Truth & Beauty: A Friendship
(Ann Patchett, unabridged, 7 CDs; needed to skim after 4)
Ann Patchett's a successful writer who wrote a popular middle-brow book, Bel Canto. Her good friend, Lucy Grealy, wrote a memoir, Autobiography of a Face, which apparently describes Grealy's life, dominated since 9 by a cancer that destroyed her lower jaw, and forced her to spend her life time continually undergoing reconstructive surgeries. Both were undergrads together at Sarah Lawrence, and got into the Iowa School for Famous Writers straight after college. There's some interesting observations: E.g., how Lucy became a clinical exhibitionist, so enured to surgery that she opted for a boob job in grad school with the facility that others might subscribe to a magazine. The thing that's not really described directly is how she used her trauma-disfigurement to manipulate people. She was clearly a brilliant and needy soul; Patchett remarks on several occasions how Lucy was always a local celebrity, known by all in whatever world she was living at the time. Because of her reconstructed face, she would be instantly recognizable, and on levels of polite intercourse, that distinctiveness apparently caused many to say "Hi Lucy!" There's not enough insight on just how false this kind of treatment really is; more to the point, because Patchett doesn't speak directly to it, it's quite likely that she left herself vulnerable to being manipulated by this unstated pity/revulsion.

The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron
(Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind, 464pp)
This book is better written than the Conspiracy of Fools, and virtually everything of value in Eichenwald's book is reported in this groundbreaker. McLean was the first to call the Emperor naked (in her 2001 Fortune article). The writing here is sharper, funnier, and more succinct. And unlike the book's title, she doesn't treat Skilling and Fastow as geniuses; just arrogant and cocky. Fastow got his MBA at Northwestern's night school, so he wasn't even in the top tier at business school. Both books repeatedly show the glib and mindless quality of the senior executives, who ran around maintaining appearances.

When Fish Fly : Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace - From the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market
(John Yokoyama, abridged, 4 CDs, punt after 2)
This should have been abridged to a pamphlet. The Seattle Fish Market is fun, and this guy, who's the owner, is a real bear. He works his employees hard, and has gradually grown to listen to the world.

Conspiracy of Fools (Kurt Eichenwald, unabridged, 25 CDs)
This book may have been bought and paid for by Ken Lay, whose name opens the narration. The book's thesis: all the guys at Enron were so busy making deals, with the sketchiest attention to economic realities, that they didn't even realize how stupid their mistakes were. Instead of evil schemers, we see spastic strivers, melting down under the pressure, but scarcely conscious of how dangerous their tricks really were. Enron overbid horrifically in most of its international auctions, and yet the focus was on getting the deal done, rather than on developing a business. This is a surprisingly intense story, with its parabolic arc of ascent and implosion a perfect image of the twisted behavior that corporate institutions can reward. Skilling and Fastow were good in school, but each guy was basically a one trick pony who failed to pay attention to all the complexities in making a business profitable. Skilling (the ego tyrant who pushed for a "meritocracy" of trader/dealers) moved from McKinsey to Enron only after the accountants signed off on using "mark to market" techniques. (Meaning: You can book as revenue the current market valuation of an asset, even if you have no way to sell it.) Fastow's trick was to create specialized entities that moved debt off the books. Now that Star Wars III is out, it's amusing to see how the nebbishy 40-somethings subverted the names of the dweeby movie to label illicit accounting entities (Jedi, Chewco, etc). A nice complement to this is the documentary, Smartest Guys in the Room. The film has great footage of a training video where Skilling plays himself, modeling the next big thing, HFV (hypothetical future valuation). Another gem: Ken Lay, after the death spiral began, answering questions from the company. The first index card he reads asks baldly: "Are you on crack?"

Irrational Exuberance, 1st edition
(Robert Shiller, abridged, 6 hours)
The thunderclap published around the same time as "Dow 36,000", but filled with all the relevant observations about why to be concerned when people expect too much of a good thing. His notion of a "natural Ponzi scheme" smashes the facile rational markets theory; since people tend to buy stocks based on word of mouth, and there's more mouthing about up-ticks than down, it is very plausible that any stock could ride a wave of hysteria, rewarding many fools who jump on the bandwagon, since the frenzy will be fed for some span of time by the continuation of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Until it don't. (This was so good, I've decided to buy the 2nd edition, which plunges into real estate).

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
(Stewart Brand, 256pp)
I've had this book for a decade, but only a recent dalliance trying to buy an old Victorian home made this essential reading. There's a very trenchant distinction between the allure of Low Road buildings (e.g., repurposed factories, house boats), and the difficulty of living inside the arch High Road edifices (e.g., architectural prize winners, such as I.M. Pei's Media Lab).

The R. Crumb Handbook
(R. Crumb & Pete Poplaski, 437 pp)
Neat little phone book dialing back to the hippie past. The only problem with the 'handbook' is that the page size is 7.5 x 5.6 inches, which makes some of the cartoons quite small. The interleaving pages with text from other people are a little random. My favorite quote: "Hell is other people -- Sartre." & "Hell is also yourself -- R. Crumb" (p387)

Introducing Kafka
(David Zane Mairowitz, illustrated by R. Crumb, 176pp)
One or two pimply bumps above Cliffs notes, and even the drawings by Crumb are not as vivid as Crumb illustrating Crumb. The one distinctive feature is that translations from the German are all done by DZM.

Freakonomics CD : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
(Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, unabridged, 6 CDs)
A pretty interesting potpourri. I've been interested in Steven Levitt's research since his collaborative work with John Donohue (on abortion reducing crime) was published in 2000. The book strikes a weird tone, since the co-writer quotes articles with quirky descriptions of Steven Levitt. Surely, he is not so unusual that he talks about himself in the third person. Levitt's MO involves collaborating with anyone, even *sociologists*. He has a knack for finding good problems (school choice, impact of black names on their owners), and an economist's bent for being contrarian. Some of the best discussions quote research, such as Judith Harris' on whether parenting matters, without any definite added content from Levitt's own economic research.

Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround(Lou Gerstner, unabridged, 8:34)
Pretty clear picture of what life looks like to a CEO, who doesn't even want to know the details of the technology in a company he's running. He ran Nabisco for a span, as the chosen leader of KKR. He reports some hilarious observations about the inwardly focused culture of IBM in 1993. It's difficult to know, from the story he spins, how closely it connects to the facts. Nevertheless, his perspective is unvarnished, and he comes across as a ruthless competitor.

Alive to the Maximum! Discovering playfulness, and dropping guilt
(Osho, 2 hours)
A rambling talk delivered by Osho (surely more famous as Bhagwan Rajneesh). His work is being distributed for some reason through a new service offered by the Peninsula Library, which requires customers to enserf themselves to Microsoft's media player. Very contrary to the wimsy advocated by the re-branded (now dead) guru.

The Inner Circle
(T. Coraghessan Boyle, unabridged, 13 CDs)
This is nearly as delightful as the Road to Wellville, one of my favorite novels. TC Boyle has an unparalleled touch for insinuating himself into history, and breathing an empathetic and sarcastic take on the characters who live near the vortex of an obsessive. Because sex obsessions are not as bizarre as foodist fetishes, this book doesn't achieve the same high level of hilarity. TC Boyle has a flair for describing the passive male, and once again, his narrator eloquently captures those moment when a man decides to surrender to the vortex.

R. Crumb's Head Comix
(Robert Crumb, 1988)
A collection of comix from 1967 and 1968. I picked this up at the library to anticipate the new Crumb Handbook. Some of these comix are still fresh; others seem very much a drugged turn of a crank. R. Crumb spoke the other day to Terri Gross, and he gave almost all the credit for his transcendent insight to LSD.

Sex and the city
(Candace Bushnell, abridged, 4 cassettes)
A guilty pleasure no more, since it's written at a higher level than the TV show. The most annoying trope in the TV version is apparently not in the book (those punning questions that Carry types on her mac screen, all to set up transitions in a forced wit). Since this is abridged, perhaps the editor disdained those little quip-stions and killed them, but in general, the author's tone is stronger and clearer than her HBO adaptationists. As a bonus, Cynthia Nixon, the lawyer on TV, reads this.

Passage
(Andy Goldsworthy, 168pp)
Another document of the fleeting way that Andy Goldsworthy plays with rocks, mud, and leaves.

