Brainiac (Ken Jennings)

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)

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)

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)

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.

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* 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)

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)

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)

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

The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins)

Be forewarned: Richard Dawkins does not pull punches, a fact that should be obvious to anyone looking at the title of his most recent book, The God Delusion. He has little patience for poor reasoning or wishful thinking, and, as he says early in the book, “I shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else.”

I’ve been a fan of his ever since I read The Blind Watchmaker, a wonderfully lucid and detailed explication of Darwinian natural selection that debunks both creationist/“intelligent design” rhetoric and the widespread misunderstandings that enable them to keep promoting their religious views as science, at least in America. (Anyone who says that evolution is “just random chance,” for example, does not really understand natural selection, and anyone who says that evolution is “just a theory” does not really understand the scientific definition of theory.)*

In Dawkins’s view, life’s complexity and variety used to provide the single most compelling reason to believe in a higher being. But Darwin showed that such a being is at best superfluous to our understanding of the universe and ourselves. The God Delusion serves as a natural extension of a book like Watchmaker: what that work did for the conflict between creationism and evolution, The God Delusion does for the broader conflict between religion and science, arguing not just that a Designer is unnecessary to explain the development of life, but that there are simply no good reasons to believe in God (or gods), and that religion is not only misguided but actively harmful to society—that it encourages the sort of blind, uncritical acceptance of received truths that supports fanaticism and intolerance.

And make no mistake: he does see religion and science as diametrically opposed. Dawkins spends a good number of pages putting to rest well-meaning notions that religion and science simply serve two different purposes, the “non-overlapping magisteria” of Stephen Jay Gould. Religion makes profoundly scientific claims about the nature of the universe (for example, whether Jesus rose from the dead is a scientific claim—it either happened or it didn’t) and tends to shun or embrace science and its methods as is convenient (if scientific evidence came to light demonstrating that Jesus did rise from the dead, it’s unlikely that religious leaders would ignore that evidence as irrelevant on the grounds that science has nothing to do with religion). And for those questions that science can’t answer, he sees no evidence that religion has any true expertise to offer, to say nothing of the impossibility of deciding which religion, exactly, is most expert.

Dawkins covers both the classic “proofs” of God’s existence and philosophical approaches like Pascal’s wager, and argues that, from a scientific point of view, God is no more likely than Bertrand Russell’s orbiting teapot or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He also thoroughly dissects many other arguments in favor of the emotional or cultural usefulness of religions (which, either way, have nothing to do with whether those religions are true):

• Don’t religions provide valuable moral guidance?
  
• Doesn’t religion provide comfort and purpose to millions of people? Why would you want to deprive them of that?
• Most religious people are perfectly nice—why can’t you leave them alone?
• Every culture in the world has religion—isn’t it an intrinsic part of humanity?
• Weren’t Hitler and Stalin atheists?
• How can atheists be happy? Don’t they think life has no purpose?
• Aren’t you just a scientific fundamentalist?

I would guess that for many, at least some of these ring true. (I’ve heard both the first and second myself, more than once, from people who aren’t especially religious themselves.) If you’re one of them, you may be interested in hearing the other side—why, for example, the link between religion and morality is nonexistent, and why Dawkins thinks that even moderate religion make a dangerous virtue of unquestioning obedience that then allows extremism to flourish.

Given how things are going so far in the twenty-first century, with a president who apparently believes God wants him in the White House, regular assaults on both science curricula and separation of church and state, and 40 percent of Americans still rejecting evolution—without even getting into the hornet's nest of religiously motivated terrorism—I’m glad to see books like Dawkins’s and Sam Harris’s on the best-seller lists. The term atheist has come to be loaded with far more negative weight than it deserves, and I would hope that they can start putting a lot of misconceptions to rest. (A recent Newsweek poll found that only 37 percent of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president. By way of comparison, homosexuals apparently fared better.) At one point Dawkins quotes Julia Sweeney’s show Letting Go of God, when, after describing how her parents learned that she had become an atheist, she says,

I think that my parents had been mildly disappointed when I’d said I didn’t believe in God anymore, but being an atheist was another thing altogether.

Absurd, of course—but absurdity that rings true. I doubt this book will convince very many people to abandon their faith and take up rational secularism, but with a few people here and there, it might eventually reach the levels of popularity currently enjoyed by astrology, ESP, and haunted houses.

Although I do hope the Flying Spaghetti Monster sticks around.

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* The Blind Watchmaker also has some really awesome parts about bats.

3 Nights in August (Buzz Bissinger)

I am fully aware that baseball season is the longest sports season in America, but that doesn't mean I handle the off-season any better with that knowledge. I don't like it. But some things make it a little more bearable, like Buzz Bissinger's book 3 Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager, which uses a three-game series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs in 2003 to present an intimate look into the mind of Tony LaRussa and into baseball, itself. (Bissinger is also the author of Friday Night Lights, the popular book about football in a small Texas town, which is one of the reasons LaRussa sought him for a collaboration.)

Now, as a Cubs fan, I do have to disclose my bias against both the Cardinals and LaRussa. Before I read this book, I was definitely not a fan of either (and I'm still not going to root for the Cardinals---they're the Cubs biggest rival in the NL Central division). But after reading Bissinger's book, I have a lot more respect for LaRussa. I found out he's a strict vegetarian and has been for years. And he works really hard at what he does. If you've ever seen LaRussa in the dugout during a game, he has a poker face like no one else, and he looks almost as businesslike as a Yankee. But I learned he is very much emotionally invested in the game. And if something doesn't turn out the way it should (as often happens in baseball), LaRussa takes it personally and wonders what he could have done to change the outcome for the better.

