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This is the best book I've read about tea, although really the only book except for one self-published from China that said tea is great and it cures cancer. I do wish this one covered more varieties of Chinese tea instead of, for example, providing a bunch of tea cocktail recipes, but maybe he's trying to convert pub drinkers. Anyway, good background on the history of tea, the basic categories, and a smattering of individual varieties with, like a good coffee book, brewing tips, and a mild admonishment not to put all kinds of sugar, milk, honey, lemon, etc. in your tea, just get some good leaves and drink!

I don't really see the added value of the comic book format, which really just means it's illustrated with comic book panel, no comic book characters/dialogue/plot. I'd rather have photos of ramen. But that aside, it's a pretty good background on ramen, the origin and different types, with the usual cookbook stuff about prep, equipment, ingredients. In other words, it's an illustrated cookbook.

I stopped reading about halfway through. I'm all for crafted, organic, farm to table food, but, as it says in the title, this is a manifesto, and the anti fast food diatribe (and by fast food she means just about any other type of food) reminds me of a Swedish colleague who asked me why poor people eat at McDonalds while we dined at a nice Thai place that cost several times as much for a meal. And a book that continuously cites health and anti-health claims should list some sources.

I picked this book up fittingly in a discount music store, and found it amusing in a crude snarky way but stopped halfway through the book and halfway through the chapter ranting about soccer, being a former youth soccer player myself, it was either too much or too much on the nose. I like to indulge in a we were the best generation as much as the next GenX-er, but GenX at its most annoying (when we're not running terrible tech companies or being the characters in Reality Bites) is ironically tearing itself down.

This might be a different case if somehow I was not familiar with the Aliens franchise or if in particular I didn't like the second film, but this story is basically Alien 2.5 and could have been the second half of a ridiculously long James Cameron directors cut starring Hicks and (in flashbacks) the rest of his marine buddies, so I thoroughly enjoyed it. Admittedly, I was a bit worried in the first few pages that this is one of those sci-fi novels I find unreadable - I haven't read Pat Cadigan's other works, but there is a screenplay/comic feel to the prose - but once you know what's going to happen, grab some popcorn, settle in for the ride, and remember to nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure (yeah, right).