Book Reviews for Real People

NurtureShock (Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman)

2010-04-04T13:41:00.000-05:00

NutureShock: New Thinking About Children is a book I've been wanting to read for some time, ever since I first read Bronson & Merryman's article in New York magazine about the effects of praise on children. I was already a big fan of Bronson's writing (see here, here, and here) and knew that he gives his subjects thoughtful attention, and here with Ashley Merryman, that same care is given to the discussion of recent scientific data on child development. (And I think that separates this book from most of the so-called parenting books out there. Well that, and all the scientific data to back up the claims!) Every single chapter in this book made me rethink what I knew (or thought I knew) about children. For example,

Praising a child for their intelligence makes a child less likely to try new things (it feeds a fear of failure), whereas praising a child for their effort creates the opposite effect.
Children who watch a lot of educational programming (e.g., PBS & Nickelodeon) show more relational violence than their peers.
There is a preschool/kindergarten program that can teach children self-control and self-focus, and this program is so sucessful in raising test scores that the at-risk kids it is servicing are no longer at risk before the program is over (which is costing the program grant money).

There's even more. I can't recommend this book enough. It's an intelligent synthesis of the recent data for the general public. One that treats the readers as smart and well-informed. Please go read this. Or I will be that annoying friend who always starts conversations with, "Did you know . . . ?"

Drive (Daniel Pink)

2010-04-04T13:00:00.000-05:00

I heard about Daniel Pink's latest book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, through the mental_floss blog (which is always an excellent source of all sorts of unnecessary but intriguing information). It's behavior economics applied to business and management, with the underlying theme of intrinsic motivation. And trust me, it's way more interesting that that last sentence makes it sound.

The behavior economics' studies and data interested me the most because I spend about one-third of every year entrenched in all things economics at work. Plus those kinds of studies are interesting in general: The data show that tasks done in the category "playing" are more fun and interesting long term than the same tasks done in the category "work." (This is one reason given for a child's allowance not being tied to helping around the home. Once the reward is tied to the task, it now becomes "work" that the child becomes unmotivated to do.) Simply put, rewards are not a motivating factor. In fact, they can cause the opposite effect: Children who were told they would win a prize for drawing were motivated to draw at first, but then they lost interest in drawing in subsequent classes. (Children in the control group did not lose interest in drawing and drew significantly more on their own.)

Pink shows how they new generation of business management can best apply these findings. He cites Best Buys' corporate headquarters adoption of a results-based operation (e.g., letting employees set their own hours) and virtual call centers staffed with remote workers working out of their homes (increasing customer service satisfaction and decreasing high turnover), among others. It gets a little what-color-is-your-parachute at the end, with questions/strategies for business managers, but I still think it's worth a read.

Committed (Elizabeth Gilbert)

2010-03-25T14:39:00.000-05:00

Anyone remember a little book called Eat, Pray, Love? Elizabeth Gilbert sure does. Eat, Pray, Love wasn't her first book, but it is, by far, her most successful book to date. So successful in fact that the task of following it with a new book was daunting. When your last book becomes a best-seller, with an audience of millions, how do you write the next and have it appeal to all those same readers? Gilbert explains what became her intended audience for Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage: twenty-seven women, ranging from her grandmother to her stepdaughter, and friends in between. But even more so, Gilbert wrote this book for herself, to work through her understanding of marriage. Because, upon returning from a trip abroad, Gilbert's partner in life, Felipe, a non-U.S. citizen, got stopped by Homeland Security, questioned for hours, and then sent to jail before being deported. (Felipe was not in the United States illegally, but his previous visas and time in the country showed a clear pattern of his relationship with Gilbert, and this was at an especially tedious time with foreigners in the United States.) Before being sent to jail, Gilbert was able to briefly talk to Felipe and make plans. The officer who had been questioning Felipe told them clearly what they needed to do: get married.

Most people would not have reacted the way Gilbert and her partner did. They were heartbroken with the news. Both previously divorced, both had no intentions of ever getting married again, but this is what they would have to do to be together. And so during a long exile from the United States, a forced one for Felipe while the paperwork/proceedings took place to allow his re-entry into the country, Gilbert thought a lot about marriage, throughout all of history, and her own familial history.

I started to worry near the beginning of the book, when Gilbert steps out of the narrative of her own life and into a long exposition on the history of marriage, quite similar to a book for which I found the subject compelling but never made it through. I was so worried that the rest of the book was going to be like this (I have a hard time staying interested in that kind of writing), that Committed stayed on a table, closed, for almost a week before I decided to power through that section and see what lay ahead. (Adding further incentive were two new library books, one with a two-week due date. Two weeks! That's like a one-day movie rental for someone with a toddler!)

I'm glad I stayed with it because the book turned out to be a thoughtful exploration of marriage woven into Gilbert's life: narratives of wedding ceremonies among the Hmong in Laos, the secret yearnings of teenage Buddhist monks, the benefits of marriage for men that far outweigh those for women, how divorce plays into marriage and exists in virtually every culture (and even among seagulls!). I'm not sure how this book will do in comparison with Eat, Pray, Love, but it feels like an honest and personal follow-up to it.

Certain Girls (Jennifer Weiner)

2010-03-11T11:19:00.000-06:00

This was not one of my favorites. It's a sequel to Good in Bed, which is great, snd it becomes very meta right from the beginning. Cannie, the main character in Good in Bed, reflects on her success writing a very autobiographical, best-selling book, which seems to be a similar situation to Jennifer Weiner's. Her thirteen-year-old daugher, Joy, reads said book, and then starts wondering if much of what her mother has told her about her past is true. Very teenage things start happening in the course of this, like shoplifting, lying, running away, etc.

I finished Certain Girls mad, swearing I was never going to read another one. This time the Very Dramatic Thing that must happen in all her books just seemed mean to the readers, unexpected in a bad way, and I was angry. About five minutes later I was pretty sure that, just like the Real Housewives series on Bravo, I'd be back for more. Sigh.

A Homemade Life (Molly Wizenberg)

2010-02-13T13:21:00.001-06:00

Molly Wizenberg has a blog. But Molly Wizenberg would probably not like my opening sentence because she doesn't like the word "blog." She also says

I guess you could say that having a blog is a little like the windows of a house I used to live in during my sophomore year of college. I loved opening them wide during the day, so that the smell of the eucalyptus trees outside could drift in and sweep out the rooms. But occasionally I would come home and find a squirrel on my desk. A live squirrel. He would have climbed up the tree outside and jumped in through the window, and now here he was, rifling with his tiny, scratchy claws through whatever he found, tearing up every paper and scrap. Blogging is a little like that. . . . [O]ccasionally you come home and find a squirrel on your desk, so to speak: a nasty comment, maybe, or even worse, something you wrote yourself, probably late at night, when you should have been sleeping, something that makes your cheeks hot.

In A Homemade Life, Wizenberg writes of her family, of her life, and of food. I started reading it in small pieces, right before bed, and near the beginning found myself thinking, you know, I really like the writing, but I'm not sure why this needed to be a book. It was all very nice, but didn't feel that meaningful. But that quickly changed, almost immediately between the end of one chapter, and the beginning of the next, when Wizenberg talks of her father's death from cancer. Then the small parts began to make a larger whole, and it became a great book.

Each small chapter ends with a recipe, and this is the first book I've found that combines narrative and recipes for which I really want to make (and could feasibly make) the recipes. Recipes include dishes such as slow-roasted tomatoes, a chocolate cake she calls "The Winning Hearts and Minds Cake" because it's just that good, and salmon with an apple-cider glaze.

Also, I don't think it would be fitting to write this review without giving some other important information. Molly Wizenberg is half of the duo behind Delancy, a new pizza restaurant in Seattle that has gotten some outstanding press and reviews. The other half of that duo is her husband, Brandon. She met her husband through her blog, while she was in Seattle and he was in New York. They then had a long-distance relationship until Brandon was able to move out to Seattle. Of course I do have incredible bias (given my own story of love), but I also found the story behind that relationship compelling. So, good writing, food, a love interest: what's not to like?

In Her Shoes (Jennifer Weiner)

2010-01-17T08:38:00.000-06:00

I'm apparently on a quest to read every book Jennifer Weiner has written, with In Her Shoes being the latest one. (Also, apparently this book was made into a movie starring Cameron Diaz, although I have not seen it.) My review of this book will be short and direct. Page 1 through 215: too dramatic! Page 216 through the end: really, really good. I'm glad I stuck with it, but if this were the first Jennifer Weiner book I had picked up, I'm not sure I would have made it through to page 216. The second half almost read like a different book (although I did find myself wondering if the second half would have been as effective if not for the first half). Here's my ranked order of Weiner's books I've read thus far:

1. Good in Bed
2. Little Earthquakes
3. In Her Shoes

Veganomicon (Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero)

2009-12-30T11:46:00.001-06:00

Why would I put a picture of a roast chicken with my review of a vegan cookbook? The short answer is that this vegan cookbook is so good that I think you can drop the word "vegan" and just call it an awesome cookbook. Everything we've made from it has been outstanding.

The longer answer is that when I was 19, I became a vegetarian and ate a strictly vegetarian diet for 12 years. About a year ago, I started eating some fish for the health benefits, and now I'm at the point where I do eat some other meat, usually locally produced. That said, we're not doing a lot of cow-based dairy these days because the littlest Duncan still cannot tolerate it. Lucky for us, our local co-op sells many goat-based dairy products that are fine for us all, so we can still have items like butter and mozzarella cheese. But it took me a long time to realize that, and in the interim, I found Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook, and am super glad that I did.

This book introduced us to Maple Mustard Dressing (now our standard salad dressing), Snobby Joes (the best take on Sloppy Joes I've ever had, using lentils instead of soy), Green Pumpkin-Seed Mole (which we spread on everything we could get our hands on, especially fried egg sandwiches), and a super awesome BBQ sauce (which we used as a sauce for a BBQ chicken pizza, made with the leftover roast chicken pictured above).

The tone of the book is informal, but sometimes so are the directions. I would not recommend this cookbook to the novice cook for that reason, but it also gives you more flexibility in the interpretation. My other caveat is that the time per recipe listed can misguide you. It really should be broken down into active and inactive time. Also, there are some recipes that do take a long time, but those can be broken down into steps and made over the course of a couple days. (The one recipe I'm thinking of is Pumpkin Baked Ziti with Caramelized Onions and Sage Crumb Topping, and oh man was it good.)

A family story we often retell is that many years ago I tasted some soy ice cream, which I was certain tasted just like real ice cream. (It had been a really long time since I had eaten real ice cream.) Yeah, well, I was fully wrong on that. And I'm sure there are vegans out there who are convinced that vegan cheese tastes like real cheese. But none of that matters with this cookbook because the recipes are based on real food, not fake-meat substitutes, and I think that's why it succeeds. So that roast chicken pictured above? Jim made that for our Christmas dinner. Alongside it we served the spiced mashed sweet potatoes featured in Veganomicon, along with my version of the green bean casserole from Moskowitz's website. And the littlest Duncan could not get enough of those green beans. So yeah, really good real food worth checking out.

Good in Bed (Jennifer Weiner)

2009-10-30T08:51:00.000-05:00

So the other weekend we were out for a walk on a beautiful fall day, and I wanted to swing by the library to pick up a book I had on hold. But I didn't have my library card. Which meant that instead of using the self-checkout machine, I'd have to hand my book to an actual librarian to check out. And so I handed her the copy of Jennifer Weiner's Good in Bed. It shows considerable self-growth that I was only a little bit embarrassed by this. One, there's the title, and two, it's definitely chick-lit, not high brow in any sense. But I've come to realize that my definition of a good book is simple: one that you don't want to put down. And that's exactly what this book was.

Cannie, the main character, finds out that her ex has started writing a column in a women's magazine about her (titled Good in Bed). Horrified, this sets off a chain of events that include taking part in a weight loss study, befriending a famous celebrity, becoming pregnant, and reconciling with her mother's lesbian partner. I'm not going to say anything more about the plot because in trying to explain the whole thing to Jim, he was practically rolling on the floor laughing in disbelief. But the book is well-written, with fully developed characters. The very-dramatic-thing-that-must-happen in these kinds of books is a little too dramatic for me, and I did notice that the main character in this book and the main character in her third book, Little Earthquakes, have a lot of similarities (and similarities to the author), but that didn't make either book less entertaining to read. (I read Little Earthquakes this past summer, and also very much enjoyed it.)

Not So Common Knowledge

2009-10-29T19:40:00.000-05:00

I've had some intense memories this fall. Every small event (the first sweet corn of the season, the first sign of leaves changing color, the first early morning tailgaters for the UW football games) reminds me of what I had been doing that time last year, and each memory seems to end with "and I was very pregnant." I'm not sure if it's because I'm getting so close to Noah's first birthday or if it's because it was until August last year that I really started paying attention to the whole pregnancy thing. I do remember, though, sometime in July or August of last year deciding that we needed to learn how to take care of this baby and that experts had written books about these things, so we better get learning quick.

I actually wanted to write a wrap-up of the books I had read during pregnancy back when I was on maternity leave, but, as it happened (surprise, surprise), I never managed to get it done. This is probably for the best as, after a full 10 months of learning on the job, I now have a different, fuller, perspective.

I chose the books I read based mainly on (a) what was available at the library, (b) what seemed to be popular on Amazon, and (c) what the pregnant woman at the gym who always was riding the stationary bike in the row in front of me was reading (she was about 6 weeks or so ahead of me).

I did not read What to Expect When You're Expecting (even though this was the book the doctor's office gave me during what I like to call my Orientation to Pregnancy). The illustration on the cover portrays a woman looking quite dour in her expectant situation, which gives me the impression there are not joyful things in these pages. (The publisher must have gotten word of the unpopular cover because they updated the 2008 edition.) I also had heard that the tone of the book, and the broad scope, covering many rare and emergency situations, could easily make readers worry more than they needed to. What I read instead was Body, Soul, Baby by Tracy Gaudet, an OB who works in integrated medicine. I loved this book for presenting a balanced look at pregnancy. Gaudet is fairly conservative in her recommendations on herbal medicines but is very open to alternative therapies. This book focuses more on the journey of pregnancy, providing a general manual (although not comprehensive) for the nine months and postpartum period. She does highlight possible complications, but it's not the focus and she often states how rare these circumstances are.

I did find through my reading that the "normal procedures" of labor and delivery presented in each book vary based on date of publication. Much has changed (for the better) over the past 5-10 years and procedures vary by region and even by hospital. We were lucky that our hospital provided a six-week comprehensive course so that we could learn their procedures, and it is also one of the few certified baby and family friendly hospitals in the nation.

I was determined to prepare for a natural birth, and so I read Birthing from Within, Calm Birth, and Hypnobirthing (although I did not follow the Hypnobirthing program, I was curious to read about it). These three books presented completely different techniques and mindsets for labor. Calm Birth I'm going to completely skip over because it was written by a doctor who really should have considered having a coauthor (writing was not his strong point), and while the central message of the book was strong (meditation is good for both baby and mother), it read awkwardly. Birthing from Within is more of an eye-of-the-tiger kind of approach to birth, a true "get in touch with your inner, animal self, unleash the moans and cries of pain and embrace them" kind of thing. Hypnobirthing focuses on the concept that "pain" is a taught sensation for the process of labor and that we need to rethink this mindset. The meditation exercises in Hypnobirthing were very helpful, but I also very much appreciated Birthing from Within's general message, so somehow these incredibly different approaches both worked for me.

I also exercised throughout the entire pregnancy, and was concerned especially about modifying my strength training and abdominal exercises. Maternal Fitness adopted the somewhat defensive, angry tone not unfamiliar to many pregnancy books (the the-doctors-are-so-not-right-in-what-they're-telling-you-to-do tone), but it did provide some good back and abdominal exercises. Expecting Fitness was the better of these two books, with more exercises and adaptations.

Jim and I both read The Happiest Baby on the Block by Dr. Harvey Karp, and found it to be extremely helpful with the swaddling and shushing techniques. In fact, Jim would rate this book as one of the top two most important baby books to read (more on the other one below).

On the feeding front, many people recommended The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding to me (which is a LaLeche league book). I'm not sure there is anything more confusing than trying to figure out the mechanics of breastfeeding before you actually have a baby you are breastfeeding. I think reading this book helped me feel calmer about the prospect, but I have to say that it also angered me in some ways. The section on returning to work should have really been subtitled "Are you sure you really want to?" because its general thesis seemed to be against it. Giving actual advice on pumping schedules, etc., would have been more helpful.

One thing I learned quickly after Noah was born was that there is no topic new mothers want to talk more about than that of infant sleep. And for understandable reasons since no one is really sleeping in those first few months (or longer). I had read the No-Cry Sleep Solution while pregnant, but of course it made little sense to me then, and I promptly forgot everything in it. This approach, touted as a calmer, gentler way to change your baby's sleep habits, compared with other approaches, would not have worked for us. Inadvertently, we found out by reading Ferber's Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems that everything we were doing in an attempt for Noah to sleep better had trained him to sleep poorly. Ferber unfortunately gets a bad reputation by those who have not read his book (they label his approach "cry it out," which it is not). But we found it to be full of science, and after coming up with a game plan to retrain Noah's sleep, he was sleeping better in less a week, as were we, and everyone was happy. (This would be the second most important book for Jim, as mentioned above.)

I remember being at the solstice service last December at the Unitarian society, a tiny one-month Noah asleep in his car seat, watching light, powdery snow falling in the night sky behind us. During the service, candles were passed and lit, while everyone focused on something that happened during the past year they would like forgiveness for. I immediately thought of how I had read parenting/baby care books like I was cramming for a final test, how I thought I knew the correct answers, and how I quietly, secretly, judged most parents I saw in action on a daily basis. I now understood how wrong I was. The day Noah was born, it was like I had been dropped off in a remote village that spoke a foreign language, and I had to become fluent just by getting by every day. After a moment of silence, the minister asked everyone to then let those thoughts go and blow out their candles. And with that, we began again. A little more fluent, a little more wise, a lot more ready to leave most of those books on the shelves.

Farm City (Novella Carpenter)

2009-07-26T11:00:00.000-05:00

Last month I spent a good hour pulling weeds that had grown up to my knees in the garden. After I was finished you could actually see the pepper and tomato plants that had been camouflaged in a green jungle of overgrowth for the past few weeks. Gardening is not my strong point. Or rather, taking time to learn how to garden and actually maintain it aren't my strong points. My approach is to buy transplants at the farmer's market in May, put them in the ground, and then I let nature take over. Luckily nature is a lot better at growing things than I am.

Novella Carpenter is really good at gardening. So good that she moved way beyond vegetables and kept bees, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, and even pigs in her garden. But she's in Oakland. As in downtown Oakland. Which is not really amenable to large-scale gardens, or as she calls it, her urban farm. Farm City is her account of her time raising livestock, vegetables, and fruits in her backyard.

I wanted to not like Novella. I was afraid she was going to be one of those hipper-than-thou types that goes on and on about how great city life is and how much cooler and better she is than everyone else because of the choices she's made for her lifestyle. And sometimes she did veer toward that area in her writing, but mostly she just comes off as a gutsy urban homesteader taking the term locavore to the most extreme level, exploring her relationship with these animals-turned-dinner in a humane and honest way, feeding her pigs on a diet of Chinatown dumpster dives. Her sense of humor that comes across in her writing separates this book from other locavore accounts; it's not the idyllic rural account of Barbara Kingsolver. It's more no nonsense and sparse at times, but in a good way.

Do-Over! (Robin Hemley)

2009-07-11T14:40:00.001-05:00

You know those things you did when you were a kid/teenager that still kind of haunt you? Like not learning how to ride a bike (just a generic example). And giving up on piano lessons because the teacher wanted you to play classical music and you wanted to play the Beatles (again, just another generic example). Robin Hemley confronts his own list of do-overs at the age of 48 in Do-Over!, including kindergarten, an elementary school play where he flubbed his lines, eighth grade, and a foreign exchange year cut short.

I loved reading this book. I would end a chapter and ask Jim questions like if he ever went to camp (answer: yes), what his favorite grade was (answer: twelfth, because it was the last) and his least favorite one (eighth grade, same as Hemley's). (My favorite was tenth grade, the year I went to a great school in Colorado Springs, and my least favorite was seventh, when it was very, very uncool to be smart). Hemley assimilates easily back into kindergarten. Of all the grades he revisits, these kids are most accepting of him.

By the end of my first day, we're all a bit confused. If I wasn't having a midlife crisis before, I am now. And my classmates are having a bit of a beginning-life crisis---not quite sure what to make of the new kid.

As we're waiting at the end of the day to be dismissed, we sit on the floor with our coats and backpacks, legs "crisscross applesauce," which is a little difficult for me.

"Are you going to Extended Day?" Stefan asks me.
"No," I say. "I'm going home."
"Do you ride the bus?" Louis asks.
"No."
"Oh. Well, who's picking you up?" Haley asks.
"My wife," I say.
There's a long moment of silence as they take that in and blink at me like cats.
"Oh," says Stefan finally. "I thought you were going to say your dad."

Hemley finds that the second time around isn't necessarily easier, and still feels a lot of the nervousness/embarrassment he felt the first time. Or there's added nervousness when he starts to think about the strangeness of his project and what others must be thinking about it.

I'd often think about my own do-over list while reading. The only item I really could think of was piano lessons (a common answer, according to Hemley), but instead of a do-over list, I was forming a different list in my head, what some people call a bucket list, or a life list (my favorite example is Maggie Mason's Mighty Life List, and she even recently got herself a sponsor!). I haven't really decided what would be on it, but in some ways it might resemble a do-over list in that some items would be things that I could have done in the past but didn't (like learn how to ride a horse, hike Pikes Peak) and other items that either I'd forget that I'd want to do or might need an extra push to actually go do them (either because they're out of my comfort zone or take commitment or extra funds, etc.). Sometimes just writing down a list of things you want to accomplish can really help push you in the right direction. I'm thinking of posting it on Facebook so then I have a built-in cheering section and can document the progress.

(Oh, and I did finally learn to ride a bike. At age 25. In a Jewish Community Center parking lot on a borrowed bike. So in some ways I guess that's a version of my own do-over.)

Shakespeare (Bill Bryson)

2009-07-01T18:00:00.000-05:00

Most of my reading these days gets done at night, right before I fall asleep, which is translating to a lot of "easy" reading, for lack of a better term: entertaining, nothing with too many details, uncomplicated, nothing really considered too literary. So I surprised myself when I requested a biography of Shakespeare at the library. But it was by Bill Bryson, who I've loved, and who I've loved not so much. I knew I had made the right decision when I read the first sentence of the book:

Before he came into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.

Fiction workshops can be built around first sentences, and this one, although considered nonfiction, is right up there with the best. (Grenville had been the owner of what is now known as the Chandos portrait, which is believed to be of Shakespeare.) Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, Bryson explains, "was written not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare as this series does. The idea is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record. Which is one reason, of course, it's so slender."

There isn't a lot on record of Shakespeare, but this hasn't stopped people from speculating, sometimes wildly, about his life and who exactly he was. Bryson brings us back to Shakespeare's time, tells us what we know, what we might, and what we don't. (He does an excellent job near the end of the book dispelling some of the myths of the Shakespeare conspiracists who believe that someone else wrote the plays, noting that much of the drive behind that movement came from Delia Bacon, an American who believed, quite wrongly, that she was connected to Francis Bacon, and that Francis Bacon was then the real playwright.)

It's definitely a good read and would probably be an excellent audiobook for those of you who appreciate such things.

The Pluto Files (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

2009-06-13T13:42:00.000-05:00

The day after the International Astronomical Union voted to demote Pluto's status to a "dwarf planet," my friend and coworker Jenn printed out "I Heart Pluto" stickers for many in our office to wear in defiance. What? You didn't do this at your work on that day? Hmmm, then maybe you don't work in science. We felt compelled to stand up for Pluto, the underdog of the nine planets, probably because that's all we remember about the Solar System in elementary school science. How can you forget Pluto? It's the furthest away and the smallest. And it has the same name as Mickey Mouse's dog.

Neil deGrasse Tyson knows Pluto all too well for an astrophysicist whose specialty is not planetary bodies. As director of the Hayden Planetarium, in 2000 he was involved in the planning of the American Museum of Natural History's new Rose Center for Earth and Space. After much discussion about Pluto, they decided to side-step the issue by not talking about the nine planets as a whole and instead grouped items with other like items. The gas giants together, the terrestrial planets together, and then Pluto together with members of the Kuiper belt (in another area of the center).

Now, I can see how as scientists this grouping like-with-like made perfect sense to them, and how they could believe that this would resolve the issue, no problem, with no questions. But soon after opening day, although the media was not discussing it yet, some of their smallest critics saw right away that Pluto was missing from their Scales of the Universe display. All the other planets were there. Where was Pluto?

The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet discusses the history of Pluto, the media storm around Pluto that began with the Rose Center's new design, and deGrasse Tyson's own personal history with Pluto (including just a few examples of the many, many letters he received some school children, along with letters and emails from working scientists and the general public). The book is engaging, written for a general audience, and brings up lots of great points: 1) We probably wouldn't have had this kind of public reaction to Pluto's reclassification if Pluto hadn't been discovered by an American, 2) There actually isn't an exact definition for what makes a planet a planet, and 3) Pluto does not care what we call it. It just goes on being Pluto.

The letters and emails contained in the book are great, and I want to highlight a couple here. Here's an email, accusing deGrasse Tyson of cultural insensitivity:

Would you say a small child or midget wasn't a person? Of course you wouldn't, although they are a different versions of the normal standard that is set as what a person would like, but they are still classified as people. By saying that Pluto is not a planet, is like saying a midget or a small child is not a person.

I'll end with a letter from Madeline Trost, an example of what deGrasse Tyson calls the "angry-kid genre." "After addressing the envelope to me personally, she bluntly addresses her letter 'Dear Scientest,' and she can't contain her flurry of assaults on my integrity, ending with an appeal to accommodate a shortcoming of her own":

Dear Scientest,
What do you call Pluto if its not a planet anymore? If you make it a planet agian all the science books will be right. Do poeple live on Pluto? If there are poeple who live there they won't exists. Why can't Pluto be a planet? If it's small doesn't meant that it doen't have to be a planet anymore. Some poeple like Pluto. If it doen't exist then they don't have a favorite planet. Please write back, but not in cursive because I can't read in cursive.

Gluten-Free Girl (Shauna James Ahern)

2009-05-31T14:44:00.000-05:00

When I was pregnant, I kept telling Jim the list of foods (foods I currently wasn't eating due to safety recommendations) I was going to eat once Noah was born. High on the list was a wonderful fried-egg breakfast sandwich at a local restaurant, complete with yummy soft French cheese. I was thinking I'd get this sandwich in the first few weeks after giving birth. I still haven't gotten to eat this sandwich. Much like myself as a baby, Noah and dairy are not friends. Meaning that I have to take a lengthy vacation from it as well. (Most babies outgrow this dairy intolerance in their first two years of life. My fingers are crossed that this happens sooner rather than later, but it was the full two years for myself.)

It turns out that avoiding all dairy, especially in packaged food, is very hard. Down low on a lengthy list of ingredients can be hiding whey power or milk protein. But I cannot even imagine how hard it must be for someone who couldn't eat gluten. Because it's not even listed on products that can contain it, which is something I didn't know until I had read Gluten-Free Girl by Shauna James Ahern. (Astute readers may realize that this is another blogger who wrote a book, and I'll just let you know right now that there are two other blogger books on hold at the library. Apparently I'm going through a phase.)

Ahern's celiac disease went undiagnosed for a long time. She was often tired and generally not feeling well. When she realized her symptoms may very well be signs of celiac disease, she couldn't get her doctor to run the test. (He told her it was a rare disease, which is completely wrong.) Most people would have been quite upset to find out they could never eat bread again (I know I certainly would've taken the news hard as a freshly baked piece of bread, toasted and buttered, is one of my favorite things in this world), but given how much better Ahern was feeling, for the first time in her life really, she embraced it.