3 Nights in August really gets into the inner workings of baseball and covers all the small details involved in shifting the defense, where to lay down a bunt, how it's easier to get a pitcher to change his mechanics than a hitter (oh, Corey Patterson, I fear you will always be swinging at those balls up high), the origins of the use of bullpen relievers and pitch count, and how the game is always changing. Plus it featured my first Cubs team, the 2003 team that almost made it to the World Series. They had Kenny Lofton, who I still love and root for no matter what team he's on (the picture above is of the Kenny bobblehead Jim got me for Christmas), "My Man Simon" (who is no longer "My Man" and is now just "Randall Simon"), Sammy Sosa before he started really sucking, and Moises Alou, who I just can't understand why anyone wouldn't like him. This was the year when Wood and Prior were (gasp!) both uninjured and consistent.

I loved this book and would recommend it to any baseball fan. It made me realize what a bad manager I would be and that there's a lot of thought behind the many decisions a baseball manager makes every day (but I'm still going to yell at the TV when I disagree!).

Next book up: Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood

Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong (Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts)

Among baseball analysts, sabermetricians are defined by their skepticism and demand for hard evidence: “You think pitching is more important than hitting? Why? By how much? How do you know? Why are you looking at me like that?”* They particularly focus on trying to prove or disprove the value of conventional wisdom—asking, for instance, whether traditional offensive statistics like batting average and RBIs, and traditional pitching statistics like ERA, are really useful ways of deciding how good a player is, and how big a role factors like luck and environment play in those statistics. It’s an indication of their success that stats like on-base percentage and slugging percentage are now shown regularly on broadcasts and at games, and that it’s now general knowledge even among casual fans that a player’s home park can have a significant effect on his superficial numbers (with Exhibit A being Coors Field in Denver).

Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong takes a series of questions about the game and tries to answer them with hard data and statistical analysis. Some of these are old sabermetric canards (whether the RBI is a useful statistic, whether there’s such a thing as clutch hitting, when teams should really use their closer), but others are just interesting questions that get to the heart of evaluating players; managerial strategy; the relative value of pitching, hitting, and defense; and even questions of payroll and stadium financing. Is Barry Bonds better than Babe Ruth? Does batting order matter? Is Alex Rodriguez overpaid? Do catchers really have an impact on pitching performance? And my favorite: Why doesn’t Billy Beane’s shit work in the playoffs? (For those who haven’t read Moneyball, this was Billy Beane’s famous answer for why the A’s did consistently well over the course of a regular season and consistently failed in the postseason: “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs.”)

The answers to these questions are invariably interesting, but just as interesting is the discussion of what the questions even mean. Most people, if asked whether Barry Bonds is better than Babe Ruth, would go straight for their career numbers, and compare their batting average, home runs, RBIs, and so on. A more serious fan might also look at stats like their OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage). But the discussion here starts asking the really hard questions: Wasn’t Ruth facing much easier pitching than Bonds does? Doesn’t Bonds benefit from modern nutrition and training methods? What about the different ballparks they played in? And how do their various core stats translate into actually helping their teams win—which is, after all, their purpose in the first place? This is how you end up with measures like EqA (Equivalent Average, a composite measure of total offensive performance) and adjustments like the Time Machine Effect and Timeline Adjustment, which are complex, but necessary to get at the truth of the question.

The book did have a few minor annoyances. The most substantial of these was that the discussion of VORP (Value Over Replacement Player), one of their fundamental concepts, doesn’t occur until more than halfway through the book, meaning every time it came up prior to then (which was often), you always being referred to a future chapter—an idea as important as that really should have been thoroughly explained much earlier. Less substantial but still bothersome was that the 27 chapters are organized into an innings-outs scheme, from Chapter 1-1 to Chapter 9-3. This is clever, but is also always producing things like “Table 1-2.7”—which, in an already numbers-heavy book, is just too many numbers to simply identify a table, and became a little tedious after 100 pages or so.**

Balancing these somewhat, though, is that this is the first book I’ve ever seen to cite the Onion in an endnote, which you’ve just got to respect.

If you love baseball and are at least willing to put up with the math, you’ll like the book—I liked it a lot, but Maria passed it over to me right around Table BP.7 in the introduction (“Babe Ruth’s EqA, Adjusted for Time Machine Effect”). It also helps, I think, if you’ve encountered at least some of these ideas before, either in Moneyball or from reading a sabermetrically inclined sportswriter or two, but there is a helpful glossary if you get lost in the maze of VORP and WARP and PECOTA and BABIP and WinEx and SNLVAR. Despite the complex subject, though, you don't have to be a mathematician to understand it and enjoy it. And even if you don’t follow all the details of every last regression analysis or take the time to examine every last line graph, when you’ve finished, you’ll undoubtedly look at the game differently than when you started.

__________
* Rejected opening #1: “If baseball analysts were states, sabermetricians would be Missouri—the Show-Me State.” What—I didn’t use it!
** And this may bug only me, but one of my pet peeves is the use of RBI as both the singular and plural form: 1 RBI, 120 RBI. I realize there are reasons for doing this (namely that RBIs appears to read literally as run batted ins), but I don’t happen to agree with them, and I frankly doubt that those who say “He had 120 RBI last year” would also say, for example, “During the war he and his unit were captured and held as POW.”

