Thank You Amazon.ca!

Less than three business days after ordering them, my twin copies of a much-wanted book arrived today, Super Saver Shipping and all.

I usually order through my local bookstore, but a) they wouldn't have arrived in time for Xmas, and b) I would have paid 30% more.

I can't divulge the title yet, since tomorrow I'm sending the other copy of it out to a friend who sometimes reads this blog. After the holidays, though, once I've read it, I'll be posting a review.

Recent book purchases

For a whopping total of $4.50 taxes in (and in like-new condition, although they're used):

Marcia Nozick's No Place Like Home: Building Sustainable Communities

From the back: "A book which challenges the conventional wisdom on social and economic development. No Place Like Home provides an alternative vision of how we can develop sustainable communities. Both critical and constructive, and written in language which everyone can understand, this book draws together five major themes, each a component of sustainable communities: economic self-reliance,; ecological development; getting community control over resources; meeting individual human needs; and, building a community culture. How these five themes interact and reinforce each other in practice is illustrated with examples drawn from communities across North America. The result is a book which cannot fail to inspire community workers everywhere and give researchers and urban planners much to think about."

Roy Genders' Money From Mushrooms: Supplement Your Income (which was published in 1969 and seems to be off Google's radar completely)

Charles Long's How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning to Live the Conserver Lifestyle

In a nutshell, this book seems to be all about how to avoid the trap of consumerism and learn to budget and make due with less -- while thriving -- so that you can leave the 5-day-a-week rat race and focus on enjoying living a more meaningful life.

Current reads

I picked up a discarded copy of Janet Barkas' The Vegetable Passion at a library book sale around a month ago. It's subtitled A History of the Vegetarian State of Mind and examines different periods throughout the history of vegetarianism, focusing on some obvious areas like its practice in India and by the early Greeks, as well as the movement that came much later in England. It also examines famous vegetarians like Tolstoy, and even Hitler (more infamous than famous, that one). Published in 1975, it definitely precedes the huge flurry of writing about vegetarianism that seems to be filling up bookstore shelves today in post-Peter-Singer days. From some snooping around online with Google, I'm assuming that it's well out-of-print.

Here's a not-so-kind review of it from Time, printed at the time of its publication. The reviewer didn't think much of Barkas' style and seeming lack of substance, but noted the importance and relevance of the of the subject matter, nonetheless. I'll share my own thoughts on the book at a later date, since I'm just a few dozen pages into it right now and am currently in over my head reading an Eliot Coleman book on organic farming (something about which I'll also be posting at a later date).

Plus or Minus

In the minus column:

• Finding out that Amazon.ca has half the available payment options as Amazon.com, although ordering from Amazon.com would involve having to pay duty on whatever was ordered.
• Realizing, sadly, that even by ordering from Amazon.com and paying duty, I could still get Eliot Coleman's The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener for less than I could through one of the local bookstores.