The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War
(Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, 432 pp)
This book has a great subject, the immense brain/body of futurologist Herman Kahn, the man who invented the doomsday bomb. The book could have used better editing, since the author's tone is a little imbalanced at points, and the flow of topics is not always easy to follow. For instance, the book talks about systems analysis for over 100 pages before anything like a definition is hazarded, and that merely comes out in quoting a Fortune article on RAND, where the reporter wrote that "Systems analysis is understood in 16 different ways by 16 different people, and yet they all do it together like a jazz band playing around an unexpressed four-four beat." (p129) The section on "serious game playing" is very amusing; the RAND dweebs (and later, the military brass who got to play) found war games too thrilling. The participants decided that the experience did not generate results commensurate with the effort required (p155), but this did not block the spread of the technique. The author is an independent scholar (kudos for independence!), although it's pretty certain that her background is literary rather than scientific. One interesting result she riffs on is the looming fear of armageddon in the Ike years, and how it somehow unleashed an interest in spontaneity that links the beatniks, jazz, improv comedy, and the world-making of Herman Kahn.

Electric Universe : The Shocking True Story of Electricity
(David Bodanis, unabridged, 6 CDs)
Even though there's fun facts here, there's not enough about Faraday, next to nothing about Maxwell, and a bit too much stuff about WWII. I learned a little about electricity, but this is not the book to learn about the details that distinguish AC from DC, nor will you feel solid about wiring your house, or making sure that your wireless connection will improve if you jiggle its antenna.

Angel of Forgetfulness
(Steve Stern, 416pp -- currently at 135)
What a pleasure to read this wild tour through the Lower East Side of the early 20th century, layered with a speedball tour of the NY in the late 1960s, meshed with a crazy fantasy of Old World stibl yiddishkeit! In complete contrast to the dried up upper West side, this novel rambles wildly and warmly on stuff that's fun to read about.

Joy Comes in the Morning
(Jonathan Rosen, unabridged, 11 CDs)
The most interesting thread in this novel hangs on the Jewish prayers and liturgy that are remarked upon as the characters use them to deal with life on the Upper West side. I did not find the humor funny, which puts an upper limit on how much enjoyment can be squeezed from well-structured sentences marching by in a nicely crafted novel. I also felt the bids to strike an earthy tone sounded coarse; this is probably explained by my failure to share the author's way into humor. There's a long vignette on the rabbi's boyfriend "playing rabbi at a real funeral" that could not have been less funny if it had been filmed by Woody Allen. The character of the woman rabbi is best realized, which makes the novel seem something like an extended crypto-valentine.

Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
(Cornel West, unabridged, 6 CDs)
As I listened to West read this, I kept wondering what rhetorical form his book was aiming to take? Nothing is ever presented as argument, in the sense of a claim, backed by evidence, supported by reasons. Instead, the rather shapeless text ranges over a wide list of topics, and West simply invokes generalizations in a tone earned only by the oracles in the Matrix movies. If you don't already agree with his notions, there's no way that this book could persuade you to adopt his formulas. His accent gives some words unusual pronunciations (keel (for kill), nekked (for naked), bohemoth, po-ig-nant). I skipped over the Christianity chapter, and finally landed on a great story in disc 6: West gives his version of his collision with Larry Summers. His formulation of Summers' infamous memo to the World Bank -- recommending that third world countries specialize in storing toxic wastes -- is twisted. He claims that the rationale had something to do with African countries being overpopulated; this comes close to the slanderous attribution that Summers aspired to genocide. Since Cornel West is outraged that Summers hadn't read his 16 books, perhaps he could have troubled to read the one page memo, which includes the line "I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted..."

Ponzi's Scheme: The true story of a financial legend
(Mitchell Zuckoff, unabridged, 10 hours -- stopped halfway)
It's never a bad time to take a deeper look at financial chicanery, but the man behind the Scheme was not so much a schemer as a 5 foot 2 dreamer, who implemented a con running a variant on the age-old exploit generically called "rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul." Ponzi's version was not particularly clever. His initial spark traced to observing that postal reply coupons trailed fluctuations in currency. Yet, from the get-go, he was simply collecting money from a small base and promising a 45-day rate of return of 50%, hoping to draw in a wider tail of followers. Barron, a financial writer for the Boston Globe, and the founder of Barron's, incisively attacked the con, especially once it became clear that Ponzi himself was holding most of his assets at ordinary banks paying 5%. The scheme was notorious enough to force Italy and other European countries to halt the issuance and honoring of postal coupons. Within a short time of becoming popular, Ponzi was pegged. Because the scheme was not very complicated, nor the schemer too terribly smart, the story of Charles Ponzi's life is not altogether that fascinating. I punted on the book once his unraveling was assured, although I'd like to someday read the part where he gets deported, since I recall hearing that he was seen off by thousands of fans.

Feet on the Street : Rambles Around New Orleans (Crown Journeys)
(Roy Blount, Jr., unabridged, 3 CDs = 144pp)
Enjoyable and distinct approach to rambling -- Blount chose to riff on various personalities, toss in a few old jokes, and literally ramble on about topics that connect to people Blount knew (or knew of) in New Orleans. It seemed to me that it started to wobble after the chat with Walker Percy, which meant that the book ends weakly.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction
(Jon Stewart, abridged, 3 CDs)
Kind of sort of funny, but usually too glib a shtick to enjoy listening to. I like Jon Stewart's intelligence, and he can be very sharp. But this audiobook wasn't fun enough to finish.

The Power Broker
(Robert Caro, part 1, 15 cassettes)
The beginning of Moses' life is not as gilded as I would have expected, after reading how much power he concentrated in his hands. At the age of 30, he was still casting about to find the appropriate venture to devote himself to. Sponsored by Al Smith, he became the 'best bill drafter' in Albany, and then wrote the bill that authorized his power as the commissioner of Long Island's parks. Caro's narrative evocation mesmerizes. This huge bolus of cassettes was swallowed in almost a single gulp, just like the previously experienced parts II and III.

Crusades Through Arab Eyes
(Amin Maalouf, unabridged, 8 cassettes; stopped after 3)
Potentially interesting, but the history presented here is pretty chalky, in incredible detail, without a strong narrative thread.

The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic : A "Walk" in Austin (Crown Journeys)
(Kinky Friedman, unabridged, 3 hours; not read by the author, alas)
Irresistible to wander around Austin with the Kinkster, even if he insists in the opening pages that the town's too sprawling to walk about, so that if you're going to explore it, you'll need 'some sort of four-wheeled penis.' Although I've never been to Austin, I now feel as if I've climbed the tower at UT, and vicariously shot down 14 Texans, with Kinky's Ballad of Charles Whitman (1966) streaming into my ear. But that's not all, since the tour includes so many quirky turns of phrase: Who but KF would observe that only cowboys and Jews can get away with wearing their hats indoors?

Abraham Lincoln: A Penguin Life
(Thomas Kenneally, unabridged, 4 cassettes)
Good but not great-- It flies through Lincoln's life, and while hitting interesting points, doesn't really evoke the man who split the rails.

Can't Stop Won't Stop : A History of the Hip Hop Generation
(Jeff Chang, with an introduction by D.J. Kool Herc; 560 pp)
I have always studied rap as an outsider, and I enjoyed the first 50 pp here. Before i could get further, I had to return this to the library. In just that jiffy, I learned that rap's roots reach back to Jamaica.

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made
(Norman Cantor, unabridged, 5 cassettes)
Fun flight through the pismire of medieval England (around 1350). [Correction: 'Pismire' does not mean a pissy quagmire; I didn't mean to imply that the middle ages can be seen as a 'social insect']

Malone Dies
(Samuel Beckett, 5:38)
Not more of the same, but somehow, more of the less that eludes and astounds in the M-trilogy.

The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror
(Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer, unabridged, 8:14)
One of the world's brightest minds throws his weight into a project associated with one of the most bean-brained world leaders: Sharansky argues that democracy is the only way to deflect the hate-waves that are broiling in the Arab world. His arguments are very direct: 1) A country that does not treat its own citizens with respect cannot be trusted to treat any other people fairly ; 2) Human rights are not abstract and difficult to measure; the simple test of respect is to ask, "Can people speak their minds in public, without fear of reprisal by the state?" -- If a person can speak openly, they live in a Free country; if not, they inhabit a Fear country; 3) Human rights are not simply a 'nice to have' quality, but essential to supporting our strategic goal of promoting peace. There's a very sharp indictment of Kissinger's accommodationist real-politik, and that supports my sense that Sharansky has great moral courage. It is weird to hear him describe Condi Rice as a "sharp thinker," and to listen to his praise for both Bush and Cheney.