The United States of Arugula (David Kamp)

Anyone who reads this blog regularly should know my stance on food. I'm pro-food. Totally for it. In a single paragraph of the preface of David Kamp's The United States Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation, he uses some of my favorite words: Ruth Reichl, Calvin Trillin, Anthony Bourdain, Zagat, Whole Foods, local farmer's markets, Cook's Illustrated.

Kamp presents a great history of how Americans started thinking more about food than just sustenance. He starts with what he refers to as The Big Three: Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and Julia Child, and I especially loved his descriptions of Child in her TV show: "She held up a roasting chicken and promised to help it realize 'the full glory of its chickendom.' She unapologetically patched back together a potato fritter that had fallen apart as she tried too flip it, saying 'You can always pick it up. If you are alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?'"

He also chronicles the availability of ingredients we can find easily today. In the late 1960s, chefs couldn't easily find fresh herbs to work with. (In its initial years, Chez Panisse in Berkeley took care of this problem by having customers bring their home garden herbs with them to dinner.) But once items became available, then there were ingredient explosions: balsalmic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes, blackened redfish (a trend started by cajun chef Paul Prudhomme, which was so popular it almost decimated the redfish population).

Along with highlighting the higher end restaurants (such as Nobu and Spago), Kamp also discusses the influences of smaller restaurants: The Greens (started by Deborah Madison, the author of what I would call the best cookbook ever, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone), the Moosewood Restaurant (which also has many great cookbooks), and Ovens of Brittany (a restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin whose staff included Odessa Piper who went on to make L'Etoile, also in Madison, the success it continues to be today).

There's a lot of great information in this book. Among other interesting things, I learned that Peets coffee (a California favorite) began before Starbucks, and that the guys who started Starbucks had Peets as their initial supplier and roaster. I would think that anyone who watches even a little bit of Food Network would like this book, and all foodies would love it.

Next book up: Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager by Buzz Bissinger

Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light (Mort Rosenblum)

Saying I enjoy chocolate might be an understatement. I really like chocolate, and I mean the good stuff. I'll take the Scharffen Berger. I'll take the extra-dark. And I'll especially take just one of the expensive handmade chocolates at the Whole Foods chocolate bar (I'd take more but that would cost me a lot of money). And thanks to Mort Rosenblum's Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light, I now am much more educated on what makes good chocolate good, and the history behind it.

I was worried this book might be too heavy-handed and boring with the history, but it wasn't at all. Rosenblum mixes the history with his present quest to learn as much as he can about chocolate. He fully admits that he was a chocolate novice when he started this book, and he surrounds himself with experts as he travels country by country to taste and experience chocolate.

The chocolate stories from Europe, including France, Belgium, and England, were great, but I most enjoyed learning about American chocolate, especially the stories behind Hershey (and hearing what non-Americans think about the taste of Hershey bars) and the Mars company.

My mom-in-law told us a couple months ago that the public can tour the Scharffen Berger chocolate factory up in Berkeley, and I guess at the time I didn't realize how much fun that would be. After reading this book, however, I definitely want to tour the factory soon, especially because you get to taste chocolate during it. And Scharffen
Berger chocolate is really, really good. (You can buy it online if it isn't available at a store near you.)

Next book up: Not sure yet. I have a couple of books waiting on the hold shelf for me at the library.

In Persuasion Nation (George Saunders) by Guest Reviewer Jim

Way back in the Dark Ages of 1996 (visionary me, age 18: “This Internet thing is totally lame”), my dad got me a new book of short stories by a guy neither of us had ever heard of or knew anything about—CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders. He bought it purely based on the interesting-sounding blurbs from Garrison Keillor, Tobias Wolff, and (particularly) the notoriously reclusive and not-given-to-spreading-effusive-praise-for-just-anybody Thomas Pynchon.

The first time I read it, I didn’t give it much thought. But when I picked it up again a year or so later, almost at random, it absolutely floored me. How I had missed this the first time, I don’t know—the stories were funny and weird and moving all at the same time, and not like anything else I’d ever read, featuring, among other things, an unfortunately chosen security guard run amok in a Civil War theme park, hapless resentment taken out on cows with windows in their sides, a guilt-ridden wave maker, and a mutant in the future making his way across an irrational American landscape trying to save his sister. I think I may have read it straight through two more times, and I’ve gone back to it at least five or six times since then.*

I’ve been an avid follower of his over the last ten years, even getting my hands on his children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, just because I had to see what a George Saunders children’s book would be like. (Answer: Very funny and very weird. And, I might add, outstandingly illustrated, and just nicely designed and well put together as a whole.) Which is a roundabout way of getting to In Persuasion Nation, his third short story collection and fifth book overall, released earlier this year.

