Average customer rating:
- Off the tip of a well-worn tongue
- Please god, let this be the start of the Hoban Renaissance.
- hoban's head is dreaming us
- Steamy Hoban-Antics!
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Angelica's Grotto: A Novel
Russell Hoban
Manufacturer: Carroll & Graf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0786708786 |
Book Description
Altogether original, at once searing and amusing, this darkly comic novel confronts Harold Klein, now in his infirm seventies, with a strange malady -- the loss of his "inner voice" -- and introduces him to the steamy world of Internet sex. Inexplicably bereft of the mental faculty that would under normal circumstances keep him from blurting out, uncensored, the first thought that pops into his head, art connoisseur Klein wanders one evening into a pornographic Web site, Angelica's Grotto. An ongoing on-line dialogue, totally without verbal inhibition on Klein's part, eventually brings him face-to-face with the brains behind the grotto, an academic sex researcher named Melissa Bottomley. Harold Klein's erotic odyssey takes him not only through unimagined erogenous zones but also into arcane corners of the art world, as he seeks to meet Melissa's need for funding and she his for sexual gratification. As Klein strives to reconcile new desires with old habits, author Russell Hoban compellingly explores the dark relations between art and pornography, acts virtual and real, culture and politics, revelation and privacy.
Customer Reviews:
Off the tip of a well-worn tongue.......2001-08-06
They all get around to it eventually. Updike gave his septuagenarian Bech a twenty-six-year-old grad-student assistant who improbably wanted his babies; Bellow had his young secretary-wife hold his desiccated body in the lapping waves and sing "Hap-py, happy Sol-o-mon;" and, most recently and most stingingly, Roth gave his Professor of Desire a graduate seminar in mortality as viewed through a plate of twenty-nothing puttanesca--a Cuban hottie whose bounteous breasts are a missile crisis of autumnal rot.
So why should not the British cult writer Russell Hoban get his turn? Like Kubrick in that double bill of yearning toward amniotic bliss, EYES WIDE SHUT and A.I., Hoban sees one brand of medication for the pain of failing daylight: the tender vent we all call home. In this hiccuppingly eccentric, deliberately minor-key novel, Hoban places his own alter ego, an impotent, diabetic, sclerotic art historian, at a worshipful stoop before a website called Angelica's Grotto. [....]Here, a feminist grad student lures potential wankers with homemade still-photo porn and 1-900-style storytelling. Hoban's aesthete, Harold Klein, is fascinated--and thus begins an improbable series of adventures that includes Angelica's accepting Klein's tongue into her grotto (out of "curiosity") and climaxes with an act of vengeance against a black stud that would make Norman Mailer and James Toback blush and hold hands.
Hey--if the Yanks can do it, let it all hang out, finally admit that they're doing it for the nookie, why can't a dotty, attention-deficited, crazy-quilt-headed old prof like Hoban drop trou too? His version certainly has more charm and gentleness, and is pointedly less misogynistic and more self-candid, than lusty-old-goat cannonades like Updike's ROGER'S VERSION or Roth's DYING ANIMAL. But like all contemporary British novelists who mark themselves as middle-class or above, Hoban is less a slave to the tang than to a public-school education. Hard, crumbly bits of German phraseology, twice-removed references to scenes from ORLANDO FURIOSO, a smug description of a dinner chat about "Klimt and Kieslowski," clot the soup and interrupt the tasty parts. Hoban still feels the urge to name-drop and to cerebralize--even though the drop-kick at the climax of the novel is that a horny old coot will literally drop a million bucks just to wet his whistle on a butchy grad student who doesn't always smell so good. [....] Like a milder, post-Zoloft Peter Greenaway, Hoban's hands flit through Jansen's History of Art and the O.E.D. while his eyes dart toward the busty sylph at the cappuccino cart.
