Reviews for New York's 50 Best Places to Take Children

The average rating for New York's 50 Best Places to Take Children based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-06-15 00:00:00 Chris Sondor I ordered this book so long ago that I had forgotten about it so that when it came last week it was like finding that I still had one Christmas present unopened. I like photography books in general, especially of men because they are less hackneyed than ones about women. Women's beauty is plastic both in the sense of silicon but also in that it varies very rapidly according to the times. Until recently beauty was White. It was Marilyn Monroe, it was Brigitte Bardot,it was Farrah Fawcett and it was Bo Derek, and then it all fell apart. Plastic surgery discovered silicon and moved out of medicine into cosmetics, it became an industry. It launched the new gravity-defying, hemispherical tits by offering them free to any Hollywood starlet likely to get into the National Enquirer or on the red carpet. With Latino Lopez and peasant-stock Kardashian bums and juicy lips like Black girls becoming fashionable, beauty was no longer White it was definitely and defiantly Multi-Cultural. It's no longer necessary to have parents from different races to have all these ethnically-different features, now you can select what you want, silicon bum, saline-bag tits, restaylne lips and cut-and-stitched big almond eyes with a botox arch. But male black beauty isn't plastic in any sense. Oh there may be a bit of botox and an orange spray tan here and there but it essentially natural, what the guy was born with improved by a lot of hard work in the gym. There is a timelessness and lack of geographical specificity of male beauty, at least for me. So as I say, I like photographic books about men. I tend to buy the ones about the Masaai, Samburu and Dogon tribes that purport to be about the interesting aspects of their culture but actually seem to be a good excuse to photograph some entirely delicious men with beautiful long limbs and defined bodies going about their day-to-day business dressed in exotic robes or even less. It's not that I like black men particularly, but a lot of photography books about white men are either by gay photographers or meant for the gay market. I have only a passing interest in the gay lifestyle and sexual poses are not what interest me. So finding this book with a cover pic of Lenny Kravitz (who is mixed race and Jewish just to add to the gene salad) was just the thing I was looking for. Men with big muscles, men with hardly any but looking sensitive, men who looked straight at me like they wanted to go to bed with me (shiver), men who looked like they thought we should go to the movies and eat popcorn, men who looked like they had no interests but themselves. Lots of lovely, desirable, handsome men... makes me smile when I open the book. Technically, the lighting was especially good and the use of the white space of the page contrasting with the pose was outstanding. A very well-thought out book and one which I will enjoy for a long time to come. Whenever we get one of these photographic books featuring men in the shop, women seem to come like magnets and we stand around eating hot bread with cheese melting in it (there is a bakery next door), chatting and pointing out the desirable features of the men in the photographs and everyone leaves full and satisfied. I still have the book, true, it didn't sell, but I don't care about that, no, not at all.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-23 00:00:00 Johnny Alexander The history of umami was decent, but the recipes looked pretty bland -- ironically, since they had lots of umami!