Ahern writes beautifully in this book about re-discovering food, much of it local, seasonal food, and how she's adapted to a gluten-free life. This is a great book, well-written, engaging, but I will say that I visited her blog after finishing the book, and it looks like some parts of the book existed as blog postings in various forms prior to the book's publication, so if you are a fan of her blog, there may not be a lot of new material here.

She also includes near the end the story of how she met her husband, the chef, as she calls him. Not that I want to give too much away here, but how can you get much better than this: Her husband (at the time her boyfriend), the chef at a small, fabulous restaurant? Yeah, he ends up making the entire menu at his restaurant gluten-free. How absolutely incredible is that? Sigh. They should make their love story into a movie. I'd go see it, and I'm sure I'd end up crying at that part.

Hungry Monkey (Matthew Amster-Burton)

2009-05-31T13:42:00.000-05:00

Noah is just a few days away from getting his hands on some solid food. Well, except, technically he's already had his first solid food: a small chunk of the service program at the Unitarian church on Mother's Day. Oh well.

The "first" of what will be a lifetime of non-liquid foods can be a little stressful for well-meaning parents. Iron-fortified rice cereal? Jarred food? Mashed bananas? The intricacies of these choices are expounded upon in Web sites, blender-specific homemade baby food books, and pamphlets given out at the doctor's office. Do this (strain, steam, vegetables-before-fruit, wait four days between new foods). Don't do this (possible allergens, unsanitized cookware, vegetables with nitrates). Thank goodness for friends with second children and for Matthew Amster-Burton's book Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater.

Amster-Burton is a writer (also a blogger) who lives in Seattle with his wife and his four-year-old daughter, Iris. I got this book for my birthday (thank you, Sue!) because I had known a little about Amster-Burton's writing through the Web site Serious Eats, and I thought it might be handy for when Noah reached the solid-food stage.

When she was around one-year old, Iris would eat just about anything, loving especially very spicy food. Sushi, spicy Thai noodles, enchiladas, you name it. Amster-Burton was thrilled, thinking he had done all the right things as a parent. And then she got older. And pickier. Just like most other kids, he learned. But even then he still tries to make a meal everyone can enjoy at dinner time, with some modification, and he shares those tips in the book. A stay-at-home dad, Amster-Burton reads Working Mother, and Iris at one point isn't actually sure her mother can cook. (She can do that? She says, in disbelief, when the idea is mentioned.) This reminds me of my sister Betsy, whose oldest daughter once complained to her father that when he was away on a business trip, Betsy made them eat cereal for breakfast. Cereal.

Some of my favorite things I've taken away from this book are that, for Iris (and I'm guessing Noah given his current behavior at the dinner table), there was a very small window of time where Amster-Burton and his wife could eat their own meal while Iris at prepared baby food. She wanted their food. So he finely chopped a portion of their meal for her, with salt and spices. In preparation for the toddler years, I'm also going to try to keep in mind a quote from Ellyn Satter that Amster-Burton draws attention to (I'm paraphrasing here): once you put the plate in front of your child, your work is done. So Zenlike, and I'm sure so hard to follow given the behavior that follows.

A Voyage Long and Strange (Tony Horwitz)

2009-01-19T16:00:00.000-06:00

I'm in week eight of my maternity leave and have discovered that the advertisers of daytime television really want me to eat at Golden Corral, buy many items from Billy Mays, and help me get the life insurance I need for my peace of mind. And while our dinners have been improved immensely by my new friends Giada and Ina, there's only so many times I can watch prosciutto being wrapped around figs. Between nursing, changing diapers, and making funny faces at the baby, I've tried to get in a little reading, and was able to finish Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World just a few hours before it was due. I was even able to snap the blurry photo above. But one thing I wasn't able to do was spend any quality time going back over the book to find the really great quotes and highlights, so bear with me on the details.

I remember 4th grade history being the year of explorers, name after name of men I imagined yielding swords in puffy pantaloons. History not being my strong point (it is unlikely I'll remember any fact for longer than oh, say, 20 minutes), I was unaware of how many Europeans had landed on our shores prior to both Columbus and the Pilgrims. I doubt that I'm alone. Horwitz explores these men and the many misconceptions that surrounds them and their legacies, with the modern cities/peoples who are constantly in a tug-of-war to be the deemed the first of the firsts.

Horwitz has this great reporting/writing style that weaves the modern into the historical, which I had enjoyed in his Blue Latitudes, his book about Captain Cook. Because A Voyage Long and Strange covers so many explorers, there's a lot more historical background for each one, especially at the beginning of the book. But today's people enter in quickly, and in interesting ways. Compared to Europe, it seems that America is lacking in a rich sense of history or tradition, but Horwitz meets people who trace themselves back to remarkably different first settlers, and hold onto these identities strongly. As always, his interactions with these people are interesting, and often hilarious (such as his participation in an all-era reinactment camp: think pirates interacting with knights).

If you want to love history but most presentations of history don't love you back, try reading some of Horwitz's writing. It's totally approachable and fun, and I've already requested another of his books from the library.

The Wishing Year (Noelle Oxenhandler)

2008-11-01T08:05:00.000-05:00

The magazine Body + Soul has a book review section at the end, in which I sometimes find books to read. One recent one was The Wishing Year: A House, A Man, My Soul -- A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire by Noelle Oxenhandler. From what I remember of the book review, the essence was that Oxenhandler did indeed get a house and a man, partly from wishing, and I was curious as to how exactly that came to be.

Oxenhandler presents herself to the reader as a skeptic. She lives in Northern California and has many friends who believe strongly in wishing, in letting their desires be known and waiting for opportunities to come from that. And she doesn't feel she fits that mold. So she decides one year to experiment with the power of wishing, the results of which are presented here.

While The Wishing Year is a memoir, it also is part literary analysis of the term wish. Those parts to me weren't as strong or as interesting as the rest of the book. One thing Oxenhandler points out from this research, however, is that the power of the formation of the wish can focus your thinking and actions into fulfilling that wish, consciously or not. And I think this is true, as seen in the somewhat recent proliferation of 100 things lists.

Did I love this book? No. Am I glad I read it? I think so. It never felt like work to pick it up at the end of the day to read, and it was fairly enjoyable overall. If the subject seems like something you're interested, then I think it would be worth picking up at the library.

Comfort Food (Kate Jacobs)

2008-10-25T10:03:00.000-05:00

As I posted earlier, I enjoyed Kate Jacobs' The Friday Night Knitting Club, so when I found out her follow-up book, Comfort Food, was about cooking, I immediately put it on my hold list at the library. I actually read the book back in August (and have since returned it to the library), so this won't be the most detailed review, but I can still definitely give you my overall impressions on it.

Powell's gives a brief plot synopsis that is better than anything I could do from memory here. The book's structure is similar to The Friday Night Knitting Club in that there are multiple narrators telling their sides of the story throughout the book. This worked really well in the previous book, but I felt like the story in Comfort Food wasn't as compelling, making this technique almost unnecessary. One of my biggest problems with the book had to do with a fairly minor character, whose behavior and personality throughout most of the book are explained and resolved way too easily near the end, making for an abrupt 180-degree turn that just didn't resonate as real.

All that said, I read the majority of the book on an airplane, and it definitely was interesting enough to keep me reading and entertained throughout my flights. So if you're going on a trip, and read and enjoyed The Friday Night Knitting Club, I'd recommend Comfort Food for that kind of reading.

Somewhat related, we just finished our first summer as CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) members. We had held off becoming members because Madison has great farmer's markets that I love to shop at, but eventually we wanted to directly support a farm. I knew the weekly CSA box would change the way I cook, but I wasn't fully aware of the extent of it. I became more of a cook-what's-on-hand person, and when confronted with an overbounty of broccoli or potatoes, learned quickly to either blanch and freeze or make a soup that would freeze well. The CSA ended this week, and now it's going to be very strange to go back to what was "normal" meal planning and grocery shopping.

One recipe that became a regular this summer helped out when our CSA box had a lot of beets: chocolate beet muffins. Jim likes to point out that these muffins sound like they would taste awful, but that they are so delicious. And, they're pretty good for you, too. (I'd recommend waiting until they cool to eat them, otherwise they may have an overly "beet-y" flavor.)

Double Dark Chocolate Beet Muffins

1 C. whole wheat flour
1 C. all-purpose flour
2 t. baking powder
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
1 C. (split into two half-cups) Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips
1/2 C. chopped pecans or walnuts
1/8 C. butter
1/8 C. milk
3/4 C. packed brown sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 C. beet puree*
1 C plain lowfat yogurt
1 t. vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Grease a 12-cup muffin tin or line it with paper cups; set aside.
In a large bowl, whisk together first 5 ingredients until well combined.Stir in the half cup chocolate chips and nuts; set aside.
In a small saucepan, melt the other 1/2 cup chocolate chips and butter over very low heat. Stir to combine, add milk, and set aside to cool until lukewarm.
In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, brown sugar, beet puree, yogurt, vanilla, and melted chocolate.
Pour the chocolate mixture into the dry ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon until just combined. Don’t over mix.
Immediately spoon batter into 12 well-greased or paper-lined muffin cups. Batter should completely fill the cups.
Place muffin pan in a preheated 375 oven and bake for 18-20 minutes. Muffins are done when they spring back when touched lightly in the center (or when a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean). Don’t overbake!
Cool muffins for 10 minutes in pan then remove them to a wire rack to cool completely.

*To prepare beets: Cut off the greens leaving about one inch attached. Don’t cut anything off the root end. Gently scrub the beets being careful not to cut the skin. In a medium saucepan, cover beets with water, bring to a gentle boil and cook, covered, 30-45 minutes until tender. Drain and let sit until cool enough to handle. The tops should pull off easily or they can be cut off. The skins will slip right off. Puree beets with a little bit of the cooking liquid in a food processor until they are the consistency of applesauce.

Recipe adapted from here.

Lush Life (Richard Price)

2008-08-30T01:50:00.000-05:00

Short version: Do you like great dialogue? Do you particularly like great cop dialogue? Lush Life is for you.

Somewhat longer version: I hadn’t read any Price before seeing him do a reading with Charles Baxter. The plot spools out from the shooting of a white kid on New York’s Lower East Side, centering on Matty Clark, the detective who ends up working the case, and Eric Cash, a waiter and perpetual failure who had been out drinking with the victim and standing next to him when he was shot. Much of the early going follows Matty and another detective, Yolanda, as they thoroughly disassemble Eric’s account of what happened in a lengthy interview that rapidly turns into an interrogation as they start turning up inconsistencies and outright falsehoods in Eric’s account of what happened.

The book is, as Price said at the reading, really a novel of place, though—the Lower East Side itself almost the main character, and the book works not just as a compelling police procedural as Matty works to solve the murder, but also as an extended exploration of the neighborhood and the people in it, from the projects kids to the roving beat cops and up to the wealthy entrepreneur Eric works for.

Plus (just to get back to the dialogue, which seriously, is first-rate), it never hurts when you can get off incidental lines like the last one here:

“Sunday night,” Berkowitz said, closing the book like a cigarette case and slipping it back into his jacket. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Sunday night going into Sunday morning?”

“Going into Monday morning.”

“Boss, we’re looking for habituals. Who’s going to be out there. Who goes barhopping on a Sunday night.”

“You want this happening or not. Saturday’s too soon. Monday I can’t promise. Tuesday’s unpredictable to the point of science fiction.”

Or, for anyone who’s ever been to open-mike poetry:

“What time are we talking?”

“Eight-thirty, eight-forty-five? They were having some kind of open-mike thing in the back room. I take a look and I see Ike at the podium, and he’s reading.”

“Reading out loud?” Yolanda asked.

Eric stared at her. “That’s what the microphone was for.”

“What was he reading?”

“I guess it was poetry because it had that pronouncement thing, you know, where you say each word like you’re angry at it?”

Hehe. So, yeah, great dialogue. If you need further convincing, he also wrote for The Wire and did the screenplay for The Color of Money, among other things. Go, read.

The Friday Night Knitting Club (Kate Jacobs)

2008-08-24T12:32:00.000-05:00

Why, hello! Fancy seeing you all here. Please, please don't leave! I can explain my 5-month-long absence. It all started back mid-March when I was overcome with constant nausea. I completely lost my appetite, which (for someone who loves cooking, eating, and thinking about food most of the time) was a completely foreign feeling. And the book I was reading at the time (Secret Ingredients, a wonderful collection of food writing from The New Yorker, a Christmas gift from Jim) I could no longer even look at. I was also exhausted, so much so that I pathetically watched Jim pack everything into boxes for our move. (I'm sure I must have done something to help, but I have no recollection what it could have been.)

We then spent our free time repainting the interior of our new house, trying to get the work done before our impending, very busy summer, one that included multiple business trips and vacations (Boston, Dallas, Seattle, Vermont, Philadelphia). And, back in February, I had enrolled in a UC Berkeley extension course in chemistry for work. So on plane trips and any time I could, I had out my calculator, a notebook, and my textbook, working through calculations and stoichiometry problems.

But then I found myself in O'Hare one week with a 3-hour delay, no chemistry book, and a low computer battery. So I went looking for a book, nothing high-brow or nonfiction. I wanted something entertaining but easy on the mind. And I found The Friday Night Knitting Club.

I'm having a hard time judging this book because, as my friend Amanda put it, pregnancy can make you want to watch movies like The Notebook over and over again. I can cry at a moment's notice, no problem (watch out Olympics!). So, in my enhanced emotional state, I very much enjoyed this book. The knitting part wasn't overly done or gimmicky, but was an organic part of the book. The many story threads, from different characters' points of view, interwove nicely, and it was a good, entertaining (albeit very female) read. However, the blurb on the front cover ("Like Steel Magnolias set in Manhattan") was a harbinger throughout. I found the ending unneeded and overly dramatic, but I enjoyed Jacobs's writing enough that I'll check out her other book (because there's no way she could end both books this way).

The Soul Thief (Charles Baxter)

2008-07-19T10:12:00.000-05:00

We went to see Baxter give a reading here recently, a double-billing with Richard Price (whose new novel Lush Life I’ve also just finished, and thoroughly enjoyed), in which he explained the origin of The Soul Thief. When he was young, he said, he’d had a friend in Los Angeles he used to exchange manuscripts with so they could give each other feedback. At one point, he’d had a couple stories published, and then discovered that his friend had been going around the L.A. area giving readings of his stories, presenting himself as Charles Baxter. (I may have gotten some of the details wrong here, but that was the gist of it.)

Needless to say, he had no idea what to do with this, except that he knew it was too strange not to write about. But he kept putting it off, until a few decades later, he decided to finally sit down and get it out.

The resulting novel is about the relationship between Nathaniel Mason, a poor graduate student in Buffalo, and Jerome Coolberg, the brilliantly eccentric fellow student and titular soul thief who begins appropriating parts of Nathaniel’s identity both physical and metaphysical. Eventually Nathaniel is driven to a mental breakdown, and the book skips forward thirty years, to find Nathaniel settled down in a relatively normal domestic life, until Coolberg suddenly contacts him again out of the blue, and they meet again for the first time since Nathaniel’s breakdown.

The book is shot through with doublings and mirrors—the young Nathaniel involving himself with both another odd fellow student, Theresa, and a lesbian artist, Jamie, who works at a soup kitchen with him; at one point Nathaniel and Theresa even go to a literal room of mirrors—and has Baxter’s usual sharp intelligence and careful attention to structure, character, and language. On those counts, it’s an unmitigated pleasure to read. The twist ending—which I won’t give away, but which throws a considerable amount of the rest of the book into doubt—is, from the other reviews I’ve come across, considered either the place where the book succeeds best, the place where it lets you down after an otherwise excellent read, or the place where it falls flat on its face and drags everything else down with it. (And no, don’t worry, it’s nothing so gauche as Coolberg being a figment of Nathaniel’s imagination.)

You can’t really say a whole lot about it without giving away too much, so I’ll just say that for my money, it works well enough. But I suspect it might not have if the book weren’t so short—210 pages, and small pages at that. At that level of investment, a bit of cunning trickery goes a lot further, and is a lot less likely to elicit resentment, than it might in a 400- or 500-pager.

If you’re already a Baxter fan, by all means pick this one up. If you haven’t read him before—well, you should, but I’d probably suggest starting with his well-known The Feast of Love (a National Book Award finalist, and rightly so) or with the superb story collections Through the Safety Net and Believers.

(Interesting side note: In the second half, we learn that Nathaniel has two children, Jeremy and Michael. At the reading, Baxter was asked whether Nathaniel would really give his first child a name so close to the name of his old antagonist, and what was up with that. Baxter—seeming slightly embarrassed—confessed that he hadn’t even noticed the similarity until people had started asking him about it after the book was published. It was just one of those accidental things that happens from time to time when you’re writing a novel, he said, and “I guess it is what it is.” Whether he gave his editor a hard time for not bringing it to his attention, he didn't say.)

The Angel on the Roof (Russell Banks)

2008-06-11T07:25:00.000-05:00

I bought The Angel on the Roof a few years ago, based mainly on a Banks story I’d heard on This American Life and really liked (“Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” as it turns out). Although I pulled it down and dipped into it from time to time, mostly it sat on my shelf and shamed me for never getting around to reading it all the way through.*

Well, finally the shame has ended. In The Angel on the Roof, Banks collects what he feels are the best stories from throughout his career along with nine new ones—thirty-one altogether. Unsurprisingly, the later stories tend to be the most most fully realized, and a few of my favorites, like “Djinn” and “Lobster Night,” the first and last stories as presented here, were among the new ones. Banks has ordered them more thematically than chronologically, and a few recurrent places and characters—a particular New Jersey trailer park and its eccentric inhabitants, a boy rejected by his father who drifts down to South America to fight with Che Guevara—thread through the collection in a series of loosely linked episodes. The stories themselves are largely concerned with the daily lives of working-class New Englanders, although a few venture off into weirdly comic/experimental territory. (“The Caul,” for example, is a second-person story where “you” are Edgar Allan Poe, trying to come to terms with being, quote, “Edgar Poe, author of ‘The Raven.’”)

In an introduction and author’s note, Banks also considers his motivations for telling stories along with some of the better thoughts I’ve read on the distinct pleasures and limitations offered by short stories and novels:

When I began writing, I wanted to be a poet, but had not the gift and fell in love instead with the short story, the form in prose closets to lyric poetry. In the intervening years, I’ve written a dozen or so novels, but the story form thrills me still. It invites me today, as it did back then, to behave on the page in a way that is more reckless, more sharply painful, more broadly comic than is allowed by the steady, slow, bourgeois respectability of the novel, which, like a good marriage, demands long-term commitment, tolerance, and compromise. The novel, in order to exist at all, accrues, accretes, and accumulates itself in small increments, like a coral reef, and through that process invites from its creator leisurely, circumambulatory exploration. By contrast, stories are like perfect waves, if one is a surfer. Stories forgive one’s mercurial nature, reward one’s longing for ecstasy, and make of one’s short memory a virtue.

The linked nature of many of the stories and the inclusion of the novella-length “The Guinea Pig Lady” make me suspect that Banks is more suited for (or at least more comfortable with) long-form fiction; compared with stories by writers whose talents seem to fall squarely in the realm of short stories—Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Jim Shepard, and Tobias Wolff come to mind—the stories collected here have a certain looseness to them, and lack the bite and piercing clarity that a great story from any of those five writers has. So while I enjoyed reading Angel, and I’ll have to get around to trying out some of Banks’s novels one of these days, this one isn’t going to unseat, say, Birds of America, Love and Hydrogen, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, or The Night in Question from atop my list of favorite story collections.

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*See also: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, Borges’s Collected Fictions, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I’m getting to them, I swear!

The Alice Stories (Jesse Lee Kercheval)

2008-06-04T08:02:00.000-05:00

Calling The Alice Stories a collection of linked short stories doesn’t really give a good sense of it—it’s really more of a novel in a stories, following its main character over the course of decades, from graduate student in Wisconsin, to San Francisco and Germany, back to Wisconsin, through marriage and children. It really manages to get the best of both forms: the relatively self-contained, evocative episodes of the short stories, accumulating into something that doesn’t quite have the weight of a proper novel, but certainly ends up in the general vicinity.

The stories themselves are a thorough pleasure to read, generous and funny even in the darker stories. From the first story, “Alice in Dairyland”:*

I stuck my left foot in the tub. The hot water burned like hell. “Jo Beth has a gun,” I said.

“Gun?” He pronounced the n very carefully, as if he thought maybe what I had said was gum. Watch out, Jo Beth has gum.

Hehe. Or (because I’m a sucker for a good simile), describing the aftermath of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake in the apartment of Alice’s brother, Mark:

The furniture, which Mark had inherited from our mother, was all on castors—Mom, who’d worked long and hard at becoming a typical American housewife, had had an irrepressible German mania for vacuuming under things—and the earthquake had sent it all rolling like boxcars across the clean parquet floor through the arch and into Mark’s study. The couch and table huddled with his desk like scared livestock.

Funny, vivid, and true—my favorite, and an apt description for the entire book.

(Full disclosure: Jesse Lee was co-chair of the Creative Writing department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison when I was there, and I know for a fact that she’s awesome, a great writer, and a first-rate teacher. So there.) (Also, while I’m at it, I’m throwing in a plug for my thesis advisor Judy Mitchell’s excellent novel The Last Day of the War. Hi coach!)

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*Which, as we just learned the other day, is an actual job title with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection. Who knew?

The Know-It-All (A.J. Jacobs)

2008-05-28T09:55:00.000-05:00

I actually read The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World a couple months ago, but since in those last couple months we’ve moved, found ourselves with a baby on the way,* and spent our weekends doing absurd things like thinking we could repaint our entire downstairs in two days, I hadn’t actually gotten around to reviewing it. Maria already had to renew it after it was overdue once (library fine: $0.25; result: cheerful turning over of quarter to library), and then discovered it was overdue AGAIN (library fine: $0.50; result: wild accusations thrown in my direction and a certain amount of crying, correctly blamed later on pregnancy hormones), so it seemed like I’d better get something down quick before more than just accusations started flying.

So, the short version: This was the precursor to Jacobs’s The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, previously reviewed by Maria, and takes the same kind of “immersion journalism” approach—in this case, he spends a year reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica from start to finish, all 33,000 pages, all 44 million words. Like The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs brings the funny along with some interesting facts:

Fillmore, Millard
The thirteenth president was born in a log cabin. Why doesn’t poor Millard ever get press for this? Lincoln hogs all the log cabin spotlight.

nursery rhyme
My favorite Mother Goose fact thus far: “Jack and Jill” is actually an extended allegory about taxes. The jack and the jill were two forms of measurement in early England. When Charles I scaled down the jack (originally two ounces) so as to collect higher sales tax, the jill, which was by definition twice the size of the jack, was automatically reduced, hence “came tumbling after.” Kids love tax stories. I can’t wait to hear the nursery rhyme about Bush’s abolishment of the estate tax.

He also still finds himself unable to begin relating everything in his life to his current project, shoehorning random facts into every conversation and generally driving his wife (Julie) crazy:

“Brrrr,” says Julie as she unbundles her several layers of winter wear.

“A little nippy out there, huh?” says Shannon.

“Not quite as cold as Antarctica’s Vostok Station, which reached a record 128 degrees below zero,” I reply. “But still cold.”

Shannon chuckles politely.

We sit down in the living room and Shannon starts telling Julie about her upcoming vacation in St. Bart’s.

“I’m so jealous,” says Julie.

“Yeah, I can’t wait to get some sun,” Shannon says. “Look how white I am.”

“Albinism affects one in twenty thousand Americans,” I say.

Shannon doesn’t quite know how to respond to that one.

“Anyhoo,” says Julie, “where are you staying?”

An entertaining read from start to finish, although if you’re planning on checking these out, read this one first, then The Year of Living Biblically—certain developments in the Jacobs household will be considerably more suspenseful if you read them in order.

OK, now if we can just find a couple of quarters around here . . .

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* Yikes! Names rejected by Maria thus far include Binomial, Flapjack (or Flapjill, if it’s a girl), and Tater. We’re working on it.

The Evolution of Useful Things (Henry Petroski)

2008-05-20T08:28:00.000-05:00

Maria had picked up a used copy of The Evolution of Useful Things for me, and given how much I liked Donald Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things (review), it definitely sounded like I would like it. Unfortunately, it turns out I’m not really interested enough in paper clips to take on a couple hundred pages of passages like this:

A great variety of such fasteners came into existence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and there was fierce competition among them. As in the evolution of all artifacts, each variation of fastener promised to solve some or all of the problems of the preexisting forms. One style, the Premier fastener, advertised that its points did not become crushed “as in fasteners similar in appearance to the Premier.” Fasteners of dissimilar appearance were also developed to answer the objection to the paper-piercing points altogether.

(I’ll refrain from boring everyone by listing all the reasons why that last sentence is the prose equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.)

I did make it about 80 pages in before moving on, so I can say that Petroski’s basic argument is that the commonplace phrase “form follows function” is wrongheaded and entirely inadequate as an explanation for how many of the objects we take for granted—forks, paperclips, zippers, etc.—came to be. Instead, he argues, these objects are the current result of a long, often meandering developmental process, one driven by the shortcomings of previous designs: “form follows failure,” as he puts it. Interesting enough. It turned out the book wasn’t really for me, but if you’re in to the history of these kinds of design and engineering problems, and if you didn’t blink at the excerpt above, it might be for you.

The Year of Living Biblically (A.J. Jacobs)

2008-03-02T16:27:00.000-06:00

Last fall, Jim and I were at a Wisconsin Book Festival reading (our second choice after Rabbi Harold Kushner couldn't attend), when I saw a stack of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs on a table in the back. Oh no, I thought, immediately. This reading includes the crazy bearded guy who followed the Bible literally for an entire year? His photograph (resembling a mug shot) in the festival program made me fear what may follow. But A.J. Jacobs turned out to clean up nicely (see the difference here) and was polite, quite personable, and hysterically funny. And the book is just as funny, if not more. And at the same time, it's incredibly sincere.

He describes his own personal religious background as follows: "I grew up in an extremely secular home in New York City. I am officially Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant. Which is to say: not very." Jacobs went at this year-long experiment with full force, studying as many different versions of the Bible as he could (including a hip-hop Bible, with translations such as "The Lord is all that"). He had spiritual advisers from different faiths. He "stoned" a grumpy elderly man with tiny pebbles. He had an unpaid intern has his modern-day slave. When trying to curb his lying, he made a list of his "daily violations" including, "I lied to Julie about how much internet access at Starbucks costs. I told her eight dollars instead of ten, so she'd be 20 percent less annoyed." Julie, his wife, had to put up with a lot during the year, such as a certain time each month where he explained to her that he couldn't sit any place she had, as she was "impure" then. (She solved this problem by sitting in every single place in the apartment.)

He spent time with snake handlers, the Amish, orthodox Jews, and creationists, among others on the extreme edges of faith:

It makes me think of [Answers in Genesis] resident astrophysicist, Jason. Before I left, he wanted to make clear to me that he's not geocentric---he doesn't believe the earth is the center of the universe. "Does anyone anymore?" I asked. He said, yes, there is a group called "biblical astronomers"---they believe the earth is stationary because the Bible says the earth "shall never be moved" (Psalms 93:1). Jason considers them an embarrassment

That was something I hadn't expected: moderate creationists who view other creationists as too extreme. But it will turn out to be one of this year's big lessons: Moderation is a relative term.

Jim also read this book, and pointed out that there were plenty of really funny parts that I hadn't marked, and he was right. There were just too many to note them all. I highly recommend this book.

No Reservations (Anthony Bourdain)

2008-02-11T19:00:00.000-06:00

Anthony Bourdain does not have kind words for vegetarians. Yet I like him. I think that says a lot about him (or maybe it says a lot about me). He can explain his rationale clearly: Most of the world does not have the option to eat a vegetarian diet, and when visiting these people, you will disgrace your guests by refusing the food they, who are often very poor, have prepared in your honor. (He has the same argument when it comes to the local liquor of choice.) Food unites people.