Although it carries the familiar “stories” description on its cover, In Persuasion Nation also includes pieces more classifiable as humor or straight satire than fiction (for example, “I CAN SPEAK!™” is a letter written from a product service representative to a customer complaining about the title product, a computerized mask that lets parents pretend their babies can speak, and “My Amendment” outlines a proposal to outlaw not only same-sex marriage, but also “samish-sex marriage” when a somewhat effeminate-seeming man marries a somewhat masculine-seeming woman). In addition to some classic Saunders lunacy, full of the kinds of guilt-ridden losers and hilarious bureaucrat speak that populated his first two collections (see “CommComm,” in which an unfortunate government PR flack becomes enmeshed in a fellow employee’s failed attempt to cover up historical artifacts at a dig site) (and also there are ghosts) (and a department called Odors), the book also includes some surprisingly straightforward narratives (see “Christmas” and “Bohemians,” both set in reasonable approximations of the real world) alongside a few that charge full speed into satirical unreality (both “Brad Carrigan, American” and “In Persuasion Nation” are set in a sort of TV dimension inhabited by characters from sitcoms and advertisements, struggling against the limitations of their existence).

The sheer variety of material and approaches, and his forays into what might understatedly be called wildly imaginative absurdity, make this book less coherent than either CivilWarLand or Pastoralia (his second collection); it feels like what I suspect it is, which is a sort of jumble of different kinds of work he’d done over the last five or six years while also working on Gappers of Frip and his terrific semi-allegorical short novel The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. That’s more of an observation than a criticism—he’s clearly given his imagination free reign to lead him wherever it wants, and I’m happy to follow. But for anyone who hasn’t read him before, it also means that I’d recommend either of his other two collections as a better place to start. But if you’ve already jumped on the Saunders train (as, incidentally, the folks over at the MacArthur Foundation did earlier this year, handing over one of their $500,000 no-strings-attached, keep-up-the-good-work "genius grants"), you won’t want to pass it up—even if the strange meta-landscapes of stories like “Brad Carrigan, American” and “In Persuasion Nation” aren’t your thing, it’d be worth it just for stories like “Bohemians” and (a favorite of mine that I’d saved from the New Yorker back in 2002) “My Flamboyant Grandson.”

And then you can start doing what I do, which is keep a keen eye out for news of his next book.

* Side note: I went to see him give a reading a couple years ago, and took along my battered old copy of CivilWarLand to get it signed. When I handed it over he looked at it and said, “Oh God, you’ve got the one with the ugly cover.” Hehe.

This I Believe (Jay Allison and Dan Gediman)

This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women caught my eye on the new book shelf because of three little letters at the bottom of the cover: npr. I love those letters and the many wonderful things in life they bring me, most especially This American Life. (I am very pleased to pass along the news, which was rumored by my dad-in-law and confirmed by Jim, that This American Life is indeed offering free podcasts of their current shows.)

This I Believe was a radio program originally started in the 1950s and revived after 9/11 with the idea that people would state their personal beliefs in a couple hundred words. The book includes selections from both the original series (Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson) and the more-recent one (Bill Gates, Gloria Steinem, Errol Morris), and it also includes nonfamous people, including one woman who wrote an essay for the original series at age 16 and an updated one for the more-recent series.

I started reading this book a couple essays at a time in the evenings before I went to bed. In that way (and at the pace), I found it to be very inspiring and calming. However, because I am now spending this week and the next or so fulfilling my civic duty in jury duty, I went through the bulk of the book in a day, which I'm guessing is not the best way to read it, and that experience left me much less excited about it.

Am I glad I read it? Yes. Do I have enough enthusiasm to recommend it to others? I don't know. But again, that could be situational (see above). I'd say if it crossed your path, you should pick it up, but I'm not sure about searching it out.

Next book up: Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light by Mort Rosenblum

Ultramarathon Man (Dean Karnazes)

Right from the beginning of Ultramarathon Man, it is very clear that Dean Karnazes is first and foremost a runner, not a writer. The beginning of the book is to the point, barebones writing, and comes off even a bit melodramatic. But then I got sucked into this unbelievable story about Karnazes' life as an ultramarathon runner, and I could care less about the style of writing (and what I felt was melodramatic at the beginning turned out to be very genuine, I realized near the end).

For those unfamiliar with the term, an ultramarathon is any distance past that of a marathon. Apparently for some people, 26.2 is just not enough. Karnazes is one of those people. He was always a runner, but didn't really begin the very-long-distance running until after he turned 30. His first ultramarathon was the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, where participants run up and down the Sierra Mountains and try to finish in 24 hours. (To train for this, among other things, he would run up Hyde Street hill in San Francisco. I personally think "hill" is the wrong term for this street. It's very, very, very steep, even in San Francisco terms.)

Probably the best part of this book is Karnazes' descriptions of what happens both to his body and his mind during these long runs. During the Western States run, he develops night blindness, where he can barely see. (And even though those in the aid tent suggest he quit, he keeps right on racing.) And as if the Western States run wasn't enough, he then enters Badwater, which goes from Death Valley to Mount Whitney, 135 miles, where for the Death Valley part runners have to wear special UV protective desert suits so their skin doesn't scorch, they have to run on the painted white line on the highway to keep their shoes from melting, and Karnazes thinks he hallucinates that a bunch of rattlesnakes are on the road, but it turns out that they are indeed really there.

There are even more astounding runs in the book, including the first ever Antarctic South Pole marathon. This is a short book (took me an afternoon to read) and I think it's worth it to read Karnazes' story. Oh, and wonder what he's doing now? He just completed Endurance 50, 50 marathons in 50 days, and now is in the process of running home from New York (home is San Francisco).

Next book up: This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman

Blue Latitudes (Tony Horwitz)

Prior to our recent trip to Hawaii, I thought it might be a good idea to get some island-themed books at the library. One I ended up taking with me was Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz. My knowledge of Captain Cook prior to reading this book didn't really go beyond name recognition, and I'd say that would probably be true for all my knowledge of the explorers. Other than learning their names along with a brief career synopsis in 4th grade, Cook (and the others) haven't really come up that much in conversation. Though, thanks to my trusty Lonely Planet guide, I did know about his eventful end on the shores of Hawaii.