Happiness: Lessons from a new science
(Richard Layard, 320 pp -- paused at p85)
Interesting collection of factoids about the failure of income (above ~$8K/year) to increase happiness.

When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden: What the Government Should be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism
(Bill Maher, 3 CDs, unabridged)
Not exactly a period piece; although it was apparently first published in late 2002, it succeeds in compressing the grave emotions that came fast after 9/11, but at this point, has been all but piffled away by the grand distractors. The weirdest angle, and most politically incorrect, is the vigorous zeal that Maher invests in advocating racial profiling of dangerous Moslems.

Molloy
(Samuel Beckett, 8:29)
What a river of shit and sheer pleasure! Buried within the Irishman's scatology is a wild, weird humor; it wasn't always clear to me how to connect the dots, but the dots themselves were dazzling. For example, consider this string: Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names.

A Reader's Guide to Writers' London
(Ian Cunningham, 293 pp)
As a first pass on who wrote what where, this contains more information than any general guide book. Since the lions' share of literature was born in Albion, this book is ultimately too skimpy: I'd wanted whole books to log the life and wanderings of Sam Johnson, and I know the Virginia Woolf section didn't even detail the route that Mrs Dalloway pursued through her pages.

Animals in Translation : Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
(Temple Grandin & Catherine Johnson, unabridged, 11:47)
Very interesting-- this must be a full-on collaboration between the 2 authors, since the surprising thing about Temple Grandin (the high functioning autistic made famous by Oliver Sacks' tale-telling) is that she insists upon her obsessive tendency to "think in pictures." In spite of this propensity to literalness, there's a wide reach to her claim that she "thinks like animals do," since that is a very bold philosophical generalization. Even though the claim is tenuous (and unfalsifiable), her discussions of horse, dog, and other animals' psychologies draw upon actual research, and then leap into interesting speculations. I would bet that Temple was the main author of the last chapter, which is a hodge podge of oddments to be applied to training a dog, or dealing with a horse, or designing a slaughter house for pigs or cows. The entire book was very fun, even if it was wildly speculative.

Graceland
(Chris Abani, unabridged, 9 cassettes)
Interesting/bleak trip into the mind of a childman growing up in Lagos Nigeria.

The Power Broker : Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
(Robert Caro, unabridged, vol 2 (15 cassettes), vol 3 (13 cassettes); of 1344 pp)
The most vivid story of raw glistening lust for power that I'd ever read was Caro's monumental 3 volumes on LBJ -- Though I was aware that Caro had begun by studying Robert Moses, that book seemed to be encrypted on paper. Then, I came across 2 boxes of cassettes covering the last 2/3 of the book (these boxes are called "volumes" by libraries, but just break up the cumbersome total of 43 cassettes into smaller chunks). Although I have yet to read about the "good" Moses, who began a life of self-less service (covered in the first 400 pp), I have now rode along the parkways of the master builder, following his evil machinations for over 4 decades. His demonic capacity to concentrate dictatorial power in his person undercuts any naive theory of democracy, since he succeeded in never bending to the request of any mayor, governor, or even President (including FDR). This tale outstrips LBJ's, since Moses' mind was far more visionary, if equally single-minded in its pursuit of power. LBJ's genius was to size up people's needs, and play them like a fiddle; Robert Moses used his amazing energy and vision to accumulate 14 different executive positions of Authority (held simultaneously), and then to wield them with absolute power. His racist, elitist agenda, played out on the canvas of New York's boroughs. The book painstakingly documents the miserable way Moses' evinced cavalier disregard for the well-being of Harlem's inhabitants. Most tragic is the story of his brutal gouging of Bronx neighborhoods to create his highways. He maliciously evicted residents, destroyed communities, and disrupted all life in the path of his roads. Instead of eliminating traffic jams, his roads doomed millions of commuters to move at speeds no faster than walking. Since his autonomous authorities, such as the Tri-Borough Bridge, were funded by tolls, he deliberately blocked mass transit, and actually designed the overpass of his hundreds of bridges to be too low to ever allow bus traffic. As he himself traveled in a chauffeured limousine, he never awoke to see the true consequences of his legerdemain. [NOTE: Unabridged does not include the endnotes, so it's essential to consult the printed version.]

One is Adam, One is Superman: The Artists of Creative Growth
(Leon Borensztein, photographer, 144pp)
This book parallels the work currently on display at Yerba Buena, about the amazing labors of love created by artists at the Oakland center, Creative Growth. Borensztein mentions in the intro that he founded Creative Growth to honor his daughter, who was born with multiple disabilities. Apparently, Oakland's Creative Growth is even older than Creativity Explored, in SF, which first exposed me to the amazing vision and intensely original art built by individuals who have been born with disabilities.

Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
(Stacy Schiff, unabridged, 13 cassettes)
Vera Nabokov devoted herself to being VN's absolute helpmate. This book documents the amazing symbiosis that these two achieved. While she handled everything but the housework that didn't involve lepidoptera or fiction, this partnership was never seen by either member as exploitative. She served as her husband's memory, or "department of corrections." She also fought vigorously for his publishing rights as she wrangled for artistic control. Having survived two hyper-inflationary periods (St. Petersburg in 1910, and Germany in the 30's), she insisted that VN's literary contract from 1968 include a cost-of-living adjustment. She was also intimately engaged in translating his work, and Nabokov relied so totally upon her judgment that the two virtually became one.

Lawrence and the Arabs
(Robert Graves, unabridged, 10 cassettes)
Fascinating tale about a man who was reserved, short, prosopagnosic, endowed with a phenomenal memory for what he read, and who devoted himself to organizing the Arabs to overthrow the Turks. Graves, who was a friend of Lawrence's, wrote a probing study of this complicated and profound man. Lawrence's unfathomable personality is presented from many angles; after fighting the Turks alongside the Arabs, he returned to Great Britain, and changed his name to Shaw, to escape the burden of his fame.

The irritable male syndrome : managing the 4 key causes of depression and aggression
(Jed Diamond, 304pp)
Instead of PMS, there's now IMS. Cranky, peeved, churlish middle-aged males -- I thought it was a plague, but it's just a syndrome!

Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives)
(Ada Louise Huxtable, unabridged, 7 CDs = 251pp)
The life of a man who early chose between "false humility and honest arrogance," his genius and creativity were matched only by his capacity for selfishness. He described himself in court as "the greatest living architect", and explained that he had to do so "because he was under oath." I love visiting his homes, and it seems that we have allowed his vision to redefine our concept of the right arrangement for living. One of the most amazing anecdotes in this interesting tale: He was invited, over coffee and cigars, by the lead partner of the most prestigious Chicago firm, to have his education arranged for him: The firm would pay for him to spend 3 years at the Beaux Arts, and another two years in Rome, while they paid for the care of his wife and family. When he returned, he would become a principal with the firm. With such a dazzling booby prize held before him, he was unswerving in his rejection, since the Europeans had nothing to teach him. There's also a hilarious story about how tedious he found Ayn Rand, and that her last visit to him at Taliesin was so cigarette-fumigated that he kicked her out, and barred smoking forever after.
After finishing this book, I viewed Ken Burns' documentary on DVD. The stunning visual images of Falling Water and the Johnson office building were great complements, and there's an amazing anecdote not found in Huxtable. Apparently, Wright had the land survey of the Falling Water property for months, and although he closely studied the grounds, he did not begin to draft any designs. Finally, he was called on the phone by Kaufman, who had commissioned the house. Wright told him to come over to see the drawings. Since Taliesin was 140 minutes from Chicago, Wright's mind was greatly concentrated, and in just over 2 hours, he completed the initial drawings of his masterpiece. This amazing story is told vividly by an apprentice, who sat beside Wright for the whole time watching him create.

The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 1)
(Lemony Snicket, unabridged, 2 cassettes)
Enjoyable kiddy-goth. I gave this cult classic a second chance after watching Daniel Handler interview Jonathan Lethem. It is witty, and dark, and now I want to find out more about the book he most loved as a child. Something about Bears...