Bourdain's life has changed immensely since he first published Kitchen Confidential, which many considered to be an expose of the restaurant world. Since then, he has written many other books, and now has his second television show, No Reservations, which is on the Travel Channel. (He does not have the kindest of words for the Food Network, which was the home of his first show, A Cook's Tour.) He loves his job, and rightfully so. No Reservations goes where he wants. It's a small production crew (only five at most working on a shoot), and if a planned scene goes bad, they ditch it and see what else they can find. He does not have to take a bite of food and smile through his teeth for the camera if he doesn't like it. He does, however, often get invited to dance by the locals, something I'm sure the production crew loves because it always provides good television. (He hates dancing, looks incredibly awkward, and has on his sheepish smile the entire time.)

Bourdain's book No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach is a nice supplement to the television series. Bourdain's quick to point out in the introduction that he's "done [his] very best not to make this some cynical, cheap-ass 'companion' book to the series, filled---as those things so often are--with excerpts from voice-over scripts, a few maps, and a bunch of blurry photos taken from the show." The photographs featured are taken by the production crew on location for the Travel Channel website.

If you've watched the series, the book will remind you of some of the show's greatest moments. Each country's section has an introductory text, providing background information on the logistics of the shoot, followed by beautiful photographs. If you haven't seen the show but are a Bourdain fan, this will probably get you started watching. It's a good book to have around, for guests to flip through (though you may want to put the book on a shelf around dinnertime if you have guests who prefer not to see photographs of dead animals waiting to become dinner).

Bourdain is known to have quite the mouth. He's had words for the Food Network, for Emeril, for Rachael Ray, among others. But what I really like about him is that while he speaks his mind, he's also the first to point out when he's wrong or when his opinions have changed (e.g., Emeril can actually cook, Bourdain has noted, and is really a nice guy). Even though many people may find him abrasive, what you see is honestly what he is, and that rings true in this book.

Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Jim Shepard)

2008-02-03T14:03:00.000-06:00

I do love me some Jim Shepard. Batting Against Castro and Love and Hydrogen (which also includes nine of the fourteen stories from the now out-of-print Batting Against Castro) are two of my favorite story collections, period, and I ordered Like You’d Understand, Anyway pretty much as soon as I heard about it. If you haven’t read him before, here’s as good a place to start as any. You won’t be disappointed.

Short stories aren’t usually known for being research-intensive, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Shepard: in his acknowledgments, he lists about sixty articles and books as research sources for these eleven stories. He’s always been drawn to historical material and fictional representations of real people or real events from the past—“Batting Against Castro,” about two journeyman American baseball players in Cuba in 1951; “Nosferatu” (later expanded into Nosferatu), F. W. Murnau’s diary of making his most famous film; “Love and Hydrogen,” about two men trying to hide their homosexuality on board the Hindenburg; and what his agent evidently refers to as his Libel Cycle, including stories told from the point of view of John Ashcroft and John Entwhistle, just to name a few—and Like You’d Understand expands on that fascination. Stories here (all first person) are narrated variously by Boris Prushinsky, the chief engineer at Chernobyl; an ineffectual Roman soldier stationed at Hadrian’s Wall; Ernst Schäfer, a German zoologist ostensibly exploring Tibet to further Nazi understanding of the Aryan race while really pursuing a quixotic quest for the yeti; a relentless British explorer of the nineteenth-century Australian outback; a middle-aged Aeschylus preparing to take up arms at the Battle of Marathon; Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space; and Charles-Henri Sanson, the chief executioner of Paris during the Reign of Terror. (Several stories from Love and Hydrogen would have fit seamlessly here—“Descent into Perpetual Night,” for example, told by William Beebe, a naturalist who made the first manned deep-sea exploration in a bathysphere.) It also includes a few more straightforward stories: domestic strife in “Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian,” two star high-school football players in “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak” (which called to mind the adrenaline-fueled jet pilot of “Who We Are, What We’re Doing” in Batting Against Castro), a teenager at summer camp in “Courtesy for Beginners.”

Given all the research that went into them, the stories naturally have a great breadth and depth of detail to them, but it’s the humanity of the voices that makes them sing—characters striving to live up to their fathers’ expectations, to navigate the complex obligations of family, to make sense of the precarious worlds they find themselves in, to understand their own hearts and the hearts of others. In that sense, the historicity is almost beside the point: these are stories of unusual people in extraordinary circumstances, but also rooted in profoundly ordinary human yearnings.

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P.S. Memo to Knopf marketing department: I’m glad this was a National Book Award finalist, and I hope the round, shiny stickers you put on here help sell more copies of this excellent collection. However, I don’t like round, shiny stickers on my books. So it would be good if, in the future, you could use stickers that don’t leave behind a sticky residue that, when you try to clean it off, ends up taking part of the cover off with it. Boooo.

Naked Pictures of Famous People (Jon Stewart)

2008-01-30T09:05:00.000-06:00

Let’s be up front about this: Jon Stewart is a genius, and The Daily Show is hilarious, and America: The Book is pretty damn funny too. Naked Pictures of Famous People is a short, oddball little book (18 pieces in 163 pages) from a pre–Daily Show Stewart, and it’s unfortunate that the two places I really laughed hard were the dedication page (“For my loves—Tracey, Stan, and Shamsky. No offense, Sportscenter.”) and the “Microsoft Word ’98 Suggested Spelling and Usage” at the end, a list of suggestions his computer had made for words and phrases appearing in the rest of the book, in no small part just because it’s funny to see some of those words reappear devoid of context (“Wilford Brimley” “WILLARD BRAMBLY”; “Jewey” “DEWEY”; “Chickenshit” “NO SUGGESTIONS”). Well, OK, and also “Martha Stewart’s Vagina,” a fake decorating article in extremely poor taste that is pretty hilarious too.*

The rest is kind of uneven, in some places thoroughly dated (“Vincent and Theo on AOL,” putting Vincent van Gogh into an AOL chat room, mainly to reveal that people in chat rooms tend not to communicate in the most literate possible language; “A Very Hanson Christmas, 1996–1999,” following several years of Hanson rise and fall through Christmas newsletters) and in others covering some pretty well-trodden territory even at the time (“Lack of Power: The Ford Tapes,” on Gerald Ford being somewhat of an ineffectual dimwit as president), although with a few bright spots along the way (“The Recipe,” an outline for creating a successful entertainment awards show, all the more funny now that Stewart has hosted the Oscars; “Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Cold,” about a man who has spent decades creating a monster in his parents’ basement for the sole purpose of turning it loose at his thirtieth high-school reunion).

So: Funny at times, but you can safely stick with The Daily Show and not feel like you’re missing out.

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*Yes, you can guess what is being decorated.

Atonement (Ian McEwan)

2008-01-27T16:13:00.000-06:00

I’d been meaning to read some McEwan for a while now, and the release of a movie version of Atonement coupled with the appearance of a 50-cent used copy at a local used-book store seemed as good an excuse as any. I haven’t seen the movie, but damn if this isn’t a great book.

Of its 350 pages, the first 175 are devoted to a single day at the Tallis household in 1935, in which a sequence of misunderstandings leads precocious, imaginative, and self-absorbed thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis to accuse her sister’s lover, Robbie Turner, of a crime he had nothing to do with, and convinces both herself and everyone else that Robbie was guilty. The second section follows Robbie, who who has since enlisted in the army in return for early release from prison, as he makes his way across France with two other men during the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940; the third shifts to an older Briony, working as a nurse in London, who as an adult has realized the enormity of the injustice she brought on Robbie and Cecilia.

That’s the outline of the plot, anyway, although trying to explain the book like that is a little like trying to explain the Grand Canyon by holding up a postcard. What makes Atonement so compelling is the depth and nuance of the characters’ internal lives, and the way even scenes in which nothing much outwardly happens offer McEwan a canvas to paint those interiors in rich detail. (I understand the movie is pretty good, but it’s difficult to imagine how the complex interplay of motivations, misconceptions, wrong ideas, and imagination that drive the novel could have possibly translated to the screen.) It’s by no means an upbeat book, but it is a tremendously satisfying and cathartic one, and I was more than a little sorry when it was over. So I guess I’ll have to keep my eyes out for Enduring Love, Amsterdam, and Saturday.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver)

2008-01-23T11:03:00.000-06:00

Our town believes in good food. We are surrounded by farmland and work hard to keep the family farms alive, buying local and joining community supported agriculture programs. Our university partners with farmers on new projects and techniques for organic farming and provides information for value-added products. Two of our nationally renowned restaurants (L'Etoile and Harvest) focus on local food year-round. We aren't just consumers. We are creators. Our local pastamaker was an normal everyday guy until he returned from a trip to Italy with stars in his eyes and determination. Former chemistry teachers are reborn as specialty bakers. We have surplus of chocolatiers. Madison is a good place to eat.

Madison may be unique among cities, but it's clear that the focus on local food is growing nationwide. This current trend is something Barbara Kingsolver may not have imagined when she began writing her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, which chronicles her year of eating locally, growing much of her family's food in their own garden. The book begins with a couple chapters defending this decision, providing a synthesis of the information Michael Pollan presents in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma in a style that feels uncharacteristic for Kingsolver. Her books are full of beautiful, vivid prose that sucks you in on the first page. I was reluctant to read The Poisonwood Bible, an Oprah book club stamp on the cover providing more of a caution sign for me than one of approval, but loved the book, gushed about it the whole time I read it. So when I picked up Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I was not ready for what a friend referred to as "textbook" prose. This introduction may be useful for the Oprah Book Clubbers who don't know who Pollan is, or who aren't familiar with the arguments for eating local, but for others, who may feel disappointed at the beginning, I have one word for you: skim. Skim this part (and the well-meaning sidebars written by her husband and her oldest daughter) and you will be gratefully rewarded with the rest of the book, which reads the way I feel a Kingsolver book should.

In preparing for their year of eating locally, her daughter Lily, age 8, lover of chickens, decides to run an egg business. When Lily asks if she can have a horse, Kingsolver figures the best answer is to say that Lily can raise the money herself through her egg business. "When I was a kid, I would have accepted these incalculable vagaries without a second thought, understanding that maybe a horse was out there for me, but I'd just have to wait and see. The entrepreneurial gene apparently skips generations. Lily got out her notebook and started asking questions." After inquiring about the cost of a horse, the selling price of a dozen organic eggs, she went to her room to run through calculations.

In a while she popped out with another question.

"How much can you sell chicken meat for?"

"Oh," I said, trying to strike a morally neutral tone in my role as financial adviser, "organic chicken sells for a good bit. Maybe three dollars a pound. A good-size roasting bird might net you ten dollars, after you subtract your food costs."

She vanished again, for a very long time. I could almost hear the spiritual wresting match, poultry vs. equines, fur and feathers flying. Many hours later, at dinner, she announced: "Eggs and meat. We'll only kill the mean ones."

There are many fine, surprising, moments in this book, with constant reminders of the origins of food and food traditions, and the importance of food in our lives. Returning to traditional practices (homebaked bread, preparing the summer harvest food for winter storage) reminds Kingsolver of her own childhood rituals, such as harvesting apples, which then makes her turn to her own children:

I don't know what rituals my kids will carry into adulthood, whether they'll grow up attached to homemade pizza on Friday nights, or the scent of peppers roasting over a fire, or what. I do know that flavors work their won ways under the skin, into the heart of longing. Where my kids are concerned I find myself hoping for the simplest things: that if someday they crave orchards where their kids can climb into the branches and steal apples, the world will still have trees enough with arms to receive them.

About Grace (Anthony Doerr)

2008-01-20T11:05:00.000-06:00

I’m surprised it took me this long to get around to reading About Grace. Doerr’s story collection The Shell Collector was first-rate, and one of my favorites of the last five years or so. I think the title may have put me off a little bit—with apologies to Doerr, it sounds more than a little like a generic holiday-season romantic comedy, perhaps starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale.*

Which, of course, it’s absolutely nothing like, except maybe that there’s snow in it. About Grace is actually about David Winkler, an Anchorage “hydrologist” semi-obsessed with snow crystal formation and occasionally cursed with dreamlike visions of the future. It opens with Winkler on a plane back to America for the first time in twenty-five years, then backtracks to his life in Anchorage, where one of his visions led him into an affair with a married woman, Sandy, and then to run off with her to the Midwest. When they have a daughter (the eponymous Grace), he has a recurring vision of her drowning in a flood despite his attempts to save her. When the flood arrives, he decides that she might live if he does something—anything—except try to save her as he does in the dream. So he flees, eventually ending up in the Caribbean, where he lives the next several decades without knowing whether his daughter is alive or dead.

I wasn’t entirely sold on this book for the first hundred pages or so—the characters seemed, in a way, too much like characters in a literary novel, with passions that seemed too overtly symbolic (David with his water cycle and snow crystals, Sandy’s penchant for constructing enormous metal sculptures in their basement, to say nothing of the name of their daughter). But once it establishes David in the Caribbean, and was able to follow his purgatorial life there and then his later quest to find out whether his daughter is still alive, the book really hits its stride, and ends up in all sorts of surprising and satisfying places.

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*Oh, wait, that was Serendipity.

Lovingkindness (Sharon Salzberg)

2008-01-18T10:30:00.000-06:00

I do not do well with general news headlines. Stories of bombings, wars, possible wars, weapons, and crime do not agree with me, make me feel bad about the general state of the world, and leave me with an overall sense of helplessness about it. A while back, however, I found a strategy that helped me deal with those kinds of situations a little bit better. It was an article in Yoga Journal about the practice of metta, or lovingkindness. Basically, the article explained that when there is not much you can do about a situation (global ones, such as those mentioned above, or local ones, like a car accident you see on the way to work), you can still send your intentions to those affected by meditating on a phrase such as May you be at peace. As simple as it is, or as crazy as it may sound, this is very effective.

The book Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg fully explains the practice of metta, including the different levels of meditation (lovingkindness for yourself, for close friends, even for your enemies). Salzberg's tone is straightforward and she provides real-life applications that make the material easier to understand.

Metta isn't about putting a rosy twist on everything you see. It's about bringing a fuller sense of intention to your life, which lets you experience joy more fully and provides a better understanding of others and their own situations. Salzberg is clear that every life has wonderful moments and painful moments. She explains, however,

How we think, how we look at our lives, is all-important, and the degree of love we manifest determines the degree of spaciousness and freedom we can bring to life's events.

Imaging taking a very small glass of water and putting into it a teaspoon of salt. Because of the small size of the container, the teaspoon of salt is going to have a big impact upon the water. However, if you approach a much larger body of water, such as lake, and put into it that same teaspoonful of salt, it will not have the same intensity of impact, because of the vastness and openness of the vessel receiving it. Even when the salt remains the same, the spaciousness of the vessel receiving it changes everything.

Salzberg includes meditation exercises at the end of each chapter, which makes a good book to purchase for anyone interested in exploring metta.

Job Hopper (Ayun Halliday)

2008-01-15T10:32:00.000-06:00

I have a really fabulous job. I think I appreciate how great it is because of my previous jobs: Once I was a temp at a dairy in El Paso and had to, using a typewriter, type price orders in Spanish on carbon paper for 12 hours straight in exchange for low pay and all the cottage cheese I could eat. I also taught kids with learning disabilities, which in theory was a noble enterprise, except when I learned that management had been Disney-fied, meaning that my time teaching a student was time I was "on stage" and the break room where I could grab a snack and a quick run to the bathroom was now the "green room." Oh, and then there was that little incident where a company I worked for went in major debt, got bought out by a new company that fired 60% of the staff, saying, "We're just asking you to step out of the boat. Once we earn more money, you can step back in." (No one bought the boat metaphor.)

So I could completely relate to Ayun Halliday's book Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante. In her case, Halliday had a string of low-end day jobs to support herself while she was an actress for an experimental theatre group. While her jobs varied (nude model for an art class, security guard for a museum), her experience in the service industry provides some great stories:

The indecencies of Turman's service didn't rest entirely on my shoulders. Kyle could perform his duties with a somnabulist's grace, but all pretense of refinement hit the bricks the moment he opened his mouth.

CustomerContemplatingDessert: "Can you tell me a little more about this 'triple-layer Ghirardelli gateau with mocha-fudge ganache'?"

Kyle, after much consideration: "Wellll. . . it's a brown cake with brown icing."

As an example of some of her less-pedestrian jobs, she once spent a few hours being Bert from Sesame Street for a meet-and-greet event in a department store:

Without warning, she thrust the infant into my arms. To say I was ill prepared to receive this bundle grossly understates the situation. I hadn't held anyone that small since high school, when the neighbors, reassured by the presence of my mother right next door, had indulged my desire to earn a dollar an hour baby-sitting. The giant felt-and-papier-mache Bert head obscuring my vision did nothing to make me feel more confident that I would remember how. Equine in its ability to sense fear, the baby started to shriek and buck, twisting its muscular torso in its mad desire to get free of the monstrous creature who had taken it from its mother. It was like trying to haul a healthy young sea bass into a rowboat with my bare hands. Actually, bare hands would have come in handy right about then. The accuracy of my Muppet gloves put me at a distinct disadvantage for going the distance with that thrashing mass of fragile human tissue.

Reading this book I was reminded of how you can meet the strangest people in the workplace, people who you might never encounter otherwise, and how they can either make a bad situation bearable or much worse. I would say this book is like the movie Office Space. You'll laugh that much harder if the situations ring true.

Early Bird (Rodney Rothman)

2008-01-11T10:00:00.000-06:00

Early Bird: A Memoir of Premature Retirement by Rodney Rothman was in the bundle of books I brought with me to the airport for our Christmas vacation. But before I talk about the actual book, let me explain a little about our Christmas vacation.

We dutifully arrived at the airport at 5 am for our 6:50 am flight only to discover that it was delayed for almost 4 hours because of dense fog. We stood in line for 2 hours to get rebooked since we were going to miss our connecting flight. We found out that our new flight would get us to Portland, our destination, about 5 hours later, which wasn't too bad. A lot of flights were canceled, so we considered ourselves lucky. We went to the gate, where I proceeded to read a good half of Early Bird before our new departure time.

But then our departure time came, and our outbound plane wasn't there. We noted that the fog outside appeared to be getting thicker.

About an hour or so later, the airline worker at the counter announced that the plane was in fact "here" if you count the airspace above us "here," but that it was circling above waiting for clearance to land. Everyone got excited, until a half an hour later when the airline worker announced that the plane above had to return to Minneapolis because it could not get enough clearance to land. Our flight was officially canceled. There was no chance for us getting out that day. They rebooked us for the next day.

We managed to stay remarkably calm throughout the experience. (We ended up not getting out the airport the next day either. It was basically the same story as above, but you can replace the word "fog" with "blowing snow and ice" and "incoming plane that had been circling now returning to Minneapolis" with "incoming plane that had been circling now diverted to Cedar Rapids"), and I can tell you, with some authority, that Early Bird is excellent airport reading material. I first heard of the book at an A.J. Jacobs/Logan Ward reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival in October.

While he's between jobs, Rothman, at the age of 28, decides to check out retired life in Florida, much to his friends' surprise. One thing he learns very quickly is that most of the retired people in his neighborhood think he's someone else's grandson, not a fellow retiree. And he finds trying to explain his situation to others to be challenging, but he eventually enters some of their inner circles, such as the group of ladies who sit around the pool daily to gossip.

He notes that the value of the early bird special is very important because very few people he meets actually cook. (And free food usually trumps healthy food.) But not everything is how he expects it to be. He's invited to a Senior League softball team and quickly finds out that these guys can outplay him any day, except the game is a little different:

The opposite side of the "strong arms/weak legs" issue is this---the hitters, once they put a ball in play, run very slowly. And the fielders, once they reach the ball, have the arm strength to fire the ball wherever it needs to go. So when people do get out, it's in ways I have never seen before---like someone hitting a line drive deep into the hole in left center, and then getting thrown out at first.

Rothman also spends his time trying figure out what he wants to do with his life, and everyone offers him advice. Many of the old men want to know why on Earth he's hanging around them instead of out in the world, dating every woman he meets. (This is what they would do, after all, if they were in his position, they say.)

My parents may be considered "older" by some people (not me), and I'm sure there are people their age living in retirement communities. But I can't even begin to picture my parents in a retirement community like the one in this book. My dad has an artificial leg and plays raquetball frequently. My stepmother is getting her volunteer EMT certification (and she's a member of the sheriff's posse). And I think the differences between my parents and the people in this book kept popping up in the back of my mind as I read. I found the book to be funny, but maybe I was expecting more; it didn't quite live up to my expectations. But I was certainly glad to have it in the airport, where it made the "holiday travel" a bit more bearable.

No Touch Monkey! (Ayun Halliday)

2008-01-05T09:47:00.000-06:00

Here's a little background on Ayun Halliday. She writes the Mother Superior column for Bust magazine and is also the creator of The East Village Inky (a zine started soon after the birth of her first child, India, aka "Inky"). You can read her bio for a full plate of information on her, but I'll say two important things here: she was a theater major at Northwestern and her husband wrote Urinetown! The Musical, which she refers to in one of her books as "the golden egg."

The Mother Superior column is where I first read Halliday, and it's a welcome respite from the Huggies commercial--style parenting familiar to many of us through commercials on HGTV, TLC, and the Oxygen network. I love her writing about her kids, so when I was loading up on books to read for my Christmas vacation [now forever known as The Incoming Plane(s) That Would Never Land], I got two of her books from the library. No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late details her adventures traveling overseas, usually on a very small budget.

It starts with stories of the Eurorail variety, sleeping in train stations, hanging out with boyfriends who eventually get replaced with different ones. And those are good, but I felt a definite shift about halfway through the book, when she tells a story about traveling to Paris with her mom. This and the stories that follow, which involve her husband Greg, are even better than the ones in the beginning.

In Sumatra, she dislocates her knee, which fills with fluid, and can't walk. With no Western-style hospital or doctor available, she eventually gets in touch with an Islamic holy man:

Without warning, he pounced, pinning my thigh to the mattress as he wrenched my shin like someone throwing the lever on a seldom-used electric chair. The dislocated knee snapped back into alignment with the resounding crack of a gunshot. The audience at the window burst into spontaneous applause while I gasped, trying to regain my composure following an exquisite blast of torture that was almost over before it had began. . . As far as I was concerned, the bone setter could have declared himself the great and powerful Oz right there, but as I suspected, he was not a man to milk it. Instead he gestured that I should take a few steps. Having played the titular role in the Indianapolis Junior Civic Theatre's production of Heidi, I could appreciate the drama inherent in the moment. Weak and wary of falling, I rose to my feet and staggered unassisted to Greg, just like Clara, the lame rich girl to whom Heidi's infection can-do spirit gives the courage to eighty-six that wheelchair.

It's a good, quick read, making my high school camping trip on a Mexican beach with my friend's overly religious family, the trip where one camper got stung by a poisonous scorpion, look like a cake walk.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes)

2007-12-25T12:25:00.000-06:00

I came to The Making of the Atomic bomb sideways, after reading a brief review of Rhodes’s new Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race that mentioned this earlier book, which had won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1988. I wasn’t entirely prepared for the size of it—886 pages, not including three photo-insert sections (see picture)—but given the scope of what Rhodes has done here, in retrospect it could hardly have been any shorter.

The book is much, much more than a recounting of the Manhattan Project in the United States—which, in fact, isn’t even first mentioned (at least by that name) until page 449. Its first several hundred pages are devoted to the birth of the science of the atom, and how physicists at the beginning of the twentieth century—Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, and many others—worked to uncover its structure and components. Like other great scientific histories, it reads almost like a detective story, with all the same suspense, false turns, and red herrings along the way. As the United States enters the war and the urgency behind the bomb project increases, Rhodes also provides an almost mini-history of the war itself. It’s a tremendous, completely absorbing read, with an almost novelistic approach to detail and character, and whatever quibbles I had as I read it pale in comparison with its unqualified success as a whole.

An epigraph quoting Robert Oppenheimer at the beginning of Part 1 encapsulates one of the central themes of the book:

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.

Rhodes might equally say that the atomic bomb was not made because it was useful; it was made because it was possible to make it. Once a few basic facts had been established—that heavy atoms could be split, that doing so released energy orders of magnitude greater than any conventional chemical reaction, and that the 235 isotope of uranium could potentially provide the material for a chain reaction of fissioning atoms—making the bomb was practically inevitable:

Patriotism contributed to many decisions, but a deeper motive among the physicists, by the measure of their statements, was fear—fear of German triumph, fear of a thousand-year Reich made invulnerable with atomic bombs. And deeper even than fear was fatalism. The bomb was latent in nature as a genome is latent in flesh. Any nation might learn to command its expression. The race was therefore not merely against Germany. As Roosevelt apparently sensed, the race was against time.

Many of the scientists involved were naturally ambivalent about what they were doing, but the knowledge that someone, someday, would make such a bomb meant that they had little choice but to barrel ahead, particularly since at the time it was not at all clear how long the war might drag on, and the bomb seemed a legitimate way that they might help shorten it. And, of course, they were all drawn to the scientific problems as a challenge to be overcome; the technical hurdles to overcome were formidable and, therefore, must have been tremendously satisfying to overcome even in service of a weapon of terrible (and terribly inhumane) power.

That it would be used at least once was, in its own way, as inevitable as the building of the bomb in the first place—some even arguing that it must be used against Japan simply to justify the enormous expenditures of resources and personnel the United States had devoted to building it. (As French chemist Bernard Goldschmidt put it in his memoir, the project amounted to “the astonishing American creation in three years, at a cost of two billion dollars, of a formidable array of factories and laboratories—as large as the entire automobile industry of the United States at that time.”) Others argued that it should be used simply to demonstrate its power. Everyone could see that such a weapon was going to cause a major shift in world politics, with the more idealistic of the scientists hoping that it would ultimately lead to the end of war—and a visceral example of the terrible consequences of its use, some hoped, might shock the world onto a more peaceful course. As Rhodes describes it, it may ultimately have been dropped because of an error—a slip of the tongue by Franklin Roosevelt in a speech in which he accidentally used the phrase “unconditional surrender” in describing Allied demands for the end of the war. That subsequently became official Allied policy in part because Winston Churchill didn’t want the Allies to appear disorganized or confused in their goals. And because Japan was prepared to fight to the death before offering unconditional surrender, ultimately using the bomb seemed like the only way to stave off a wholesale invasion of the Japan at the cost of hundreds of thousands, or millions, of lives.

The descriptions of the aftermath at Hiroshima were tremendously difficult to read. Rhodes retreats to the background in favor of the voices of those who were there, quoting, page after page, short passages from memoirs and oral histories and later studies of the bomb’s brutal devastation: Hiroshima not as a land of the dead and the living, but as a land of the dead and the walking dead. It’s deeply affecting, and throws everything that has come before it—all the basic science, all the technical problems, all the fears about Germany and Japan that drove the project from start to finish—into sharp perspective: ultimately, this was the result of all that work over the decades, a hellish, blasted place of unimaginable suffering.

The paradox, of course, is that despite the horrific outcome, it’s difficult to second-guess the reasoning that drove the project and the bomb’s eventual use. If the United States hadn’t made it, the bomb may have ended up in Stalin’s hands, without an equally matched opponent as counterweight for the Cold War. The bomb was coming; the tragedy was that the only question was who would have it, and how they would or would not use it. At one point, midway through the war, General Leslie Groves, the thoroughly competent military head of the bomb project, “proposed to the Military Policy Committee that the United States attempt to acquire total control of all the world’s known supplies of uranium ore”:

That uranium is common in the crust of the earth to the extend of millions of tons Groves may not have known. In 1943, when the element in useful concentrations was thought to be rare, the general, acting on behalf of the nation to which he gave unquestioning devotion, exercised himself to hoard for his country’s exclusive use every last pound. He might as well have tried to hoard the sea.

Service Included (Phoebe Damrosch)

2007-12-16T10:02:00.000-06:00

I find the title Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter to be a little misleading. The subtitle sounds like a celebrity/socialite expose instead of a thoughtful book on the finer points of being a server at Per Se, Thomas Keller's New York restaurant. But this was apparently the publisher's meaning, even though it doesn't appropriately represent the book, given this blurb (from William Morrow): "Kitchen Confidential meets Sex and the City in this delicious, behind-the-scenes memoir from the first female captain at one of New York City's most prestigious restaurants." And if by that they mean it's about the inner workings of a restaurant and involves Phoebe Damrosch's (who lives in New York) personal life, then yes, I guess you could say that. But Tony Bourdain and Carrie Bradshaw were not even close to the first two people that came to mind while reading, I can tell you that much.