Americans may just want him to get on with it--and get over it. Less rageful and accusatory than his American analogs, Hoban also commits a sin they don't--he puts on a slightly Mitteleuropa, who-little-old-me? act. The Angelica character calls him on it, but he keeps it up, as it were--making himself seem meek, mild, lamely inquisitive, prodding at his willingness to sacrifice all for sex as if it were a fancy, unfamiliar cushion that somehow wound up on a kitchen chair. The Americans plowing this terrain own up more freely to the bawl of their soon-to-be-terminal inner child. For their sourness, the Updike and Roth versions of the old-man-with-an-itch have a bitter grandeur, and an impressive surrender before the mysterious simplicity of our biological hardwiring. Hoban tries to stave off anxiety with art-review chatter and three-card-monte cultural crossreference. [...]
Unwittingly, ANGELICA'S GROTTO demonstrates a peculiar neurosis of the aging urban intelligentsia that is the only real drama the book permits: the arm-wrestle between "I wanna go out and live!" and "Eek--a germ!" [....] Some may find Hoban's avuncular, donnish treatment of this vacillation surprisingly warm and humane. Everyone else will find himself speeding through the pages, eager to get back to a world where Hoban's issues can be discussed without the mimeographed proprieties of a teacher-student conference.
Please god, let this be the start of the Hoban Renaissance........2001-07-14
My girlfriend is a Berlinerin, and while visiting her a couple months ago, taking the S-Bahn to her college, we passed a typically cryptic graffiti scrawl -- even the hoodlums in Germany fancy themselves Nietzsches -- that said "There are 20 great men in the world today, and we are here to help them." It's a sign of either my prescience or psychosis that I immediately thought of... well, myself, but that's the typical reaction. Right afterwards I thought of a much more deserving candidate for a member of this illustrious, if somewhat arbitrary 20; Russell Hoban, author of the book you're reading about here and, this is not an opinion, one of the most important writers alive. The irony is that there is no one on earth who has gotten less "help" with his project, his career, his LIFE than Hoban -- after scoring a cult success with Riddley Walker in 1981, he had the unforgivable audacity to better it with Pilgermann, my candidate for the greatest novel of the second half of the 20th century, a visionary and bottomlessly complex work that put him in the rarefied company of Kleist, Kafka and Borges... and which was promptly rejected, along with its creator, as if Hoban were the literary equivalent of Right Said Fred. People just did not want to go beyond Riddley.
As it turns out, we couldn't have helped Hoban more than by ignoring him -- like Proust's composer Vinteuil, Hoban has lived and worked in relative limbo, admired by fellow novelists but ignored by the ox populi, having nothing to guide him but his own instincts. "I have been denied my rightful martyrdom," complained George Bernhard Shaw in a preface, knowing full well his new play, like all the others, would be a thumping success. Hoban, however, has suffered multiple martyrdoms, almost every time he's put out a book -- this is the first of his books to even be PUBLISHED in America since Pilgermann in 1983! -- and here we see him reaping the benefits of a lifetime of bitterness, loss and unjustified neglect.
What possible benefits could there be from such a horrid fate? Well, what other 75-year old could have written a book as immediate and personal, possibly even as era-defining, as The Catcher in the Rye? The central character of Angelica's Grotto, Harold Klein, could almost be a geriatric Holden Caulfield, if he weren't so distinctly Hobanian -- an adjective that will come to mean "wistful, yet cranky, and apt to make random connections between everyday life and myth, B-movies and obscure paintings." The book works because Klein is also, to put none too fine a point upon it, Hoban himself. He makes sport of his angina, his impotence, his irrelevance, but every stunning sentence, every radiant description of London and exhibition of puppyish sexual curiosity, belies his self-loathing and reveals he has the heart of a much younger man -- or a child. Hence the heartbreak of growing old, and of this book.
The plot, Hoban's most clever and subtle variation yet on the Orpheus myth -- all his books since 1986's The Medusa Frequency work this territory -- kicks off when art-critic and aging bachelor Klein becomes obsessed by an Internet porn-chippie who reminds him of a dead lover ( and one of his beloved paintings. ) What follows is an eye-opening, if ultimately nihilistic, peek into the inner life of a man whose spirit is willing, but whose flesh is falling off his brittle old bones. Hoban, like Kubrick with Eyes Wide Shut, scoffs at any notion of wisdom coming with age -- instead of the repugnant Yoda-like apothegms of John Updike, we get the uncertainty, naked fear, and helpless lust more associated with autobiographical first novels written by 20-somethings. More importantly, we also get a story with actual relevance.
