Two Words, One Answer.
hungry years
 The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America $20.00 Rating this book is somewhat difficult. On the one hand, it does appear to be well researched and footnoted. On the other hand, I agree with the other reviewers who found it less accessible, and less user friendly than it could be. A good editor could rather easily pare this massive tome down to half it's length without sacrificing any valuable content. And reordering it a bit might go a long way towards making it seem to flow better. The author could have chosen a strict chronological order. Or he could've fully explored the causes and effects of the Great Depression. Instead, he did a little of each, but without fully conveying a sense of either. Like others have said, a history of this period should've been right up my alley, but I'm finding useful information to be hard to come by in this book without a lot of careful weeding out of the extraneous. The noise to signal ratio is higher than I'd like, but the book does contain a lot of interesting data. This should not be one's first primer on the Great Depression, nor it's causes, nor what it was like to actually live through the Great Depression. Rather, it should serve the role to really fill in the gaps left by other books that address those individual topics in more detail or in more accessible manners.  HUNGRY HIPPOS HUNGRYHIPPOS HUNGRY HIPPO FUN ONRUN $4.99 I like this because it is small, easy to pack and you won't lose the marbles. We really enjoyed playing this game.  Mommy Teach Me Spanish, Vol. 1: I Am Hungry $14.99 This could have been a really fun video for teaching some basic Spanish words to children. But I'm just in shock about some of the people that narrate or star in this. I hate to be mean, because they are obviously well-meaning. But the Spanish accent of all but one of them is so atrocious as to actually be detrimental to learning Spanish. One male narrator seems to be bilingual, as in he may have learned Spanish at home. But he obviously grew up in the United States. A real native speaker would have been ideal, I think, but he is passable. The other adult and children are horrendous. This video looks like it was produced at the University of Wisconsin, which confuses me, because everyone in this video seems to have a strong Southern accent (I lived in Oklahoma for 3 years, so I don't think I'm mistaken). Even in English, it's kind of grating when you aren't used to it anymore. It kind of sounds like a "you might be a redneck" routine. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude. People can't help their local accent - it's just surprising for what I thought was going to be a professional video. But the English is forgivable. The Spanish accents are not. I do not know what the excuse is for an adult to speak Spanish with a Southern drawl on an educational video. The children are even worse, which they can't help, since they are obviously not native speakers and are just reading or repeating a phrase. But this could only work if the children were native speakers. Oh, it's so awful. It could have been really cute, but I feel like I need to turn the volume down and say the words myself so that the accent is correct (I'm not even a native speaker, but I know what correct pronunciation sounds like). This was a nice attempt. I have to say that I'm watching a version from the library which may be older, just in case they decided to fix these glaring defects in a later edition. If not, please do! |
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