As I myself have waited tables (in such fine establishments as your local neighborhood Applebee's and everyone's favorite "Australian" steakhouse Outback Steakhouse), I was pleased to see a food-centered book written from the front-of-the-house perspective. (Michael Ruhlman does an excellent job exploring the back-of-the house perspective Thomas Keller's restaurants.)

Keller's attention to detail extends to the dining room of his restaurants and the intensity of the training his employees receive. As some may know from their experience (or, in my case, from watching Top Chef), the head chef in a restaurant is referred to as "chef." Things roll a little different in Keller's restaurant:

I had already noticed that in Chef Keller's kitchens, everyone was called "chef," not only The Chef. In fact, everyone who worked in the restaurant, from the reservationist to the coffee server, was called "Chef." It was an equalizer, a sign of respect for people's metiers, and a great way to get out of learning hundreds of coworkers' names. Not that Thomas didn't know our names, because, for the most part, he did. It was surprisingly hard to resist, and I was soon calling my mother "chef," as well as cabdrivers and guests. I even fell into the habit of calling friends "chefie," which even I found irritating. Once, when I called a man I was dating "chef," he became irate.

"Who's Jeff?" he demanded. When I tried to explain that I had actually called him "chef," he looked dubious.

"I bet you know who this Jeff is, you little Judas?"" he said to the dog sitting at the end of the bed---whom I regularly called "chef" as well.

Damrosch began working at Per Se as a backserver but quickly found herself promoted to captain:

It would be a relief to talk about something other than the bread, butter, and water selections. As a backserver, from the moment the first table entered my section to the time I had changed all the tablecloths at the end of the night, I moved nonstop. Pouring, marking, clearing, surviving the wrath of the captain who had barely survived the wrath of a chef or maitre d' and needed someone to blame. It was an exhausting job, but at least the time went by quickly. Being a captain, on the other hand, would carry more responsibility, but it would also be a hell of a lot more fun. No longer would I feel like a marking machine. I could make real connections with the guests, get to know the chefs better, and become even more familiar with the food.

The Per Se story is entertaining, especially regarding the many visits Frank Bruni made prior to his review of the restaurant in The New York Times. But what really made me keep reading was Damrosch's romance with a sommelier at the restaurant. That's where the real story lies in the book, in my opinion, making it accessible to people who aren't obsessed with food as well.

The Elephant Vanishes (Haruki Murakami)

2007-12-02T14:12:00.000-06:00

I actually thought I had read this collection before until I idly picked it up the other day and realized that, no, I’d just read a number of the stories in other places—usually the New Yorker, either when they were originally published or in the Complete New Yorker collection. The unexpected discovery of an unread Murakami book right there on my very own bookshelf naturally required immediate attention.

Unsurprisingly, The Elephant Vanishes is a great collection, full of Murakami’s usual array of directionless men, mysterious women, surreal events intruding into otherwise normal lives, and ordinary events taking on sudden and unexpected meaning. “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” which later appeared in revised form as the opening of the sprawling, phenomenal Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, is a great little story on its own. (Oddly, the novel’s sinister Noboru Wataya character is here named Noboru Watanabe, a name that Murakami also uses in two other stories, with no obvious connection between them and to no obvious end.) Others feature both weirdly inexplicable occurrences (the title story, in which an elephant and its keeper vanish mysteriously one evening, and “The TV People,” in which smallish men appear in the narrator’s apartment, rearrange his living room, and set up a television); more traditional realist stories (“Lederhosen,” in which a pair of German shorts impels a woman to suddenly divorce her husband); and events that fall somewhere in between (“The Second Bakery Attack,” in which a newly married couple decide to dispel a curse on the husband by robbing a McDonald’s of bread in the middle of the night; “Sleep,” in which a housewife suddenly loses her need to sleep).

Unfortunately, after finishing it, I examined our bookshelves closely and found no other unread Murakami works hiding there. So I guess I’ll have to wait for more until I get a chance to pick up After Dark.

My Life in France (Julia Child)

2007-12-02T14:11:00.000-06:00

I have a hard time packing things I'll actually need when traveling. For one, I can't imagine how the climate at my destination can be any different from the climate at home. (This caused a lot of problems when traveling from California to anywhere cold.) I also will either overpack reading material or not bring nearly enough. So a few weeks ago when I went to Salt Lake City for work, what I brought to read only made it through the flight there. So I spent some time once there wandering around downtown Salt Lake City in search of a bookstore. Even though I did not run into either Dooce or Ken Jennings (really, the only two celebrities I know of in Salt Lake City), I was lucky enough to stumble upon Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore, a large independent bookstore that sold both used and new books. I could have spent the afternoon there, which was good, considering that what I had seen of the rest of downtown Salt Lake City didn't have much to offer. Of all the great books they had available, I finally decided on a copy of My Life in France by Julia Child.

I loved this book. It is written by Alex Prud'homme, Julia's great nephew, who sat with Julia for long discussions of her life and looked through old photographs and letters written both by Julia and her husband, Paul. The book is in Julia's voice and he did an excellent job getting the tone just right. It reads much the way I imagine she spoke.

What impressed me most about Julia Child is how hard she worked in her life, although work might be the wrong term to use, as she seemed to enjoy almost every minute. She was an awful cook when she started, but was determined to get it right. While working on Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she constantly testing recipes, all variations of coq au vin, for example, and did significant research, so much so that the book took her and her coauthors years to complete.

She and her husband Paul had a wonderful relationship that really shines in the book. (The photograph on the cover of the book is one of many of their Valentine's day cards, which they sent in lieu of Christmas cards, partly because they could never seem to get the Christmas cards out in the mail on time.)

This is one of those books I will read again. Probably often. The tone is comforting, the story engaging and warmhearted, and she never takes herself too seriously. The book is full of fabulous passages, and here is one of my favorites:

I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make. When one's hostess starts in with self-deprecations such as "Oh, I don't know how to cook. . .," or "Poor little me. . .," or "This may taste awful. . .," it is so dreadful to have to reassure her that everything is delicious and fine, whether it is or not. Besides, such admissions only draw attention to one's shortcomings (or self-perceived shortcomings), and make the other person think, "Yes, you're right, this really is an awful meal!" Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed---eh bien, tant pis!

How SASSY Changed My Life (Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer)

2007-12-02T14:10:00.000-06:00

"So how did Sassy change their lives?" Jim asked, looking at the book on the table.

"The same way it changed all girls lives my age," I said. "Our lives sucked before we got the magazine. Then we got it. And everything was awesome."

A bit of an overstatement, yes, but how many girls out there read Sassy and then felt like it was okay to be different from the popular girls at school? And while I can't remember every issue I ever received, I remember the first one. I believe I read the whole thing with my mouth wide open. As a young girl, I was a supporter of Tiger Beat (not a subscriber, but I surely convinced my mom to get me the issue with a fold-out poster of Kirk Cameron), and when I was in sixth grade I started reading Seventeen, which made me feel like I had a long way to go before I would be cool (which, in all fairness, was probably true). But Sassy didn't look or feel like Seventeen. It introduced me to independent actors and musicians, made fun of the 90210 celebrities who could do no wrong at the time, and told me how to dye my hair with kool-aid.

And then, many years after my very first issue, Sassy disappeared for a while in a pre-Internet age where you couldn't easily find out why. A few months later, Sassy came in the mail. But I was immediately put in the defensive: Who is this super smiley bland girl on the cover? I flipped through the magazine. It was like bizarro-Sassy, Sassy without the Sassiness or any of the writers that had made the magazine what it was. I was furious. And I, apparently like almost every other Sassy reader out there, wrote them a letter expressing my discontent. For my efforts, I got an extension on my subscription, the worst possible outcome.

Since that time, "what happened to Sassy" has been a mystery to me. How SASSY Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greated Teen Magazine of All Time documents the story of the magazine from its inception to the dark unSassy Sassy days. There are stories of the conservative outrage that sparked advertisers to pull out in the early days because they felt the magazine was too explicit about sex, the writers who were in their early teens who wrote as if they were talking to their younger sisters, the story of how Sassy paved the way for such great magazines as Bitch and Bust. Jesella and Meltzer do a good job presenting the whole story, which for me helped make what had become almost a myth (the undeserved downfall of the most amazing teen magazine ever) into a story that involves real people not always making the best decisions.

I will say that the design of the book is a bit odd. It's a two-column magazine style, but the font is rather large for the look, and there are no photographs. (Not that the design of the book would have affected my decision to read the book, but the part of me that spends every weekday working in publishing can't let it go.)

This is a quick read and good one, filled with lots of inside stories about the staff (including interesting stories involving Spike Jones, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love). Highly recommended for every girl who read Sassy.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Mark Haddon)

2007-11-24T10:27:00.000-06:00

I’d heard a lot of good things about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, so when I saw it at a used-book sale for our local library (along with Stephen King’s Everything’s Eventual; review), I snapped it up. Told from the point of view of Christopher Boone, an autistic boy in Swindon, England,* it opens with Christopher discovering that a neighborhood dog has been killed, and then—as he is a great admirer of Sherlock Holmes—his attempts to uncover the killer.

Interestingly, Haddon said in a Powell’s interview that he actually didn’t set off with the character in mind:

Dave: Where did you find the original impulse to write this novel? I know that it wasn't a matter of you thinking you'd write a book about an autistic boy, as some might presume.

Mark Haddon: No, very deliberately not. And I think if I had done that I'd have run the risk of producing a very stolid, earnest, and over-worthy book.

It came from the image of the dead dog with the fork through it. I just wanted a good image on that first page. To me, that was gripping and vivid, and it stuck in your head. Only when I was writing it did I realize, at least to my mind, that it was also quite funny. But it was only funny if you described it in the voice that I used in the book.

So the dog came along first, then the voice. Only after a few pages did I really start to ask, Who does the voice belong to? So Christopher came along, in fact, after the book had already got underway.

That voice is everything in a book like this, and Haddon nails it—the affectless, deadpan voice allows a uniquely paradoxical blend of sadness and humor, one that can slip down all sorts of side roads without losing the continuity of the story. At just over 200 pages (with more than a few diagrams), it’s a quick, wonderful little read, and highly recommended.

__________
* Which, if you’ve seen the British version of The Office, you will always think of as the location of the Wernham Hogg branch absorbed into David Brent’s Slough branch.

Super Natural Cooking (Heidi Swanson) and A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen (Jack Bishop)

2007-11-22T11:45:00.000-06:00

I've been meaning to write a post about these two cookbooks for a long time now, and today seemed like the most appropriate day. I love Thanksgiving, and besides the friends and family (to which we are forever grateful), this day is all about the food. Yes, even for vegetarians. Jim and I both like Thanksgiving so much that we're spending today with some good friends and then tomorrow is Thanksgiving 2, The Sequel (thank you, Doug, for the official name), where we're going to fix more of our favorites to last through the weekend.

Lately I've been cooking mainly from three cookbooks: Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison, which I've written about before, Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson, and A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen by Jack Bishop.

Heidi Swanson is the creator of 101cookbooks.com, where she posts recipes from her many cookbooks, with her adaptations, helpful tips, and her beautiful photography. When I first picked up Super Natural Cooking at a Berkeley bookstore, I debated buying it. I had heard great things about it, but after a quick look, placed it down. At first glance, it seemed too complicated, with the ingredients too exotic. Luckily, I picked it up again at a different book store not too long after. And this time I gave it more than a glance. Once I actually looked at the recipes, I realized that they weren't that complicated, that many of the ingredients could be purchased at a natural foods store, and some were quite simple.

Super Natural Cooking is a vegetarian cookbook, but many of the recipes could easily be paired with your choice of meat or fish. It focuses on whole grains, such as quinoa, farro, brown rice, and many others. It also has an excellent section on what grains are best suited for different meals, different kinds of sweeteners (agave, brown rice syrup), and oils. The book includes my favorite preparation of quinoa (with some dry white wine, sauteed onions and mushrooms), an absolutely amazing "sushi bowl" that has a citrus-soy dressing that makes you want to eat every last grain of rice, peanut butter krispy treats, a panna cotta made with coconut milk, and many other hits. Her recipes are adaptable to each season and the vegetables you have on hand. There's a lot of room for making the recipes your own, or varying them each time you make them. For example, the raspberry curd cake can be make with any kind of fruit butter (I made it with pumpkin butter0, but you have to read the introductory text in that recipe to figure that out, so it pays to spend some quality time with the book before deciding on a recipe. My only complaint is that its organization is lacking. It's arranged by "Superfoods", "Cook by color", etc., which is not that helpful when you're trying to find an exact recipe. I find myself using the index a lot, but this has never stopped me from using the book.

A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen is arranged by season, focusing on seasonal produce. I first got this book right after Christmas last year, and I chose it because the author, Jack Bishop, is an Editor for Cook's Illustrated, which is one of my favorite magazines. I was immediately ecstatic about it. The first two recipes I made from it, carmelized onion enchiladas and a creamy tomato soup, were phenomenal. And over time, I've realized that the strongest recipes are from the winter section, with some other very good ones in the fall and spring sections. So far, I've found the summer section lacking, but I think that may have more to do with
the overall bounty of fresh produce available in the summer. There's not much you need to do to vegetables in the summer, and most of the time you don't want to spend too much time at the stove then anyway. I love the seasonal focus of this book, especially that he doesn't list fresh tomatoes as an ingredient in the winter (only cherry tomatoes, which really are your best choice this time of year). I've made some amazing meals from this book, and others have just been okay, but again, there's a lot of flexibility here, and sometimes just looking at one of his recipes will give me an idea for my own take on it.

So enjoy cooking and eating today, and eating tomorrow and throughout the weekend. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Everything’s Eventual (Stephen King)

2007-11-22T09:27:00.000-06:00

Between the ages of 12 and 18, I read, by my best count, 196,000 pages of Stephen King. He gets a bad rap in literary circles—mainly, I suspect, by people who either haven’t read much if anything by him, or by people who dislike horror and science fiction and the like on general principle—but his best work has always been about more than just monsters and the supernatural. The Stand is about an epic post-apocalyptic confrontation of good and evil, yes, but it’s also about the dangers inherent in human civilization, and whether we’re doomed to destroy ourselves. It is about a supernatural alien clown, but it’s also about the fears of childhood, and what it means to grow up. And, as his writing memoir On Writing showed, he cares a lot more about the craft of telling stories than he generally gets credit for.

His short fiction can be even more uneven than his novels—for every lovely, elegiac ghost story like “The Reach,” you also tend to get one like “Graveyard Shift,” about a group of mill workers being devoured by mutant rats. But I had high hopes for Everything’s Eventual, which I picked up at a used-book sale for our local library and which includes four stories published in the New Yorker, one of which won an O. Henry Award.

I have to admit I was more than a little alarmed by the first story, a semi-horror, semi-comic take on premature burial in which a man wakes up, unable to move or speak, as he’s about to be autopsied. (The way in which they eventually discover he’s alive provides the comic element.) Apparently he chose the order of the stories at random by drawing from a deck of Tarot cards (yes, yes, very good, Mr. King), but as can be the case with his short fiction, there simply wasn’t much to it other than the premise itself. (I’m looking at you, mutant rats.)

Fortunately, it just turns out that the Tarot cards were a bad idea, because that was hands-down the weakest story of the bunch, and the next one, the O. Henry winner “The Man in the Black Suit,” was a major relief. He includes a short paragraph or two on each story explaining how they originated and giving other thoughts on them, and interestingly, he says of this one, “I thought the finished product a rather humdrum folktale told in pedestrian language. . . . When The New Yorker asked to publish it, I was shocked. When it won first prize in the O. Henry Best Short Story competition for 1996, I was convinced someone had made a mistake. . . . This story is proof that writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.” Indeed. The frustrating thing about King is that sometimes he does seem to write stories that have depth and power to them by accident, while he’s occupied elsewhere with getting his monsters out onto the page. “The Man in the Black Suit,” about a boy who meets the devil during an afternoon of fishing, might be humdrum by the standard that no one is devoured by mutant rats,* but that’s because the story isn’t really about meeting the devil—it’s about a boy confronting mortality for the first time, both his own and that of those he loves. In that sense, it’s as good a story as he’s ever written.

Like his other collections, Everything’s Eventual can be uneven: alongside the opener of “Autopsy Room Four,” I’d be hard-pressed to make a case for “In the Deathroom” or “The Road Virus Heads North” as worth rereading, and I suspect “The Little Sisters of Eluria” would be of little interest to anyone who hasn’t already been sucked into the world of his thoroughly excellent Dark Tower books. But alongside “The Man in the Black Suit,” you also have stories that reach for deeper issues—like the title story, about a supernaturally gifted young man, working in a go-nowhere job and bullied by a coworker, who winds up recruited into work that lets him truly use his talent for the first time, but at the cost of deluding himself about both his employers and what he’s actually being paid to do. And those stories, like his best work, are well worth rereading.

__________
* I promise this is the last time I’ll harp on the mutant rats.

See You in a Hundred Years (Logan Ward)

2007-11-19T22:05:00.000-06:00

It's no secret I'm a fan of the Reality TV, and I especially like the PBS brand of reality TV, one of the first being The 1900 House. Not only did they have a modern-day family live in a Victorian-era house, they were British. Even better! The show was fantastic and led to such spin-offs as The Frontier House,which, Jim was solemnly tell anyone who will listen, is what we were watching the evening of Randy Johnson's perfect game. For the record, this was before I knew what a strike zone was, so you can hardly blame me.

Well, apparently others also liked The 1900 House, including Logan Ward, author of See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America. He liked it so much that he thought the idea was the perfect remedy for his modern life in New York City. Ward moved his family (his wife and young son) to rural Virginia, where they subsistence farmed using only the technologies that were available in 1900 for an entire year.

Ward was a recent presenter at Wisconsin Book Festival---I was able to attend his session as Rabbi Kushner was unable to attend his own earlier that day. Seeing Ward in person prepared me well for his book. He was thoughtful, polite, and a little subdued, well, he may not have seemed subdued if he had been paired with someone else besides A.J. Jacobs (whose latest book I have on hold at the library and will review as soon as I get it). I think any of us would have appeared subdued next to A.J. Jacobs.

Ward's book is very thoughtful and a good read. Sometimes the prose is little too lush for my likings, but overall I enjoyed it. What was most interesting to me was my own reaction to Ward's 1900 rules. I didn't get as angry at him as I did at the PBS family when he "broke" his own rules of 1900 living. Maybe it was because his rules were self-enforced, or that his version of breaking the rules did not seem to be as frivolous as the TV family. I also considered the character of people who would enter a project such as Ward's, for a book, not for TV. Think about it, with no producers to check in on you, would you follow self-made rules? Would you be able to make it through the whole project? I'm not sure I would.

The Braindead Megaphone (George Saunders)

2007-11-12T11:03:00.000-06:00

George Saunders is one of the few writers I’ll read anything by, whose new books I’ll go buy without knowing anything about them except that they’re by George Saunders. His short stories has always been terrific (if lately gone from a little weird to a lot weird), and The Braindead Megaphone, his first collection of nonfiction, has the same eye for the absurd and gigantic heart that made those previous books so good.

The book includes several long travel pieces—exploring Dubai (first section head, “Put That Stately Pleasure Palace There Between Those Other Two”), staking out the Mexican border with a group of Minutemen (“I announce myself as an Eastern Liberal, and am thereafter treated like a minicelebrity or lab specimen, a living example of a rare species they’ve heretofore only heard about on Fox”), and visiting a Nepalese boy who has supposedly been meditating without food or water for seven months (“At 7:20, oddly, a car alarm goes off. How many cars in deep rural Nepal have alarms? It goes on and on. Finally it dawns on me, when the car alarm moves to a different tree, that the car alarm is a bird”)—as well as essays on politics (the title story, comparing the state of modern American media to a pretty good party that unfortunately includes a guy shouting things into a megaphone at everyone else; and two essays revolving around the “fluid-nation” People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction), writing (“Thank You, Esther Forbes,” about Saunders’s young love for Johnny Tremain; “Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra,” about his slightly older love for Kurt Vonnegut; “The Perfect Gerbil,” a nice piece on story structure examining Donald Barthelme’s “The School”; and “The United States of Huck,” his introduction to the Modern Library paperback of Huckleberry Finn), plain weirdo-ness (“Ask the Optimist!,” in which a ludicrously upbeat advice columnist gets into a fight with one of his readers), and the British, in front of whom he conducts a reading with Margaret Atwood:*

Margaret Atwood is a famous Canadian genius. Our crowd consists of approximately three hundred Margaret Atwood fans, with the remainder of the crowd being my fan. After the reading, Margaret and I were overrun by our fans, crowding around her to get her to sign our books. It was at this point that my fan (Larry) changed his mind and became Margaret’s fan, and, in a fury of conversion, scribbled out my autograph and thrust my book at Margaret, while unfavorably comparing my work to Margaret’s, leaving me with zero (0) fans! (Thanks, Larry! To hell with you, Larry! I may not be as talented as Margaret Atwood, but I am less funny, and it has taken me a lot longer to write a lot fewer books! So there! Do I come to your work and disavow you, Larry?)

Hehe.

The cover may be among the most garish of all time (see left, but don’t look too long unless you have a ready supply of ibuprofen), but what’s inside is, as usual, inventive, insightful, generous, and hilarious, and a thoroughly enjoyable read.

And George, even if we see you read with Margaret Atwood, we promise to be your fans too.

__________
*Not sure how I ended up with a 260-word sentence there. Yeesh.

Apartment Therapy (Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan)

2007-11-11T15:47:00.000-06:00

Apartment Therapy (the website) is a place for small-space living, with helpful tips for home decor, paint colors, storage, ecofriendly living, and all around cool camaraderie. Originally started in NYC, there are now separate online areas (San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles), so there's a little bit of local flavor. Apartment Therapy (the book), as its subtitle states, is "the eight-step home cure," designed to help turn your apartment into a home. The author (and website founder) Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, an interior designer, lives in a 250-square-foot West Village apartment so knows a little bit about living small.

I love the website. I get four of their blog feeds---Chicago, the Kitchen (which has a lot of great mostly vegetarian recipes), Home Tech (how we found the best way to hide all our home office cords under the desk), and Green (lots of ecofriendly tips, many helpful). Sometimes, however, I have a problem with the tone (there's a lot of anonymous "we" in their prose when I think it's really just the current blogger's opinion) and the focus is usually on modern styling, which can be somewhat limiting.

The book suffers from a few problems. First, it's a design book without any photographs. I'm not an interior designer, and hand-drawn floor plans showing me layouts of furniture do me little good. (I can't really tell the difference between the "befores" and "afters" with that kind of drawing.) Apartment Therapy the website has interested online participants join in on The Cure (as they call it) at least once a year, and I can get more out of their posted before/after pictures than I can from the book.

Second, this book is really focused at small apartment people, especially in New York. One week has a major task of cooking at least one meal at home. At least one? I see the good intentions behind it, but it's not applicable to me. Another thing he asks his readers to consider is getting rid of their televisions. Again, I understand we're talking very limited square footage here, but I find this request of his a little odd, given that he's been featured on at least two cable television home decorating shows (Small Space, Big Style and Mission: Organization).

Overall I find his use of metaphors a little too overreaching and some of the writing overdone (the couple who was having problems conceiving, and then once they revamped their bedroom the woman was pregnant. I'm sure it really happened, but it's a little cloying in the book), there are some very helpful tips in here, such as focusing on one room (easier to see what you need to get done, more likely to finish), what height to hang art (much lower than you think, though Jim thinks Gillingham-Ryan might be really short), some tips on furniture dealers, and what colors to paint certain rooms.

The Honourable Schoolboy (John le Carré)

2007-11-11T10:55:00.000-06:00

I had The Honourable Schoolboy reserved at our local library branch when we happened to go to a street fair nearby, which happened to feature a book sale by another local branch, which happened to have an old paperback copy on sale for 50 cents. Who could say no?

This book picks up where the excellent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (review) left off, with George Smiley now head of a British Intelligence in complete disarray after the discovery of the Soviet mole in Tinker. In casting about for a way to get off the defensive, Smiley begins searching for operations that the mole had shown an unusual interest in suppressing, and comes upon one in Hong Kong—large payments made to a mysterious bank account by Smiley’s counterpart in Moscow, Karla, tied somehow to drug shipments at a tiny airline business.

Schoolboy has the same attention to detail and character, and the same wrestling with the nature of spy work—the constant drive, as he puts it at one point, “to be inhuman in the defense of our humanity . . . harsh in defense of compassion”—that made Tinker and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold so good. It did, however, suffer from unfortunate bouts of Research Syndrome—apparently le Carré made a number of trips to Southeast Asia, and at times the book starts to read more like journalism than a novel, with long stretches of Jerry Westerby (the eponymous Honourable Schoolboy) hoofing it around Cambodia and Laos and Thailand and meeting people and seeing various horrible things in various war-torn regions. The passages do theoretically tie into the story—Westerby is searching for assorted unsavory characters on Smiley’s orders—but he probably could’ve gotten the job done in a hundred or so fewer pages, and they definitely slowed things down to a crawl for a while. (I get the feeling that they worked better at the time the book was first published, when the Vietnam War had barely ended and the Khmer Rouge were still in power in Cambodia, and the events described in Schoolboy would have had more immediacy.)

Schoolboy also felt a little more distant than Tinker—the stakes not quite as high, the subject perhaps not quite as close to le Carré’s heart. (Kim Philby, the model for the mole in Tinker, had ended le Carré’s own career with British Intelligence.) But it’s still a compelling read, and I’m still looking forward to the last of the trilogy, Smiley’s People.

(Also, note to the cover designers: When you have to hyphenate two words in your title? Maybe time to bring the font size down a few points.)

Is This a Great Game, or What? (Tim Kurkjian)

2007-10-31T21:40:00.000-05:00

Any watcher of Baseball Tonight knows what a Web Gem is. For those of you who are staring at your screen blankly, 1. Baseball Tonight is a daily ESPN show that airs during baseball season. It is awesome. 2. A Web Gem is a spectacular defensive play, the best of which involve outfielders catching a ball while running backward into a wall, or a shortstop just barely throwing out the runner at first while on his knees. They are also awesome. This past season, there were a few new features to Baseball Tonight, including the Kurk Gems (named in the spirit of the Web Gem but for the baseball writer Tim Kurkjian). A Kurk Gem goes something like this: Tim Kurkjian's voice over (in a tone that is somewhat professorly with a touch of monotone, but in a likeable way) telling you that X player hit into X number of double plays in the month of July, which is a new record, but only in away parks and only off left-handed pitchers named Joe. It's a lot of information thrown at you at once, some of it weird, some of it awesome. In this past season's Rangers/Orioles game at Camden Yard where the Rangers beat the Orioles 30 to 3 (mind you, in the Oriole's own field), the Baseball Tonight crew got Kurkjian, who was at the park that night, on the phone. The joy in his voice rang through loud and clear, his voice cracking as he tried to not to get his words out through his laughter, he said something like, "And the Ranger's closer! He got the save!" It was probably one of his happiest moments.

Tim Kurkjian's book Is This a Great Game, or What? is awesome. It is awesome like Web Gems are awesome. It's full of stories, much like the Rangers game I mentioned above. I think I read half the book aloud to Jim because it was so funny that I kept laughing so hard. I'm afraid to pick small sections to highlight here because I might not do them justice, so consider this a small sampling:

On how the White House was a perfectly good place to discuss Pokey Reese:

[Baseball writers] are seamheads; we are the unlaundered, often overweight, usually unathletic baseball nerds who are trained only to cover baseball. We have covered winter ball games, Instructional League games, Arizona Fall League games, simulated games, and we have traveled two hundred miles to watch a "B" game on a back field in spring training. The White House? We know more about pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander than we do about Grover Cleveland. The opera? When you say Placido, we think Polanco, not Domingo.

On the not so smart players:

I promised never to reveal the name of the player who was told in the early 1990s that Major League Baseball might be moving a team to Washington, D.C. And the player said, "The league can't give Washington a team. It already has two teams, Baltimore and Seattle."