It must be said, if this book were to become a movie, it would go unrated. Klein/Hoban does not shy away from graphic descriptions of what he sees on his favorite websites. But since Internet porn is practically an epidemic, and certainly worthy of intelligent debate, I see no reason why this should bother anyone -- what I'm trying to say is that Hoban is not a hypocrite, which is why he's had so little success in this simultaneously priggish and debauched country. The book is simply the truth, and the truth, as always, is harsh. If this is all we have to look forward to from our golden years, I thought during more than one passage, we might as well pack it in now -- except then we might miss the next book from Russell Hoban. May he live forever.
hoban's head is dreaming us.......2001-03-03
Fantastic, moving novel, from Hoban's increasingly fertile and prolific late period. You've read what it's about. Like all Hoban's novels, this is concerned with the relationship between reality and fantasy; and as with all his best (Riddley Walker, Turtle Diary, and the new one, Amaryllis Night and Day), the difference between these is rendered uncertain. Hoban's writing represents a gritty, everyday, totally honest species of Magic Realism which leaves out glamour and sfx to suggest that the way we all behave is deeply and inevitably conditioned by our fears, histories, hopes, dreams and desires; and ultimately that these get the upper hand over some objective idea of what the real world is or some standard of correct behaviour. Thus, 72-year-old Klein experiences a latelife Yeatsian erotic upsurge which leads him to do all sorts of weird, dangerous, and entertaining things beyond his own immediate comprehension. These things are logical and inevitable, like the mad things we all do are. Klein is a great character: old, cranky, bright, experimental, on-the-case, natural, honest - and lonely; Hoban's best creation since Riddley. The book has wise and empowering things to say about the importance of the internal in public life - as well as the challenges and dangers of trying to honour it. Plus, it is an extremely funny and constantly engaging insight into what it's like to be old but deeply clued-in, contemporary, and not yet sexually dormant. I hope I end up like Klein (but you can spare me the weird stuff). High art delivered in an easy package, Angelica's Grotto is a resonant, unforgettable, wise novel written in beautiful, spare, epigrammatic prose with great humour and concision. You can start and finish it on a local flight. Buy.
Steamy Hoban-Antics!.......2001-02-12
Vastly enjoyable for the linguistic acrobatics as for the sarcastic viewpoint of the central character, Klein. I found myself giggling particularly at his old-man impatience with others, including his comic psychiatrist, further humour value coming from outbursts worthy of a sufferer of Turet's Syndrome. And yet it is a very clever novel. As a reader, you travel with him as he becomes embroiled in a tale of his own dangerous indulgence and insiduously become an unwitting voyeur...
Book Description
A prequel to The Stone Prince and The Painter Knight, The Granite Shield is an equally rich action- and conflict-packed novel, replete with battles, politics, religious and Court intrigues, and focusing around a family gifted with the magic of the Flame, a power which can give its wielder the world or consume him.
Praise for Fiona Patton:
"All the complexity of an epic combined with the intimacy of plot and character that comes from excellent storytelling." --Tanya Huff, for The Stone Prince
"A fabulous new talent by the name of Fiona Patton lights up the DAW skies with a fascinating new fantasy...a marvelously detailed variation of the British Isles featuring strong, energetic characters and a rich tapestry of events to keep us turning the pages at a feverish rate." --Romantic Times, for The Stone Prince
"A strong debut...an epic tale of intrigue and battles, of betrayals and romances, of misunderstandings and magic." --Lambda Book Report, for The Stone Prince
"A rousing adventure, full of color and spectacular magics, and just a hint of romance in this intriguing world where men and women both fight and rule." --Locus, for The Painter Knight
Customer Reviews:
Bogged down by minutae.......2005-07-02
Having read the first two books in the series, I was terribly disappointed with this one... I can't even get myself to finish it after two weeks, and I burned through the first two in a couple of days!
