Taming Your Kitchen: A Review of Donna Hay’s Off the Shelf: Cooking From the Pantry

You know that feeling. It is 5:30pm, everyone is expecting dinner, and you have nothing to cook, no food in the house, and no ideas. Enter Donna Hay, with her bestselling book Off the Shelf. The book contains a range of meals attractive enough for guests, based entirely on simple and readily available cupboard ingredients. If you follow Hay’s advice, and shopping list, you will be prepared for most food situations, including drop in visitors, special occasions, and fast family meals.

Zero decibels Quiet: Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiance

The Australian Fiance is a deeply moving novel. Not so much because of its story, which has moments of intensity, but is primarily, a simple story of love and loss. Rather, it is the exquisite language, the poetic transcendence affected by Lazaroo’s narrative which draws the reader into the character of the Eurasian woman, submerged with her, until we are also nameless, nationless, simultaneously guilty and innocent, soft and hard, lost and found.

Longer, Leaner, and Taller: A Review of Pilates by Lesley Ackland

The exercises are simple, and not very different from other types of callisthenics, although they draw from Yoga a focus on breathing, and on slow, controlled movements done perfectly, in an attempt to integrate mind and body. The book covers the origins and philosophy behind Pilates, including the use of things like creative visualisation, breathing, control over the specific body parts being conditioned, flow, precision, and coordination.

A review of The Poetry of Business by Tracy Repchuk

This would be a great tool for a conferencing, teambuilding, or ideally, a career development session, and the simple but innovative exercises coupled with the poetic focus would provide a refreshing change, especially if done with the help of a trained facilitator, to the usual teambuilding fodder. As a stimulus to breaking though a career rut, and opening the door to self-awareness and examination, it’s ideal.

A review of My Arthritic Heart by Liz Hall-Downs

While Hall-Downs makes it clear in the preface that My Arthritic Heart is an autobiographical account of her struggles with Rheumatoid Arthritis, the poetry, like all good poetry, transcends its subject. In the intense immediacy of the words, Rheumatoid Arthritis becomes every chronic disease; every feeling of marginalisation; every expression of poverty; the sense of being not good enough, not pretty enough, not fit enough.