That guy wouldn't do well in the geography category on Jeopardy, but Jeopardy was on TV in the Charlotte Knights (AAA) clubhouse one September day in 1994. I was doing a story on the minor-league play-offs since there were no play-offs in major leagues due to the players' strike. I was watching the show out of the corner of my eye. The Final Jeopardy category was Poetry. Suddenly, a Knights' player ran out of the player's lounge screaming as if he had won the lottery. "Did he get the Final Jeopardy answer in Poetry?" I asked, incredulous. "Oh no, that's not how we play," said Tim Jones, a Knights infielder. "The way we play, if you guess the Final Jeopardy category, you win. Hey, we're baseball players."

On Los Angeles Angels manager Mike Scioscia's reports he makes players give during Spring Training:

One spring, Angels pitcher Jarrod Washburn, and a couple of young players, were assigned to cover a local ostrich festival. For $150 and a couple of autographed balls, Washburn, the team prankster, convinced the workers at the festival to bring the ostrich to the Angels' clubhouse the next morning. . . . "At 9:30, in they walked with the ostrich. It was chaos. Guys were screaming with laughter." Scioscia was one of them. "[Pitcher] Ramon Ortiz jumped in his locker," he said. "He was holding on to the walls and yelling, in Spanish, 'Get that big chicken away from me!' Washburn smiled and said, "It was hilarious. I don't think anything we ever do will ever top the ostrich."

First baseman Scott Spiezio did . . . in a way. "He was given the word 'erudite' to research," Scioscia said. "He got all mixed up and researched the wrong word. He researched 'hermaphrodite,' not 'erudite.' So he's up there talking about all this sexual stuff, and everyone in the room is laughing. From 'caveat' to 'hermaphrodite,' I've learned a lot of new words."

I agree completely with Kurkjian when he says that the best four words in the English language are "Pitchers and catchers report." This book is for baseball lovers, baseball geeks, and baseball nerds. Read it, but only in places where it's okay to laugh out loud. It would make a great present for your friends who love baseball, even if you don't understand the game at all.

Overcoming Life's Disappointments (Harold S. Kushner)

2007-10-31T19:57:00.000-05:00

The Wisconsin Book Festival, an annual free event every October, took place a few weeks ago. Madison is a city full of readers, and the festival takes over downtown over the course of 5 days with many venues.

The Sunday of the festival there were two sessions that I wanted to attend, but the timing on them was pretty bad. One went from 4 to 5:30 and the other from 6 to 7:30. For any normal person who does not have the tendency to cry when they get too hungry or who does not go to bed at 9 so they can go to the gym at 5:30 in the morning, this would not be a problem. For us, however, this was monumental. The only way we were going to get to eat dinner that evening at a reasonable hour was for me to make a decision: Which should we attend? I ended up choosing the first session, Rabbi Harold Kushner discussing his book Overcoming Life's Disappointments. Like the Dalai Lama, Rabbi Harold Kushner gets quoted a lot in Body + Soul magazine, and I've had a couple of his books on my list to read. So we headed downtown, got to the Orpheum Theatre for the reading, and there were signs on the doors: Kushner's reading has been canceled. Due to bad weather in Boston, he couldn't make it. Jokingly, I said to Jim, "Well, if I had already read his book, then I would know how to overcome this disappointment." (It turned out to work out fine. I got to go to the other session I wanted to, but I'll talk more about that one in future reviews.)

Being neither Jewish nor particularly religious, I didn't really know the story of Moses (or really any Biblical stories beyond that whole Jonah and the whale thing). But Kushner uses Moses's story fairly seamlessly as the basis for his book about handling life when life is not what you expect. Even more, Kushner also quotes Buddha scholars, therapists, movies, and other popular culture references that I found quite surprising. It's a really nice read and helps to remind you about what is good in people and how you can continue to be a good person to others (keep your promises! Kushner's really big on that one). I read the book not really having any large disappointments to overcome at the time (or now for that matter), but still felt like I got a lot out of the experience. It made me thankful for all I have and it made me feel more conscientious of how I treat others. I think I was an especially kind and helpful person to everyone I met for at least a week after I finished it. (This is not saying that I am not kind in everyday life, but that week I was the person who would REALLY go out of my way for you. Like when I offered to take a man's luggage through the turnstiles at the CTA station in Chicago, and then was fairly surprised when he agreed by giving me the piece of luggage that was almost half my size.) I'll definitely read more of Kushner's work.

Searching for Bobby Fischer (Fred Waitzkin)

2007-10-18T14:42:00.000-05:00

I’ve been wanting to read Searching for Bobby Fischer for a long time—I’ve seen the movie three or four times, and I’m one of those people (sometimes to Maria’s dismay) who enjoys sitting on the couch with baseball on the TV and a book of tactical chess puzzles in his lap. It was inexplicably not available in our previous library system (despite my repeated detailed submissions in their “Suggest a Purchase” section), but fortunately it didn’t come to that with our current system.

It’s always interesting to read something after having seen the movie version of it, to see how they’ve reshaped the material to fit into a two-hour film. Both focus, of course, on the early life of young chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin. The movie sets up its conflicts in a straightforward, concentrated, dramatic way—the slow, serious chess of Josh’s teacher, Bruce Pandolfini, vs. the wild blitz chess of Vinnie, the Washington Square Park vagrant; the all-consuming, completely chess-focused life of Josh’s rival, Jonathan Poe, and his almost robotic desire to destroy his opponents, vs. the Waitzkins’ struggle to have Josh live some semblance of a well-rounded life. The Vinnie character in the movie, played by Laurence Fishburne, is essentially a wholesale invention, or at least a composite—a man named Vinnie is mentioned briefly in the book, but wasn’t anyone especially notable, and certainly didn’t come to the national championship with Josh and his father. Bruce Pandolfini wasn’t ever thrown out of the house by Josh’s mother after he comes down hard on Josh for not concentrating during a lesson. And, interestingly, at the national championships that end both the book and the movie, Josh didn’t beat the boy the Jonathan Poe character was based on—a kid Josh’s age named Jeff Sarwer, whose father really did keep him out of school so he could study chess full time—nor did he offer a draw in a won position out of empathy for his opponent: instead, he was able to work a tricky draw out of a lost position to finish in a tie, leaving Josh in first place based on the tiebreaker rules. (I was delighted, however, that at the end of the book Josh actually says the line to his younger friend Morgan that ends the movie.)

So although the movie is terrific (with a first-rate cast—highly recommended if you haven’t seen it), it naturally takes plenty of liberties with the source material to fit the story in, and leaves plenty out. The book approaches the same themes in a more complicated and often darker way. Waitzkin struggles constantly with what chess is doing, or might do, to his son and to their relationship. He wants his son to succeed, to fulfill the potential of his inexplicable talent for this game, but is always aware of the sacrifices that have to be made to reach the highest levels. He worries about whether working Josh too hard will cause him to lose his love for the game and quit it, and at the same time worries about the kind of life he might have if he does continue, and succeeds—the book is shot through with grandmaster-level players living in poverty, unable to support themselves on the one thing in life they are truly exceptional at, seemingly taking little joy in grinding out one win after another but at the same time unable to stop playing.

The book was also written in the 1980s, when the Cold War was still on and the Soviet Union still intact, and one of the longest and most interesting sections of the book that was left completely out of the movie is devoted to a trip Waitzkin, Josh, and Pandolfini took to Moscow in the summer of 1984 so Waitzkin could cover the first Karpov–Kasparov World Championship match. In contrast to America, chess is a serious, well-respected pursuit in Russia, where top-level players could live comfortable lives supported by the state. But at the same time, the game was almost absurdly politicized: tournament players were regularly asked to throw games if it would help certain favored players do well, or prevent certain disfavored players from winning (particularly Americans and Jews), and the battle between Karpov and Kasparov was fought as much behind the scenes as on the board, with each maneuvering through their political connections to gain advantages or to force concessions from the other side. When Waitzkin tries to arrange to visit Soviet chess classes for children, he’s told that that won’t be possible; all the schools are close for repairs. When he finally gets a teacher to let him sit in on a class, the visit is conducted like an undercover casing of a military facility—the teacher nervous, urging the Americans not to speak at all, to just nod if anyone speaks to them.

Waitzkin also goes to considerable lengths to track down a high-level player named Boris Gulko whose outspoken political views had left him under house arrest, and who, when he was allowed to play in tournaments, was excised from news reports of the results (if he won, they would simply not mention the winner):

I was told that Gulko would be willing to discuss the politics of Soviet chess, as well as the problems of Jewish chess players in the Soviet Union. . . . “To find Gulko, you’ll need to contact a man I know who is a well-known grandmaster, an expert in the endgame,” said the Russian American, who gave me a name and a Moscow phone number. “He is also a KGB agent, but don’t worry, he is totally corrupt. The first day you meet him, give him a present worth fifteen or twenty dollars—a digital watch, maybe. Don’t expect him to speak candidly at first. Most likely he’ll seem apathetic. But I know this man, and you’ll have aroused his curiosity. He will suggest dinner. During the meal present him with pornographic books and magazines; then the chances are he will arrange for you to meet Gulko.”

In case this approach didn’t work, the man gave me the name of a second grandmaster to bribe with a few digital pens; he wouldn’t be as expensive. He cautioned that I must never mention the name of the second grandmaster to the KGB grandmaster because they were enemies.

The KGB seem to be everywhere, although they rarely know for sure when or if they’re being monitored. When they are planning to leave, Waitzkin has to go to the American embassy and arrange to have them transport his notes and interview tapes back to the U.S.—a process arranged by writing on scraps of paper while the Americans loudly assured Fred that they could not help him with anything, to fool the KGB bugs—while he went back with fakes in case anything was confiscated. (“What madness, I thought. My chess notes were hardly espionage material.”)

If you like chess or liked the movie, definitely give the book a read. And for those who are interested—Josh eventually gained an international master ranking (one level below grandmaster), and is also a Tai Chi champion.

---

Update: Also, by the way, it looks like Jeff Sarwer has reappeared in the chess world this year after a long absence, and that his sister is writing a memoir of their childhood.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz)

2007-10-16T17:10:00.000-05:00

The New Yorker does this thing that drives me crazy, where they publish excerpts from soon-to-be-released novels without mentioning that they are excerpts from soon-to-be-released novels. So I read them, occasionally think “Man, that was a good story,” and then four or five months later, when I hear that the writer has a novel out, discover that this “short story” was actually an excerpt from that novel. Ian McEwan’s Saturday (or “Saturday,” as it was presented in the magazine) leaps to mind. So does Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (or “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”).

But although I might wish they gave some little indication when what they’re publishing might have three or four hundred more pages to it lying around somewhere, it’s difficult to fault them on Oscar Wao. They published the excerpt in 2000, four years after Díaz’s excellent debut story collection Drown—and now here’s the novel, published seven years after that. So it’s been a while. Fortunately, all that time seems to have been well spent, because this is a first-rate book.

Narrated by Yunior, an ultra-male, girl-chasing Dominican American (although with hidden corners of nerdery), the story revolves around a cursed Dominican American family and both the life they have in the United States and the ties they still have back in the Dominican Republic. Although the focus initially seems to be on Oscar—a nerd’s nerd, a virgin’s virgin, unable both to stop himself from falling in love with unattainable women and to get those women to fall in love with him—one of the main pleasures of the book is the way it continually opens up, drawing back, turning to different characters, incorporating lengthy footnotes on the history of the Dominican Republic under the dictator Trujillo, who both seems to lurk at the edges of every scene and is central to the fukú curse that sits at the story’s center. It moves back first to a lengthy section on Oscar’s mother, and then back again, later, to her own parents—an upper-class family ruined by Trujillo, her sisters dead, herself left orphaned for years as a young child before being rescued by her aunt.

The narrative voice is a slangy mix of street talk, uncountable allusions to other books (mainly sci-fi and fantasy), and Spanish. The Spanish was certainly the most frustrating part of the book, because although some of it was clearly incidental, other parts seemed hugely important—and online translators can only tell you so much, and don’t do well at all with the idiomatic speech Díaz uses so heavily. It helps me a little bit to have Google tell me that, in its opinion, Tú ta llorando por una muchacha means “You ta crying for a girl”; less so to have Coño, pero tú sí eres fea return “Jesus, but you do you are ugly.”

“I don’t write enough,” Díaz admits in a Powell’s interview (in response to the weirdly job-interviewish question “What do you consider your greatest weakness as a writer?”). I hope I don’t have to wait eleven years for another book, but hey, if that’s what he needs to produce a terrific novel like this, I’ll happily see him in 2018. (And Junot, I’ll see if I can learn some Spanish by then.)

Little League, Big Dreams (Charles Euchner)

2007-10-15T21:56:00.000-05:00

For me, it all started with a skinny, short second baseman nicknamed "Mouse." It was during ESPN's broadcast of the Little League World Series one year, and as soon as Mouse stepped up to the plate, I said two things to Jim: 1. Look how cute he is! and 2. What's a strike zone?

I love the LLWS, so I was incredibly excited to read Charles Euchner's book Little League, Big Dreams, which focuses on the 2005 LLWS. Unfortunately the book has some major structural problems. First, the book assumes you know who won the 2005 LLWS. (That being a year that we moved and were without cable for a month, I had no idea. Plus even if I had watched the game at the time, I probably wouldn't be able to tell you now off the top of my head.) This is incredibly distracting and takes away some built-in tension/organization/reason to keep reading to find out what happens. Second, the organization of the book doesn't make sense to the reader. The most organic structure for this kind of book (and one that has been used quite successfully in other baseball books such as One Day in Fenway) is the natural time frame of the World Series tournament format. When reading Little League, Big Dreams, it was easy to forget who was on which team and which team made it to what level in the series. And why some chapters went where (or why some material went in them in the first place) was unclear, such as a section about pushy parents in a chapter about faith and religion in the sport. There's also a chapter titled "The Greatest Little League World Series Ever" but it was never clear to me why this particular one was the greatest. I really wanted this book to succeed. But in the end, I was disappointed.

I did come away with some new knowledge about Little League. For example, it's not considered the highest level of competition for youth baseball (with PONY leagues, travel teams, and Ripken baseball all above it), but what it has that the others don't is the television broadcast.

For now I'll just have to settle with grown men playing baseball in a grown-up World Series (as the Cubs are out, go Rockies!).

The Century in Food (Beverly Bundy)

2007-10-05T09:07:00.000-05:00

Three words. Coffee table book. I don't understand coffee table books. Are they that popular that they get their own category? Who buys them? Do people who buy them place them on their coffee table and read them there? Or do they buy them for their guests? And wouldn't it be kind of rude to ignore your guests and expect them instead to read your coffee table books while you go about your business? Seriously, if anyone understands the mystery of the coffee table book, please share it with me.

The Century in Food: America's Fads and Favorites by Beverly Bundy is a coffee table book. It presents information without information, meaning it tells you some things, but not all things, or even related things. For example, at the end of the first chapter is the recipe for Perfection Salad. Aha! I thought. She's going to tell the story about this unusual salad and where it came from. No. Just the recipe. Which would seem pretty random and meaningless to anyone who didn't know the history of the salad.

There are some neat historical ads, photographs, and quirky bits of information, with the best sections being the timelines presented by decade from 1900 to 2000. Here are some highlights:

1902: Nabisco introduces Barnum's Animal Crackers. The crackers appear just before Christmas in boxes topped with white string so they can be hung from Christmas trees.

1911: Procter & Gamble introduces Crisco, the first solid vegetable shortening. The product is a hard sell for women who had been taught to cook with butter and lard. To promote its product, the manufacturer suggests glazing sweet potatoes with brown sugar and Crisco, and spreading sandwiches with Crisco mixed with an egg yolk, Worcester-shire sauce, lemon juice, and vinegar.

1917: The hamburger becomes a "liberty sandwich" and sauerkraut is "liberty cabbage" during World War I.

1927: Pez is introduced in Austria as a peppermint breath mint for smokers. In 1948, the plastic dispensers are introduced and the United States begins to manufacture the brand and market to children.

1937: Sylvan Goldman . . . devises a shopping cart by fabricating lawn chairs into a frame that holds two hand baskets. He figures if the shoppers can carry more, they'll buy more. But the first shopping cart is a hard sell. Men find the carts less than masculine and women don't see the point---they're accustomed to shopping often. Finally, Goldman pays "shoppers" to cruise the stores using the carts.

1946: Earl W. Tupper invents resealable food containers. The inventor's plastic, a lightweight but sturdy "Poly-T," was probably first used in gas masks worn on European battlefields.

1958: Tang Breakfast Beverage Crystals is introduced nationally. . . Contrary to playground myth, Tang is not invented for the astronauts, although it does go into space with Gemini 4 in 1965 and on all manned U. S. flights throughout the rest of the century.

1962: John Glenn says that his first meal in space, applesauce through a tube, is nothing to write home about.

1974: The first product printed with a UPC (Universal Product Code)---a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit Gum---is scanned at March Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. An IBM engineer is credited with the patent, although several companies are working on the project at the request of a group of grocery stores.

1980: Whole Food's Market opens in Austin, Tex., with a staff of 19. By the end of the century, through growth and acquisition, the chain is the No. 1 natural-foods grocer in the U.S.

19992: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barbara Bush duke it out with rival cookie recipes published in Family Circle.

The Reach of a Chef (Michael Ruhlman)

2007-10-05T08:55:00.000-05:00

I've previously reviewed two other Michael Ruhlman books (The Making of a Chef and The Soul of a Chef), and The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen is the third book in this informal series. Ruhlman’s writing is good, the kind of good where you don’t even notice it because you’re so caught up in the story he’s telling. I am also a frequent reader of his blog, which I recommend because it not only provides good food discussion, but he actually engages in conversation those who comment, and you just never know when Anthony Bourdain will stop by and guest blog, going on one of those juicy, expletive-laden (but in the best way possible) tirades it is in his nature to do. Life is never boring at ruhlman.com.

Ruhlman begins this book by explaining how confused we are as a country about food:

Since the end of World War II, this country has been out of sync with the natural order of sustenance and nourishment, embracing processed foods, revering canned goods, “instant” breakfasts, and frozen dinners, then elevating fast food to a way of life with such force that its impact has become global, then simultaneously abhorring animal fat for health and dietary reasons, while still becoming the fattest community on earth, then turning around to proselytize on diets composed entirely of salt-rich protein and animal fat, and banishing bread of all things---the staff of life was now the evildoer, and just when bakers in this country had figured out how to make it well. We completely upended the food pyramid we’d always accepted as undeniable and good common sense. Ours is a country that for years held out a silver cross at eggs. Eggs are bad for you. Eggs! The most natural food on earth, a symbol of life and fertility, a compact package of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates whose versatility in the kitchen, pleasure at the table, and economy at the store is unmatched by any other food. We learned to hate the egg! Do you need any further proof that something is seriously wrong with this country that teaches people to avoid eggs?

He also returns to the Culinary Institute of America (the subject of the previous two books mentioned above) to see how the school has changed since the rise of the celebrity chef:

[Eve Felder] suggested the change in the dynamic may have begun in 1989, when the school first gave students teacher-evaluation sheets, officially called "Feedback Forms," to fill out at the end of each block. This was a revolutionary idea (and not a very pleasant one) to a chef who had been pretty much allowed to do what he wanted in his own kitchen. "My staff gets to evaluate me? Grade me?"

The Reach of a Chef focusing on some newer talents, two especially: Grant Achatz and Melissa Kelly. Grant Achatz (who worked for Thomas Keller at the French Laundry) is the executive chef of Alinea, which is among the first Chicago restaurants to get the a four-star New York--restaurant amount of press for the quality of the food and the sheer creativity. (“the PB&J. . . A peeled green grape, still attached to its stem, had been glazed with peanut butter, sprinkled with chopped peanuts, and rolled in a very thin slice of bread, then lightly toasted”). [A brief update on Grant: Doctors recently found a cancerous tumor in his tongue, needing aggressive cancer treatment. The standard treatment would mean loss of part of his tongue and most likely loss of his taste buds, which would be a tragic fate for one of the country’s top chefs. However, a team of doctors at the University of Chicago is working on an alternative treatment for him, trying to take care of the cancer, while saving his sense of taste. So far the initial stages of the treatment have been quite successful. I do wish the best for Grant.] Melissa Kelly seems to be at the opposite spectrum as Grant. While both chefs are centered in classic technique, Melissa takes a different approach, cooking food her grandfather would love. She and her husband own Primo in coastal Maine, located in an old Victorian house and have a large garden on the grounds they use for their restaurant, focusing on fresh food, new menu items daily. No foams, no deconstruction. Real fresh food, heirloom food, cooked well.

Ruhlman also discusses “the branding of the chef”---Wolfang Puck soups, chef’s outposts in Vegas, Emerilware---and talks some about both Rachael Ray and Emeril. Oh, and the chef consensus on Emeril? While everyone may not love what he’s doing on TV, they all say what a nice guy he is. Even Tony Bourdain.

If you like food, read Michael Ruhlman. That's really what it comes down to. Read his books, read his blog, watch him in the Cleveland episode of Bourdain's No Reservations. Watch him on his upcoming show The Next Iron Chef America (which starts this Sunday on the Food Network). I don't think you'll be disappointed.

The Cheater's Guide to Baseball (Derek Zumsteg)

2007-09-27T20:09:00.000-05:00

Derek Zumsteg wants to make one thing clear: in baseball, there are “cheaters,” and then there are cheaters. The difference between the two is often subtle, and things that most fans might consider cheating (think of that pine tar on Kenny Rogers’s hand in game 2 of last year’s Cardinals-Tigers World Series) are actually considered “cheating” by most of the players themselves (recall that Tony La Russa didn’t make nearly as much of a fuss over that pine tar as, say, Joe Buck did).

Sticky stuff on a pitcher’s fingers to get a better grip on the ball? “Cheating”—at least as long as the hitters don’t come back to the dugout complaining that the ball is doing crazy things. Stealing signs? “Cheating”—at least as long as the as the team doing the stealing doesn’t have a guy sitting behind the scoreboard with a pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie.

Zumsteg, in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, notes that that all sorts of things that are technically against the rules—a runner sliding far outside second base to break up a double play, a shortstop dancing across the base without actually touching it to make that double play, a catcher blocking home plate—are a traditional and accepted part of the game, so much so that many might be surprised to learn they’re illegal even in a technical sense (I know I was). And without players trying all sorts of rule-bending maneuvers early in the game’s history, the game would be less strategically rich today.

The distinction he makes between this sort of “cheating” and real cheating is a basic one: If everyone did this, would it fundamentally damage the game itself?* A hard slide into the opposing shortstop at second base does not. Throwing games (the 1919 Black Sox) or betting on baseball (Pete Rose) does. So does steroids, although the line here is less clear. (Does it damage the game when a pitcher takes steroids to help recover from an arm injury that, in the past, would have ended his career? Probably not—in fact, the game probably benefits. But what if those steroids, incidentally, also add a couple miles per hour to his fastball?)

Cheater’s Guide covers the broad and colorful history of cheating both with and without the quotation marks, from the win-at-all-costs approach of the 1890s Orioles (who routinely tripped and elbowed opposing players trying to run the bases and distracted and intimidated umpires, but also invented the modern hit-and-run and other strategies), to spitballers like Gaylord Perry and corked bats like Sammy Sosa’s, to the unexpected power groundskeepers have over visiting teams, to—yes—the notorious Black Sox, Pete Rose, and Barry Bonds.

The book is informal and colloquial throughout—broadly informative, but not scholarly by any means—and full of weird and occasionally unfortunate sidebars based on extended riffs that don’t quite work (“A hypothetical conversation between the commissioner and a team stealing signs”; a whole series of “What a conversation with Pete Rose would be like if he hit your car while you were standing next to it and you caught the whole thing on video”; the almost non-sequitur-caliber “A discussion of Jason Giambi with Fulbright scholar Jeff Shaw”). But it’s a quick read on an interesting subject, and certainly worth picking up for anyone wondering exactly what a spitball does, what Will Clark has to do with pitchers covering their mouths during mound visits, and how they can finally start corking their own bats.

__________
* A rule that brought back unpleasant memories of all-night arguments about Kant while studying for an undergrad philosophy final.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Michael Chabon)

2007-09-23T15:54:00.000-05:00

I’d read a few of Michael Chabon’s stories before being handed a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (thanks, Mom!), a sprawling, genuinely amazing novel about the intersection of comics, World War II, escapism, revenge, art, and love that includes Antarctica, the premiere of Citizen Kane, and Salvador Dali in a diver’s helmet. (What’s not to like?) I’ve read it three times, and I assure you that the Pulitzer committee got this one right.

So it’s not really a criticism to say that his new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, doesn’t match Kavalier and Clay—it’s still an idiosyncratic, inventive, thoroughly enjoyable ride, with the same fluidity in the writing that has always been Chabon’s greatest asset. Set in an alternate time line in which Israel failed and a temporary Jewish home was established in Sitka, Alaska (as was apparently actually proposed by Franklin Roosevelt at one time), the story follows alcoholic, divorced, entirely unhappy police detective Meyer Landsman after a murdered man is discovered in the hotel where he’s been living. Hanging over every moment is the imminence of Reversion, when Sitka ceases to be an independent district for Jews and becomes just another part of America, one where Sitka’s current residents may or may not still have homes. Reversion has brought a sense of weary fatalism to almost everyone in the story, one that comes out again and again as Meyer investigates the case and confronts both the barely concealed underworld of Sitka and the various broken pieces of his own life, including a sister who may or may not have been murdered herself, his ex-wife, and their long-ago unborn baby.

If I have a criticism, it would be that at times the story leans to heavily into the conventions of detective noir—Meyer too much the alcoholic, unhappy detective, his partner Berko (despite having the singular distinction of being a half-Jewish, half-Tlingit giant) too much the buddy sidekick, the ghosts of Meyer’s past sewn up a little too well into his current troubles. But the vibrancy of the setting, the pleasure of Meyer’s stubborn, self-destructive quest—the pleasure of all stubborn, self-destructive quests in the face of tidal historic forces—and Chabon’s writing make up for a lot. Sure, Landsman is too much the alcoholic, unhappy detective, but I’m a sucker for a well-turned metaphor, and it’s difficult to resist exuberant ones like these:

According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with the crude hammer of hundred-proof brandy. But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead. . . . The problem comes in the hours when he isn’t working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from a blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down.

Or this description of Meyer as a boy playing chess with his father, a skilled player unable to understand his son’s incapacity for the game:

Satisfied, burning with shame, he would watch unfold the grim destiny that he had been unable to foresee. And Landsman’s father would demolish him, flay him, vivisect him, gazing at his son all the while from behind the sagging porch of his face.

Or this sleazebag American muckraker attempting (and failing) to speak the Yiddish native to Sitka:

“I want a story,” Brennan says. “What else? And I know I’ll never get one from you unless I try to clear the air. So. For the record.” Once again he lashes himself to the tiller of his Flying Dutchman version of the mother tongue.

It’s the kind of writing where, whatever other flaws there are, every once in a while you have to stop reading and shout, “Yes, dammit! That is how it is done!”

How to See Yourself as You Really Are (The Dalai Lama)

2007-09-22T15:56:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, we walked to the library to pick up the books I had on hold. Once inside, I noticed that all the hold books were behind the librarian's counter, meaning I had to talk to an actual person to get my books, and that this actual person would check out my books for me, looking over the crazy assortment of books I've chosen (a book on cheaters in baseball and one by the Dalai Lama? Really?) and judge me. I've spent the last two years in California, where I didn't interact with one single person to get my library books. I searched for them online, requested them online, and then in the library I picked up my books from an unguarded hold shelf, and used a self-service checkout machine. No one needed to know about the Bollywood dance workout DVD I checked out. No one.

But so far, after two trips of what will become many, this actual personal interaction hasn't been bad at all, which is good, as they're going to see a lot of me, given my library book habit. And really, it's the Wisconsin Public Library's system's own fault I'm hoarding their books right now---I have a lengthy list of books to read, many of which I couldn't find in the San Jose system, and the Wisconsin system seems to have them all.

