The reason I snapped a photo of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and Under The Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer is two-fold.
First, I was playing around in the apartment with using my flash off-camera. The other day I bought myself a flash PC sync cord and hotshoe adapter so I wanted to get a few shots of something just to see how the set-up might work. In this shot I simply set the flash up at about a 45 degree angle from the books and bounced the light off my ceiling. Nothing extraordinary, I know, but a least I did get my flash off the camera. The sync cord I have requires that I set the output of the flash manually, so I'm learning as I go. I hope to add a lightstand and umbrella to the mix because this is a set-up I want to use more down the road as I get more comfortable with it.
The second, and most important reason for the photo of these particular books is due to the eye-opening experience I had while delving into them. Anyone who knows me, knows that I love to read; books, magazines, newspapers, been that way since I was a kid. I've read some really good writing, along with some complete crap, but I don't ever recall reading two books in a row that informed and mesmerized me like these.
When I was given Fast Food Nation to me as a gift, I was expecting the book to primarily be about the health consequences of fast food and the unsanitary restaurants that serve it. However, Schlosser takes you much deeper into the history of the business and the inner workings of today's meat and poultry manufacturing/packaging, along with the effect the fast food business has on a global economy.
I came upon Under The Banner of Heaven while at a flea market in Florida last month(not a flea market type of guy, unless of course they have books). This was by far the best $1.00 I've ever spent. Jon Krakauer's book centers around the 1984 murders of a woman and her infant daughter at the hands of two fundamentalist Mormon brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty. Krakauer, through these murders, opens the door to the history of the Mormon Church and to the present-day reality of the thousands of polygamist-practicing fundamentalist Mormons throughout western North America. As a Baptist that grew up in North Carolina, I've had little to no interaction with Mormons, and know almost nothing about their history or faith, so this was an extremely interesting read for me.
If you don't get an opportunity to read any other books this year, do yourself a favor a check these out. Great stuff!!
2 comments:
Yeah, I like this blog. I enjoyed the pictures, knowing what you're working on, as well as your mini-review of the books. It made me want to read both. Very nice.
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