Musings of a Snickerdoodle

I knew a little about the famous Israeli rescue of hostages held in Entebbe but didn't know a lot.  'Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport, The Most Audacious Hostage Rescue Mission in History' by Saul David was an interesting way to learn about it.  David takes you through each day, in 'real time', as it were, bringing you back and forth from the hostages and terrorists to Israeli diplomats and military men, international political leaders and others,   continually switching locations to give you a perspective of what was going on in these significant places and among the various significant people throughout each of these 8 days of tension.   It was quite interesting,   and very informative.   I did not know that hijackings were such a common thing in the late 60s into the early 70s.   And that they were mainly to make demands of Israel! Nor did I know that there were Japanese terrorists fighting for the Pal...

In my opinion, this book is worth having just for the convection oven information at the beginning. It explains, not only how different convection ovens work, but also how to adapt recipes designed to be cooked in conventional ones. It has several recipes, organized into sections like, "Breakfast and Brunch", "Appetizers and Snacks", "Poultry", "Breads" and so on. Each recipe gives a brief description of the food, at times even explaining how the convection oven cooks it to perfection, and also lists which types of Convection Ovens the recipe works best with, Full-Size, Countertop, Halogen…etc. And which setting to use, BAKE or ROAST. The one thing I think that this cookbook could be improved by is having pictures of each recipe.  But many of the titles and descriptions of the foods sound tasty just to read about, so it's not too important. There are many (in my opinion) easy to follow recipes, like  Juicy-Oven-Grilled Bacon ...

The CSB kids Bible is a pretty nice Bible. As to its physical characteristics of this Bible, it is a very colorful hardcover which kids will probably like.  Even the edges of the pages are colored.  I do want to note that on the inside of the front and back cover has an orange crinkly pattern, at first I thought that the pages were damaged, but on closer examination I realized that it was just a picture.   It has some colorful pages scattered at wide intervals through the Bible.   Many of them have summaries of what each book of the Bible contains.   They give descriptions like, "Matthew was originally written for the Jews and shows Jesus as the Messiah and King, in whom the Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled." Many of them give pretty good descriptions but I didn't like all of their summaries as some seem to be leaning toward a "Christocentric" hermeneutic instead of a literal, grammatical, historical one. Some pages have maps, and othe...

Want to learn some history in about an hour?   This book series is a good way to do it. In60Learning produces books that are designed to be read in an hour's time.   Thus providing a quick learning experience.   Upon being offered the chance to try out their material, I chose Alexander the Great: Student of Aristotle, Descendant of Heroes, a part of their BiographyIn60 series.   I did not know much about him though I have noticed many references to him in some of my other reading and felt a curiosity to learn more about him.   Alexander's life is summed up in thirty pages.   A skilled military leader, who conquered a great deal of territory, building on his father, Philip's, strong start.   He could be quite ruthless in taking cities, but I was surprised at how many times he exercised mercy and allowed the peoples of the towns he conquered to live.   It gives a high level   overview of Alexander's life, relationships with hi...

  How to be a Perfect Christian: Your Comprehensive Guide to Flawless Spiritual Living is a satirical book about how to attain complete sanctification this side of eternity.  By the folks at the Babylon Bee (a satirical Christian news site), this book lives up to their usual method of using humor to make a point, only this time, instead of a small news snippet, you get a whole book full of pointed humor. Having enjoyed much of their writing already I thought that it would be interesting to see how it would work in a book. And it works quite well.  The book gives you a step by step process of becoming completely perfect.  Guiding you in the process of choosing the right church, explaining how you can 'worship like a pro', what type of standards you should have, and how you ought to make sure that you are always confirming to the most current mainstream Christian beliefs. At the end of most of the chapters is a 'Holiness Tracker 5000" chart, showing your pr...

I don't know that I would have EVER thought that a book about the Kings of Saudi Arabia and an oil company would have been interesting. But this book is! I don't just mean that the book is well written (it is) but Wald actually seems very enthusiastic about the topic and that carries over to the reader.  Or at least it did to me. I almost want to laugh at myself for how interesting and intriguing I found this book, " SAUDI INC. The Arabian Kingdom's Pursuit of Profit and Power" by Ellen R. Wald. Abdul Aziz, or ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia (never realized where the name came from, sort of a 'duh' moment when I found that out: SAUD-i Arabia) was quite an interesting guy.  He started out by conquering his hometown of Riyadh and then ended up growing his territory over time until he had even conquered Mecca.  He and Sheikh Abdullah Sulaiman, the man he put in charge of his finances (also an interesting character), made quite the team to build...

This book,"Christ: Chronological" is a sort of chronological parallel Bible.  Using the Christian Standard Bible translation the Gospel accounts, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are arranged in a chronological order and they are placed alongside each other in parallel columns when dealing with the same account. The text from each Gospel is in a different color, blue for Matthew, Green for Mark, a reddish color for Luke and purple for John.  Along the very bottom of each page is a 'color code' key as it were, reminding you which color represents each Gospel. Very nicely bound (a hardcover book, and wider than a typical Bible - it's in a square shape), the book lies quite flat when opened, so you can easily lay it down on a table while reading it without keeping one hand on it to make sure that the pages won't turn on their own.   The font is easy to read, a good size, and also, despite the font being various colors, they are bold colors and ...