How to See Yourself as You Really Are by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (oh that the poor Library of Congress worker who got stuck working on the cip data for this book. I can see her saying, the official author name is what?) is one of the books on my list, probably jotted down after reading an article in some issue of Body + Soul magazine. I thought, if you want to know the secrets of true happiness, who else would you go to but the Dalai Lama, himself?

It turns out that the Dalai Lama and I are two very different people. And we live in two very different worlds. The book is translated and it reads like it is, so much so, that I had a hard time connecting to it. Most of the language was abstract, even in the examples given, and one example he kept mentioning was sewing (I have no idea why), and how sewing may seem to be a beneficial task, but it may keep you from seeing yourself as you really are. (Okay, he didn't say it that way, but he did point it out as a form of procrastination---which in my life, is usually the opposite case. Like right now? I'm writing this review, procrastinating from the sewing I need to do!)

I don't need a hipster version of the book, or it dumbed down, but I do need a version that applies more to my life as it really is. I'm sure the Dalai Lama and his translator get his message across to many people, but in the end, the book made me feel like I would never really see myself as I really am, according to the Dalai Lama, because I do not speak the language to get there. But I'll try some other books that may be more on my level and report back again. In the mean time, if you see me, let me know.

Underworld (Don DeLillo)

2007-09-04T08:25:00.000-05:00

A friend and I once had a lengthy late-night argument—as only heavily inebriated college-age people can—about what meaningful distinction there was between liking something, and actually thinking it’s good. Playing devil’s advocate, I was arguing that it’s absurd for someone to say, “I don’t like X, but I think it’s good”—that this was a straight cop-out. “No, I didn’t really like 2001, but I thought it was good.” By not liking it, don’t you really think, deep down, that 2001 was bad in some basic way, even if you can’t articulate it? Or, similarly, if you claim to like something while simultaneously admitting it’s bad, doesn’t that mean that you secretly think it’s good?

Which is a roundabout way of getting to the book I was slogging through before our Great Cross-Country About-Face: Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Because here’s the thing about DeLillo: He’s very good. Very, very, very good. And I just don’t like his books at all.

Granted, I’ve only read one other: White Noise, seven or eight years ago. At the time I was on in a postmodernist phase, reading a lot of Donald Barthelme and John Barth and Robert Coover and Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino and so on, and DeLillo’s name popped up from time to time in a similar context, so I figured I’d try him out.

What I remember (vaguely) was thinking that White Noise felt far too anesthetized—the atmosphere, the characters, everything had this sort of cold fluorescence about it, drained of blood and emotion. Given the book’s subject, I don’t doubt that this was intentional. I didn’t even really think it was a bad book. In fact, it was undoubtedly a very good book.

But I didn’t like it. I didn’t particularly care what happened in it, or what happened to the characters. At the time, I was willing to put up with a lot from books where caring about the characters wasn’t really the point. But I find that lately that’s become much more of a deal-breaker for me. (Although Barthelme can still hook me with his sentences alone, and with his gonzo, Dr. Seuss-ish logic.)

I had the same reaction to Underworld as I did to White Noise. It’s obviously very, very good. Great writing. Highly accomplished. But when I had to return it to the library a few days before we moved, 350+ pages in, I didn’t feel any real need to finish it. I just didn’t care about any of these people. In spite of whatever ostensible passions they had, or longings, or betrayals, there was something robotic about them. One of them was having an affair: Didn’t care. One of them was tracking a baseball: Cared a little bit, but not a lot. And so on.

You get the impression that DeLillo himself doesn’t particularly care for his characters—that rather than involving himself with them, or approaching them with empathy or understanding, he’s critiquing them. Or using them as a vehicle to critique “society” or “modern America” or some similar abstraction. And I find that I’m just not interested in reading an 800-page critique these days, even one as well crafted as this. If I’m going to live with these people, I want to care about them. I want to care what happens to them, and I want to care about what they care about.*

I should make two caveats. First, of course, is that I obviously didn’t finish the book. It could be that DeLillo weaves everything together marvelously in the second half, and that had I finished it, I would’ve ended up liking it. But somehow I doubt it.

The second is that the long prologue, originally published separately as a novella titled Pafko at the Wall, is phenomenal. Loved it. Fully worth reading on its own. I had read it before as part of an anthology, and it was actually because I had liked that novella, and because Roger Kahn kept mentioning Andy Pafko, that I started reading Underworld in the first place. Set at the 1951 Giants-Dodgers game when Bobby Thomson hit his famous pennant-winning home run for the Giants, it starts with a bunch of kids leaping the turnstiles to get into the game and then wends its way around the stadium, picking up Russ Hodges in the radio booth, Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover in their box seats, the players themselves, and one of those turnstile-leaping kids who first befriends the man sitting next to him and then ends up fighting with him over the game-winning ball.

The ball is one of the centerpieces of Underworld—the kid takes it home and, unable to resist, shows it off to his father, who steals it later that night with the intention of selling it. The book then jumps forward into the 1990s and works its way backward, with the ball popping up now and then with different characters, one of whom is trying to track its lineage of ownership back to the game itself, to prove that the ball is really the ball. Finishing the prologue was, unfortunately, the high point for me for the next couple hundred pages. The original theft of the ball was resonant in all sorts of ways, and involving in a way the rest of the book was not, maybe because the kid’s complicated attitude toward it—as a prize, as a talisman of power, as a bit of luck in a down-and-out sort of life, and then as an embodiment of the naïve trust he had in his father and his own need to impress him—had a genuine emotional heft to it that everything else lacked. I wouldn’t be surprised, again, if that were intentional, and if DeLillo was making some point about how America had changed since then, how nobody cares about anything anymore the way people cared about that game, and that kid cared about that ball. But that made it awfully hard to care about the book, too.

But enough of that. Next up, the book I read instead of going back to Underworld, which I both liked and thought was good: Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

__________
* This is a very different thing, and much harder, from making characters “likable.”

Our (Soon to be Over) Haitus

2007-08-24T20:34:00.000-05:00

It's almost over, really! We moved. Really far away. And it turns out that you don't have much time for reading a lot of books when you do that. Or when you start working again the day after you arrive at your new home. Or when you go on an extended business trip to Boston just 10 days after that. But we have been reading the following:

Harry Potter. (Maria and Jim) That's all we're going to say on the matter (especially considering how grateful we were to have made it this long without having it spoiled for us).
Little House in the Big Woods. (Maria) Because, you know, nothing makes you feel better about living out of boxes without cable TV than reading about life as a pioneer, when the best form of entertainment you had was when your father blew air into a pig's bladder, tied it up, so you could bat it around like a ball.
The Penske Towing Guide. (Jim, with some minor cursing and dismayed, confused expressions) Even with illustrated directions in the paper version, this work is mysterious. And the first thing they tell you is, do NOT back up. Ever. You try driving 2,000+ miles without backing up.
The new issue of Real Simple Family. (mostly Maria, but Jim read Dean's letter) I wouldn't normally pick up this magazine, but this issue features some of our favorite people, ones we really know (Dean Bakopoulus and his two-year-old Lydia, with photographs taken, I'm guessing, by Dean's wife, the lovely Amanda Okopski) and ones we feel like we know from reading their blog all the time (Heather Armstrong and her daughter Leta).

We got our library cards yesterday, so we plan on getting some more reviews up here soon. In the meantime, what have you been reading?

Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing About It a Game (Roger Kahn)

2007-07-01T16:30:00.000-05:00

If he does nothing else in Memories of Summer, Roger Kahn makes it clear that he writes a damn fine opening sentence. First sentence of the book:

I saw my first World Series game in 1920, seven years before I was born.

Opening his newspaper account of the last game of the 1952 World Series, when he watched his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers—with their fans’ never-ending cries of “Wait till next year”—lose to the Yankees, winners of four Series in a row:

Every year is next year for the Yankees.

Covering Willie Mays’s first spring training game back from the army in 1954, in which he hit a 400-foot home run and caught a center-field blast by running 50 feet straight back and catching it over his shoulder:

This is not going to be a plausible story, but then no one ever accused Willie Mays of being a plausible ballplayer.

Nicely done, sir.

Maria rescued this book from a pile at her work (along with Barbarians Led by Bill Gates; review). I read quite a few baseball books as a kid,* although I don’t think Kahn’s best-known book, The Boys of Summer, was among them. I suspect I’ll have to read it now. Kahn is, first of all, a superlative writer. I’m not generally one for weather descriptions, but when I hit this one, I stopped dead, then re-read it, then re-read a few more times:

An autumn shower fell on Brooklyn Thursday morning, making puddles in the sidewalks along Sullivan Place and sending little rivers running down the cobblestone gutters of Bedford Avenue toward Empire Boulevard and Fred Fitzsimmons’ Bowling Lanes.

Kahn had early aspirations toward poetry, and it shows—that sentence is perfectly balanced, and I could probably go on at length about its r and s and z sounds if I wanted to cross over into Book Reviews for Former English Majors instead of Book Reviews for Real People.** I’ll leave it at this: I’ve re-read it maybe five more times just now, and it’s not getting old.

Memories is a memoir starting with Kahn’s youth in Brooklyn, sailing through his brief attempt at college, and then settling down into the serious business of sportswriting as an art and career. Like Boys, it devotes many pages to the Dodger teams of the 1950s, which he covered as a newspaperman, but also equal space later to his coverage of both the Giants and the Yankees.

This is a baseball book, of course, but it becomes clear early on that Kahn is also tackling larger issues of midcentury racism. He naturally spends a lot of time on Jackie Robinson, a hero of those 1950s Dodger teams, a man Kahn knew and greatly admired. In the last third of the book, after he’s graduated from the daily grind of newspaper reporting into freelancing and columnist jobs with the nascent Sports Illustrated and Newsweek, he also devotes considerable space to Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. On the field they were peers; off the field, one was black and one was white.

He tells a story that he didn’t write about at the time, for various reasons, when a casino security guard asked him to keep Mays away from the dice tables, and the casino manager, finding out who (the now furious) Kahn was, tried to bribe him into not writing about it, explaining more or less that they just didn’t want black men at the dice tables because they could get too close to white women. This contrasts sharply with a scene elsewhere in the book, when a racist editor of his more or less demanded that he write about Mantle because Mantle was “a clean-cut, nice-looking white kid.”

And it contrasts all the more sharply—and not accidentally, I’m sure—in the face of Kahn’s portrait of the two men: the irrepressible, gentle intelligence of Mays; the alcoholic, unfaithful, often crude Mantle, Herculean and supernaturally gifted but also walled-off, even from himself. He professes, when Mantle’s adult son asks whether his father was a nice guy, to think that he was indeed a nice guy, but I wonder whether he would be as willing to reach that conclusion were Mantle a writer colleague, or an acquaintance, rather than one of the all-time baseball greats. When he went to visit the retired Mantle in 1971 to write a piece about him for Esquire, Mantle showed off a machine to help teach switch hitting:

“You still swing?”

“Oh, sure. Mostly lefthanded these days.”

“I’d like to watch.”

“Set it at ninety, will ya. I’ll hit a few.”

He didn’t miss. The tethered ball came in at a constant speed and could not curve or drop, but his batting eye, against ninety-mile-an-hour stuff, was phenomenal. That and his power. He swung so hard that each swing made him grunt. He hit for ten minutes and never missed. I had never seen anybody swing so hard. As best I could tell, some power came up from his battered legs, but most seemed to flow out of the upper body and the mighty arms and wrists. Swing. Crack. Grunt. Swing. Crack. Grunt. His timing meshed arm strength and wrist strength into an instant of phenomenally violent contact with the baseball. Again and again and again. It was only 68 degrees, but he was sweating when he limped away. I wanted to cheer.

Watching Mantle hit, Kahn gives way to the fan he is at heart, and the excesses of Mantle’s personality are inseparable from the excesses of his talent and power. Much can be forgiven for a fan.

Memories is an excellent read from start to finish. Kahn apparently has a photographic memory (literally—his father had one too), which no doubts helps the novelistic level of detail and scene and drama he’s able to bring to a memoir. Highly recommended for fans of baseball—or just fans of great writing.

__________
* Particularly if you count the ten or fifteen times I read the Mickey Mantle autobiography The Mick between the ages of about nine and thirteen.
** A line I’ve probably crossed more than once. These footnotes aren’t helping.

What to Eat (Marion Nestle)

2007-06-30T13:14:00.000-05:00

"I have no idea what other people do in their spare time on business trips, but I visit supermarkets," says Marion Nestle in her book What to Eat. Marion and I would get along very well. I like to visit health food stores on vacation. (The first time I suggested to Jim that we do this on our very first vacation together, he thought I was crazy.) It's like seeing old friends (Hi Annie! Hi Nell Newman!) and new ones local to that area. Part of Marion's job is to explore how supermarkets operate, and she states early on in her book that supermarkets do not usually have your best interests in mind. "The foods that sell best and bring in the most profits are not necessarily the ones that are best for your health, and the conflict between health and business goals is at the root of public confusion about food choices."

What to Eat has been touted in the food community as The Book To Read, and I have to say I agree wholeheartedly. Nestle's tone is straightforward and she's not out to judge you, the reader; she's there to inform you about things she understands you probably don't know [and she explains the (often political) reasons why you don't]. Here are some basic rules from the book.

"The basic principles of good diets are so simple that I can summarize them in just ten words: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables. For additional clarification, a five-word modifier helps: go easy on junk foods."
Avoid food marketing claims. This one's tough because they are everywhere. And they're not only touting certain brands but also certain foods, or certain food properties. Current hot marketing topics include the probiotics added to yogurt, special tea drinks, even cereal; and soy and/or green tea added to every product on the sun. [Oh, and yogurt? Real (nonsugared) yogurt is a good choice, but the majority of yogurt available in stores is not a health food. It is a dessert.]
Don't eat only certain fruits or vegetables at the expense of others because of their touted health claims:
My office file of studies extolling the special nutrient content or health benefits of one or another fruit or vegetable includes work on apples, avocados, broccoli, blueberries, cherries, cranberries, garlic, grapefruit, grapes, onions, pomegranates, raisins, spinach, strawberries, and tomatoes, among others. I conclude from this that all fruits and vegetables have something good about them, even though some have more of one good thing and others have more of another. That is why we nutritionists are always telling you to eat a variety of foods. It's the mix that is most beneficial and most protective.
Do not worry about getting enough protein. Americans get plenty of protein: "unless your diet is unusually restrictive, you will get enough protein as long as you get enough calories."
While Nestle doesn't suggest everyone should become vegetarians, she does suggest that most people should lower the amount of meat they eat, and points out that "[t]he meat industry's big public relations problem is that vegetarians are demonstrably healthier than meat eaters. If you do not eat beef, pork, lamb, or even chicken, your risk of heart disease and certain cancers is likely to be lower than that of the average meat-eating America. And as long as you eat any other animal product at all---dairy, fish, or eggs---you can avoid eating meat without affecting the nutritional quality of your diet."
If you're going to eat fish, you should be informed on the kind of toxins in that fish and how often it is safe to eat it. Don't necessarily trust the seafood industry for this information. (Nestle points out a huge difference between the safety of albacore tuna and tongol tuna that no one in the tuna industry is going to talk about.) The best place to find out this information (besides this book) is Seafood Watch, a guide created by the Monterey Bay Aquarium that is frequently updated.
"'Fruit concentrate,' according to the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, is a euphemism for sugars." So a label that says "Made with real fruit" or "100% fruit juice" does not necessarily mean that it is healthy. Read the actual ingredients and then decide.

What to Eat is a book to purchase, read, and then keep around for reference. I finished reading this book earlier this week, and it already influenced the choices I made shopping at the grocery store today and it will continue to do so in the long run.

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Daniel J. Levitin)

2007-06-17T21:44:00.000-05:00

Music is one of those things—like walking, having a conversation, or catching a fly ball—that it’s easy to take for granted until you start wondering how, exactly, we do that. (Or, in the case of catching a fly ball, how other people do that.) After all, listening to music is really just sensing changes in air pressure. Why, and how, do we turn those into rhythm, melody, song? Why do different instruments sound different? What happens when our brains follow a beat? How much of music perception is hard-wired, and how much is learned? Why do we like the music we do? Why do some songs get stuck in our heads, even when we don’t like them?

Levitin, a session musician and recording engineer before pursuing a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience, spends a lot of his time thinking about these kinds of questions, and This Is Your Brain on Music is an attempt to answer some of them. The bad news is that a lot of the time, the answer eventually adds up to “We don’t really know yet, not really.” The good news is that what they do know is fascinating, and gives at least a tantalizing glimpse into the still largely mysterious world of the brain.

For example: When we hear a harmonic tone—a plucked guitar string, a note from a flute—we’re not actually hearing a single vibration, but many different vibrations, typically in integer multiples of the fundamental tone (e.g., a 100 Hz fundamental has overtone vibrations at 200 Hz, 300 Hz, etc.; a 210 Hz fundamental has overtone vibrations at 420 Hz, 630 Hz, etc.). Our brains resolve that into the basic fundamental note—what we actually hear is a 100 Hz note or a 210 Hz note. In fact, our brains our so good at this that if you artificially create only the overtone frequencies, we will still hear the correct fundamental note.

OK, so that’s pretty interesting. How about this:

Petr [a graduate student] placed electrodes in the inferior colliculus of the barn owl, part of its auditory system. Then, he played the owls a version of Strauss’s “The Blue Danube Waltz” made up of tones from which the fundamental frequency had been removed. Petr hypothesized that if the missing fundamental is restored at early levels of auditory processing, neurons in the owl’s inferior colliculus should fire at the rate of the missing fundamental. This was exactly what he found. And because the electrodes put out a small electrical signal with each firing—and because the firing rate is the same as a frequency of firing—Petr sent the output of these electrodes to a small amplifier, and played back the sound of the owl’s neurons through a loudspeaker. What he heard was astonishing: the melody of “The Blue Danube Waltz” sang clearly from the loudspeakers. . . . We were hearing the firing rates of the neurons and they were identical to the frequency of the missing fundamental. The overtone series had an instantiation not just in the early levels of auditory processing, but in a completely different species.

I bet that was a pretty mind-blowing moment.

The book ranges over a wide variety of subjects, from what happens in our brains, exactly, when we listen to music; how we categorize it, and how that relates to our capacity for categorization in general; how we acquire our taste in music; how and why music affects us emotionally; what makes expert musicians different from the rest of us; and possible evolutionary sources for our musical sense. (Ask the owls what they’re doing restoring missing fundamentals!) It’s a fascinating read from an author who’s obviously passionate (and thoroughly knowledgeable) about both music and the mysteries of neuroscience.

Help Save McSweeney's

2007-06-14T16:07:00.002-05:00

A few years ago, my favorite magazine BUST almost went bust. But they called out to their readers to buy subscriptions en masse, and because BUST readers are a dedicated crew, they did (including me). And the magazine was (thankfully) saved. (Just ask Jim how excited I get on the day BUST arrives in the mail. It's a very exciting day.)

Well, now McSweeney's, a small independent publisher, has found themselves in a similar situation, in hard times. They are also reaching out to their readers (see here) and have a major sale on in their online store to try to get through this crunch. Jim has been the lucky beneficiary of many gifts I have purchased him in their online store, including English as She Is Spoke; Animals in the Ocean, In Particular the Giant Squid, and a very nice squid shirt (unrelated to the book, but just as cool). They also have many rare-item eBay auctions going on, including items donated by Nick Hornby and Sarah Vowell.

So if you are able, please check out their offerings and make a purchase. Their goods make great gifts.

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith (Anne Lamott)

2007-05-27T12:24:00.000-05:00

For anyone who's been visiting this site for a while, I probably don't need to say again how much I like Anne Lamott's nonfiction (you can see it here, here, and here). Her latest book Grace (Eventually) continues with the same style as her previous books, but I would suggest anyone who wants to read Lamott start with the previous books, not this one. This one's good (with great such as Pepperidge Farm Mint Milanos being wrapped "in their little paper panties"), but with chapters that are shorter and less connected than her previous books.

She continues trying to grapple with how one copes under the current administration, feeling remarkably good on some days when she finds that she doesn't hate anybody, not even Bush. She teaches Sunday school to children at her church, and I wish someone like her had taught my Sunday school classes when I was a child:

Next, as always, we did Loved and Chosen.
I sat on the couch and glanced slowly around in a goofy, menacing way, and then said, "Is anyone here wearing a blue sweatshirt with Pokemon on it?" The four-year-old looked down at his chest, astonished to discover that he matched this description---like, What are the odds? He raised his hand. "Come over here to the couch," I said. "You are so loved and so chosen." He clutched at himself like a beauty pageant finalist.

Sam, her son, is now a teenager, and she describes daily battles of wills, and why she decided to have a child in the first place (in a beautiful chapter about why some "unlikely candidates," like herself, do have children).

As long as she keeps writing, I will keep reading. It's like listening to a good friend who admits all her faults and triumphs, secretly knows how you feels, and lets you know that somehow it will all work out.

The Stone Raft (José Saramago)

2007-05-27T08:02:00.000-05:00

I bought The Stone Raft when I was about halfway through Blindness (review), since it had been obvious from about the second page of that book that I was going to have to read more of Saramago. I was not disappointed.

Like Blindness, Raft opens with a mysterious event that demolishes a fundamental pillar of life—in this case, the Iberian peninsula suddenly splitting off from the rest of Europe and drifting west into the Atlantic—and then follows the main characters as they and everyone else try to cope with their strange new existence. Here, the story focuses on five people who had other unexplained experiences when the split occurred, and may or may not have caused it. Early on, the authorities apprehend several of them and put them through a gauntlet of tests, trying to understand what happened and whether it can be stopped (or perhaps, in the spirit of bureaucracy, trying to figure out who can be blamed), but soon the question of why and how the split happened gives way to more practical concerns, with the peninsula bearing down on the Azores and ultimately heading toward North America.

While Blindness had an unrelenting urgency to it, Raft is more of a meandering tale. The five main characters (and the strange, silent dog who travels with them) eventually take to a nomadic life in a horse-drawn wagon, selling clothes to make money, as they make their way across the peninsula toward what remains of the Pyrenees so they can see what the split actually looks like. On a technical level, it uses the same run-on style and unmarked dialogue as Blindness that, while sometimes difficult to follow, help sustain the surreality of the story. It isn’t as compelling as the other book simply because it lacks the fight for survival that fueled the other book and its tight focus on the moment-by-moment detail of that struggle, but it’s more playful, drawing back from the main characters periodically to follow how the Portuguese and Spanish politicians are handling the situation and how other world leaders are responding (the U.S., naturally, is secretly excited at the potential for a large mid-Atlantic military base), and even having the narrator stick his head into the story from time to time to comment on how the writing is going.

And it shares many of the same strengths and themes as Blindness as well—the surprising suddenness of love, the value of companionship, the resiliency of the human spirit in the face of an inexplicable and often hostile universe. At one point the group sits in the shade of a tree while eating lunch, arguing over whether they will be able to make enough money and why they’re doing what they’re doing:

Maria Guavaira had been listening in silence and now she began speaking like someone beginning another conversation, perhaps she had not fully grasped what the others had said, People are reborn each day, but they can decide whether to go on living the previous day or to make a fresh start.

In Saramago’s tales, eventually everyone learns how to make a fresh start.

36 Views of Mt. Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan (Cathy N. Davidson)

2007-05-25T19:43:00.000-05:00

36 Views in Mount Fuji is the title of a series of woodblock prints by Hokusai (which actually includes 46 prints) and also a title of Davidson's memoir of her travels in Japan back in the 1980s and 1990s. The book has recently been reissued with a new afterword, but the library copy I read was the original 1993 paperback. I'd be curious to read the new afterword (and might duck into a bookstore to do just that) because I very much enjoyed this book, I read it quickly, and often, whenever I had a few minutes.

Davidson's main thread throughout the book is what it is like to be a foreigner, mostly in a foreign country, but even somehow in your own country after returning from abroad. She's adept at picking up minute details in body language, nuances in what is said and what is not, and gives a snapshot of the Japanese culture and people she experienced during her travels: her participation in what she believed to be a mandatory health screening, the willingness of her Japanese friends to step out of their own cultural practices when she needed them most, and her found happiness in Paris (which turns out to be related to Japan in ways she couldn't have imagined).

In the woodblock series, Mount Fuji is sometimes off-center, very small, or not visible at all (in the case of a scene taking place on the mountain), and Davidson feels her experience of Japan is fragmented in the same way. I would recommend this book to everyone, those who have traveled abroad, who want to, or who feel like their travelers in their own city.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (John le Carré)

2007-05-23T22:50:00.000-05:00

Maria bought me John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold as a gift a few years ago, somewhat out of the blue, after she’d heard it described on NPR and thought it sounded like something I would like. I knew le Carré wrote spy novels, but that was about it, so I suppose I was expecting a tightly plotted genre novel of some kind, perhaps featuring microfilm and silencers.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I read it to find it was much more than a spy novel. Like Hitchcock, le Carré has a gift for turning taking the raw material of a genre plot and turning it into a story of great resonance and meaning, more than the sum of its parts. Certainly it had little in common with the series of Connery-era James Bond movies we’d recently run through at the time I read Spy. The spies of Le Carré, who worked in the British MI6 during the Cold War, were more mundanely human than Bond, their work more about planning and deception and elaborate, chess-like strategies than about parachuting down into exotic locations to infiltrate an evil organization’s volcano headquarters, sometimes with more in common with their supposed enemies than with their own countrymen. In the course of elaborately and endlessly deceiving their opponents about their intentions and the kind of person they were, they were just as likely to wind up deceiving their friends and themselves. And meanwhile, the great machinery of the war used them and threw them away with a cold relentlessness.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is every bit as good as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Based on the Kim Philby case, it follows George Smiley—a minor character in Spy, who has since been forcibly retired—as he attempts to track down an alleged mole in the ranks of the British intelligence service. But, of course, it’s about much more than that, touching on how the double lives their jobs require reflects the double lives at the heart of most relationships, and how the trust at the heart of those relationships is both necessary and, in some ways, impossible.

Le Carré is as good as he was on Spy at manipulating point of view in key places to keep the suspense taut while simultaneously showing us different sides of the main characters. He does stay closer to the characters here than in Spy—which kept even Alec Leamas, the main character, at arm’s length—which gives the story a warmer and more intimate feeling. And he’s capable of remarkable turns of a phrase to bring even minor characters to life:

“We budget for a hundred and twenty.” With numbers, with facts of all sorts, Lacon never faltered. They were the gold he worked with, wrested from the grey bureaucratic earth.

Lovely—he could say not another word about Lacon, and you would feel you knew him.

(Although he does sometimes lose me with his Britishness, which I suppose is hardly his fault:

In the scullery Smiley had once more checked his thoroughfare, shoved some deck-chairs aside, and pinned a string to the mangle to guide him because he saw badly in the dark.

Wha?)

Tinker, I’m pleased to say, is the first book in what turned into a trilogy. And I’m thoroughly looking forward to The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.

The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan)

2007-05-16T21:40:00.000-05:00

The Omnivore's Dilemma got a lot of press when it was first published, the doomsday oh-the-horror kind of press, the kind I don't seek out because I really don't want to spend my free time reading about how horrible the state of American food is, especially when I'm doing my best to eat well and naturally. But then Michael Pollan kept creeping up everywhere: there were the open letters he and John Mackey (the CEO of Whole Foods) wrote to each other, their Berkeley showdown (available as a webcast), which turned out fairly amicable, and a highly recommend (by me) essay where he lists 12 rules of eating (his take on nutritionism and food science). Michael Pollan was saying some sound, reasonable things, and I was finally convinced that I should read The Omnivore's Dilemma.

In full disclosure, I have to say that I did skip some parts of the book, like the chapter on slaughtering chickens and the one on hunting a pig. Other than the puppet show Tim Cunningham and I presented in eleventh grade re-enacting the atrocities of Sinclair's The Jungle using sock puppets, I tend to stay away from that kind of reading.