Horwitz writes history in my favorite way to read it. He intersperses Cook's voyages (even with excerpts from Cook's journals and journals from others on the ships with him) with his own voyages to these places, where he talks to both experts and everyday people who live with Cook's legacy, in places like Fiji, Tonga, Australia, Hawaii, even in the very remote Unalaska Island in the Bering Sea. One of Horwitz's goal in doing this research and writing this book was to get as close as he could to a balanced account, no only presenting the English side, but also that of the natives of the places Cook visited.

Among Horwitz traveling adventures are many trips at sea, which prove very entertaining as he readily admits it's not his favorite way to travel. During a yacht race in Australia, he says, "I sprawled flat with my face against the desk. This seemed to help, so long as I hugged the mast and kept my eyes firmly shut. Eventually I felt not so much sick as listless and profoundly apathetic, like a polar explorer who announces, 'I'll just lie down in the snow for a while.' Or like the pitiable few in Bligh's longboat who, after being set adrift from the Bounty, became so thirsty and despairing that they drank seawater and died. It was depressing to realize that I was the type who wouldn't have made it."

In Cooktown, Australia, a remote town best known for its rowdiness and drinking, they have an annual "Discovery Festival" celebrating the Endeavour's landing there. When Horwitz takes part he learns, "the reenactment also had a shifting cast. A mainstay of the troup once failed to show up because 'he was on holiday at the Queen's request,' Rob said; in other words, in prison, for possession of drugs. Another lost his part due to 'lead poisoning,' meaning he'd shot himself. Also, since the reenactment came on the last day of the festival, it inevitably suffered from AWOL sailors: men too hung over to show up."

In Horwitz's travels, he encounters almost every possible emotion regarding Cook. Many islanders felt rage at what he had done to their ancestors. Even more it seemed were apathetic about it. And in many places, Horwitz found people trying their best keep the best of Cook alive and honored. He also encounters people living, as he and often they refer to it, on the edge of the world, such as in a small town on the Alaskan Peninsula, where he goes for a walk onshore. "Almost no one else bothered to disembark, and it was easy to see why. The wind blew so hard that I was almost crawling on all fours by the time I reached the end of the long pier. Taking refuge in the first building I came to--the harbor office--I found four men sipping coffee and staring out the window. . . . 'A bit fresh out today,' I said, as a conversation started. One of the men looked at me strangely. 'This is a nice day today,' he said' Last month we clocked the wind at a hundred and thirty-seven miles an hour.'"

This book is interesting both for the stories of the history and those of the present. It's a long book, but worth the read, and entertaining the whole way through.

Next book up: Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner by Dean Karnazes

Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball (Molly O'Neil)

I found Mostly True on the new book rack at the library. How could I pass it up? A book that combines food and baseball? What's not to love? Molly O'Neill is the sister of former Major Leaguer Paul O'Neill (he's one of her five brothers). And if you're like me and that name doesn't ring a bell (because you are not a Yankees fan), Jim helpfully reminded me that Paul O'Neill guest-starred as himself in a Seinfeld episode (the one where Kramer makes him promise to hit two home runs in a game for a sick kid in the hospital).

I had not heard of Molly O'Neill before, but I found out she has made quite a name for herself in reviewing restaurants for The New York Times, and while developing her cooking and writing career, she became good friends with such food personalities as Julia Child.

I figured that I had my hopes up too high for this book as it combined two of my favorite things in life, so I was fully prepared for it to be mediocre. I was so wrong. From the very beginning of this book, it was clear that O'Neill writes well and with energy. It's a beautiful book that moves from baseball to cooking seamlessly. I spent a good half-hour on a sunny beach in Hawaii finishing the book before I would get in the water because I didn't want to put it down. It was that good.

Next book up: Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz

Lost and Found (Carolyn Parkhurst)

I haven't read very much fiction lately, so I was looking forward to Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst. All I knew about it was that it was about contestants on a reality TV show and it had gotten good reviews, which was enough for me to want to read it. The first chapter begins from the point of view of a mother who is competing on the show with her teenage daughter, and by page six, the reader finds out their big story, the reason why they're on the show, which is that the daughter was pregnant and had a baby with the mother unaware of this until the night she gave birth. This information was presented so dramatically that I wasn't sure I could handle the rest of the book if it was all this emotionally supercharged.

Luckily, a few of the other contestants in the show (including the daughter) also take turns telling their stories in the chapters (former child actors, a "saved" gay man and lesbian woman now married to each other), and while I still felt there were uber-dramatical moments throughout, it got better and better, and I had a hard time putting this book down. I was sucked in and had a lot of gasp-out-loud moments. This book would be a good one for traveling or when you have an afternoon or two where you don't have to be anywhere or do anything and you can lose yourself in a book.

There'll be a slight haitus for the blog while Jim and I head to Hawaii to enjoy hikes in dormant volcano, a tour of a goat cheese farm where we'll get to help herd the goats and feed them, and various kinds of water activities. Mahalo!