A major issue for me, which other reviewers have also acknowleged, is the sheer volume of detail and data. Despite the chapter-by-chapter list of Dramatis Personae, I still found it frustrating to try and keep track of who was who. While true historical politics are certainly as convoluted and complex as events in The Granite Shield, I prefer to be able to get through a fantasy novel without having to refer to an appendix after every paragraph. In my opinion, the plot just got bogged down by too much information, making it a struggle to read.
My second issue is simply that, at the mid-point of the book, I still have not developed any affinity for these characters. Maybe it's a side effect from the info overload discussed above, but I just cannot get attached to the characters in this book, whereas I felt connected to Simon (The Painter Knight) and Demnor and Kelahnus (The Stone Prince) from the very first page .
Gripes aside, however, I remain appreciative of Patton's egalitarian society where gender and sexual orientation are complete non-issues. But for my money, The Stone Prince and The Painter Knight are much stronger works with stronger, more memorable characters.
Ah, the Branion series. :).......2004-05-26
If you've read other books in the Branion series and enjoyed them, then you're most likely going to enjoy this one, too (surprise!). You've got the Living Flame, Essus, the infamous "gender-free" society, hotheaded red-heads ... what more couldja want? :)
The development of relationships in this book - and all Fiona Patton's Branion books - is appealing. In The Granite Shield, I'd say the most interesting (and most focused upon) is the relationship between the two main characters, a pair of (half-)brothers with intertwined destinies. Another fascinating feature in the series is the conflict/relationship between Essus and the Living Flame. In this particular book, you get an interesting vantage point into that relationship through the eyes of a powerful seer.
As one reader noted, you probably won't see any great reason to choose one "side" over another ... and I think that's part of what Fiona Patton does very, very well. She doesn't give you a "good guys triumphing over the bad guys" plot - instead, you get what I'd call a more realistic view of conflict.
A review.......2003-01-03
I enjoyed this book a great deal, it was more dense tha I had anticipated but very entertaining, with three-dimensional characters.
My one problem was that, in all honesty, I didn't particularly see why I, as a reader, should be more in favor of Gwyneth over Branion, when Rhys didn't seem like a much more favorable choice than his father. The theocratic aspects were very interesting, but on a personal level, I thought that the main characters had something lacking. Ms. Patton's minor characters and adversaries were far more compelling. I found myself hoping for Drusus and Calliston to be victorious instead.
Even so, I enjoyed the overall tone and feel of the book and look forward to reading more of her work.
Ick........2001-10-29
Tediously slow. The details are details for the sake of being details. The details in this book do not enhance and bring forth an awesome plot or anything like that. They're just there. Like great blocks of granite thrown by a giant's child, they're just there. They don't form a pyramid, a great monument, or anything. They exist just because--there's not much of a reason for such excessive detail. It's kind of like Stone Prince. Barely better. I had bought three of the Patton books because the covers looked interesting and the details, when skimmed, looked ok. However, after I read these, I couldn't stand them any longer and gave them to Pocketbook so they could deal with these things.
i was disappointed.......2001-07-14
maybe i was spoiled since my frist fantasy books were marion zimmer bradley's "the mists of avalon." and george r. r. martin's "a song of fire and ice" series but i found this book written on such a base level that after about five pages i was bored. though like everyone else i found the non-gender based society refreshing and interesting i quickly began to ignore the lengthy titles and descriptions of every minor character. the plot and many of the aspects were intrigueing but i felt like i was reading a book for some junior high school student. to many things are blatanly pointed out and no subtley is afford in mrs. patton's work. instead of easing observations into the context of the story she stops everything to describes the page boy who just walked in down to his shoelaces. though from the other reviews i have read i am led to believe that the "painter prince" and her other works are much better i was sourly dissappointed by this work. i will give her credit though before i leave off for her original and highly detailed concepts, though by the second half of the book i just stop trying to figure out who the hell was who. one last note is the that though i am all for the bisexuality and gay reltaionships the casual but yet almost forced way they are placed in the book is irritating. mrs.patton mentions how the meeting with so and so went and the last two lines go something like..."oh yeah and the two guys had sex." i say if you are anything near a sophisticated reader go for bradley or martin but if you are just exploring the genre this is still a fairly descent read.
