Nonfiction

The Truffle Underground: A Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and Manipulation in the Shadowy Market of the World’s Most Expensive Fungus

Filed Under: Books Read

The Truffle Underground: A Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and Manipulation in the Shadowy Market of the World’s Most Expensive Fungus

The Truffle Underground: A Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and Manipulation in the Shadowy Market of the World's Most Expensive Fungus by Ryan Jacobs
Published by Clarkson Potter Publishers on June 4, 2019
Pages: 288
Format: hardback
Genres: Nonfiction, True Crime
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

Beneath the gloss of star chefs and crystal-laden tables, the truffle supply chain is touched by theft, secrecy, sabotage, and fraud. Farmers patrol their fields with rifles and fear losing trade secrets to spies. Hunters plant poisoned meatballs to eliminate rival truffle-hunting dogs. Naive buyers and even knowledgeable experts are duped by liars and counterfeits.

This exposé documents the dark, sometimes deadly crimes at each level of the truffle’s path from ground to plate, making sense of an industry that traffics in scarcity, seduction, and cash.

When you get right down to it, who really cares that the Truffle business is just another crime laden enterprise. After reading this book, I understood that the Truffle business doesn’t really want to reform itself; the industry is very happy lying and manipulating the market as long as it is profitable.

I wonder does anyone have any sensibilities anymore. I can not forgive those who had dogs murdered that did nothing to protect them.

Pure Land: A True Story of Three Lives, Three Cultures, and the Search for Heaven on Earth

Filed Under: Books Read

Pure Land: A True Story of Three Lives, Three Cultures, and the Search for Heaven on Earth

Pure Land: A True Story of Three Lives, Three Cultures, and the Search for Heaven on Earth by Annette McGivney
Published by Aquarius Press on October 2, 2017
Pages: 354
Format: paperback
Genres: Domestic Politics, Japan, Journalism, Native American, United States
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

Tomomi Hanamure, a Japanese citizen who loved exploring the wilderness of the American West, was killed on her birthday May 8, 2006. She was stabbed 29 times as she hiked to Havasu Falls on the Havasupai Indian Reservation at the bottom of Grand Canyon. Her killer was a distressed 18-year-old Havasupai youth. Pure Land is the story of this tragedy. But it is also the story of how McGivney’s quest to understand Hanamure’s life and death wound up guiding the author through her own life-threatening crisis. On this journey stretching from the southern tip of Japan to the bottom of Grand Canyon, and into the ugliest aspects of human behavior, Pure Land offers proof of the healing power of nature and the resiliency of the human spirit.

"There is such tragic irony here. The very things that Japanese tourist Tomomi Hanamure is so deeply passionate about--the wild, stark, beautiful American West and Native American culture--are what leads to her violent death. Around this single horrific event Annette McGivney has masterfully woven three separate, highly personal narratives."-- S. C. Gwynne, Author of Empire of the Summer Moon, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

"McGivney intuitively grounds her narrative while exploring humanity's roots of culture and origins of character, like the light of the sun awakening each intricate layer of earth in the deepest of canyons. She is a storyteller of the highest caliber, with a style reminiscent of Jon Krakauer's journalistic skill and unmistakable purpose."-- Carine McCandless, author of The Wild Truth, the New York Times bestselling follow-up to Into the Wild

"Annette McGivney has gathered three disparate narratives and braided them into a bewitching tapestry of darkness and light, pain and atonement, along with the unexpected gifts that can sometimes accompany profoundly devastating loss." -- Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short

Filed Under: Books Read

Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short

Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short by William D. Cohan
Published by Flatiron Books on July 9, 2019
Pages: 384
Format: ebook
Genres: Memior, Nonfiction
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

A powerful portrait of the lives of four boarding school graduates who died too young, John F. Kennedy, Jr. among them, by their fellow Andover classmate, New York Times bestselling author William D. Cohan.

In his masterful pieces for Vanity Fair and in his bestselling books, William D. Cohan has proven to be one of the most meticulous and intrepid journalists covering the world of Wall Street and high finance. In his utterly original new book, Four Friends, he brings all of his brilliant reportorial skills to a subject much closer to home: four friends of his who died young. All four attended Andover, the most elite of American boarding schools, before spinning out into very different orbits. Indelibly, using copious interviews from wives, girlfriends, colleagues, and friends, Cohan brings these men to life on the page.

Jack Berman, the child of impoverished Holocaust survivors, uses his unlikely Andover pedigree to achieve the American dream, only to be cut down in an unimaginable act of violence. Will Daniel, Harry Truman's grandson and the son of the managing editor of The New York Times, does everything possible to escape the burdens of a family legacy he's ultimately trapped by. Harry Bull builds the life of a careful, successful Chicago lawyer and heir to his family's fortune...before taking an inexplicable and devastating risk on a beautiful summer day. And the life and death of John F. Kennedy, Jr.--a story we think we know--is told here with surprising new details that cast it in an entirely different light. Four Friends is an immersive, wide-ranging, tragic, and ultimately inspiring account of promising lives cut short, written with compassion, honesty, and insight. It not only captures the fragility of life but also its poignant, magisterial, and pivotal moments.

There is something off-kilter with this book. Cohan writes about his time at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA. Andover is rated the top prep-school in the country where it’s graduates go on to Havard or Yale, becoming the cream of the crop in American society.

Cohan, taken with the death of four of his contemporaries; they were not friends, just four young men attending Andover at the same time as Cohan, that he decided to write about their deaths. While singing the praises for Andover, Cohan, in a tabloid fashion, describes their years at Andover and goes to reveal how they met their end. I am not sure of the purpose of this book, other than Cohan survived, and his four very privileged contemporaries did not.