I'm also more of a glass half-full kind of person and would rather focus on what I can do (or what is being done) to help make a bad situation better. And after a rather lengthy opening section on the horrors of subsidized corn (that corn makes its way into most processed foods in one way or another, this processed food contains more fat/sugar than natural foods, which makes us fat and unhealthy, and growing corn the current industrial way is bad for the soil, environment, and the economic health of the farmers who grow it . . . I could go on with even more examples; really, it's very depressing), he eventually turns to what I thought was the best part: the story of Polyface Farm, a sustainable farm that runs on grass management. Not grass management through pesticides and chemical fertilizers, but grass management through cow grazing, chicken grazing, earthworms, pigs, and rabbits (each playing an integral role at different stages), with the farmer orchestrating which animals go where when, and for how long.

What I came away with from this book is to focus on eating as much locally grown food as possible and eating as much unprocessed food as possible. And while this may seem overly simple, I realize it can be very hard to do in our society today. One of my former commuters on the CalTrain talked about the produce at the local farmer's market as being as expensive if not more so than the produce at the grocery store. When I said, but you're helping your local community by supporting the farmers (trying not to get into the politics of it all, which was pretty hard considering how much food literature I read), he said, but I've got two kids to feed. And I understand that. But I'm also guessing that most of his weekly food budget is not being spent on fresh produce and may be used for processed, or convenience foods. In Pollan's book, he states "Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world." It's definitely worth thinking about and reassessing priorities both in our spending of money and time in food preparation (i.e., less money on prepared/packaged foods and more money on high-quality produce, fruits, and grains).

And I know I've been spoiled by the bounty at the local farmer's markets in California, which I can visit year-round and get lots of fruit, but we did a pretty good job of eating locally in Madison. And I know I do more from-scratch cooking than a lot of people, but I'm not the only one out there. Here are just a few examples of women in the blogosphere who are spending quality time cooking: The author of the French Laundry at Home blog writes about her attempts to cook the recipes (all of them) out of the French Laundry Cookbook (from the premiere Northern California restaurant known for its complicated, exquisite tasting menus), and her postings are quite entertaining. In Washington, Jennifer McCann takes photos of the bento-style lunches she makes her grade-school son before he takes them to school in her blog Vegan Lunch Box (and rates them based on how much he ate and enjoyed the meals). I wish this woman would make my lunches! And there's Rebecca Blood's blog Eating Organic on a Food Stamp Budget, where she's feeding a family of two following the USDA's thrifty food plan budget, here's the catch, eating organic food.

I would also like to point out that the three nominated books for the Writing on Food category of the 2007 James Beard Foundation Awards were The Omnivore's Dilemma, The United States of Arugula, and Heat, all of which have now been reviewed on this site. While I think Heat is the most entertaining read of the group, Omnivore's Dilemma won, and I agree that it is probably the most thought-provoking of the three and the one most likely to create change throughout our national food system.

Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside (Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller)

2007-05-10T20:38:00.000-05:00

John Gruber wrote an interesting article back in 2004 on his Daring Fireball Web site about what he sees as a persistent and erroneous myth, namely that if Apple had only been willing to license its OS to PC makers, it could have become the industry-dominating giant that Microsoft eventually became—“an industry colossus sitting atop a Scrooge-McDuck-style mountain of gold.” He believes that this is unlikely for a number of reasons, but he also offers, as a theory about why Microsoft became so gigantically successful while Apple struggled through much of the late 1980s and early 1990s, that it came down to pragmatism vs. idealism. Microsoft, after convincing IBM to license MS-DOS, was able to build on that success with early versions of Windows (which, importantly, still ran DOS software and would still run on the same kinds of PCs that DOS did), and then able to build off of Windows with Microsoft Office. Microsoft wanted to dominate the PC software market, and particularly the OS market, so compatibility was key.

Apple, in contrast, had developed the hugely successful Apple II . . . and promptly abandoned it in favor of the Mac, which had nothing to do with the Apple II. The Mac was revolutionary—but anyone who wanted one also had to buy all new hardware and all new software, a not-insignificant obstacle. Rather than making the sound business decision of building off the Apple II, they wanted to make something insanely great.

To hear Jennifer Edstrom (daughter of former Microsoft PR rep Pam Edstrom) and Marlin Eller (a lead developer at Microsoft for over ten years) tell it in Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside, however, Microsoft practically stumbled into its monopoly on accident—almost in spite of its business strategies rather than because of them. Far from the clear-headed prescience often assigned to Gates, which would have him cackling as he talked IBM into handing over control of its OS and then relentlessly pushing forward with the ubiquitous Windows, Edstrom and Eller describe Windows as something of an ugly stepchild at Microsoft, a project seen as little more than a temporary stopgap product while they worked with IBM on a graphical OS/2, one that was almost wholly abandoned at least once, and one that Gates himself only saw as important after it was well on its way to monopoly status.

Although Microsoft might not have had deliberately and strategically built off of DOS the way Gruber implies, he and Edstrom and Eller certainly agree on one thing—by the time Windows rolled around, Microsoft was pragmatic to the core. Rarely do you hear anyone in the book talk about making a great product, something cool that people would like, or even something that they themselves would like, much less anything truly innovative. Everything they did was instead motivated by a competitor: in describing Microsoft’s floundering attempts to build sophisticated software to automate people’s homes—lights, music, heating, air conditioning, everything—Edstrom and Eller write, “No other major companies were working on it, and that was exactly the problem. Microsoft does best when it has a successful competitor it can copy and then crush.” Gates’s constant refrain throughout the original development of Windows was “Make it more like the Mac!”* And after devoting a lot of time and effort, during a brief craze for handwriting recognition technology instigated primarily by a company called GO, to developing an OS called Pen Windows, when Eller’s manager points out that it hasn’t really sold well and seems like a disaster, Eller tells him,

“Greg, look. This wasn’t a thing about making money. This was all about ‘Block that kick.’ We were on the special team. We were preventing GO from running away with the market. That was our job. . . . We weren’t trying to sell software, we were trying to prevent other people from selling software.

“From my view, Pen Windows was a winner. We shut down GO. They spent $75 million pumping up this market, we spent four million shooting them down. They’re toast. That company is dead. They won’t sell their shit anymore. We did our job.”

Barbarians is, unfortunately, plagued by strange decisions in the writing. They make occasional stabs at a misguided breeziness, referring to Microsoft as “the Soft,” and to Gates as “Field Marshal Gates” and (once, weirdly) “Supreme Techlord William Gates.” More significantly, although Eller is a coauthor, he is also described in the third person: Marlin Eller did this, Marlin Eller said that. They mention this in the introduction, and explain that the book had evolved beyond an autobiography when they wanted to include more varied material, but it still gives the book an oddly disingenuous feel—particularly since it seems that Eller’s colleagues and managers, and Gates himself, are always missing the big picture, pushing forward with unrealistic goals, and wrongheadedly refusing to listen to Eller’s invariably sensible ideas:

Myhrvold was just throwing out some random and utterly convoluted way of doing the same thing Eller was already going after on a much more direct path.

. . .

Plenty of developers resented Myhrvold. They were the ones who actually wrote the code and knew the nitty-gritty. . . . Myhrvold argued that you could design a new graphics architecture in only two weeks. People like Eller, who had personally spent three years developing graphics for Windows, knew better.

. . .

A long silence hung suspended between the two. Eller knew Gates had heard him. But Gates gazed off in the distance, seemingly oblivious to the Willits canoe, to the black and white stills of early Seattle settlers—and to Eller’s point.

“Uh huh,” Gates muttered.

In a first-person autobiography, it would be understood that the author is just presenting his own view of things. Here, though, the third-person narrative gives it the weight of journalistic objectivity, a weight it doesn’t always bear well. Still, Barbarians is a quick, interesting read on how one of the most dominant companies of the last quarter-century arrived in that position—full of fits and starts, fights, and accidents, and driven as much by internal politics and competitiveness as anything else.

__________
* A refrain he seems to have been keeping up during the development Windows Vista, as David Pogue points out in this tongue-in-cheek video for the New York Times Web site.

Dance Dance Dance (Haruki Murakami)

2007-05-08T21:27:00.000-05:00

Reading enough Murakami gives you the feeling that he is profoundly mystified by his own internal workings. If he has a theme, a subject he keeps coming back to, it would have to be people’s essential inability to understand themselves, much less everyone else around them. Characters in his books are always doing things they feel mysteriously compelled to do, unable to explain even to themselves their motivations. The more malevolent characters in his books are often at the mercy of forces both internal and external that seem beyond their control, and even his relatively featureless narrators tend to be troubled by an unknowable presence at the center of themselves that ultimately manifests itself in the world around them. He even devoted an entire novel—the singular Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World—to the story of a man literally disappearing into his own unconscious.

Dance Dance Dance, the sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, finds the still-unnamed narrator toiling away as a freelance writer—“shoveling cultural snow,” as he calls it—and unable to shake the feeling that he has left something undone at the Dolphin Hotel, where much of A Wild Sheep Chase took place, and that the woman he stayed there with has something vitally important to tell him. Needless to say, particularly for those who have read Murakami before, strange things turn up once he arrives: the small, empty place he stayed at in A Wild Sheep Chase has been replaced by a giant luxury hotel, and after beginning an uncertain sort of relationship with one of the receptionists, he hears stories of an elevator that sometimes opens on dark, otherworldly floors. His quest later leads him to take up with an old school friend, a teenage psychic, her famous parents (one of them a washed-up writer named, amusingly, “Hiraku Makimura”), and, of course, the Sheep Man from the first book.

Dance Dance Dance suffers simply for being an unplanned sequel—almost by definition, it can’t feel as whole and complete as the first book—and although Murakami has keen instincts for when to get the story moving, large stretches go by more or less like this:

Day after day I was thinking about almost nothing. Just swimming and lying in the sun getting tan, driving around the island listening to the Stones and Bruce Springsteen, walking moonlit beaches, drinking in hotel bars.

Murakami’s voice is irresistible, and I’m happy enough to follow as his narrator wanders around, having metaphysical crises and struggling to understand what he wants and what this lost woman is trying to tell him, but at times the story was crying out for a little more urgency. I wouldn’t recommend this one as much as I would the other books I’ve mentioned so far (or the tour de force of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), but decent Murakami is still awfully good.

Perfection Salad (Laura Shapiro)

2007-04-08T16:31:00.000-05:00

First, let me explain exactly what perfection salad is: In the words of Michael Stern (who wrote the Introduction) it's "an aspic filled with finely chopped cabbage, celery, and red pepper that won its creator, Mrs. John Cooke, third prize (a new sewing machine) in the 1905 Knox gelatin cooking contest." And it's a great symbol of what "domestic scientists" (the precursors to home economists) stood for: something inventive, nutritious, and dainty. (Taste was rarely considered if at all in many of these creations.)

Laura Shapiro's book Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (part of the Modern Library Food Series, edited by Ruth Reichl) explores the domestic scientist's role in American cooking in the early 20th century. Domestic scientists were professional women who wanted to ensure that all families ate nutritious meals, although the standards for nutrition at the time were quite rudimentary to what we know--or think we know--now), with the cornerstone being digestion: Their calculations on how long it would take to digest a meal were based on digestion tables created by an Army surgeon in the early 1820s who (I'll spare the full details here) was able to study the digestion on an injured soldier quite well due to the extent and nature of the injury. Therefore, eating pounds of rice or oatmeal was nutritious, and eating a steak was not.

Interesting facts in the book include how hard it was to cook back then: There weren't standardized measurements (recipes would refer to a teacup's worth or the size of a hazelnut), and many recipes just assumed the readers knew how to cook, so they'd skip many (if not all) of the steps. Not only that, but wood-burning stoves made it nearly impossible to maintain a constant temperature.

These domestic scientists started cooking schools (popular with women who wanted to ensure that they ran a proper household) and gave lectures to aid the American woman; they believed their style of cooking to be far superior to all others (theirs was scientifically based--how could the others compete?). Immigrants were told to shun their traditional food and adopt this new style of cooking. One thing in particular that they were very against was sweets, especially cakes and pies. "Helen Campbell told the story, all to familiar to domestic scientists on the lecture circuit, of the scientific-cooking expert who was asked what her audiences throughout the country most frequently wanted to hear more about, after the lecture was over. 'Chocolate cake and lemon pie,' was the grim response."

As the processed food revolution exploded, cookbooks became endorsements for certain companies. "Dainty Dishes for All the Year Round was a collection of frozen desserts and ground-meat entrees, published by a company that made an ice-cream freezer and a meat grinder."

The domestic scientists eventually gave way to the field of home economics, which became the catch-all field for women who wanted to attend college. Interested in chemistry? Biology? Publishing? But you're a woman? Then you'd study home economics instead, which the universities insisted covered all these subjects.

I had a slow start with this book, but then I got really into it. I'm now looking forward to reading Shapiro's other books, including Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, and her recent biography of Julia Child.

Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Kevin Kelly)

2007-04-08T16:21:00.000-05:00

Somewhere inside the middling 521-page Out of Control is a really, really great 350-page book trying to get out. Which is unfortunate, because Kelly—at the time the executive editor of Wired, and currently billed as its “chief maverick”—tackles a lot of very interesting subjects, and clearly has an affinity for them as well as the natural curiosity that makes for great science and technology writing. But mostly reading this book just made me really wish someone like Oliver Sacks or Malcolm Gladwell had written it instead—or that, at the very least, he could have had much better editing than he did.

The book focuses on complex, distributed, adaptable systems such as biological organisms and superorganisms, computer networks, and swarms of various types, which takes Kelly across such diverse subjects as the Biosphere 2 project and other “closed systems,” artificial evolution, industrial ecology, military simulations, robotics and artificial intelligence (and the nature of human intelligence itself), and predicting the future—all very compelling stuff. The problem was that I found that I was having to enjoy the information in spite of Kelly’s writing, rather than because of it (or, better, without having to notice it at all). I’ll often flag things when I read, and one way to tell how much I’m liking a book is to compare the ratio of things I’m flagging as “Wow!” to those I’m flagging as “This seems awfully silly.” And although there were a lot of things I liked about Out of Control, I also found myself flagging an awful lot of things for silliness. He often seemed to spend four or five pages making a point he could have said in one or two, and was prone to wild, pseudo-profound generalizations like the following:

“While every human is born pretty much the same, every death is different. If a coroner’s cause-of-death certificates were exact, each one would be unique.” (This is barely more true of death than of birth—if a doctor’s birth report were exact, each one would be unique too, and by the same token, plenty of people have died very similar deaths.)
“Snake is linear, but when it feeds back into itself it becomes the archetype of nonlinear being. In the classical Jungian framework, the tail-biting Uroborus is the symbolic depiction of the self. The completeness of the circle is the self-containment of self, a containment that is at the same time made of one thing and made of competing parts. The flush toilet, then, as the plainest manifestation of a feedback loop, is a mythical beast—the beast of self.” (The abstract academic language is bad enough, and the flush toilet simply can’t support this level of grandiosity. I had to stop and search for signs that he was trying to be funny, and found none.)
“Stripped of all secondary motives, all addictions are one: to make a world of our own.” (This is the kind of thing that sounds good until you try to figure out what it means—how, exactly, are alcoholics or heroin addicts trying to make a world of their own? I have no idea. I thought they were trying to satisfy a chemical dependency.)
“So few long-term predictions prove correct that statistically they are all wrong. Yet, by the same statistical measure, so many short term [sic] predictions are right, that all short-term predictions are right.” (What he’s trying to say is that people in the prediction business know that they cannot rely on long-term predictions, because so few of them are right—which is a far cry from saying that in fact they are all wrong. Applying the word “statistically” doesn’t change “few are right” to “none are right.” If anything, it makes the statement even less true.)

He also expends a lot of words on dubious imaginative journeys through history (the invention of “autonomous control” in ninth-century China) and more esoteric terrain (searching Borges’s Infinite Library for a copy of his own as-yet-unfinished Out of Control), and on hopelessly clunky constructions like “This hardware quarantine has been a prime factor in the nonhappening of this future” and odd similes like “The CPU, no larger than a soggy cornflake. . . . ”

Which isn’t to say that it’s a terrible book—in fact, the reason I found the writing and editing (or lack thereof) so frustrating was that the material itself was so fascinating, and I wanted to like it. He’s at his best when discussing cutting-edge technology and possible futures—computer simulations, robotics, artificial life—and although he loses his way a bit when he involves himself in philosophy and more general science, he does always takes them on with an obvious and genuine enthusiasm.

But still, on finishing it, I was mostly relieved that I could finally get back to Dance Dance Dance.

E = mc2 (David Bodanis)

2007-03-11T18:13:00.000-05:00

Yes. It's been a while. But I do have good excuses. I ran a half-marathon (and spent that afternoon eating ice cream and brownies while sprawled on the couch, then spent the next week hobbling around because my feet hurt so badly), started two other books and decided not to finish them (more on that below), started taking an online course on marine biology through UC Berkeley Extension (did you know that the pufferfish itself is not poisonous, its the symbiotic bacteria living in it that are?), and had to prep for my fantasy baseball league (I'm already looking at the Yahoo! baseball headlines with dread---will the $140 pillow Carlos Delgado bought help his stiff neck? Will Ordonez be okay after being hit in the head with a pitch during Spring Training on Saturday?).

The first book I started and put down was Ball Four, by Jim Bouton. Ball Four apparently caused quite a scandal when it was published in 1970 as it exposed the behind-the-scenes world of locker rooms and big league ball. It's written in a journal style, with a matter-of-fact tone by Bouton, a player at the time. I think I may give it another try some time in the future because I think it's probably a good book, and a historically important one for major-league baseball. But I got about 50 pages into it (of 500) and felt a little overwhelmed at the time that I was never going to finish it or get to my other library books before they were due (poor planning on my part). And I wasn't hooked enough to keep reading.

The second book was The Best Thing I Ever Tasted by Sallie Tisdale. The beginning was great, filled with poetic narrative about Tisdale's childhood memories of food, casseroles made from cans, faux-apple pie kind of food. But then as I kept reading, I thought, wow, there are some bold claims being made here---where are the footnotes? Where are the sources to support these arguments? And the poetic narrative stopped being so pleasant for me. I think my problem was that I wanted a bit more journalism than she provided. And I thought, you know, there are books out there that are saying similar messages that I connect with better, so I put this book down, too.

But finally I did manage to both start and finish a book. E = mc² by David Bodanis, which was recommended to me by my good friend who is known in the blogosphere as ADoD (thank you!). Bodanis decided to approach the equation by giving a history and analysis of each individual part of the equation before discussing it as a whole. When I read about this approach in the preface, I was worried the discussion would either be too simplistic (and boring) or too complex (and boring). But Bodanis's own excitement about his subject matter comes through in the book, and while I couldn't discuss the technicalities (or the hard science) of the equation, I have a much clearer understanding. For example, Bodanis explains what would happen if the pilot of a space shuttle tried to go faster than the speed of light:

"Think frat boys jammed into a phone booth, their faces squashed hard against the glass walls. Think of a parade balloon, with an air hose pumping into it that can't be turned off. The whole balloon starts swelling, far beyond any size for which it was intended. The same thing would happen to the shuttle. The engines are roaring with energy, but that can't raise the shuttle's speed, for nothing goes faster than light. But the energy can't just disappear, either."

Much of the book focuses on Einstein and the history of the nuclear bomb (but Bodanis stays mainly on the science side). There are also other discussions of scientists integral to parts of the equation (he discusses Cecilia Payne, who was the first to discover the sun mainly comprises hydrogen, not iron as the current researchers believed) and current applications of E = mc² in our everyday lives (smoke detectors and red-glowing exit signs). I thought this book make the subject accessible, and will definitely read more of Bodanis's work.

Next book up: Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century by Laura Shapiro

Blindness (José Saramago)

2007-03-04T17:59:00.000-06:00

Wow.

I haven’t made much of an effort to seek out Nobel Prize winners—my (probably incorrect) impression is that they tend toward Ultra-Serious, Humorless Social Novels about topics such as The Continuing Injustices of Post-Colonialism and The Tragedies of the Poor. I blame this on unfortunate early exposure to plodders like Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown, as well as the fact that Kurt Vonnegut doesn’t have one and probably never will.

But José Saramago’s Blindness (alongside Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera) may force me to reevaluate. It starts from a simple premise—an epidemic of “white blindness” spreading through a city—and follows what happens next to its logical conclusions, with the majority of the book taking place in an abandoned mental asylum where the government sets up a quarantine for the afflicted blind, a place that quickly devolves into a hellish prison ruled by a pack of blind thugs.

You won’t find the deep insights into individual characters of a García Márquez—no one in Blindness even has the distinction of a name, and the people are often little more than sketches passing through the decimated, chaotic city. (“Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters,” a character says at one point.) He differentiates them by role and description—the doctor, the doctor’s wife, the first blind man, the girl with the dark glasses—and in his dialogue eschews quotation marks, paragraph breaks, and even most punctuation other than commas, lending a surreal sheen to the narrative. The technique is superbly handled, and seemed particularly well suited for this book, dissolving as it does the barriers between direct description and the increasingly auditory world of the blind, although it turns out that’s just how Saramago likes his dialogue in general.

But the power of the book is in the almost tactile realness of its world, in the demented and irresistible logic of its failing society, and in its relentless, unblinking exploration of human nature, both bad and good—people’s selfishness, opportunism, and indifference, but also their capacity for empathy and endless perseverance. A writer hasn’t grabbed me this hard since Haruki Murakami with After the Quake and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I even bought another of Saramago’s books, The Stone Raft, when I was little more than halfway through this one. Whether it’ll be as good as Blindness, I can’t say, but I’m guessing it’ll be pretty good. (After all, he did win a Nobel Prize.)

The Psychology of Everyday Things (Donald Norman)

2007-02-21T08:24:00.000-06:00

Ever stared blankly at your car radio, trying to remember which combination of buttons to push to set the time? Had trouble remembering which light switches corresponds to which lights, even in a place you’ve lived in for years? Struggled to answer call waiting on your new NASA-level phone system? (Hi, Mom and Dad!)

Donald Norman wants you to know one important thing: It’s not you. It’s the design.

The Psychology of Everyday Things (also titled The Design of Everyday Things, depending on country and year of publication)* is a classic among designers—it was, among other things, required reading for the original TiVO interface team. It’s full of hilarious examples of bad design from his own house and other places he’s been (a refrigerator temperature that’s nearly impossible to set, a faucet that befuddled much of a visiting conference, a set of doors that seemed to trap a man between them, the fictitious “Masochist’s Coffee Pot” shown on the cover), thoroughly analyzing why some devices seem so hard to use even for relatively simple things, and what designers can do to make them more usable.

One of his bugaboos is the elevation of aesthetics over usability—he writes off many an unusable object with the dismissal “It probably won a prize.” Aesthetics, for example, often dictates that control panels use rows of similar-looking buttons, which leads almost inevitably to mistakenly pushing the wrong button. This can be inconsequential in a clock radio; in an airplane cockpit or nuclear power plant station, it can be disastrous. (One enterprising team at a nuclear power plant took the step of replacing their identical cookie-cutter levers with different beer keg taps so they wouldn’t mix them up.) This isn’t to say that he thinks aesthetics is a negative value (although it occasionally seems that way), but rather that when aesthetics and usability conflict, they must be balanced appropriately. Aesthetics seems to win out far too often.

He offers a number of principles that can help make design more usable, like making operations visible (users should be able to figure out what they can do with an object—if a phone has a hold function, it should have a “hold” button), providing useful feedback (users should be able to tell what they’ve just done, and whether a particular operation was successful), and exploiting constraints (don’t allow incorrect behavior—Ikea generally does a marvelous job of this, sizing different screws so they only fit in the correct holes and often even making sure that the boards only fit together in the correct direction and alignment). He also devotes a lot of time to the problem of user error, identifying different types of common general errors people make and arguing that designers should design for error—in many cases they shouldn’t even think of it as either “error” or “correct action,” but rather as a sort of conversation between user and device, with the user trying to accomplish tasks in different ways and the device providing feedback on what the best way is to do so. Errors should be both nondestructive and reversible. (In the course of a nice analysis of how Scott Adams managed to mistakenly delete 500 moderated blog comments, Bruce Tognazzini, founder of Apple’s Human Interface Group, notes it is never useful for software designers to blame the user.)

Some of his ideas for improvements seem straight out of a charming 1950s-era World of Tomorrow (such as a scanner on microwaves that can read encoded instructions on packaging so you can just scan them in and push “start”), and at other times he seems like something of a classic Old Coot (such as when he captions a figure showing an instruction manual page from the original NES as “The Nintendo Children’s Toy”). But overall this is a thoroughly entertaining and well-thought-out treatise on user-centered design—and next time you’re befuddled by the shower in a hotel room, you can take a moment to cheerfully assess exactly where and how the designers went wrong.

__________
* This took me a while to figure out. I wanted to read Design, but was stymied by the library listing the status of its single copy as ON SEARCH. There was no way to ascertain what this meant or what might be done about it. Meanwhile, I saw that they had six copies of Psychology, and was dismayed that they had all these copies of a book I’d never heard of and no copies of the well-known one I wanted. Norman would have a field day with this.

The Republican War on Science (Chris Mooney)

2007-01-29T22:28:00.000-06:00

I don’t generally seek out books like this—a decided lefty sitting around reading books about just how bad the Republicans and the Bush administration are seems almost unspeakably banal, like a college Republican sitting in his dorm room nodding along with Sean Hannity. And when a friend passed Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science to Maria for me, my first reaction was, “Oh God, this book is going to make me so mad.”

Having secured a healthy supply of blood-pressure medication and a plastic tub of Tums Ultra, though, I finally plunged in. It’s important to establish up front that this is no leftist screed or Michael Moore–esque conspiracy theory: Mooney conducted what I’d ballpark as about 200 interviews for the book’s material (listed in the back), and includes 62 pages of detailed source notes—he’s clearly done his homework, which includes interviews with (and extensive discussions of answers from) people like Bush presidential science adviser John Marburger and President’s Council on Bioethics chairman Leon Kass (who requested that some of his written statements be reproduced in full, which Mooney has obligingly done). And he acknowledges that the Left has been guilty of abusing science as well—particularly in cases of animal rights activism, hyping fears about genetically modified foods, and overplaying the potential for quick cures from technologies like stem cell research. “In fact, in politicized fights involving science, it is rare to find liberals entirely innocent of abuses,” he writes. “But they are almost never as guilty as the Right.”

Mooney organizes the book into four sections. The first provides an overview of the relationship between science and politics going back to FDR, arguing that the current climate largely originated from the alliance between business interests and religious conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the Gingrich Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and, ultimately, the current administration. The second discusses areas where science has come under attack mainly because of its conflict with corporate interests, namely global warming, environmental and public health regulation, the links between fast food and obesity and between mercury poisoning and fish, and the protection of endangered species under the Nixon-era Endangered Species Act. The third outlines the impact of religious thinking on those old favorites evolution, stem cell research, and sex education and abortion. The fourth focuses specifically on the Bush administration.

The major shift that has taken place, in the current administration in particular, is the pervasive treatment of science as a politicized tool, not only by ignoring, suppressing, or sowing misinformation about broadly accepted results that conflict with their policies, but also falsely adopting the language of science to justify those policies. There was a time when politicians largely allowed scientists to do their work, and then politicians took those results into account in making policy decisions, an entirely separate process—when the politicians’ role was to debate over what to do with the accepted body of scientific knowledge, not argue over what that accepted body of scientific knowledge was. Near the end of the book Mooney discusses, as an example, the fact that despite compelling studies demonstrating that needle-exchange programs help prevent the spread of HIV and do not encourage drug use, neither the Clinton administration or the second Bush administration supported them at the federal level. But while the Clinton administration simply said that it accepted these conclusions but had decided to leave the decision up to local communities, the Bush administration justified its decision to the Washington Post (as discussed in this editorial) by directing the paper to “a number of researchers who have allegedly cast doubt on the pro-exchange consensus.” Mooney goes on, “So the Post actually called up these scientists and found that, lo and behold, they think no such thing. The Bush administration peddled other questionable evidence to the paper, too, which the Post also skewered.”

This type of false justification is both dishonest and cowardly, and illustrates one of the key tactics in the titular war, familiar to anyone who has been following debates over global warming and evolution. It goes back to a famous tobacco company memo from the late 1960s:

Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.