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
(Richard Rhodes, unabridged, 25 cassettes = 736pp)
I loved the Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I recall reading in the late 80s in Cambridge. I avidly attended talks by the wizened bomb builders (Eugene Wigner, Vicky Weiskopff, Philip Abelson), and imagined the excitement inside the testosterone packed death factory that was Los Alamos. I chose not to read Dark Sun when it came out in 1995, because I'd mistakenly assumed that it would be all about Ed Teller. Instead, the book's first half focuses almost entirely on the Soviet bomb enterprise. Apparently, Stalin started his program with about 20 physicists, and over a thousand spies who carted off secrets to the group that worked under Beria's iron fist. The lab director in the Soviet Union had access to "the correct answers", and would drive his physicists to exert themselves until they converged on what the Americans had done. The story in America in the early 50s, in the ineluctable development of the super, highlights a technological tragedy. Almost none of the physicists, nor Presidents Truman or Eisenhower, wanted to build up the destructive power of the nuclear arsenal. Yet, there was little that could have stopped the political momentum as Europe was split into East and West. Some of the scariest stories concern American Strategic Air Command. Curtis LeMay advocated many ways to "win" a nuclear war, and he deliberately tried to provoke the Soviets into attacking so he could use all his firepower. The even more ominous character, General Thomas Powers, who inherited leadership of SAC from LeMay, was described by his predecessor as a "sadist".

Time's Magpie: A Walk in Prague
(Myla Goldberg, abridged, 3 CDs out of 144pp)
The best city tour yet from the Crown Journeys series. Prague ranks as one of the most mesmerizing cities I've ever fallen into. The city's soul seems strangely like an alluring Eastern European woman, who carelessly smokes and drinks hard, indifferent to the fact that such a path leads inevitably to crone-itude. In the early 90's, Western economists strangled the Velvet revolutionaries, and young American punks streamed over the fallen Wall. Myla Goldberg was apparently one of those young punks, and she moves knowingly through Prague's sidestreets.

Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors
(ed by Beth Luey, 255 pp)
Each chapter is written by an editor at an academic press, and the information they provide helps guide someone who's trying to figure out how to turn a blob into a baby. Useful, usually succinct advice.

The Art of the Book Proposal
(Eric Maisel, 272 pp)
Not awe-inspiring, nor, at times, very useful, but it was still worth scanning. I found some of the checklists, and descriptions of a couple of the exercises (e.g., on brain-storming a book title) to be of some value.

Pit Bull: Lessons from Wall Street's Champion Trader
(Martin Schwartz, unabridged, 8 cassettes)
A lurid window on the gambling frenzy that drives a "Market Wizard." This autobiographical account reveals the competitive, nearly crazed impulses of an hour by hour trader who played the S&P future with sufficient success to win contests and earn the praise of Barron's. It's sort of surprising to hear how successful he was while relying on chartist technical jigglies (like the Elliott wave). A typical anecdote: Schwartz brought his wife to a Caribbean island for their honeymoon, because he expected to spend the time gambling.

Gates of Eden
(Ethan Coen, abridged, 4 cassettes)
As much fun as a Coen brothers film, and of course, it makes sense that the screenwriter would be a great writer. These short stories cover the terrain of Fargo, and noir punk gangsters, but also have hilarious stories about little frummy family struggles over the milchig and fleischig plates.

The CEO of the Sofa
(PJ O'Rourke, unabridged, 6 cassettes; stopped after 4)
Not a peak performance, but listening to PJO is a lot like hanging around Philip Greenspun: There's a willful contrariness in the formulated opinions, and it's usually amusing.

Love, etc
(Julian Barnes, unabridged, stopped after 2 cassettes)
Well written, rather deft, but I came to it hoping to re-encounter Flaubert's Parrot, and since this was not the same novel as that amazing book, I wasn't very open to hearing it on its own terms.

The Travel Book
(Roz Hopkins, 444 pp)
Lonely Planet usually has an interesting take on the planet's nations; this format leaves so little space (2 page spread per country) that it destroys any chance to say something sharp. It's of some interest to look at countries you never knew about (Quiz q: Is Turks & Caicos one nation or two?) The formulaic set of questions: Best time to visit, essential experiences, etc leads to very glib, rather silly summations. I was intrigued by some of the little details, although the photos aim for quotidian, and end up being banal. (The quintessence of NY involves a photo of the subway stairs at 51st and Lex; is this for real, or is it an adamant anti-Americanism?)

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
(Elaine Pagels, abridged, 6 CDs)
A fine writer, trained in Greek, revises the take she had in the "Gnostic Gospels", now that scholarship suggests that the Nag Hamadi texts were not generated by knowers, but rather, Jewish-ish seekers. The book is not focused on Thomas, so much as it generally covers the coalition of historical events that led to the Nicaean Creed. I enjoyed this story, even though my interest in theology can be squeezed into a thimble, leaving room for Jonathan Swift's assessment, as he inscribed it in Gulliver's Travels. Nevertheless, I never knew that "Thomas" was Aramaic for Twin, and that there was a group who felt that Thomas was the most intimate disciple. And the fact that he is cast by John as the doubter, and explicitly excluded from the presence of the other disciples who saw the resurrected Christ, surely indicates that there was an animus toward whatever his followers believed.

Poe's Heart and the Mountain Climber: Exploring the Effect of Anxiety on our Brains and Culture
(Richard Restak, abridged, 4 CDs)
Although I never learned what Poe has to do with the book, this is a very useful assessment of how our society is pumping anxiety inflicting stimuli into our consciousness, w/o any rational balance. This surveys the tendency for Americans to mis-perceive risk, to inflate terror in a post-9/11 world, and to become paralyzed by irrational stressors. Why allow CNN to inflict repeated signals of fright at a time when there's no possible place for flight? The evidence is so balanced here, I have even contemplated reducing my coffee intake.

Unleashing the Ideavirus
(Seth Godin, abridged, 2 CDs)
Marketing's problem is simple to state: How do you introduce something to another consciousness, w/o irritating the people whose attention is being grabbed? This book is not profound, but it does worry about this problem. There is a nod to Dawkins' notion of memes, but an even deeper overlap is with Goldhaber's thinking about "attention economics." Goldhaber's formulation is deeper, but the basic idea is outlined here as well: Give away your ideas, make it easy for people to share them, and then figure out ways to create value-add-ons that require payment. In this abridged form, it's almost amusing to hear echoes of the boom-boom 2001 era outlook, since the boiled down book is just a longish magazine article.

The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker
(ed by Robert Mankoff, 656 pp)
Wow-- 68 thousand cartoons cover the first 80 years of New Yorkers; that averages ~17 a week (only the post 9/11/01 issue, and the 1945 issue with John Hersey's Hiroshima had zero cartoons). Finally, a set of CD-ROMs that are totally worth the reasonable expense.

All the Shah's men
(Stephen Kinzer, unabridged, 15 hours)
Like most Americans, my understanding of our difficulties with Iran begins in 1979, with the Shah's fall and the hostage crisis. I had no awareness, until reading this, that America had staged a coup in 1953 to depose their popular prime minister, whose only crime was nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian oil company (later named BP). Instead of being about the uncharismatic Shah, Reza Pahlavi, this book focuses on the dirty tricks, led by TR's grandson, Kermit Roosevelt, to create mobs and disinformation that enabled a coup to derail the Persian democratic nationalists. Truman opposed such meddling. But then Ike was elected, and the Dulles brothers (Allan of the CIA, John Foster of State) moved to "pre-empt" the "potential" instability of a country lead by a prime minister who "might" be killed, which would leave a vacuum for the communists. The Soviet Union did meddle in Iran under Stalin, but the Americans' paranoiac pre-emption has sown grief for decades. Winston Churchill reached a real ralphnadir in his political life, as he appears to have advocated a coup simply because of England's need for cheap oil. The most catastrophic consequence of the Iranian coup was that it gave a steroid boost to the Dulles' appetite for coups; since it "worked in Iran", the very next year they replayed the strategem in Guatemala, and then tried a few more times across the globe.

Terror and Liberalism
(Paul Berman, 7:40, Unabridged)
Interesting, sophisticated, but the world's such a mess! This is a measured account of taking terrorism seriously, while not being a Bushy.

The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts
(Colson Whitehead, unabridged, 3 hours)
Unreadable mass of crap. The series, which asks a fiction writer to riff on a favorite city, has had some good, some not so good, but this one takes the cake for sucking. I kept jumping around trying to find 2 consecutive sentences worth listening to, but I lost.

True Notebooks
(Mark Salzman, unabridged, 7 cassettes)
I don't know any murderers, so this book was an introduction to one person's experience, sitting in a room full of gang-bangers, most of whom were charged with crimes coded "187" (in LA, this is the number used by the law for murder). It's surprising, and sad, to discover that most juvenile killers have little awareness of what they have wrought. The writer, Mark Salzman, undertook the volunteer job of teaching writing to violent kids. It's a terrifying task, really, to exhort teenagers to become conscious, at a time when they are facing decades of prison time.

