Trans fats are out. Smoking is definitely out. Is caffeine next? You may be convinced after reading Caffeine Makes Me Bleed (And How It Can Poison You, Too!) by Susan Lynn, a resident of Diamond in Portage County.
To Lynn, caffeine is the Dark Master. Most of the book is written as a memoir, beginning with her childhood in Lake Milton, where her autoworker father bought her chocolate candy and the whole family enjoyed cola drinks with their meals.
After Lynn's marriage, she studied to be a nurse, but was badly injured in a car accident in which her classmate, who was driving, was killed. This ended nursing school for her, and was the beginning of chronic health problems.
Lynn found a job as an executive assistant in the highly competitive and highly caffeinated field of commercial construction. This is the best portion of the book, as Lynn describes her high-stress work, including satisfying the boss's persnickety wife, who designed a template for Lynn to cut the paper she was to use to wrap hundreds of Christmas hams for employee gifts — which she then had to alphabetize by recipient.
Lynn's job grows increasingly stressful even before she gives birth to a premature son, and then her boss makes her the firm's director of safety, a huge responsibility, without decreasing any of her other duties. She began using her cola drinks to wash down antacids, and begins seeing blood in the bathroom; a doctor assures her it's just hemorrhoids.
After her personal story comes to an end, the book turns into an insistent diatribe, which carries on well after she has made her point. Lynn's book may not persuade you to give up caffeine, but she does tell her story well.
As ''carpe diem'' means ''seize the day,'' ''carpe viam'' means ''seize the road,'' and that is what the characters in Michael J. Keyser's novel Carpe Viam: A Time to Live do. In this late-1960s-set story of a skirt-chasing businessman, Jim Hastings comes to work for a California aluminum company and soon begins an affair with his boss's wife (they have an open marriage, but don't reveal the identities of their lovers).
When Jim is assigned to a Northern California territory and settles in San Francisco, his lady friend and her husband recommit to monogamy, and Jim meets Rhonda, a paralegal who later becomes the company's lawyer and Jim's wife. Jim and Rhonda seize the road before them with travel, children and careers.
Keyser's preface notes that his novel ''contains no blasphemy,'' but that doesn't mean it's not risque: There's a lot of talk about sex — and about aluminum, Keyser's former business.
没有评论:
发表评论