Amazon.com
The spaces between space are full of dragons. The colonists on Guera went mad--one of the plague of mutations that affected all human colonies and drove Earth back from the stars--but their controlled madness meant that they and they alone could cope with hyperspace, could ask the Earth humans they and other new human species hate for past betrayal back into space. But a virus is infecting the human-machine interfaces by which they live and stay sane, and Earth's racists are the prime suspects. Meanwhile, Jamisia, the subject of endless experiments and host to a myriad of alternate personalities, flees Earth's bloody corporate politics in pursuit of safe haven--and everyone wants a piece of her. The hacker known as Phoenix just wants revenge on the makers of the virus for the death of friends.
C.S. Friedman's galaxy full of altered humanities and vicious politics has room in it for tenderness and honor; this is a satisfying space opera because it is full of characters, some of whom will do the right thing. She is good on what stays the same when things change--the austere, mad, security expert Masada and the sweet slob Phoenix are recognizable types, but attractively individualized. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk
Book Description
In the first age of Earth's colonization of space, the FTL drive that powered the starships caused severe genetic damage in the colonists. Generations later, a new mutant race arises, one which can safely conduct people between the stars. But since they use their ability to tightly control all interstellar commerce, rival interests soon seek to break the monopoly. An when a lab-raised young woman narrowly escapes kidnapping, even as a rogue computer virus wreaks havoc on the interstellar "Net," she must flee into "alien shores", evading her persuers while attempting to uncover the secrets of her own existence.
Praise for C.S. Friedman's Cold Fire trilogy:
"The creative genius of C.S. Friedman burns brightly with the publication of her stunning new novel, blending elements of science fiction and fantasy into an extraordinary reading experience."-- Rave Reviews
"Friedman writes cogently on the nature of human desire for knowledge and the dangerous covenants necessary to attain it...."-- Publishers Weekly
"Some of the best writing I have seen in quite a while, and the ending is excellent. Very highly recommended."-- Science Fiction Review
Customer Reviews:
Racial tolerance in Sci-Fi.......2007-01-13
Since Huxley's Brave New World, Science Fiction has been riddled with stories involving "eugenics." This grim vision of a future when, in extreme cases, human beings are practically manufactured has certainly kept readers interested for decades. Now, in This Alien Shore, C.S. Friedman shows us a very different future, one in which, rather than trying to create the perfect carbon-copy human specimen, humanity at large is promoting and protecting as much genetic diversity as possible. And, thanks to a faulty faster-than-light drive, the "Hausman Effect" has caused branchings of the human genome far more bizarre than any imagineable alien race. Only poor Earth, virtually lost in the mutant-controlled galaxy, refuses to embrace the new diversity of man. Sadly for Terrans, all space travel is controlled by the mutants, or "Variants," and these new humans are still very angry at the homeworld that tried to destroy them once the Hausman mutations were discovered.
This is a wonderfully confusing tale of sci-fi, politics, racism, sexuality, language, and insanity. If you're looking for Heinlein, run away quickly. Friedman herein describes a galaxy packed with slimy, tentacled, freakish humans who would make Starman Jones lose his lunch -- and the only way to travel in this mutant empire is to brave a hyperspace teeming with demonic monsters which feed on the human soul. I found the story both refreshing and highly thought-provoking. After all, what does the racism of skin color or religion amount to when we all have two arms and two legs, and how would I react to a neighbor who looked more like a slug than a human, particularly in the realm of real interaction, like MATING? What if that slug were the most brilliant physician, or violinist, or poet the world had ever known? Friedman makes Earth's racial purity movements (still extant in this oh-so-distant future) seem silly, antiquated, and pathetic -- all against the backdrop of a masterfully crafted sci-fi mystery.
My Alien Shore.......2006-12-23
This book has my highest praises because it deals with a subject that controls my life, mental disorders. Yet it doesn't preach that pills are bad or that they are needed. It just holds two different societies up side by side and lets you see the benefits and drawbacks of each. Doing this while creating a story which holds my attention and characters who are so well crafted that I can believe they "suffer" different mental aberrations is nothing short of amazing.