Authentic Happiness : Using the new Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment
(Martin Seligman, abridged, 9 CDs)
This book covers about half of the good, & significant chunks of the bad, in current academic psychology. The good part is often very basic: You can choose the types of experiences to dwell upon, immerse yourself in, and this will have a substantial impact on your life outlook and mood. (Albert Ellis, wizened prophet, puts this all more pungently and Aaron Beck, the cognitive therapist, outlines many practical exercises that are clinically proven to help with depression.) Seligman's contribution is to cheerlead a re-direction in academia to address ways to learn skills of mastery and vibrant good cheer. Csikszentmihalyi has done the best work here by studying Flow. In the areas where I am directly familiar with the research (e.g., Kahneman's work on hedonics), I felt that Seligman's formulation was overly coarse and flattened. OK, ok, but what are the bad parts? Once exposed to, for example, the Values Attitudes and Interests survey, you can answer that yourself. It's a thin hope that such bald survey questions could help identify your true Buddha nature.

The Importance of Being Famous : Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity-Industial Complex
(Maureen Orth, 384pp)
This sounded sharp, but it turned out to be a re-tread of Vanity Fair articles. The author is articulate, and the bios of Madonna, Karl Langerfeld, and Michael Jackson are shrewd. There's a little spliced commentary about how weird we've gotten since the 70s, when Elvis's funeral got only a paragraph on the front page of the NYT.

The Rough Guide Country Music
(Kurt Wolff, 596pp)
Pretty complete coverage, up to 2000. It's a little strange that the last section clusters all the No Depression/alt country musicians alphabetically, so that Son Volt precede the band that spawned it, Uncle Tupelo, and Lucinda Williams goes nearly last. Ryan Adams expressed the very pith of this music with his line: "There's nothing better than making yourself feel great about expressing the fact that you feel like shit." (p586)

E-Myth Mastery : The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World-Class Company
(Michael Gerber, abridged, 7 CDs)
Not a great book, but I got a great deal of value out of listening to it. There are a few points here worth following: The crucial, mystical, inspiring point is that to be an entrepreneur (the E), one has to be motivated by passion, to be intent on creating, and focused on that process above and beyond any thought of the outcome. As soon as one fixes on the outcome, one descends to the role of a Manager, who balances instrumental ends. Not surprisingly, this role is important, but scarcely capable of inspiring. The lowest role, Technician, is easy to fall into, and involves the least ownership over one's actions. There is a sadly moving story about how the author blew it in the mid-80s, and ended up being sued by all his franchisees. He's had paid back half the 2 million in debts from this period, but can at least claim to walk the walk of finally understanding what it really means to be the Owner and Creator.

A History of Britain, Volume II, The Wars of the British, 1603-1776
(Simon Schama, abridged, 7 cassettes)
The language is creamy, the thinking clear, and the history bloody. I'd read that Mark Twain had patented a game to aid in the memorization of the monarchs of England. That string of facts doesn't seem of great use. But the backstory of the religious nuts who dragged the modern world toward representative government is of great interest, and Schama does a wonderful job of drawing out the major themes.

The Namesake
(Jhumpa Lahiri; unabridged, 6 cassettes)
This novel is a pleasure. I recall reading one of Lahiri's short stories, about a character named Gogol, but it had left me unmoved. This novel tracks the birth and family context of Gogol, and every detail was finely revealed. The character Gogol is not particularly warm-hearted, but I found the family world that nurtured him fascinating. As the book came to a close, I felt a slight anxiety that the book would abruptly segue into the Gogol story I'd disliked, and that such an ending would contaminate my pure pleasure. This never happened, and the release of this anxiety counted as a minor additional delight. One evocation that I'm sure added to my enjoyment was the occasional mention of the Brattle Theater in Cambridge; I'd almost forgotten how much joy I'd experienced there, and what an easy source of fun it was to walk by the Theater and just buy a ticket if the offerings were sufficiently intriguing.

Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate
(Neil Baldwin, 432 pp)
Wow! Herr Ford was one toxic anti-semite. More than a hobby, he threw himself into publishing all kinds of slander about "international Jews", paying for the wide dispersal of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and distinguishing himself so thoroughly in the world of Jew hatred that young Adolf Hitler had a large portrait of the industrialist behind his desk in the early 1920's. He connected his vile toxin with simpering positive advocacy of pacifism, and it played out that this good vibe for peace was inseparable from his belief that Jewish bankers were the cause of WWI. Because he believed that history is more or less bunk, his pin-headed anti-semitic perspective was not even encumbered by messy facts. After he had distinguished himself as America's leading anti-semite, he threw a lot of money into advertising his Model A; Jewish publications had to decide whether to accept the dollars. Surprisingly, the Forward took his dirty money.

Mark Twain
(Geoffrey Ward, Ken Burns, Dayton Duncan; unabridged; 6 cassettes)
The comic genius had an gargantuan ego, commensurately distorted to his stature as the supremely hilarious writer. Apparently, his need to be the center of attention required him to wear a mink sable gown to his own daughter's wedding. There are many interesting incidents revealed here; the latter cassettes begin to feel a bit of a re-tread, as his claim that Hartford was the most beautiful of cities apparently is so worthy of note that it's quoted twice. I didn't realize until viewing the Amazon link, that this book was a PBS show and illustrated book. So, I'm now scanning through the print version, which has 288 pp of the magisterial mustache.

Entertaining America: Jews, movies, and broadcasting
(J. Hoberman, Jeffrey Shandler; 336 pp)
This book was the inevitable step to take after I gave the new Marxist DVDs a shot; there's a various bunch of ideas in this museum collection. My favorite nuggetoid: Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism when she married Arthur Miller.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot
(Sarah Vowell, unabridged, 4 cassettes)
What a pleasure it was to listen to Ms. Vowell narrate the essays and sharp thoughts distilled from her nerdish attention to the world. Her flat nasal accent perfectly mirrors the droll observations she presents.

Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change
(Clayton Christensen, Erik Roth, Scott Anthony; unabridged; 8 cassettes)
Very stimulating analysis of industry trends, and a penetrating look at what sort of conditions favor disruptive market entrants. Interestingly, Christensen claims that the best environment for disruption is one where the entrant feeds on the fringe, initially taking on a class of customers not attractive or served at all by the dominant players. There is a recurrent attempt to rebut the critics of "theory," which was the book's weakest part. Apparently, the authors wrestle with people who absolutely resist any attempt to find abstractions that unify diverse events. But, barring that sincere attempt to exhort cavemen to connect the dots, the book has much to say. The theory of motivation was the murkiest part, but even there I was interested in applying their framework.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Jared Diamond, abridged, 8 CDs)
Grim, yet not bleak. There's fascinating details about Texaco's oil rigs in Borneo that have a minimal environmental footprint, which contrast strongly with most industry's over-fishing, over-foresting, etc. This book is not as mesmerizing as Guns, Germs and Steel; it often sounds like a litany of lists, strung together to make a good lecture, but without the integral vision that Diamond's earlier book had.

The O'Franken Factor' Factor: The Very Best of the O'Franken Factor
(Al Franken; 1 CD)
If this is the best, then there's no hope for this radio show. Extremely brothy skits, with none of the zing of his other political books

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
(Malcolm Gladwell, unabridged, 7 CDs)
This book can almost be read in a Blink. There's so many things to admire about Malcolm that it's almost irresistible to list his Achilles' heel(s): a facile capacity to eschew numbers for narrative, an aptitude for coining phrases to make phenomena memorable, and a mesmerizing talent for threading together disparate stuff into a shiny magpie nest that feels so homey. James Surowiecki's advertisement for non-thinking is more compelling; Malcolm's tour is far more heterogeneous, as he romps across the brainfully crafted decision trees guiding emergency room diagnoses, the simple rules guiding improv comedy, and art criticism. This book won't become another tipping point; no matter how you thin-slice it, managers will find here no magic method to become geniuses by following their unreflective impulses.

100 years of landscape architecture : some patterns of a century
(Melanie Simo, 374 pp, ASLA Press, c1999)
Interesting review of the professional organization, the American Society of Landscape Architects, which at various points in the last century, aimed to be scientific, or beautiful, or to pursue a process of decisionmaking that would validate their work. And like many interactive & synthetic disciplines, the challenge is ultimately to create environments that please the people who experience those environments.

