I just finished Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire by Bret Baier. It’s a New York Times bestseller that takes you into the world of Ronald Reagan, his rise to power in politics, and his role in ending the Cold War. And it does in a personable way with gentle humor throughout.

I enjoyed the fascinating behind-the-scene insights about the personalities involved and the clarity about what really happened. And how the book brings Reagan to life, as if he’s almost there. Along the way you’ll also get insight into Mikhail Gorbachev, the assassination attempt on Reagan, and more.

Baier is the chief political anchor for Fox News. In 2001, he became the station’s chief Pentagon correspondent and ended up traveling to Afghanistan 11 times and Iraq 13 times. In 2007, he became the station’s chief correspondent to the White House. More importantly, Baier seems to be one of the few journalists these days who is simply trying to get and report facts instead of spin. And that’s exactly what he’s done here.

If you like biographies or history, if you want to know how the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. stepped back from decades of mutually assured destruction, if you want to get a view into how diplomacy is done, then I think you’ll love this book. And you’ll probably love it even more if you can listen to the audio book version, read by Baier himself, which also includes a recording of Reagan’s speech to the students at Moscow State University. I listened to it via the Overdrive account my public library provides. Baier’s reading was terrific.  

There’s nothing quite like the laughter and fun a good family or party game creates. And we discovered two games this summer that have brought hours of pleasure.

The first is Just One. It’s for 3 to 7 players and takes about 20 minutes to finish.

Now, I was skeptical of this game at first because it’s a cooperative party game.

I mean, come on. Cooperation?

No teams?

No competition?

What were we going to do—hold hands and sing Kumbaya?

I was fully expecting to be bored out of my mind. Boy, was I wrong. There was suspense, laughter, and loads of fun.

There are 13 rounds in each game. In each round, one player blindly selects the number of a word on one of the game cards. The other players each write a one word clue to help that player guess the word. However, if two or more players write down the same word, they have to remove that clue.

So you’re trying to come up with one-word clues the others won’t that still help the guessing player. Some clues lead the guessing player off onto funny tangents. Others are just funny. And then there’s the suspense of whether someone else wrote your word and whether the player will be able to guess it from the clues that are left.

Your goal is to guess all 13 words selected. And there’s a little score card that ranks what it means if you get 13, 12, 11, etc.

As an aside, it’s crazy to me that the score card provided motivation. But it did. It was a delightful little brain hack.

One Word is a quick, fun game. We’ve played it with a few as 3 and as many 8 players and had a ball each time. We are so happy to have it in the family game closet.

The next is Fish Bowl. It’s for 4+ players. What this game does is take favorites like Taboo, One Word, and charades and mixes them together in a competitive game between two teams.

Here’s how you play it. Each person writes up 5 to 7 different words or phrases on separate slips of paper, folds the papers, and puts them in a bowl. Then you do 3 rounds.

Round 1 is like Taboo, where you can describe, but can’t say or act out the word or phrase on the paper. You select a team to go first. One person on the team selects the papers from the bowl and then tries to describe the word or phrase. The team has 30-45 seconds (you decide) to guess as many of the words as possible. When the time is up, it’s the other team’s turn. Back and forth you go, selecting a new team member each turn to give the clues, until there are no more slips of paper in the bowl. Then you count the number of slips each team got and move to round 2.

In round two, you put all of the slips of paper back into the bowl. The team that went second in the first round starts this one. This time the person giving clues gets to share one word. That’s it. And the team has to guess it. Again, the team has 30-45 seconds to guess as many as they can.  Then it goes to the next team. And you switch back and forth just like you did in round 1, and when the slips of paper are gone, each team counts up their score.

In round 3, you put all of the slips of paper back into the bowl. The time the person giving the clues has to act them out. No words allowed. You run this round just like you did the first two with  30-45  second turns, switching back and forth between the teams until all the papers are gone. At that point, the teams  total their scores for this round and then for all 3 rounds together to see which team won.