I was only sad that my personal aberration is missing from the book.
A well layered story.......2005-11-06
Anymore the stories that capture me and make want to never lay down a book, or atleast return to it as soon as life lets me, have many layers to the story. Those layers that detail the many view points from individuals leading their lives separately but eventually to a point that profoundly affects each of them. I've read many books I enjoy for this or that reason, but never before did I realize the ones I like most have this quality, until I read this book. It has that quality like many other well written stories, but it also purposes to tell a story about the space inside of us and the many individual thoughts that often come from different places and experiences we've had and eventually fall into place to cause a profound change. After reading this book I looked at my growing collection of books to keep and realized many of them have a similar story telling technique. Though none of the other stories I've read caused me to think about the way I view life as much as this one did. I hope everyone else who read it enjoyed it so much, again and again.
Enjoyable sci-fi.......2005-08-25
I hadn't realized I'd read anything by Friedman before, until I glanced inside the cover and saw Black Sun Rising. This led me to anticipate a good read, an expectation that was not disappointed. The science is explained in layman's terms, including the computer hacking that is central to the book's plot of a major virus infecting (and killing) the Guild Pilots who provide the only means of transport between the far flung human worlds and space stations. While I was not all that fond of the lead female character (Jamisia), she was not annoyingly perfect and jarring like many female-written female leads are. However, I found the male characters (particularly Masada and Phoenix) to be a bit more interesting. The ending is fitting, and not quite what I expected. The only real quibble I had with the novel is that it ends rather abruptly, without really showing Jamisia except as an afterthought mentioned by another character. After the intensity of her climatic scene, it was a bit of a disappointment for her to just disappear off-camera and her fate be really told in passing in another character's final scene.
Completely fantastic.......2005-05-08
This is a complex, but interesting novel. Mankind's first experience in space travel ended disastrously when it was discovered that it caused severe genetic damage to the travelers. Known as the Hausman effect, it caused Earth to abruptly discontinue all contact with her colonies. The Variants, as they came to be called, were left to fend for themselves. Ultimately, the Guerans brought space travel back to Earth. Unlike many of the Variants, they physically resembled humans. The Guerans' Variation was of the mind and psyche and it was this mutation which enabled them to brave the dangers of space. Their resulting monopoly on space travel and the control exerted by The Guild over intergalactic commerce causes many to fear, hate and envy them. Additionally, there is dissension between the Variants and Earth. The Variants have not forgotten, or forgiven, Earth's abandonment while Earth still fears the strangeness of the Variants.
In Friedman's universe the internet is an archaic concept. Rather, she speaks of the Innernet, a planet-wide communication system, and the Outernet, a network spanning the galaxy. Although computers still exist, they are almost entirely obsolete. It has long been decreed that every child would have a computer chip installed in his or her brain at birth. This brainware allows the user to control and access information at a level far beyond our current standards. Now imagine the chaos and destruction that would occur if a virus was let loose in such circumstances. Add in the various factions (Terrans, Guerans, Variants, etc.) and you get a society on the edge of explosion. This is exactly the situation Friedman explores in this novel. She has created several main characters and switches back and forth between them and their seemingly disconnected stories. Jamisia Shido is an orphan, cared for by her tutor, living on a corporate habitat. When treachery befalls the habitat, she is suddenly pushed into a universe of intrigue for which she is ill prepared. Dr. Kio Masada is a highly respected Gueran programmer, trying to unravel the secrets of the virus. Phoenix, a hacker, is trying to discover the creator of the virus, for his own personal reasons.
Friedman has developed a highly complex scenario that can be read on several different levels. On the surface it is purely a high-tech mystery, but if you read more closely Friedman has a lot to say about the way people interact and deal with our differences. You won't need to speak "computerese" to understand the problems caused by the computer virus or the efforts made to stop it. You also won't need to be a psychologist to understand the personalities involved. Additionally, Friedman has inserted some interesting information between chapters. These "asides" provide some important background along the way and shouldn't be skipped over. Overall, Friedman brings all of the various elements of this novel together into a well-knit whole. The characters are interesting and recognizable. I cared about what happened to them and, although it takes a while for the big picture to come into focus, it is well worth waiting for. This is the first book I've read by Friedman, but I definitely plan to add her books to my "must read" list.