This has since been dubbed “manufacturing uncertainty,” an approach that recurs throughout the book, and one that relies heavily on the misunderstanding that good science is somehow both unanimous and definite. Rather than focusing on central findings and the broad weight of evidence, opponents who find those disagreeable seize on the caveats in individual studies or reports to discredit them, and point to other studies (frequently from less credible sources with clear conflicts of interest) that take an opposing view or play up the uncertainty even more.

But science is always uncertain; it is central to the whole notion of science that all hypotheses and theories are provisional in the face of evidence, even those that are tremendously well supported. Good scientists are open to this uncertainty and accept it as a necessary element of their work, not hamstrung into inaction and an endless inability to accept basic conclusions, which is the state the Right has steadily led the government into. They hide behind loaded Orwellian terms like “sound science” and “junk science” (two terms that Mooney dissects at length for what they really mean, which has little to do with scientific merit), pretending to simply want reliable information while rejecting anything they don’t agree with as too uncertain to act on.

All of these tactics are brought to bear on, for example, global warming. In the face of an overwhelming number of studies showing that human activity is contributing significantly to global warming, the Right regularly cites scientific outliers and industry-funded research (to show there is a “controversy” in which “more research” is needed) and cherry-pick sentences from scientific reports that supposedly show uncertainty among scientists—reports that, when read in total, come down firmly on the side that human activity is contributing to global warming. They also hold what Mooney calls “science courts” in congressional hearings, which, in one example, pitted a single scientist representing the mainstream view against two “doubters” with strong ties to the petroleum industry (undisclosed at the time, of course). To anyone watching, whenever a question was asked about whether or how humans are affecting the climate, the vote came down two against and one in favor:

All the disagreement led Senator Craig Thomas, a Wyoming Republican, to throw up his hands and state, “We are expected to make some policy decisions based on what we ought to be doing with regard to these kinds of things, but yet there does not seem to be a basis for that kind of decision.”

How surprising. In fact, the treatment of two sides of a debate as equal in merit even when one has tremendous support behind it and the other is a fringe position at best is a major problem not only with the Right, but also in the broader coverage of science in the media. Mooney cites two studies that dramatically illustrate the discrepancy: one by science historian Naomi Oreskes published in Science in 2004, which determined that of a sample of 928 scientific papers published between 1993 and 2003 with the keywords “global climate change,” not one disagreed with the mainstream consensus that humans are causing global warming; and one by scholars Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff published in the journal Global Environmental Change (not freely available online, but discussed by the authors here) that found that of articles on global warming in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times from 1988 to 2002, 53 percent gave “roughly equal attention” to both this mainstream view and the outlier view that it is solely a natural phenomenon. This was perhaps credible early on—the 1990 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was far from settled on the subject—but simply isn’t any more. The years since then have only confirmed and added to the evidence, and subsequent IPCC reports have reflected that. As the executive editor-in-chief of Science wrote in a 2001 editorial, “Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science.” You’d never know it from the way it’s often discussed by the media (who often just report that one side says X, while those who disagree say Y) or the Right (who don’t want to do anything about it, on grounds completely unrelated to science).

It’s also important to keep in mind that strong scientific consensus is not a cavalier thing—it’s not a fad, or groupthink. The doubters like to cast themselves as independent-minded skeptics refusing to conform, but as a Harvard biological oceanographer tells Mooney, “Every good scientist is a skeptic through and through.” And when the first studies came out, scientists were appropriately skeptical—they thought, along with most everyone, that the climate was reasonably stable, and human activity small in comparison. What convinced them was evidence, and evidence heaped upon evidence, and study after study over the course of decades. To dismiss that in favor of a few doubters is both perverse and incredibly irresponsible.

———

The key problem is that the Right no longer treats science as a source of information to help them create the best policies—instead, they’ve already decided what the best policies are, and science that might obstruct those policies must be wrong. The studies are treated as political attacks, not evidence-based results. Mooney discusses this at length throughout the book, but two examples particularly struck me. The first example came during a 2004 congressional hearing regarding the shutoff of irrigation water designed to safeguard endangered fish species, involving Rep. John Doolittle, a conservative California Republican:

First, he tried doggedly to get NAS [National Academy of Sciences] panel chair William Lewis to answer a policy question: Should the 2001 water shutoff have occurred? Lewis repeatedly (and properly) declined to answer the question, noting that the NAS committee had restricted itself to assessing the scientific basis for the water cutoff decision. Doolittle seemed incapable of grasping the distinction.

The second comes when discussing David Reardon, a prominent (albeit questionably credentialed) pro-lifer who has published extensively on alleged negative physical or psychological consequences of abortion despite comprehensive studies demonstrating that no such link exists:

In fact, Reardon appears to believe, for religious reasons, that abortion must cause harm. In a 2002 essay in the conservative journal Ethics & Medicine, Reardon defended what he called the “neglected rhetorical strategy” of opposing abortion on the grounds that it hurts women, instead of simply because it is morally wrong. He also noted that “because abortion is evil, we can expect, and can even know, that it will harm those who participate in it. Nothing good comes from evil.”

I suspect that one reason the Right is so convinced that scientists who disagree with them are biased or fraudulent or incompetent is that they themselves are so inclined to manipulate the evidence to favor their beliefs, rather than the other way around: to put it in stark terms, it’s as hard for an honest person to assume other people lying as for a liar to assume other people are being honest.

The weakest (and perhaps most dispiriting) part of the book is the epilogue, entitled “What We Can Do”—which, it turns out, for ordinary citizens doesn’t amount to much more than “For God’s sake, stop electing these people,” coupled with a plea for journalists to learn something when they write about scientific topics so they can appropriately convey consensus instead of simply seeking a he said/she said type of “balance.” The chapter reflects, in a way, the helplessness of both scientists and the exiled Left over the last six years, because the fate of science in politics is ultimately up to the politicians, many of whom have recently proven themselves either unfathomably cynical or else so misinformed and incurious that they seem incapable of either understanding science or putting it to good use. The emblem of this era has been the now-notorious 2004 statement of a “senior adviser” to the president in a New York Times article by Ron Suskind:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

This was about foreign policy, of course, but given the types of abuses documented by Mooney, it’s just as apt for describing the Right’s approach to science. I’ve touched on some of the subjects Mooney explores much more fully in the book, and would certainly encourage anyone to read it, regardless of political affiliation, who wants a thorough untangling of how science has been misused in recent years. The danger of continuing down this path is very real. Because the problem with reality is that it tends to stick around whether you believe in it or not—and unfortunately, if our leaders keep ignoring it, everyone pays in the end.

Brainiac (Ken Jennings)

2007-01-28T10:28:00.000-06:00

Where were you the summer of Ken Jennings? We were in Madison, and every day after work I'd come home halfway through the game. "How's Ken doing?" I'd ask Jim, who was working from home at the time, and he'd give me the update on the current Jeopardy! game. At first I wasn't a big Ken fan, but he quickly grew on me: He seemed very nice, was gracious to the two poor saps who had to play against him, and didn't present himself as too much of a know-it-all or too pretentious. It was probably the longest streak of continuous Jeopardy-watching we've ever had. In the end, Ken won 74 Jeopardy! games.

Well now Ken Jennings has written a book: Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs. The book is a mix of Ken's experience on Jeopardy!, along with more information than you could imagine on trivia: the history of it, stories about people who make their living writing about it, how to phrase a good trivia question, and crazy days-long trivia fests in places like Steven's Point, Wisconsin.

A complete aside, but while reading this book, I could not get the song "Jeopardy" by Greg Kihn out of my head. Not because it's a particularly good song, but because it's on the radio a lot and I only know the first line ("Our love's in jeopardy, baby. Oooohhh ooh ooh ooooohhh.) and it easily repeats in my head. Greg Kihn is now an aging rock star who is one of the radio deejays on the morning show we listen to on our way to work. Among other things, he usually talks about how much he hates Berkeley (he's a George Bush voter), what new parts of him ache as he's getting older (sometimes he even takes calls from other aging rockers to discuss their latest body ailments), and at least once a week about how his Dad fought in the snow in Belgium in World War II, and how things just aren't the same as they used to be. Even now, while writing this review, the song is looping in my head, though sometimes I switch the lyrics to the Weird Al version ("I lost of Jeopardy.")

Ken's a pretty decent writer, and I found the story of his adventures with Jeopardy! to be the best part of the book. Someone else in the book's production must have known that too (whether it was Ken or his editor) because the book is organized so that many parts begin with Ken's story with Jeopardy!, leave you at somewhat of a cliffhanger, and then jump into a many-page long story about the history of trivia before returning back to what happened on Jeopardy!. (Did you know that we he first tried out for Jeopardy!, they still had the 5-day champion rule? He was called to be on the show 8 months after he auditioned, and in that time, they had changed the rule.)

Ken couldn't talk about the Jeopardy! experience while it was happening, so he felt like he was leading a double-life of sorts (the tapings would occur every Tuesday and Wednesday each week, so he'd fly back and forth between Los Angeles and his home town of Salt Lake City). But once his episodes were on air, he became a national celebrity. He knew it was maybe getting out of control when his young son started referring to him as "Ken Jennings" instead of "Daddy."

If you're the least bit curious about the inner workings of Jeopardy! or want to know more about trivia, I'd recommend this book. Jennings even has trivia questions throughout each chapter, so you can test your own trivia knowledge.

Next book up: Ball Four by Jim Bouton

The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

2007-01-26T07:57:00.000-06:00

A friend mentioned The Master and Margarita to me several years ago, and despite my love for the classic Russians, I somehow hadn’t gotten around to reading it until now.

My loss, it seems. This is a phenomenal book—compelling, surprising, endlessly inventive, frequently hilarious. (Every time I laughed, Maria would tell me again that I must be mistaken, because the Russians aren’t supposed to be funny.) Bulgakov wrote it during the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s, knowing that he would never see it published in the repressive Soviet Union. It’s simultaneously a satire of Moscow life, a love story, and a philosophical fantasy, which begins when the devil (here named Woland) arrives in Moscow with a squabbling group of attendants and begins causing trouble. It’s set mostly in contemporary Moscow, but also follows in parallel the story of Pontius Pilate during the sentencing, execution, and aftermath Jesus’ crucifixion, a story variously told aloud by Woland, dreamed by a poet named Ivan Homeless, and read by the title character Margarita in a novel by the unnamed master, a story that converges toward the end with the main Moscow thread.

What makes it so funny is both the writing and twists the story takes, the way both are bound up in the characters and the setting, and how the episodes build on each other. I tried to find a brief one-off line I could quote by way of example, and finally realized that the humor is too elaborately woven into the story for that—giving an example required summarizing the scene and characters, then quoting from a few different paragraphs at least before arriving at the punch line, which even then probably wouldn’t seem as funny as it was in the book’s full context. It’s irreducible, and the more satisfying because of it. So you’ll just have to take my word on this.

The translation, incidentally, was the recent version by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, done before they became the most well-known translators in America following Anna Karenina’s appearance in Oprah’s Book Club in 2004. Obviously I haven’t read the other versions (evidently the one by Burgin and O’Connor is also excellent), but I certainly had no complaints with this one: the writing is marvelous. In great fiction the sentences have a physical weight to them—you can almost roll the words around in your palm like marbles—and this is great fiction. This has more to do with the alchemy of Bulgakov’s story than the translation, of course, but translation is a difficult and interesting art, and shouldn’t be overlooked; although I suspect Maria might think I’m insane for saying this, I’m looking forward to settling down with Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov with Pevear and Volokhonsky in one hand and the traditional Constance Garnett in the other.

They also provide a good introduction and a useful but not overwhelming set of endnotes. It’s helpful to know, for example, that Bulgakov was still revising when he died in 1940, and left it unfinished in certain ways—which explains why, for example, characters in the second half will sometimes leave a room by flying through a window, and then shortly after be seen walking down the stairs and out of the building. The endnotes, meanwhile, mostly identify real contemporary and historical figures that appear in the book, highlight allusions to other works (most notably to Faust), and explain aspects of Russian culture that Bulgakov and his Russian audience would have taken for granted. (This is particularly important for Bulgakov’s frequent subtle, sideways references to the Soviet secret police, which sometimes hinge on knowing something as specific as what they do with the coat buttons of someone held for questioning.)

But at any rate, this is a thoroughly entertaining classic, incorporating the irreverence and penchant for absurdity of a book like Catch-22 alongside the deep unreality and social critique of one like The Trial while creating its own inimitable world. It deserves to be as well known as both of those books, and can't be recommended enough.

Mindless Eating (Brian Wansink)

2007-01-21T18:28:00.000-06:00

Wansink's lab ran a study using American soldiers to see how eating in the dark affected the taste of food. The researchers told the soldiers they would be trying a new kind of strawberry yogurt and that they wanted to make sure that it tasted good, even in the dark. The researchers turned off the lights and gave the soldiers the yogurt. The soldiers all said the strawberry yogurt was good, and one soldier, who said strawberry was her favorite flavor of yogurt, said this would be her new favorite brand. Well, here's the thing. It wasn't strawberry yogurt. It was chocolate yogurt.

This is just one of the many intriguing studies in Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink. Wansink is a scientist, not a diet book writer or a nutritionist. He is also not a food snob. While he does enjoy a good fine-dining restaurant, he also is a big fan of Burger King’s Cini-Minis. His job is to do research on what we eat and what specifically changes what and how we eat. Wansink tells us right away in the introduction that the average person makes over 200 decisions about food every day, most of which are unconscious (after thinking about this statistic, I decided I probably make more than that and Jim decided he probably makes less). We take cues from such things as food packaging, restaurant lighting, food appearance, and environment. And while you may think that you’re smart enough to be immune (trust me, that’s how I felt when I started reading this book), you’re not: Wansink proves that time and again with all his research.

Wansink also says that this book is not about “dietary extremism.” He has a long discussion about why most deprivation diets---Atkin’s, South Beach, SugarBusters---don’t work: “1) Our body fights against them; 2) our brain fights against them; 3) our day-to-day environment fights against them.”

What the book is about is using what he refers to as the “mindless margin” to work for us in maintaining or losing weight. The mindless margin is a span of about 200 calories that can make the difference between gaining 10 pounds in a year (by eating 100 calories more a day) or losing 10 pounds in a year (by eating 100 calories less a day). The reason he calls it mindless is because your brain and body won’t even notice that the 100 calories are missing.

He covers a wide variety of topics and research in the book, including why we overeat when we aren’t even hungry and the power of numbers in grocery store promotions (e.g., “'2 for $2’ versus ‘1 for $1’”):

“After the research was completed and published in the Journal of Marketing Research, another friend and I were in the checkout line at a grocery store, where I saw a sign advertising gum, '10 packs for $2.' I was eagerly counting out 10 packs onto the conveyer belt, when my friend commented, ‘Didn’t you just publish a big research paper on that?’”

One study focused on the eating habits of young children, focusing on their like/dislike of vegetables. His initial assumption was that parents who practiced healthy eating habits would have children who liked vegetables. That may have been true for some, but he came across a day-care center filled with children who loved broccoli, regardless of their parents' eating habits:

“Many of the children told us they loved broccoli because their friends liked it or because it was ‘cool.’ Most of these associations we could trace back to two little brothers. In their laddering interviews both said broccoli reminded them of dinosaur trees, and they liked it because of that. This didn’t make much sense, but because of the far-reaching impact it seemed to have on the rest of the day-care group, we interviewed the mother in person. We discovered she had convinced them that broccoli looked like a dinosaur tree and when they ate broccoli, they could pretend they were ‘long-necked dinosaurs eating the dinosaur trees.’ At the dinosaur-loving age of three and five, this was pretty cool, and it quickly became pretty cool to their friends.”

I highly recommend this book to everyone. It's fun to read, you'll learn tons of neat information that will impress your friends, and it makes science fun.

Next book up: Braniac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs by Ken Jennings

The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

2007-01-20T18:41:00.000-06:00

Although he’s recently become more well known for his opposition to religion and supernaturalism in works like The God Delusion (see review), Richard Dawkins is, first and foremost, a biologist and animal behaviorist. The Selfish Gene, his first book, concerns itself with a basic question of evolution: Where does natural selection act?

The common understanding of the process is that it takes place at the level of the individual organism: for example, a zebra that has slightly better leg muscles than other zebras, and can therefore run faster, is less likely to be run down by a lion looking for dinner. It is also therefore more likely to reproduce and pass its slightly better leg muscles down to the next generation, and eventually most zebras have those slightly better leg muscles.

This is all well and good, but it also quickly runs into difficulties in the real world. For example, how can this explain a bird that, upon spotting a predator, makes loud warning cries to the rest of its flock? This is good for the flock, obviously, but it also draws the predator’s attention to the bird making the warning cries—seemingly the opposite of a better leg muscle, and something that on the face of it shouldn’t be favored by natural selection. Similarly, the real crux of evolution is in reproduction, with survival important mainly because it allows reproduction to occur. So what to make of nonreproductive drones and workers in insect populations, most of whom never pass on any genes at all?

A conventional answer when Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene was that natural selection takes place at both the level of the organism and the level of the group or species. The bird’s warning cry is bad for the organism, but good for a particular flock—flocks that used warning cries were more likely to survive than flocks that did not. Similarly, although sterile workers are little good to themselves as far as reproduction goes, their ability to concentrate on finding food and other tasks, without having to expend energy on reproduction, benefits their group.

Dawkins’s argument runs counter to this thinking, not in its effect (apparent individual altruism for the benefit of the group), but in its cause. Rather than moving up to the level of the group or species, we have to move down to the level of the gene. The question to ask is not whether or how a particular trait is good for an organism, or good for a species, but whether it’s good for the gene that influences the trait. When we say that a fast zebra is able to pass its slightly better leg muscles on to the next generation more effectively than other zebras, what we are really saying is that the DNA structures that produced those muscles have become more common in the population. From the gene’s point of view, the muscles are incidental. In this model, the organism, and the species it belongs to, are “survival machines” or “vehicles” that have, through the slow incremental processes of natural selection, been built by DNA replicators because those replicators that had good vehicles were better at surviving and reproducing than those who did not build such vehicles. It perhaps started with elements as simple as a cell wall, or two strands entwining to produce something better than each could on its own, and the argument in The Selfish Gene is that all of the complexity of life today is a difference of scale, not of principle.

This leads to all sorts of interesting and counterintuitive consequences. A central idea of the book (not original to Dawkins, although he expands on it) is the idea of kin selection. In local populations, there’s a good chance that a gene in any particular animal is also in other nearby animals, simply because they’ve been reproducing with one another. So although the bird warning others of a predator might be less likely to reproduce on its own, the warning is likely to benefit the same gene sitting in other members of the flock. We would also expect, for example, that animals would be more likely to show this altruism toward members of their family—who are, after all, the ones most likely to share the same gene. And not only that, but they should presumably be most likely to be altruistic toward those closely related to them, and less likely the further away you get: parents share 50 percent of their genes with their children and 25 percent with their grandchildren, so you would expect them to go more out of their way to help their children than their grandchildren. Siblings (who also have a 50 percent chance of sharing any given gene) should be more likely to help each other than they are to help cousins (who have only a 12.5 percent chance of sharing a gene).

This helps explain the nonreproductive insect workers mentioned earlier. A number of insect species are haplodiploid, which just means that rather than a chromosome determining gender (as in humans), eggs that have been fertilized by a male become females, and eggs that have not been fertilized become males. In these species, males have half the number of genes of females, which in terms of kin selection means that males share 100 percent of their genes with their mother. From the gene’s point of view, helping the mother to propagate children is just as good as if the individual male itself were able to reproduce.

These are just two basic examples, and simplified accounts of them at that; much of the pleasure of the book is in Dawkins’s fuller explication of these and many others. Ideas from game theory like the prisoner’s dilemma and the evolutionarily stable strategy turn out to be remarkably relevant to the gene’s “desire” to propagate itself at the expense of rival genes, and Dawkins has a talent for explaining these complicated ideas nonmathematically in vivid, lucid language.

He also moves beyond pure biological evolution to a more general theory—that natural selection and evolution are not specific to plants and animals, nor even to DNA. The only elements required are:

Stable replicators capable of making copies of themselves with a high degree of accuracy, but not perfect accuracy
Competition among these replicators such that the differences between them make some more likely to replicate and spread than others

In other words, reproduction, variation, and competition—these three things must lead, in principle, to natural selection and evolution. Dawkins speculates that life anywhere in the universe, regardless of how different it might be from life here, will have arisen from this process, and he also notes that it need not even apply solely to living things. This was the book that introduced the now widespread term meme, a cultural analogue to the gene that propagates itself through human minds and also possesses the three requisite elements for evolution. A meme reproduces when one person passes it to another, varies when the person it passes to doesn’t remember it or understand it exactly as the first person did, and competes with other memes for prominence in individual minds and in the culture at large.

The 30th anniversary edition of the book was released last year, and is worth reading almost as much for the endnotes as the text itself. Although he has mostly refrained from revision, and says that he still holds substantially the same views now as he did when he originally wrote the book, he also notes places where he turned out to be wrong, or he has changed his mind, or further evidence has come to light, or others have expanded on his ideas or raised interesting counterarguments.*

He does also display some of the weaknesses later evident in books like The God Delusion. In the endnotes, he admits at several different points that he went overboard with his rhetoric—for example, when he predicts that we will eventually see the idea of the evolutionarily stable strategy as “one of the most important advances in evolutionary theory since Darwin,” and says in the endnotes that this was “a bit over the top. I was probably over-reacting to the then prevalent neglect of the ESS idea in the contemporary biological literature.” You wonder whether the same type of overreaction might have resulted in some of the angrier-sounding passages of The God Delusion. He also seems unable to refrain from taking potshots about his pet peeves, which you wish his editor had been able to convince him to cut. (In The God Delusion, I’d imagine that those who agree with him would term them “witty asides”; those who don’t, perhaps “snide barbs.”) Toward the end of The Selfish Gene, for example, he devotes a couple parenthetical sentences in the middle of a paragraph to explaining the correct pronunciation of the word algae. Perhaps correct (at least at the time), but also pedantic and irrelevant.

Those aside, The Selfish Gene is a terrifically engaging book—it won’t topple The Blind Watchmaker from atop my list of favorites, but it’s well worth reading. Although since Dawkins mentions more than once in the endnotes that The Extended Phenotype is the book he’s personally most proud of, that one will be getting a shot soon.

__________
* Sometimes in funny ways. In a section discussing the division of labor in social insects that leads to some individuals devoting themselves to bearing offspring and others to caring for those offspring, he notes, “Although it is theoretically possible for evolution to proceed in this direction, it seems to be only in the social insects that it has actually happened.” The endnote to this sentence begins, “That is what we all thought. We had reckoned without naked mole rats.” Hehe.

The End (Lemony Snicket)

2007-01-16T22:54:00.000-06:00

One of my new favorite ways to exercise at the gym is to read while using the recumbent exercise bike. This is especially good considering that the TVs at the gym are normally only on CNN and ESPN (I would be grateful for ESPN if it were baseball season, but it is not). Last Sunday morning, I sat down on the bike, set up my program (Hills Plus, Interval), and settled into the beginning of The End by Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler). And then a woman sat down on the bike next to me.

"Is that the last one?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
"I read some of the earlier ones. But I just can't get passed how depressing they are."

Hmm, I thought. I mean, the books are dark, but we're not talking anywhere near Six Feet Under: Season Five depressing. Or even 5 minutes of CNN depressing. In fact, they're very humorous (in a unusual and intelligent sort of way). And they're full of writing like this:

They found some of their least favorite spices, including dried parsely, which scarcely tastes like anything, and garlic salt, which forces the taste of everything else to flee. They found spices they associated with certain dishes, such as turmeric, which their father used to use while making curried peanut soup, and nutmeg, which their mother used to mix into gingerbread, and they found spices they did not associate with anything, such as marjoram, which everyone owns but scarcely anyone uses, and powdered lemon peel, which should only be used in emergencies, such as when fresh lemons have become extinct.

The way Handler tells his stories is part of the enjoyment of reading these books. And ending a 13-book series that has a dedicated fan base isn't easy. Wrap things up too easily and you'll satisfy some and annoy others. The same would be true for leaving things too open ended. Simply put, we find out some answers and we are left with some questions, which really does follow the spirit of the rest of the books.

Next book up: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brain Wansink

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Haruki Murakami)

2007-01-09T07:28:00.000-06:00

Murakami’s stories don’t seem written so much as transcribed directly from the subconscious, built on the unfathomable logic of dreams. They often give the impression that something mysterious and enormous is just out of sight, intruding just a small corner into an otherwise normal world.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman brings together 24 uncollected stories from throughout his career, including several that were later worked into novels. It’s trademark Murakami in a lot of ways—Kafka or Borges as written by Raymond Carver, a profusion of terse, typically unremarkable first-person narrators grappling with mysterious women, inexplicable strangers, strange deaths and disappearances, and, in one, a talking monkey. (Anyone who’s been following his work will also recognize his ongoing preoccupation with ears, cats, zoos, and wells). But he gets a lot of mileage out of this instantly recognizable voice—the book ranges from fable-like stories at the far side of bizarre (“The Ice Man,” “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story,” “The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes”) to relatively straightforward realist fiction (the title story, “The Year of Spaghetti,” “Firefly”).

If you’ve read Murakami before and liked him, you definitely won’t want to pass this up. If you haven’t: time to jump on board—this is as good a place to start as any.

Also highly recommended (at least among the ones I’ve read so far):

Novels
A Wild Sheep Chase
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Norwegian Wood

Short stories
The Elephant Vanishes
After the Quake

(For the record, I found his most recent novel, Kafka on the Shore, a little disappointing—it was missing some essential quality of coherence that his other work seems to create effortlessly. But otherwise, I have yet to read anything of his I haven’t liked.)

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World (John Wood)

2007-01-07T15:28:00.000-06:00

About a year ago, one of my coworkers told me that she volunteered at this place that built schools overseas. I thought that was pretty cool, but then I didn't think too much else about it. Then one day we were looking through photos of a trip she took to Cambodia and Vietnam a few years ago. She told me the trip was through the company she volunteered with, and that part of it involved touring the schools the company help finance. Again, I thought that it was a great thing, but I still didn't completely realize how amazing the company was until I read the book she loaned me: Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood, who is the founder of the company she volunteers for, Room to Read. And now I'm very glad to say, I finally get the importance of this company and the work it's doing.

John Wood was trekking in Nepal when he visited a school's library. But it didn't look how we would imagine a library to be. It was empty, save for a few outdated books locked up in a cabinet because they were so valuable. He vowed right then to send books to this country to fill the library. His local guide said that many travelers before him had made such promises, but no one had ever followed through. But John did. He contacted his friends and relatives, received tons of donations and worked through the logistics of getting the books over there. And that was just the first step.

Probably the most amazing part of this story is that John had never worked in a nonprofit before and had never really seen himself in this role. He was first and foremost an entrepreneur and used his knowledge from Microsoft to create a successful company. But in many ways, he was just like any of us: an ordinary person who had a goal, did everything he could to meet the goal, and just happened to change the world because of it.

Over the years, the company has expanded out of Nepal and into Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and other countries. It has helped finance schools, libraries, computer rooms, and scholarships for girls. (One of the central workings of Room to Read is that each project must have local support---the company provides a challenge grant, which the community needs to meet financially and/or through providing labor and supplies to meet their goal.)

They've partnered with publishers to create bilingual books and books relating to each specific culture. Even though they didn't know how they were going to do it (both staff-wise and financially), they responded to the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka with a pledge to build schools there. The donations came in and they found the staff devoted to do the work, and they were one of the first companies to respond to the disaster with a future investment to the community.

One of the reasons Room to Read is so successful is that donors can see exactly where their money is going. For a certain amount of money, they can adopt an entire school and even visit the school once it is constructed. And throughout the book, Wood continually stresses how important education is to the growth and health of a community, its country, and our world. The personal stories he tells in the book are uplifting and enlightening, both those of the students who have benefited from the programs and the donors themselves.

If you are interested in learning more about Room to Read, I'd recommend reading this book (it really is inspiring) and visiting their website. They take monetary donations but they do not take book donations from individuals (they have found over the years that new book donations from publishers work best for their needs).

Next book up: The End by Lemony Snickett