If you don’t want to use paper, you can play a version online.

Either way, it’s another fast, fun game. In fact, we played it last night. And laughed and laughed when one daughter was trying to get the other to guess “sling” and nailed her teammate in the head trying to act out a rock hitting Goliath.   Movies are great. But sometimes what you need is some delightful game fun. And I’m betting you’ll love these.

T. Colin Campbell grew up on a dairy farm, loved milk, loved meat, and started his career as a nutrition scientist thinking the cornerstone of good nutrition was high-quality animal protein—meat, milk, and eggs.

One of his first projects was for MIT, trying to help the chicken industry. Millions of chickens were dying each year from something toxic in their feed. What was the mystery killer? Campbell was responsible for isolating and determining the structure of the chemical. Through his work, he helped discover dioxin, one of the most toxic chemicals ever found.

After helping with that, he began work helping malnourished children in the Philippines. He wanted to find ways to help them get more protein in their diets, because, again, protein was supposed to be the cornerstone of health. Part of the project was remedying an unusually high incidence of liver cancer in children, which is normally an adult disease. At the time, they thought a lack of protein was leaving the children vulnerable to aflatoxin in their diet.

But as they began their scientific investigation, Campbell discovered the kids who ate the most protein had the highest rates of liver cancer.

But that just couldn’t be right.

And then he came across a study of rats and aflatoxin. The scientists in the study administered the cancer-causing aflatoxin to all of the animals. Half of the animals were then fed a diet with 5% protein. The other half were fed a diet with 20% protein. All of the animals fed a diet with 20% protein developed liver cancer. None of the animals fed a diet with 5% protein developed the cancer.

Again, that couldn’t be right. Protein was good for you. A respected colleague suggested surely the researchers must have mislabeled the animal cages. Campbell decided to run his own studies and find out. Back at Cornell, he and his research assistants ran the experiment multiple times and in various ways. And all of the experiments confirmed that protein promoted cancer growth. In fact, they could turn cancer growth on and off by the amount of protein they fed the animals.

But it wasn’t all protein. It was animal-based protein. The plant-based protein didn’t promote cancer growth.

Campbell was astounded. The findings rocked his world, but he was determined to follow the facts wherever they led. This began decades of research into diet and nutrition. The culmination was what’s called The China Study. It is the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted. And what all of his decades of research demonstrated was that “People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. Even relatively small intakes of animal-based food were associated with adverse effects. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease.”

Campbell didn’t rest there. He sought out the findings of other researchers and clinicians. And what he found all demonstrates that “The same diet that is good for the prevention of cancer is also good for the prevention of heart disease, as well as obesity, diabetes, cataracts, macular degeneration, Alzheimer’s, cognitive dysfunction, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis and other diseases.”

What was the diet that showed such important results? A whole food plant-based diet. It’s a diet rich in legumes, whole grains, vegetables, and fruits with little or no meat, milk, and eggs.

Campbell has written a book for lay people like you and me that explains the science and findings called The China Study: Revised and Expanded Edition.

The book is a fascinating masterwork of clarity. In it, he not only explains the research but also how and why various groups have tried to suppress and discredit the information.

Campbell is not some crazy quack. He isn’t someone selling pills and supplement drinks on the internet. He has no financial interest in you believing him. He is one of the foremost researchers on nutrition, a renowned scientist at Cornell University, who has worked as a senior science adviser to the American Institute for Cancer Research, sat on government nutrition panels, and is on the advisory board of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.  

If you or someone you love are worried about any of the following:

• Heart disease
• Cancer (breast, prostate, colon, liver, and others)
• Type 1 Diabetes
• Type 2 Diabetes
• Erectile dysfunction
• Multiple sclerosis
• Cataracts
• Macular degeneration
• Osteoporosis
• Alzheimer’s

I think you will be interested in hearing what he has to report. Of course, you’ll have to make up your own mind about the evidence he provides. But I think you owe it to yourself to hear what he has to say.