Average customer rating:
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THIS ALIEN SHORE
C.S. Friedman
Manufacturer: Daw Books, Inc. , New York, First paperback printing, July
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000IWVSLK |
Book Description
Practical, easy-to-follow guide contains virtually everything consumers need to know about home canning: how to select, prepare, and can fruits, vegetables, poultry, red meats and seafoods; how to preserve fruit spreads, fermented foods, and pickled vegetables; how to prepare foods for special diets, and much more.
Customer Reviews:
The Complete Guide to Home Canning and Preserving (Second Revised Edition).......2007-09-13
I am happy I bought this book it has alot of useful information concerning altitudes times and temps for jarring a huge selection of specialty food items. It also has quite a nice selection of recipes.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in jarring food products.
Home Canning.......2007-04-10
I purchased this book along with "Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving: 400 Delicious and Creative Recipes for Today (Paperback) by Judi Kingry" and together they make a great pair. This book gives the nitty gritty on what is needed for a simple set up and that is just perfect to get me started.
Complete Guide to Home Canning and Preserving (2nd revised edition ).......2007-01-12
This is an excellent guide to home canning. One of the best I have seen. It is easy to follow even for a beginner.
Good basic direstions, if you can find them.......2006-09-18
I received a copy (make that two copies) as a gift, since my family knows how much I put up canned veggies and pickles. While the directions are simple and concise, the organization of this book is the exact opposite. The book is little more than a collection of guides published by the USDA with an index in the back. The small print did not help in the throes of a bushel's worth of veggies either. The lack of more complex recipes was disappointing. All in all, I'd rather have a copy of the Ball Blue Book than this.
Canning review.......2006-07-15
very eaasy to read book on canning many items. I found this very useful in my kitchen, and have used several recipes from it.
Customer Reviews:
Very nice book, very complete.......1998-08-05
Very nice book, with REALLY old pictures. It was complete, and answered virtually any question about canning. Would suggest this book to anyone who is interested in learning to can.
Book Description
With this practical, easy-to-follow, color guide, anyone can learn to preserve their own fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats. Every step of the preserving process is carefully explained: you’ll learn the best ways to destroy dangerous micro-organisms; sterilize empty jars; minimize nutrition loss; and maintain color and flavor. There’s also advice on equipment, adjusting for differences in altitude, and preparing pickled and fermented foods. A wealth of simple recipes includes everything from spiced crabapples and spaghetti sauce to chili con carne and marinated mushrooms. Complete with full-color photographs and useful illustrations, this is a worthy addition to any kitchen library.
Average customer rating:
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Complete Guide to Home Canning and Preserving
Manufacturer: United States Government Printing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Do-It-Yourself
| How-to & Home Improvements
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0160000777 |
Customer Reviews:
Complete Guide.......2000-05-24
This book should be considered the bible of all canning books. It has detail instructions that are easy to understand. I had never canned before this book, but everything I have canned since has turned out perfect. It has some of the most wonderful recipes for jams and jellies. It even tells how to pickle foods and make sauerkraut. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn how to can. Expert canners might even learn a new thing or two. Enjoy your reading!
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Recommended Books
- History: Fiction or Science
- 500 Teapots: Contemporary Explorations of a Timeless Design
- The Blue Wolf: The Epic Tale of the Life of Genghis Khan and the Empire of the Steppes
- The Origins of Totalitarianism
- The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
- A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana
- What Shape is a Snowflake
- The Curriculum Vitae Handbook: How to Present and Promote Your Academic Career
- The Effects of a Choice Automobile Insurance Plan on Insurance Costs and Compensation: An Updated An
- European Union Committee 8th Report Of Session 2003-2004 The Rome Ii Regulation Report With Evidence