The Plot Against America
(Philip Roth, 11 CDs)
Great on growing up Jewish in America in the early 40s. Roth's obsessiveness frequently brims over with insights that can only be unleashed through his uniquely intense concentration. The initial story line feels a bit welded together from weird elements. The weakest leit motif is glommed on from the young stamp collector Philip's view of the daily events from the magnifying lens of his little stamp collection. Once the Lindbergh presidency kicks in gear, the anti-semitic nightmare is fully realized with great panache. Another layer of the story that is superbly balanced emerges from the smiling assimilationists who betray Judaism by their desires to appear "reasonable" before the gentiles. If you have a hard time believing that a rabbi could shake the hand of Ribbentrop, then scan the biography of Schwarzenegger: Rabbi Hier of the Wiesenthal Center has continually apologized for the embarrassing past of our Arnold.

O Jerusalem
(Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre; read by Theodore Bikel, unabridged, 20+ hours)
Fascinating story of the birth of the state of Israel. I'll be gnawing on this bone over the next few weeks. [Two weeks later] As I have continued to listen to the history of Jerusalem, Theodore Bikel's warm voice and dramatizing narrative is superb. The details about Golda Meir's contribution to the early state are amazing. [Feb 21] The final part of the book did not seem as inspiring, but that may simply be due to the inevitability of the narrative history, since the reader knows that it must lead to the formation of the state of Israel.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
(Anthony Bourdain, 8 hours)
A tour through the down-and-eventually up world of cooking. The machismo that sustains these hard-working chefs is perhaps no surprise. The middle of the book slows, since it's reprised earlier (and more succinctly) in his opening indictment of the misguided reasons people open a restaurant. Still, the stories are fun, and the underbelly world of foodism is worth the cook's tour.

Peace Kills
(PJ O'Rourke, unabridged, 5 CDs)
Piercingly funny, irreverent, but very acute look at foreign policy.

Oh Play That Thing
(Roddy Doyle, 12 CDs)
Not terrifically fun; way too much discursiveness to the character development. There's almost no dramatizing of the interaction between Henry and Louis Armstrong, and I never felt I got inside Louis' wonderful world.

Insight Guide Israel (Insight Guides Israel)
(Pam Barrett, 400 pp)
This glossy guide book captures a lot of useable info, including the same map of Jerusalem that seems to be used by Israeli government tourism. While it's not chock full of crunchy details and arcana, it does present a valuable and quick overview.

Israel Handbook (Footprint Israel Handbook with the Palestinian Authority Areas)
(Dave Winter, 850pp)
I bought this used, since there's a dearth of current tourist guides to Israel. The customer reviews at Amazon were very polarized, but I wanted to see for myself. In the end, my sense is that this Brit's attempt to sound even-handed is doomed; the desire to view "both sides" of the Holocaust debate would almost be laughable, but it's ultimately offensive.

Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits
(Art Spiegelman, 144 pp)
After reading the Men of Tomorrow, I followed up one of the footnotes to pursue the reference to Plas, my favorite superhero. Since Spiegelman is the alpha-comic-nerd, this homage pulls together many interesting details, esp. concerning the Plas' creator's early role at Playboy. Weirdly, Cole's ambition to make the big time involved a scheme to develop a bland newspaper-distributed comic strip; after its whimpering launch, he ended his life. The last strips encrypt a possible explanation: a husband and wife confess their act(s) of infidelity; the hubby admits one single lapse, and the cartoon wife can't complete her long list before bedtime. Perhaps it was the context of mixing life and art, but my recollections of the Plas were richer, more antic and hilarious than the 3 reprinted here.

Alexander Hamilton
(Ron Chernow, unabridged, starting with the 2nd half [#15] of the zillions of cassettes)
Great story-- Chernow clearly admires the "windbag", "word machine", colossus of intellect. There's a fascinating parallel between Jefferson, suspicious of banks, and the modern day (antique?) Left, who believe that capitalists wink, use secret handshakes, and arrange the cosmos through intentional manipulation.

The Jewish world : 365 days : from the collections of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem
(744 pp)
Interesting objects and beautiful pages from prayer books. More than one pair of Yemeni bridal pants.

Terra Non Firma
James Gere and Haresh Shah (5 cassettes)
I picked this up out of mild interest, as a survival guide to living in an earthquake zone. Even though the book is 20 years old, the information was great. I'd never known how imprecise the measurement of earthquake intensity was, since it varies with the estimated location of the epicenter, and also depends on the radiating medium of the kind of earth it travels through. The single most fascinating detail concerned tsunamis-- Apparently, it is possible to be on a ship and have one pass below, without realizing it, since the wave is flat and so long that the sea doesn't appear to have changed. Sailors a few miles off shore can watch with astonishment as the tsunami breaks against the shore.

Time
(Andy Goldsworthy, 192pp)
A pleasure to page through, and a great complement to the Rivers and Tides DVD. I learned that there is a cairn built by AG in nearby Hollister.

Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book
(Gerard Jones, 384pp)
Nerdly tribute to the Walter Mitty nebbishes who gave birth to the superheroic age. The book does not fly at the start, but like the original Superman, manages only an effortful flea-sized leap: The two guys behind Supermen were losers, exploited by pushy businessman with sometime-connections to gangsters. A fascinating thread of the origin story ties comic creation into the piecework mentality of the garment trade (and has interesting echoes today with the impossibility of identifying the true creative minds behind most software). This rag trade outlook explains how Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel obliviously signed away the rights to their mind child. The first part of the book (almost right up until the photo insertions) is painfully focused on these 2 dweebishly shy guys from Cleveland. All of a sudden, the story matures, and the narrative widens to include the guys who grew up reading the comics (Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Bill Gaines), as well as extending to give accounts of Will Eisner and Jack Cole (inventor of my fave, Plastic Man). When the story of Jerry Siegel's fight for his rights concludes, with huge Warner Communications agreeing to give him and Joe Shuster creative credit, along with a lifetime payment of $100K/year, the passage was so moving that I could only describe my response as verklempt.

Damascus Gate
(Robert Stone, unabridged, 14 cassettes)
Amazing synthesis of the insanity that makes Jerusalem so fascinating -- Robert Stone's strength is to weave a story of great psychological complexity using the simplest of ingredients -- drugs, delusions, schemes, and seamy underworld threats. This huge novel centers on the dangerous dalliances of fundamentalist Christians with millenialist Jews who aspire to catalyze the re-building of the Temple (third time's a charm to brew up red heifers, drug dealing terrorists, and other omens of the end). A writer attempts to understand the 'Jerusalem Syndrome' (one year after Stone's novel, in 1999, 50 people succumbed to the sense that they were the Messiah).

Hippie
(Barry Miles, 384 pp)
Big picture book, with lots of inscribed arcana. E.g., where the very early Acid Trips took place (the 2nd next to San Jose State, the 3rd in Mt View). The Mad Magazine perspective on Hippies is increasingly compelling, even though that was drawn through the eyes of middle aged men who knew beatniks well enough to be impatient with their pose.

Literary Modernism: The Struggle for Modern History
(Jeffrey Perl, 4 cassettes)
This was a complete pleasure to listen to: Very concise, astute, informed treatment of Eliot and his gang of moderns. I never knew how smart TSE was as a philosophy grad student; smart enough to write up his dissertation but then decline to even file for his PhD. [Meta-question: Is a lecture a book? Amazon apparently doesn't sell the Teaching Company's Great Courses, so perhaps this doesn't *count*.)

The Joy Diet : 10 Practices for a Happier Life
(Martha Beck, abridged, 5 cassettes)
Surprisingly, this is not insipid-- Do NOTHING? What a challenging activity to add to the iPod'ing, picture book reading, DVD-viewing activity; I'm sure I can multi-task nothing along with the other stuff. Being honest, going for the things that most give joy, and trying to be playful. These are all part of Ms Beck's daily diet recommendations.

Virginia Woolf
(Nigel Nicolson, unabridged, 4 cassettes)
Very revealing, succinct account of her life, written by her "nephew," the son of Vita Sackville-West. (I learned that his mother was VW's lover, and the model for Orlando). Other nuggets: That VW was molested by her half-brother; that she was sufficiently anti-semitic to boast of having the broadness of mind to marry a Jew; that she never flew in a plane or visited America. The author is quite testy about her feminism, and repeatedly claims that her success refuted her claim that women were not allowed to flourish in the 20th cent.

Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed
(Harold Koda, 168 pp)
Museum pictures of the many ways that people disfigure themselves to become attractive. These photos have nothing on the scarifying that goes on in the Mission these days, but it serves as the polite version of an online zine I recently encountered, the BME.