Next book up: Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball by Molly O'Neill

Galloway's Book on Running (Jeff Galloway)

A few weeks ago, I found myself awake at 5 am on a cold, dark morning in downtown San Jose with a bunch of other green T shirt-clad people who were volunteering for the San Jose Rock n' Roll Half-Marathon. (For those of you not familiar with a Rock n' Roll marathon, it is a marathon where a live band plays at each mile, and there's usually a big concert at the end.) Even though my friend Ashley and I had volunteered for the finish line portion of the race, we still had to be there by 5 am. Luckily, though, we ended up with an even better job. We were two of the three official timers for Meb Keflezghi, who won the silver medal back in Athens for the marathon. He was trying to set a new 10-mile record, so we stood at the 10-mile marker, stopwatches in hand, index fingers poised, and clicked the millisecond worth of time that his chest crossed our line. (Meb was not having the best day and he was the third elite runner to cross the 10-mile line, so he did not set a new record.)

Once our official job was over, we stood at the 10-mile marker and cheered on everyone who ran by, and it made for an inspiring day. There was a blind runner aided by a guide who ran directly in front of him, while they each held onto a pole in each hand. There was a woman with a prosthetic running leg, and her running partner was completing the race barefoot. There were old and young runners, runners in great shape and those who were really struggling. We cheered on friends, and after a couple hours of watching people stream by, we thought, you know, maybe we can do this, too.

I was never an athletic kid. At all. Jim has fond memories of his elementary school PE class, with juggling, roller skating, and hula hooping. I remember being picked last for softball, being hit again and again by a stiff gray foam dodgeball, and hanging on a rope I couldn't climb until they told me I could let go. But a couple years ago, I found myself in great shape (thanks to the Monkey Bar Gym in Madison, Wisconsin) and decided I wanted to run. I completed two 5 Ks, and even an 8 K, but then didn't run regularly after that.

But I learned something very valuable from some of the half-marathoners. You don't have to run the whole time. There's this wonderful formula called the "5-1" where you run for 5 minutes, walk for 1 minute, and then repeat until you finish the race. I had never heard of this before and had always thought of walking during running as giving up (whenever I stopped to walk I could never get up the energy to run again). Well, according to Jeff Galloway, one of the reasons that the 5-1 works is that you start taking the walk breaks before you're really tired, so you keep your endurance but you give yourself a breather and you work all your leg muscles, which helps from cramping or overuse. I find that the best part of the 5-1 is that 5 minutes seems doable. Running 3 more miles may not, but 5 minutes? I can do that.

In Galloway's Book on Running, the original edition coming out in 1987, Jeff Galloway presents what was probably at that time a fairly revolutionary program of running. Not only does he talk about the walk breaks (which he even recommends to elite runners, though with a less than a minute walk in between the runs), he also talks about how it can be better to run every other day than everyday.

In this book, I learned how much you need to run a week to progress toward a goal for a race or to keep weight off. He goes into the science behind what happens to your body when you run, how to be faster, how to find the right pair of shoes, how to prevent injury, and his wife talks about the differences between men running and women running. The best thing I learned from this book is that you only have to run 3 times a week (two 30-45 min runs and then one long run) to run a half-marathon or even a full marathon. And (even better), you should not run your long run fast when training. It should be slow. Galloway's book does give some advice to elite athletes, but I feel like his main audience is what he refers to as the "neighborhood runner," and he's all for people running throughout their lives (he gives plenty examples of people who start running very late in life and have great experiences).

And for those who are afraid running for 5 minutes at a time seems too long, don't worry. Galloway recommends that beginning runners start walking first, and running just a bit at a time (even as little as 30 seconds at a time) and then working up to more. When I first started running again a few weeks ago, I started with a 2-1 and worked up to the 5-1. I have to say, I've had a lot more fun running these past few weeks than I ever had before. I'm going to do my first-ever 10K on Thanksgiving morning, which really, is just a very good excuse to eat a lot of pie later in the day. And I am training for a half-marathon in February up in Golden Gate Park, and my goal isn't to finish fast, but just to finish.

Next book up: Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst

The Lost Continent (Bill Bryson)

In A Brief History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson is excited. So excited in fact, that you, the reader, get really excited (enough to want to start a Bill Bryson fan club).

In The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America, he's not excited. He's young and brash, easily annoyed, disrespectful, quick to judge, and frankly no fun to be around. I did not find the first half of this book to be very entertaining or funny (though I felt that was the intention). Now, I may be especially biased about this, I'm well aware. Let me explain.

I am, like Bill Bryson, from Iowa. However, he is from Des Moines (king of all the cities in Iowa in terms of bigness and prides itself for being bigger than any other city in Iowa), whereas I am from Davenport (a medium-sized Iowa city that would be small in most other states but prides itself in being near a muddy river and being bigger than the small towns in Iowa). And, just like your family, you can complain all you want, but no one can make fun of them but you.

Technically then, Bill Bryson qualifies to make fun of the Midwest, but the problem is that he has been out of the country, living in England, for a long time, so he's especially put off by American life for most of the book as he takes a 38-state tour of the country via car for 300-some pages. Single-person road trips can make people cranky, and I feel like he's covered too much material. I found the second part of the book better, but not enough to recommend it. Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation does a great job presenting somewhat similar material in a more focused, and more entertaining way.

Next book up: Galloway's Book on Running by Jeff Galloway

Interview: Chad Davidson and John Poch

Poets Chad Davidson and John Poch teamed up to write their new book, Hockey Haiku: The Essential Collection, and I may not know much about hockey, but I do like the haiku, am a big fan of Chad and John, and happen to know they're writing is excellent. They were kind enough to brave the time zone differences (me in California, Chad in Georgia, and John in Spain) to talk about their book with me.

