Reading Recommendations: The End of Food, Paul Roberts.

Paul Roberts, the best selling author of The End of Oil, turns his attention to the modern food economy and finds that the system entrusted to our most basic need is failing.

In this carefully researched, vivid narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities behind modern food and shows how our system of making, marketing, and moving what we eat is growing less and less compatible with the billions of consumers that system was built to serve.

At the heart of The End of Food, is a grim paradox: the rise of large scale food production, though it generates more food more cheaply than at any time in history, has reached a point of dangerously diminishing returns. Our high volume factory systems are creating new risks for foodborne illness, from e. coli to avian flu. Our high yield crops and livestock generate grain, vegetables, and meat of declining nutritional quality. When nearly one billion people worldwide are overweight or obese, the same number of people, one in every seven of us, can't get enough to eat. In some of the hardest hit regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, the lack of a single nutrient, vitamin A, has left more than five million children permanently blind.

Meanwhile, the shift to heavily mechanized, chemically intensive farming has so compromised soil and water that its unclear how long such output can be maintained. And just as we've begun to understand the limits of our abundance, the burgeoning economics of Asia, with their rising middle classes, are adopting western style, meat heavy diets, putting new demands on global food supplies.

Comprehensive in scope and full of fresh insights, The End of Food presents a lucid, stark vision of the future. It is a call for us to make crucial decisions to help us survive the demise of food production as we know it.

And, The Assassin, Stephen Coonts.

"The headlines only reveal half the truth. Here's the real story".

Abu Qasim, the ruthless and cunning Al Qaeda leader who nearly succeeded in blowing up a meeting of the G-8 in Paris, has escaped from the grasp of the Americans and is plotting his next move. A small band of powerful men, highly placed leaders of industry and politics in the West, have decided they need to target and destroy the terrorist and his inner circle before he can strike again. When a prominent Russian dissident is poisoned in London, however, its clear that there is a dangerous leak within the ranks of the Westerners, and that Abu Qasim has turned the tables on his rivals, it is now he who is pursuing, and his aim is to kill.

Admiral Jake Grafton dispatches special agent Tommy Carmellini to infiltrate the plot. He tracks the gorgeous and seductive Marisa Petron, a French woman who may be Qasim's daughter and who has her own reasons for wanting him alive, or wishing him dead. Qasim, meanwhile, has a trick up his sleeve, one that he's been planning for years.

Who is behind the methodical assassinations of the wealthy and powerful western vigilante team? Will Abu Qasim slip the noose once again? In this unforgettable thriller, Tommy Carmellini must put a stop to a master of terror before he unleashes even more death.

And, Architecture in Texas 1895-1945, Jay C. Henry.

Texas architecture of the twentieth century encompasses a wide range of building styles, from an internationally inspired modernism, to the Spanish Colonial Revival that recalls Texas' earliest European heritage. This book is the first comprehensive survey of Texas architecture of the first half of the twentieth century and continues the architectural history begun in such works as Drury Blakeley Alexander's Texas Homes of the Nineteenth Century and Willard B. Robinson's Texas Public Buildings of the Nineteenth Century.

Filled with narrative and pictures of churches, courthouses, homes, college buildings and much more, the reader will learn much from the various styles, as well as samples of various early architects.

A real learning experience of those of us who love Texas.

See you at Rylander!