hawaii into the unbridged arms of the Golden Gate, it arrived aboard vessels bearing rich cargoes, hopeful immigrants, and infected vermin. The rats slipped out of their shadowy holds, scuttled down the rigging, and alighted on the wharf. Uphill they scurried, insinuating themselves into the heart of the city.” (From the hardcover edition)

Of Muppets and Men: The Making of the Muppet Show, by Christopher Finch

Rating: 3/5
Publisher: Muppet Press/Knopf
178 pages
1981
Source: Library

Description: A coffee table book about The Muppet Show.


Review: About what you'd expect from a coffee table book about a tv show. The text is readable and entertaining. There's lots of pictures. And it probably doesn't tell you much that you didn't already know, if you had an interest in the subject already. And since it's a coffee table book, it's rather unwieldy to actually read.

Given this came out the same year as The Muppet Show's final season, it is unsurprisingly out of print.

Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe, by William Rosen

Rating: 4/5
Publisher: Viking
367 pages
2007
Source: Library book

Description: In the middle of the sixth century, the world's smallest organism collided with the world's mightiest power. Twenty-five million corpses later, the Roman Empire, under her last great emperor Justinian, was decimated. Before Yersina pestis, the bacterium that carries bubonic plague, was through, both Rome and Persia were easy targets for the armies of Muhammad on their conquering march out of Arabia. In it's wake, the plague~history's first pandemic~marked the end of a multinational Mediterranean imperium and the birth of the European  nation-states... the transition from late antiquity to the medieval world. (Copied from the book jacket.)


Review: I found this book to be fascinating, but a little disappointing.