MD: Are you afraid of Canadians?

Chad: It's not so much fear as a guarded fascination. During my years researching for this book at the Hockey Haiku Institute in Nova Scotia, I came to be drawn to their peculiar customs. I once perchanced to see two Canadians conversing in what appeared to be a foreign tongue. Turns out it was a form of French spoken in part of that great land. Who would have guessed the Canadians possessed so much interest! Endlessly evocative, I must say. Stories of cannibalism circulate, of course, but these seem mere rumor, near myth, in fact.

John: I’m afraid of many Canadians but not of anybody from Winnipeg. With hockey haiku, in general, one learns not to be afraid, but to embrace ones fears. What is a tough check on the boards to me? Nothing, I get back up. The same goes for writing a difficult haiku and failing to find that third line. Back to the question, though, one should generally fear Canadians more than Americans.

MD: Who is the bigger hockey fan of the two of you?

John: I know very little about hockey. Wallace Stevens said that one of the sources of poetry is ignorance, so I find myself more adept at understanding hockey haiku than Chad, at times. We are different kinds of fans, for sure. Chad likes to sit in fancy schmanzy press boxes with private bathrooms while I like my face pressed up against the glass, feeling the percussion of the sticks on the ice, the vibration of the Zamboni as it sweeps by, the blood sweat and tears of the players and my fellow comrades in the pit. It’s primal, really. Chad does spend time down below with us, but he does like to hang out with the bigwigs now and then. He wears cologne while I prefer Speedstick alone.

Chad: I am, of course. John has no skill at all. Fan skill, that is. He has no sense of rhythm when we have to clap our hands at games after a goal, has no real taste for Molson Ice, and also hates hot dogs.

MD: Do you think people who aren't schooled in poetry (but are very schooled in, say, the San Jose Sharks) would enjoy this book?

Chad: Definitely. Look, there are two kinds of hockey haiku fans out there. There are the fiercely aggressive and loyal fans--the type who tattoo certain hockey haiku on their thighs and chant them to the harvest moon. There are also, though, the more common, staid varieties, people like you and me who, as chance may have it, work in San Jose, St. Paul, or New York, who work at desk jobs, perhaps, whose only source of joy is that fleeting sense of satisfaction amid the workday when a moment of clarity transports us to that peaceful realm known as hockey haiku. Religions have been formed around less.

MD: I think hockey season is just starting up, is that correct? Did you guys plan for the book to be released at the beginning of the season?

John: We planned for it to be released during the playoffs and the run into the Stanley Cup, but the editors at St. Martin’s realized what a good stocking stuffer it would be for every little hockey hooligan out there just waiting for his boot (in Canada they hang boots over the fireplace rather than stockings) to be full of hockey haiku. The kids love it. They can’t get enough, and we should be thankful to St. Martin’s for realizing this. We get caught up in the game and forget about things like money. We’re poets, after all.

MD: I have to say that there are people who are bigger hockey fans out there than me. I'm a baseball girl myself. Do you see a baseball haiku book on the horizon?

Chad: After Davey Lopes' classic Baseball Haiku Quarterly went under in '79, I am sure we all had visions of reviving it, or, better, trying ourhands at an anthology. Really, though, if you look at the baseball haiku that have been promoted as of late--mostly in the Northeastern schools, I think it's fallen away. It's become too disembodied. They've lost a sense of the populace, what Williams called "the pressure of reality." Some of the South American baseball haiku, especially those indebted to Marquez and the magical realists, are quite stunning.

MD: Can you write a haiku for me about the sad state of this past Cubs season and perhaps their hopeful rebirth for the next?

Chad: No, but what comes to mind is Yezzy Gradebill's classic haiku on just that subject: Chicago snow falls / long past spring, past summer cubs / still at mother's teats.

MD: Thanks for that. Back to hockey, any predictions for this season?

Chad: What with the book's release and our Japanese tour poised to begin, I haven't had a chance to look over my stats, yet. I hope, childishly, for Modano to play on another winning Stars team.

MD: I think it’s great the two of you did this project together. Do you see any other joint projects in the future?

John: Well, we can’t talk about too many of them, as others will want to swoop in and try their hand at what we alone can do. I do know that we’re a little dismayed that we’ve left out the Kyoto school from this anthology, but the poems are so singular and foreign to the American cultures, we just didn’t think anyone but a scholar would realize the beauty. But we’re beginning to think otherwise. You can’t underestimate hockey fans. Zamboni, after all, the word itself, comes out of an ancient Kyoto haiku. Most people think it’s Italian.

MD: Given this is for a website about book reviews, could you recommend a book?

Chad: I think Fivolovic's last collection of hockey haiku, The Path Sick Senators Took, is perhaps his most challenging. It's not the type of hockey haiku you relax with. It demands a lot of its readers, sort of the Scotty Bowman of recent hockey haiku collections, but it pays off in spades.

John: Black Ice. It’s the story of the rise and fall of former Dallas Stars net minder Eddie Belfour and his current recovery from substance addictions. Do you know what’s bringing him out of his depression and addiction? Yes, of course, we all have heard. Practicing hockey haiku in the mornings and evenings, when he would normally be out cruising the seediest parts of town looking for the biggest bouncer he could find to challenge to a bare-fisted brouhaha. Eddie Belfour has also started quoting famous Presidents at lunch. I’ve heard this is a favorite of his that he is bringing onto the ice this season to mess with the offensive linemen who deign sidle up to him: As FDR said: “I’ve seen war and I’ve seen Eleanor. I’ll take war!”

