– – – • • • • • • –

Time for some book talks!

Fifty Shades of Chicken is a delightfully humorous cookbook. Did you like the steamy action of Fifty Shades of Grey? Do you like to eat good chicken? Well look no further! This book combines the steaminess of one of the most popular book series in recent memory with the technical skills of cooking a whole bird. Author F.L. Fowler, which I'm assuming is a pseudonym, takes the recipes for various forms of cooked chicken and gives them creatively suggestive titles as well as introducing them with passages of a saucy romance between a chef and their chicken. Clearly designed as a parody, this book is a frantically fun way of making chicken all while enjoying the suggestive nature of romance books.

There are fewer and fewer people who realize that the White House as it exists today was not the one that John Adams first moved into in November of 1800. Not only was the house burned down during the War of 1812 and subsequently rebuilt but new additions were put on in later years. All of this led to the house being in generally poor condition by the time Harry Truman moved in 1945. Robert Klara's book The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America's Most Famous Residence examines what happened after Truman moved in.
Famous for the fact that it is the President's residence, the house was in such bad repair that the Trumans had to move out for several years while it was rebuilt. The inside of the house was completely torn out. All that remained were the famous outer walls, a husk of the building. Steel was added, as was concrete, and the house grew inside while the outside remained unchanged. Along the way various strong personalities, not least of which was Harry Truman's, butted heads to get the job done. In the end, they rebuilt the most famous house in the nation to withstand many more years to come.