A Drinking Life
(Pete Hamill, unabridged, 9 cassettes)
Sort of a Brooklyn in a box -- an account of a guy who grew up loving the comics of the 1940s, in an Irish household, aspiring to be an artist, ending up a writer. His drunken father was peg-legged (due to an amputation after a soccer injury), his mother is pretty much absent except for the brood of siblings she generated, and the foreground is the 50s and 60s machismo that flowed from loving Hemingway, writing for the Post, and drinking before and after hours.

Gandhi: A Photo Biography
(Peter Ruhe, 312 pp)
Some interesting photos, and it's a continual curiosity to me how to makes sense of such a saint. Is Gandhi's independence movement to blame for the millions of Moslems and Hindus who died in the separation? The most fascinating document in this book is the mahatma's letter to Hitler, in 1939; it begins sweetly, "Dear Friend." Although he was opposed to Nazism, it's telling that he could not formulate a political response to shameless evil

Shadows on the Hudson
(I.B. Singer, unabridged, 15 cassettes [actually, it's 16 tapes, but the last was lost; this compelled me to re-read the whole book on paper)
I read almost all of IB's stories and novels by 1997, and when this translation came out posthumously in 1998, it did not feel compelling to read this big book. As it turns out, this delay was a gift to my 21st century self: I re-experienced all the pleasure of reading IB anew, in this very wicked and fascinating novel.
The themes are familiar: Affairs stacked on top of affairs in nested tangles of infidelity; secular jews tormented by the belief that only the halachically rigorous life is valid; fatalism intertwined with varieties of deviance. The language is endlessly pungent, and the characters are so vivid, so articulate about their rage toward God. (The novel takes place in the late 1940s as Jews struggle to cope with the bitter memories and loss of the Holocaust). Those who have survived the Nazis dally with Stalin; the perverse allure that the Communists held over the smart set is colorfully exposed, since even then it was known publicly that Stalin was addicted to psychopathic binges of anti-semitic purging. Every page of this novel shines with the beautiful complexity of character that is uniquely Singer; who else has the chutzpah to label God a Hitler. Each person in the book is a mystery to him or herself, and they decry their fates even as each pursues his/her uniquely personal undoing.

Simone Weil
(Francine Du Plessix Gray, 5 cassettes, stopped after 3)
What a transcendent nut case!! Here's the profit derived from being born into a family of well-to-do genius: She masochistically praised the factory worker's suffering, smoked like a Frenchman, was wracked with migraines, and died at 34 from anorexia.

Living to tell the Tale
(Gabriel Garcia Marquez, paused after 1st chapter)
Imagine the thrill of reading *100 Years of Solitude* for the first time. This book, which covers the life of the family that spun Cien Anos de Soledad, offered a chance for me to read that mythological family story from another angle. The library recalled the book after I'd finished the first chapter, but i was convinced by then that this book is worth owning (esp now that it's remaindered at less than $2).

The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram
(Thomas Blass, 320 pp)
Not an amazing biography, and perhaps, Stanley Milgram's gift doesn't convert to a compelling life story. Of course, he was a most brilliant experimental showman. Besides his famous obedience experiment, he also created the lost-letter paradigm, and designed a concrete test of the small world (6 degrees) notion. Alas, he never recovered from being denied tenure at Harvard. As the big fish in CUNY Grad School's small pond, he made weird choices in pursuit of fame (e.g., his small world research was published in the first issue of Psychology Today, rather than in a peer reviewed journal). His last years were mis-spent trying to direct films. He made some documentaries, and got hooked, convinced that film was a better medium than experiments to demonstrate truths. He vainly angled to have the NSF fund his movies, but the reviewers balked. A bad heart cut his life short, and he died in 1984 at age 50.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
(Eliyahu Goldratt, 8 cassettes, 12 hours, narratively enacted by a league of cheeseballs)
This 'novel' was frequently used at Harvard Business School, and I've always been curious what its apparently self-published covers contained. The hero is an engineer in charge of a failing factory; to spice the drama, his marriage is also on the rocks. The core idea offers some value, and it is demonstrated through a couple of clearly visualized vignettes: Essentially, in a work-flow, the slowest process (bottleneck) will set the pace for the entire system. If other parts of an assembly line continue to produce at their own pace, the accumulated inventory is a cost that can easily exceed the "efficiency" of not having down-time. The solutions: Shrink the batch size passed between each process, focus on finding ways to open the bottleneck's throughput, and pay attention at all times to The Goal.

Charlie Wilson's war : the extraordinary story of the largest covert operation in history
(George Crile, 18 CDs, unabridged)
Oh you masters of War! A look into a twisted heart of darkness. And, yes, this too came from Texas. Charlie Wilson (a congressman at the time) exuded charisma and sensitivity -- he famously explained why he hired beautiful women: "You can teach them to type, but you can't teach them to grow tits." Although he had a few problems with hit-and-runs while DUI, Charlie Wilson clearly succeeded in building an alliance within Congress and the CIA to deliver the weapons needed by the Afghan mujahideen to defeat the Soviet Union. Cumulative little errors: defending Pakistan's A-bomb and the unleashing of a nest of airline-downing Stingers that may come to haunt us. Oopie. Worst of all, this book fascinates with its portrayal of the total inside story. It's addictively thrilling to read how Charlie and his Greek CIA accomplice willfully broke laws to run the largest covert operation in history.

Men and Cartoons: Stories
(Jonathan Lethem, 4 CDs, unabridged)
Very strong opening story, which first appeared in Tin House, about a guy who encounters someone he knew from grade school who had the habit of dressing as a superhero named The Vision. The other stories are variable, with astute observations here and there. The story about people who live in a traffic jam reminded me too much of Julio Cortazar's similar tale, w/o the distinctive joke of labeling all the characters as the cars they drove. A lot of the stories are exercises, pumping sentences to build muscular prose. Lethem's earnest seriousness is noble, but it isn't always enjoyable to watch. Note: The CDs deploy interesting narrators, such as Sandra Bernhard, but the packaging sacrifices some of the intricate replication of comic book back pages that the hard cover includes.

My Left Foot
(Christy Brown, unabridged, 4 CDs)
I'd put this in a category with Frederick Douglass's Autobiography of a Slave: Inspiring story of a man who confronts his situation with straightforward honesty and clarity. His brothers kindly named the first wagon he traveled about in his 'chariot', which exemplifies how the language of the Irish can hold such healing power in its blarney. When he outgrew that chariot, he became suddenly conscious of his abnormality, and he writes so movingly of his struggles to overcome his handicap.

Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects
(Josie Glausiusz & Volker Steger, 144 pp)
Cool electron microscopic photos of our strange bedmates.

Chronicles : Volume One (Chronicles)
(Bob Dylan, abridged to 6 hours, read by Sean Penn)
Sean Penn's the ideal voice for Dylan's autobiographical quick sketches: Prickly, remote, burdened with a heart bursting with sensitivity. Dylan writes plainly about his life (his love for Judy Garland songs, his appreciation of Tony Bennett, his fascination with an old man who believes that the Chinese will take over the world). Even when stepping inside his shoes, all you can say is that you never knew the guy, and you wouldn't even recognize him if you spent your life trying to know him.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind : An Unauthorized Autobiography
(Chuck Norris, 8 CDs, abort after 1)
Perhaps you've heard the scuttle-butt, the intrigue surrounding the life story of a gameshow host who claimed to have been a CIA double agent. The first chapters are horribly plausibly trite, with self-obsessed criticisms about how boring his life is. Since there's no mystery or sparkle there, as soon as he mentioned packing a gun with a silencer, I knew that the author had reached for the steroids, trying to flash up his sorry life.

The Making of a Philosopher : My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy
(Colin McGinn, 5 cassettes)
There's very little about philosophy, but that's not such a flaw. (The older I get, the harder it is for me to recall what was so fascinating about the niggling points of reference.) It's more interesting to hear how he went from a family of coal miners to become the first college grad. He reveals his crabby side; after a single rude criticism from Michael Dummett, he decided to never attend the faculty philosophy club at Oxford. Later, Dan Dennett said the wrong thing, and they ceased to be friends. Still, he has some A-grade pals, such as Jerry Fodor and Oliver Sacks.

The Good Terrorist
(Doris Lessing, unabridged, punted after 1 cassette)
This may be about terrorism, but it's basically about that flavor of English culture who need council housing and fret about socialism. I couldn't make myself care.

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut: Twenty-Five Years of P.J. O'Rourke
(P.J. O'Rourke, unabridged, heard 6 out of 9 cassettes)
I think it makes sense to compare P.J.O to Mark Twain; they both can be incredibly funny, and when their bile backs up, their humor leaks away. The early hippie pages were very amusing; I'd mistakenly thought he was the editor of the National Lampoon during its glory days (before Nixon resigned), but this collection reveals that he didn't take the helm until 1978. This collection documents his veering from libertarian to rancid Republican, at which point I punted.

Washington Schlepped Here : Walking in the Nation's Capital
(Christopher Buckley, 3 cassettes)
Better than the title. A demi-amusing tour of DC, with little nuggetoids of history. E.g., Lincoln's son saw his father die, then managed to witness the next 2 presidential assassinations over the next 30 years.

Designs on the Land: Exploring America From the Air
(Alex S. Maclean, 368 pp)
What a cool book! This guy flies around alone in a plane, taking photos of the land, collecting interesting patterns of activities, either human or geological. One of my favorite past times is to listen to an audiobook, staring out the window of a plane flying over the Sierras. Paging through this picture book while conversing with friends can give you that thrill!

Good Things for Organizing
(Martha Stewart, 144 pp)
I've looked at scads of organization books lately, and I've decided to list only the one keeper. Martha's guidance isn't super applicable to tiny NY apts, but in every other kind of space, her velvety dominatrix approach is perfect for putting everything in its proper place.

The Little Drummer Girl
(John Le Carre, unabridged, 12 cassettes)
A very elaborate intellectual confection, exploring the terrorist world of Palestinian fighters in the early 1980s. The amount of intelligence invested in deploying a vast trick makes a good novel, but an implausible account of the threats in the world today. The brain power today pours into developing an alluring account of suicide; once that delusion is deployed, the rest of the game is just to saddle bags of explosives on the deluded. An additional implausibility in this story is that the key player is a woman, who has a claim to a relationship with the dead brother of a terrorist. How, one wonders, would the manly world of Israeli and Palestinian fighters respond to such a woman? Would either side really expect that she would continue to have any place in the game, once her lover has died?

Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
(John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, 236pp)
This book documents the amazing extent to which PR has distorted the political process (and this was written in 1995!!). I read this on the flight to New Mexico to work with the Moveon PAC. I am still uncertain to what extent the *right causes* should learn from the right wing's bankrolled subversion tactics. I learned of two insidious PR strategies, astroturfing and grasstops, both of which use money and public relations machinery to create the illusion of grassroots organizations. The astroturfed groups are those ubiquitous industry fronts who whip up letters behind letterheads with pleasing names (Forest Defense League etc). Of course, this doublespeak has now gone Federal with Bush's cynical labeling of his attacks on the environment. Grasstopping is something else again, which puts the friends of congressmen on the boards of these falsely fronted organizations, so that their social influence will drift into the world of the legislators.

Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
(Laurence Bergreen, unabridged, 14 CDs, punted after 6)
Kind of interesting, but not compelling; lots of colorful anecdotes about significant technicians being caught sodomizing young men while at sea, and the conflict between the Roman Catholic code and the need to stay on course (Catholicism won in the story).

Searching for Bobby Fischer: The Father of a Prodigy Observes the World of Chess
(Fred Waitzkin, unabridged, 7 CDs)
The chess world is fascinating, and the character portraits drawn here are very amusing. Written in the mid 1980s, when the Soviet Union still existed, there was at least one place where chess playing was a way to make a living. It is intriguing to consider how beautiful and intricate the patterns of a chess game can be, and yet, how impossible it is to transform the activity into a vocation that society will support. Mathematicians get support because there is some chance of mapping their noodle-grams to a real world process. Because chess is intrinsically rewarding, the vast majority of grand masters eek out a living at a $1/game in America. Although Bobby Fischer was not yet an international war criminal, this book revealed his Hitler fascination and paranoiac need to have all his dental fillings removed to avoid being attack with "radio waves".

IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation
(Edwin Black, abridged, 5 CDs)
A disturbing window on the "final" solutions company. Tom Watson preached trade as the bridge to peace long after Kristallnacht. The Nazis were supreme consumers of punched cards for running internal race counts, and IBM's live-and-let-die philosopher king blandly wrote internal reminders that exhorted the sales staff to focus on its role as a world citizen. Help customers with any project that they have; if our values differ, well, just do the parts that we agree about, and perhaps someone else will take on a different slice. There are quotations from key officers who weirdly recount that attending Nazi government events was felt to be "the most interesting experience in my life." This book, written and read by the son of 2 survivor parents, is rhetorically too passionate to be read as an objective history, although the documentary evidence presents an overwhelming indictment of tradesmen as peacemakers.

Getting Mother's Body
(Suzan Lori Parks, read and SUNG by the author, unabridged, 7:33)
Amazing novel, set in Texas in 1963, with a narrative line similar to the Secret Life of Bees. Little light can be shed by comparing them, but if you wanted to read just one of the two, this is by far the richer and more rewarding. The language sings with an earthy individuality that is a great delight to hear. The emotional drama of the quest is handled with equal power and verve.

The Family : The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty
(Kitty Kelley, unabridged, 20 cassettes)
Once I started listening to this, there was no stopping. The Bushes incarnate a WASP's parody of the Kennedy family. The family lineage provides scores of independent reasons to hate Yale; each rat-bastard great-uncle gave the nod to bring in the next round of hypocrites and greedy skin-flints. This book reveals what shouldn't be a surprise, namely, that the first Bush to become president was a weasel, who ran for Congress in Texas on a racist "states' right" appeal. Though acclaimed as the brainy Bush (who did get a phi beta kappa key in college), his practice of the bureaucratic life turned his brain into a mush long before he was elected president. Each page uncovers another false posture or reveals another way for the family to express its apparently inborn tendency to be cheap and grubbing (e.g., Barbara Bush considers Velveeta cheese on Ritz crackers to be high style). The prose is level-headed & scrupulously attentive to details; since the author had written before about Nancy Reagan and Frank Sinatra, I was not sure how remote this book would land from the tone of a tabloid. Throughout, I never heard a false note.

Natasha : And Other Stories
(David Bezmozgis, 160 pp)
A fine set of 6 stories, that starts with the angle of a young Latvian boy who has immigrated to Toronto. The set follows his family through the next 20 years, and finishes with the superb *Minyan*. A great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926-1930
(Scott Eyman, 15 hours, paused after 6)
Interesting stories: I'd never realized that sound films convert audio waves to optical vibrations, that can then be inscribed on the photographic medium at the same time as the image. This is the stuff you'll learn, along with anecdotes about the Warner Bros, Fox, et al. Unfortunately, I didn't hear the one thing I was most interested in: how Chaplin, and other silent stars, fought the transition.

The Best Business Stories of the Year: 2002 Edition
(edited by Andrew Leckey and Ken Auletta; unabridged; 16 hours)
Think of this as magazine articles from 2002 that deserved to make it to DVD. It opens with the jarring reminder that 2002 followed on the heels of 9.11.01, so that it really is a world away from today. The best pieces were portraits: Michael Milken (sneaky), Mary Meeker (just a shade from indictable as an internet touter), Ron Popeil (beautifully portrayed by Malcolm Gladwell). There are also period pieces of "promising new technology" which is already dead in the water (miracle paper that will make printers & faxes obsolete!).

A History of Europe
(J.M. Roberts, unabridged, 40 hours; 628 dense pages)
The ideal audio-slog. Concise, interesting tales, almost entirely concentrating on dead white men. It proceeds at a logarithmic pace, covering millenia of Neanderthals in a page, and then shifting to several pages per month for WWII.

Why we buy: The Science of Shopping
(Paco Underhill, unabridged, 8:40)
I resisted reading this for years, because a quick scan made me judge it rather harshly. In fact, it's chock full of interesting observations, in spite of its misleading title. It is not "why we buy", but rather, an account of "how we shop." Even less accurate is the colonic claim that it is "the science of shopping." In the closing chapter, Underhill is pretty honest about the fact that he's learned by observing, and that there's much art to retail. Perhaps he was forced by editors to overhype his story. (I also felt that the first chapter, where he touts his method of using Excel spreadsheets, is the weakest; perhaps this dispensable intro was extracted by editors who felt the "science" needed to be situated like a chrome plated hood ornament.) With those caveats in mind, the book is nevertheless a rewarding read. Underhill's real strength as an empathetic observer, who generates loads of valuable ideas about how to entice shoppers with sensory interaction. E.g., why don't video stores copy bookstores, and create viewing clubs & schedule talks by movie people?