Two for the Road (Jane and Michael Stern)

I grew up in a town in Iowa where it was a big deal when we got an Olive Garden. (As a kid, I thought it was a very fancy restaurant.) We did have some national chain restaurants, but mostly of the fast-food persuasion. Instead we had family-owned restaurants, ones we went to after dance recitals to get ice cream sundaes and others that for some reason served a kind of fish called smelt, which I cannot judge because I have not tasted it, but the name alone doesn't bode well.

In Two for the Road: Our Love Affair with American Food, Jane and Michael Stern's memoir of their lives on the road as food writers, they take you back to a time before Olive Gardens, when almost every roadside restaurant served up local specialities. When they decided to write a national food guide in the 1970s, they had no idea what they were doing, so they decided the best thing would be to write about ALL the restaurants (they had never been outside the East Coast before), and so started a long span of eating 12 meals a day (they do detail in the book how this is humanly possible). They went to restaurants where they'd be the only strangers and Midwestern cafes where the salads contained no lettuce but instead gobs of mayonnaise, marshmallows, and sugar. (The chapters on Midwestern food especially hit home. Just a few years ago when my grandmother passed away, the sweet older ladies at her church prepared our family a salad luncheon following the funeral, and there was a lot of mayonnaise, a lot of marshmallows, and meat in places you'd never even think of. I went straight for the homemade pie.)

This pre-Olive Garden world may seem foreign, but I think there's still enough small, local restaurants around. In Iowa City, for example, there's this diner that serves pie milkshakes. When you order, you tell them what kind of milkshake you want and then you ask what kind of freshly baked pie they have that day. They make the milkshake, then take a piece of pie, put it in with the milkshake and blend it all together. We had vanilla with apple pie. It was the best milkshake I ever had.

From their years of experience, they also discuss the art of menu writing ("we cater to prim Donnas"), signs of a bad hotel (a TV that's chained to the wall), and signs of a good restaurant (a handmade larger than life pig wearing an apron on the roof). This book is a quick, fun read with a lot of nostalgia.

Next book up: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America by Bill Bryson

Salt: A World History (Mark Kurlansky)

This is how I usually check books out at the library: I have a list of books I want to read, I search for them on the San Jose library web site. If they have it, I request it and depending on it's status (check shelves, current unavailable, on hold), it could be ready in a couple days to a couple weeks. Sometimes I come home from a trip to the library with an insurmountable pile of books, both ones I've requested and ones that caught my eye on the new book shelf. Three weeks seems like a long time unless you have a really big pile or a couple of very long books. And with Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, I sadly learned that there was a limit to the number of times you can renew a book online.

I made it about halfway through the book before it was due. Jim pointed out, (and to his credit, he was most likely right) that I probably could have taken the book in and renewed it in person, as long as there wasn't another hold on it. But, I have to tell you, as much great history as in this book, it was lengthy, and there wasn't any big impetus for me to keep reading, other than the looming due date. I loved the old recipes in the book, and I feel like there were so many small gems of stories in it that I don't want to discourage anyone from reading it. Maybe the best advice I can give is not to read it during the baseball playoffs. Yes. That's advice I can stand behind.

Next book up: Two for the Road: Our Love Affair with American Food by Jane and Michael Stern

A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)

I going to start a personal campaign to have Bill Bryson rewrite all the science textbooks the American public school system makes children read. All of them. And while he's at it, maybe he could also rewrite all the history textbooks, too. Why? He's exciting writer. A great one, too. And he takes topics that have been treated poorly in the past by other writers, or deemed too abstract or too scientific for nongeniuses, and he makes them not only accessible, but interesting, and dare I say, cool.

I highly recommend A Short History of Nearly Everything. I may even start a Bill Bryson fan club. (I realize I've only read this one book of his, but I plan to read many more in the near future. And, I just found out on Powell's website, he's a fellow Iowan!) This book is not small (but when you think about it trying to cover "nearly everything" isn't a very small task), but it didn't feel like a chore to get through at all. It has the right mix of hard science with historial, yet very lively, anecdotes, and explanation. I will admit I had some what I will call wimpy moments---I did not enjoy the chapters on the supervolcanoes and the who-knows-when-they-will-come-at-a-moment's-notice-and-destroy-us-all asteroids/comets. But then again, I don't like scary movies. Overall, it was highly enjoyable, with way too much information to cover it all here. I will, however, share some personal favorite moments:

• The planet Uranus was discovered in 1781. However, the discoverer wanted to call it George. (Luckily he was "overruled.")

• "In 1785, [Dr. James Parkinson] became possibly the only person in history to win a natural history museum in a raffle."

• As mentioned in Strathern's book, the distinction between chemistry and alchemy was a tough one in the beginning. "Into the eighteen century scholars could feel oddly comfortable in both camps---like the German Johann Becher, who produced an unexceptionable work on mineralogy called Physica Subterranea, but who also was certain that, given the right materials, he could make himself invisible."

• "Physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields. When the wife of the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli left him for a chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. 'Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood,' he remarked in wonder to a friend. 'But a chemist. . . "

Next book up: Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky