Shalimar the Clown
(Salman Rushdie, unabridged, 18:13 = 416 pp)
Rushdie brings his attention to bear on the furies that leap out of the Kashmir, in a novel that ranges over decades, with his monkey barrel overflowing with strange characters. The lurid language (e.g., it opens with an ambassador being "slaughtered ... like a halal chicken dinner") is balanced against a complex historical background. Since almost everything I know about Indian history was learned from Midnight's Children, this faction builds on the foundation of all my misconceptual structure of India's complex history. Shalimar's life, which begins in the Kashmiri village of Pachigam, is woven together with that of the "flying Jew" Max Ophuls. (John Updike asked in a review, why have a character named Max Ophuls, who lives in vague contemporaneity with the historical Ophuls, a not-obscure movie director?) Rushdie's persecution makes him a perfect candidate for being the 21st century man of ideas, and his ability to juggle fuzzy balls of tangential associations is unparalleled. He has done a pretty adequate job of flourishing these past 20 years, dancing in the presence of the shadowy specter of a blind assassin. I got lost in this novel several times, and had to re-listen to parts to make the collage hold together, but I was almost always fascinated. To my mind, the only writer who can match Rushdie for sheer story-telling firepower is Garcia Marquez.

Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, as Told By Its Stars, Writers and Guests
(James A. Miller & Tom Shales, 656 pp)
This book is organized in vignette-meatball paragraphs, a format which I believe was originated by George Plimpton's oral history of Edie (Sedgwick). Like the TV show it obsesses about, it has great parts, rough patches, and occasional filler. The first year was of course full of glories; I was surprised to realize that the first cast did not include Bill Murray, and even when he first joined, he felt that he was always getting parts as the 'second cop'. Chevy Chase grabbed far more attention than was ever justified, since I never thought he was funny. John Belushi is the whirlwind at the heart of the launchpad, and Dan Akroyd well describes his deep respect for the Bluto boy. I wish there were more about Gilda, and there's only a few peeps about Andy Kaufman. Larry David worked as a writer during the early 80s, and in his entire year, saw only one or possibly two sketches get on the show. He tells a hilarious story about being so frustrated that he walked, telling the executive Dick Ebersol he quit. But on the walk home, he realized he needed the money, so he returned on Monday, as if he hadn't ever quit. Al Franken's stories were sometimes so superb I laughed out loud. As the book moves toward the 25th anniversary, I found myself being more intrigued by Lorne Michaels, the evil genius behind the whole show, who exerts a mysterious charisma. Fortunately, the last section is all about his role, as inscrutable father figure, star-f*cker, theorist of comedy, and master producer. (I read the first 342 pages on a flight, and then chipped away at the final portions by listening to the 15-cassette tape version).

Jane Goodall : 40 years at Gombe : a tribute to four decades of wildlife research, education, and conservation
(Jennifer Lindsey, 128pp)
This book came out in 1999, and serves as a sort of libretto/Cliffs Notes summary of Goodall's career. An amazing factoid mentioned here is that she hasn't stayed in any one place on the planet for more than 3 weeks at a time in over a decade.

Jewish Intellectual History, part 2
(David Ruderman, 6 CDs)
The second part of this series is not as fascinating as the first half, although the lectures continue to range over a wide array of topics. The treatment of complex topics is occasionally quite cursory, although the choice of topics is invariably interesting, which included early Zionism, Existentialism (as understood by Buber), Reconstructionism (Mordechai Kaplan), and the place of Abraham Heschel. The discussion of feminism in particular reveals how Ruderman stretches to incorporate information outside his own experience.

My Life So Far
(Jane Fonda, unabridged, 8 CDs)
Jane Fonda has been riding the zeitgeist's rocket her entire life, beginning with the child-eyed adoration she felt for her Tom Joad/Lincoln-impersonating Dad. Her mother was a suicide who slit her throat when Jane Fonda was only 10. The language she uses to describe her life occasionally slips into technical therapeutic terms (although it's not a 12-stepping jargon); What exactly does she mean by a de-laminated family? Throughout, she speaks with honesty about her insecurities. At times, it seems surprising how immature/undeveloped her perspective sounds, but she courageously seeks to play it as it lays. Her marriage to Tom Hayden is only briefly covered, and there's not a word about her term in Berkeley. She chose to marry Ted Turner, even though he could not even bring himself to pronounce the word "monogamy" (when he tried to say that word, he always mangled it). The book ends on a strange note, since she reveals that she is now a convert to Christianity, who has deliberately chosen to settle into Atlanta as a single grandmother.

The Disappointment Artist
(Jonathan Lethem, abridged, 3 cassettes)
Lethem is intensely serious about his esthetic pleasures, and in these essays, he's also very open about the underlying autobiographical experiences that drove some of his most significant obsessions. I enjoyed hearing him read these essays. What motivated the abridgment to 3 cassettes? This excised a couple of pieces, such as his essay on Cassavettes. Lethem recently won a MacArthur genius prize, and he has clearly earned it by dint of the labor he has devoted to comics, science fiction, movies, and music. One theme that emerges within the essay, "Defending THE SEARCHERS," explores the alienating impact of too much devotion. He reveals that he has been haunted by his attempts to make a work of art so great, so worthy, so important: Instead of being what it is, the work gets saddled with an impossible burden that destroys the possibility of responding to it on its own terms. I've been following Lethem since Motherless Brooklyn, and he is here wrestling openly with his central existential dilemma. The obsessive attention he brings to his heroes, the weight of his homages, the earnestness of his intensity, vitiate the light touch, the humorous twist, the angular exposure that make art human.

Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography
(William F. Buckley, unabridged, 18:45)
Someone said of Churchill that all his flaws were evident upon first meeting him, and his virtues shone through more and more clearly as one got to knew him. With William F. Buckley, the picture is slightly more complicated: His inflection is irksomely mannered, and yet, his statements are frequently erudite, precise and witty. It is of course supremely annoying that he makes his life sound dramatically more interesting than mine, as he yachts about with David Niven, goes skiing with Milton Friedman, and befriends intellectual opponents such as John Kenneth Galbraith. In spite of his patrician perspective and sharp mind, he has an awesome capacity to be cracked. He claims to believe that JFK's first impulse was wise, and that we should have launched an all out attack on the USSR when the Cuban missiles were discovered. Game over. (Apparently, his voice is so important, that the hardback version includes a CD of the man reading a selection of these 50 essays). [The exact quote on Churchill runs: "the first time you meet Winston you see all his faults, and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues."]

Skyscrapers
(Andres Lepik, 160pp)
Cool book, written up with a teutonic tone that sometimes sounds a bit odd. I hadn't realized, until skimming the intro, that the ability to build above 5 floors had to wait for Otis, who designed the first safe elevator. The progression of buildings is presented chronologically, and the later pages show buildings in Dubai, Indonesia and Shanghai that I'd otherwise know nothing about. It seems unfortunate that the book did not choose to include the exact street addresses of each building. As a complement to this picture book, there's an awesome site with all sorts of interesting info accessible at http://skyscraperpage.com/

Venice Observed
(Mary McCarthy, 158pp)
I skipped around in here, after I finished the first chapter. Published in 1963, she well describes the problem that nothing new can ever be said about Venice. In this case, McCarthy says everything quite well, but her writing here is OLD, right? (Venice hadn't even re-surrected its Carnevale until the late 1970's, so the descriptions here are of historical interest).

Shadow of the Wind
(Carlos Ruiz Zafon, unabridged, stopped after 1 CD)
Set in Barcelona, and wrapped around the "idea" of bibliophilia, this seemed promising. But I found it no more gripping or psychologically plausible than Umberto Eco, a man who's just an over-educated blatherer. I never grew to care about this book in the course of the first CD.

The City of Falling Angels
(John Behrendt, unabridged, 13:01)
Vivid streams of personal stories, which waft around the tale of Venice's La Fenice Opera House, which burned down in 1996, just 3 days before the author showed up after riding a whirlwind of success with his earlier book about Savannah. I wish this had been released a week earlier, because I would have been able to listen to it while wandering upon the Grand Canals. The personalities are colorful, and the tales told have Rashomon shimmers, as each tale gets ever more complicated with differing versions. There are numerous accounts of families at odds over their legacies, or usurpers who have glommed onto estates (such as that of Ezra Pound). Some of the truly fascinating qualities of Venice are well evoked, such as the fact that this car free city necessarily has cleaner air and lower noise pollution than almost anywhere else in the world.

Humboldt's Gift
(Saul Bellow, unabridged, 18 hours = 487pp)
Listening to Bellow is such a rich pleasure. This book was not at all structured as it stood in my memory: the Delmore Schwartz character gets some key parts, but he is most often off-stage. The Chicago thug, Rinaldo Cantabile, persists through the entire tale. Another easy to forget aspect is the prominence of anthroposophy in Charlie Citrine's musings. Although the component pieces are not high art, it's truly amazing to attend to Bellow's vigorous prose. One thing that does shine through, however inadvertently, is his intention to fantasize about women, rather than grow intimate with their real personalities. (Poking around in James Atlas' biography of Bellow, I learned on p426 that he wrote the book 'in my usual way' ... "Lots of beginnings, three years on the middle, and then the last third in six weeks flat out.")

The Rough Guide to Paris 9
(rough guys, 512 pp)
Great compendium of information about the center of chic. This was very helpful in navigating the Marais neighborhood, wandering by Notre Dame and St Chappelle, and it was this book that persuaded me to squeeze in the Museum de Moyen Age on my last morning in Paris.

Rick Steves' Paris 2005
(Rick Steves, 434 pp)
Like the man's inimitable videos, this provides walking tours of Paris that combine the greatest hits with a few recherche items you wouldn't expect. (For example, Rick lists the hotel where Oscar Wilde died, which I tried to find while wandering the Left Bank, but didn't ultimately reach). These books are designed so that if you follow in Rick's footsteps, you will see the Pareto optimal chunk of famous destinations. On the other hand, it's boiled down to cover only those destinations, so doesn't support wandering off the charted path.

A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
(Simon Winchester, unabridged, 12:30)
Great and timely topic, but not a very well-organized presentation. There are great bits in the second half, when the book finally jumps into the Bay Area (the first half meanders across geological background). I have not greatly enjoyed other books by Winchester (such as The madman and the professor, or even worse, the retread, The Meaning of Everything). Though he frequently picks topics of interest to me, his method feels too diffuse to grip my attention.

Day of Atonement Prayer Book
(David de Sola Pool)
This sephardic service, in Hebrew and English, made the Venice Yom Kippur observance easy to follow.

Exuberance: The Passion for Life
(Kay Redfield Jamison, abridged, 4 CDs)
This book advances a valid thesis (that intense feelings of inspiration are significant), and comes from the author who has written so much about the creative fury inside many manic-depressives' life stories. While it contains some good points, there is nothing that really goes beyond her earlier Touched by Fire.

Off the Cuff
(Carson Kressley, unabridged, 4 CDs)
A funny tour of the closet, and what to keep in there. The language is light, the guidance is very useful, although its scope is deliberately limited to the basics. Even though it's clothing 101, it does cover everything from hats to shoes, and on virtually every topic, I appreciated the matter of fact guidance.

Baedeker Venice
(Baedeker 1995 edition, 136pp)
Lots of arcane details, a good map of the city folded in, but a very weird organization (alphabetical rather than topographic). The two great virtues of this guide: it's small, and aspires to be pedantically complete. It lacks a strong point of view, although I did enjoy the history and pointers to films about the city.

Venice & The Veneto (Eyewitness Travel Guides)
(Susan Boulton, 312pp)
A very useful guide, held by most of the Americans in Venice. I found it quite helpful, even though it did not prevent me from getting lost a hundred and seventeen times.

Jewish Intellectual History, part 1
(David Ruderman, 6 CDs)
Great story of modern Judaism, beginning in the Venice ghetto, with the paradoxical claim that by clamping Italian Jews into the heart of the Italian city, they learned from, and incorporated, gentile tricks, such as polyphonic harmony in their services. Baruch Spinoza wrestles with Maimonides (off-stage, but still relevant), and then Moses Mendelsohn and Graetz get special lectures.

Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage
(Diane Middlebrook, unabridged, 10:57)
Ted Hughes' career thrived after Sylvia Plath's suicide, and he even became her literary state's executor (opportunities for a morbid pun there). This double bio makes a powerful case that Hughes felt that they shared one mind, and he clearly esteemed Plath as a poet of great power. It is common knowledge that Hughes left Plath to pursue a married woman, with whom he had a child. Shockingly, the other woman also ended her life in suicide, even more violently, since she killed their four year old child at the same time. Middlebrook is extremely qualified to write this tragic story (she has also published a bio of Anne Sexton). Although the book doesn't include much about Sexton, there's a anecdote about how Sexton complained to her shrink that Plath pre-empted her exit move, and that the boost she had hoped to give her poetry would now seem only like a copy-cat act. Usually, I feel a strong moral disdain for philanderers. In Hughes' case, it is clear that he suffered abundantly for his bad choices, and he clearly needed sexual predation to feed his poetic muse. The love that sparked between the two poets is told with great clarity.

The Know-It-All : One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
(AJ Jacobs, unabridged, 12 CDs, punt after 2 CDs)
This should have been an absurdist magazine article, but it has alas been pumped up on the steroids of irrelevant fact-mongering, to kill hundreds of pages. The writer dithers, blathers, and exemplifies in his approach everything that is flawed in the notion that someone is smart if they are crammed with Jeopardy trivia questions. (4 months later: I recently saw this book on a shelf, and paging through it, realized that the wandering scope and grab bag of strange facts is not nearly as unpleasant, when experienced on paper, since the reader can skim and quickly jump about for an eyecatching nugget.)

Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga
(Stephen Davis, -- jumped around and read about half of the 400 pp)
Gross guys, good music, bad book. The whole entourage acted as child molesters who get winked at by the author. The drummer, Bonzo Bonham, was a rapist and batterer of women, before he imploded into a drunken but well-deserved death. Their agent was a fat thug who intimidated artists like Bill Graham. The best explanation, beyond lurid gossip-mongering, for giving a glance through this book is to honor one's inner thirteen year old.

Wandering Home : A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks (Crown Journeys)
(Bill McKibben, unabridged, 4 CDs)
One of the great green places, celebrated with clarity and an awareness of the nutty bran-flaked notions (hemp, biodiesel, local economies) that make Vermont such a great space.

The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved
(Alan Dershowitz, unabridged, 7 hours)
Cogent, spot-on arguments for how to transform the middle east by recognizing the contributions Israel has made, and what could be accomplished if the world were to insist that the Palestinian Authority match that commitment to stop terrorism, enforce a rule of law, and oppose hate-speech. There is a sub-plot inside this book which vigorously attacks the academic apparatus which is consistently anti-Israel. I believe Dershowitz to be fair in his intense defense of Israel, and he makes clear that Chomsky has no claim to be an honest or accurate analyst of the situation. As but one proof of his lack of insight, Chomsky once held out Lebanon as the exemplar for Israel's future, and when that blew up, suggested instead that the Israelis pursue the course of Yugoslavia.

Envy, or Yiddish in America: The Pagan Rabbi
(Cynthia Ozick, unabridged, 3:50)
These two novellas are worth a listen, although it's difficult to get a precise bead on how to describe the pleasures of Ozick. Her discipline and intelligence shine through the two well-crafted stories.

Gesundheit! : Bringing Good Health to You, the Medical System, and Society through Physician Service, Complementary Therapies, Humor, and Joy
(Patch Adams & Maureen Mylander, abridged, 4 cassettes)
In the same insufferable key as the Tuesdays with Morrie, chock full of wide-ranging common sense advice, this book, unlike Morrie, does not close with the satisfying view watching the wise guy piffle away. There is no reason to disagree with his claim that doctors should be empathetic, give hugs, laugh. But it stretches the plausible to believe they can be your friend, that they should never carry malpractice insurance because that's adversarial. He has the courage to live in line with his convictions, but he must certainly be bipolar, lurching about to reform the entire medical system with his clown nose patched on. Of interest, but not particularly well written.

Chaplin : genius of the cinema
(Jeffrey Vance, 400 pp)
Great compendium of the master comedian. I stopped after the Great Dictator, since the later work is nearly as bad as late Woody Allen. Several people remarked upon the irony that the most loved comedian and the world's vilest dictator were born 5 days apart, and looked so similar. The text documents why the Chaplin estate has such a contested attitude toward his body of work; Sennett studios continued to release Chaplin outtakes as new films for years after he left; Chaplin compounded these problems by recording music in the early 1970s, and releasing "official" prints that hacked the ratio of 19 to 21 frames for silent into a procrustean 32 frames per second. My personal favorites come from his Mutual Series, 10 films shot with a minimum of artistic interference, in 1916 and 1917. Nuggetoids: Stan Laurel was Chaplin's theater understudy when he toured America in 1911; the first public appearance of the Tramp was shot at a race car event in Venice California, and the footage shows the audience observing and growing to love the Tramp; the shoes that were devoured in the Gold Rush were made of licorice, of which the excess consumption is laxative. Films that must now be re-seen: A Busy Day; The Rounders (with Fatty Arbuckle); Kid Auto Races at Venice; Shanghaied; A Woman; The Pawnshop from 1916; Behind the Screen; Easy Street; The Cure; The Immigrant.

Shingle styles : innovation and tradition in American architecture 1874 to 1982
(Leland Roth with Bret Morgan as photographer, 240 pp)
A celebration of the many styles that wooden shingles were deployed. A bizarre outlier is the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. The retirement home of Frederick Law Olmstead in Deer Isle, Maine, called Felsted, looks amazing. There are several great examples from the East Bay: The First Unitarian Church of Berkeley, Grayoaks in Ross, and the John Galen Howard House, the John S. Thomas House, and the Guy Hyde Chick House (B, B, and Oakland, respectively).

Lost in My Own Backyard : A Walk in Yellowstone National Park (Crown Journeys)
(Tim Cahill, unabridged, 3 CDs = 144pp)
Enjoyable toe dip into the steaming waters and massive volcanic geology of our first national park, and according to Cahill, "America's backyard." I have visited Yellowstone twice, once at 12, then again at 20. This book's synoptic glance at the park, in all its enormity and beauty, made me yearn for another chance to do the American thing: Drive a few thousand miles to a destination of awesome beauty, and then zip around the park in a glass-&-metal bubble. One amazing statistic from the book: "In 2001, according to Yellowstone Visitors Services, the park had 2,758,526 recreational visitors, of which 19,239 applied for backcountry camping permits. That means—rounding the numbers off a bit—that, in 2001 anyway, 99.3 percent of park visitors didn’t overnight in the backcountry."

The Unnameable
(Samuel Beckett, unabridged, 5:48)
Beats me what this is "about", although this sequence of highly improbable sentences streamed by quite enjoyably. Beckett's trilogy must be the audible experience par excellence. I would have never gotten around to his work, even though I've known for decades that Beckett built on Joyce's work, and my favorite short story writer, Donald Barthelme, always guided readers to the master. (Consult the Believer article on DonB's syllabus, wherein his only recommended approach to Beckett is
"Samuel Beckett entire"). Much of the first half was heard twice, but was understood less than half a time; it's awesome that such psychological reality can be compressed into scenes of on-beyond-surreality (a worm, a man without limbs, a juggle of Molloy, Malone, and Mahood).

Introduction to Judaism
(Shai Cherry, 12 CDs)
Great, informative, chockfull of useful historical and theological points. Topics of the lectures covered all of the following: Repentance; Study; Prayer; Deeds of Loving Kindness; Messianism; Sabbath; Holidays. One of the most interesting ideas, from a lecture on the Reform movement in England, advances the claim that Orthodox Judaism had to be developed in opposition to the Reform, and so there is a sense in which Reform is primary in defining the Judaisms of the present day. As one other example of the crunchy ideas touched upon, the lecturer mentions that the transliteration that exhorts no kid to be seared in its mother's milk, could instead have referred to chelev (not chalav), and have actually instructed no one to kill two generations at once. The one quirk of the lecturer, who apparently grew up in San Mateo in the 1970s, is his predilection for Joni Mitchell/Janis Joplin verses for exegesis of the Tanakh.

1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
(Charles Mann, unabridged, 11:23)
A wide-ranging discussion of the intense ecological impact that Native Americans exerted by their agricultural practices, as well as the earlier patterns of hunting that extinguished many species. The book is similar to Guns, Germs and Steel, in its willingness to discuss many different threads of archeological and anthropological evidence. It differs from Jared Diamond's take, in its emphasis upon the awesome power that Native Americans exerted over the environment. Although it's inherently speculative to gainsay the population size of Indians just before smallpox, measles and other germs killed millions, the arguments are well-discussed and cogently presented. NOTE: This book began as an Atlantic Monthly article, and for those without a desire for the grad level seminar on the topic, that is probably enough gist. (The Atlantic grants only limited access, but google's cache holds this)

Churchill
(J. Rufus Fears, 12 half-hour lectures)
An Oklahoman's tribute to the Great Man theory of History, and who better to showcase such a claim that Men (yes, Men!) make history, than Sir Winston. A quick fly-over, un-nuanced in the lecturer's admiration for the man, but still fun.

San Francisco Mime Troupe Reader
(Susan Vaneta Mason, Editor; 312 pp)
I bought this from the troupe when they last played in my neighborhood. Their broad humor and agit-prop history are well-documented here. Since I came onto this scene in the late '90's, this book is a great place to learn about the roots. The troupe has two epochs, the first 10 years with a fancy French inflected accent, the SF "Meem" troupe, led by the leftist R.G. Davis from 1959 to 1969. Early troupe members went on to found Mabou Mines, and workshopped fruitfully with the Bread and Puppet-eers. Apparently Davis' politics did not mix well with sharing the power, and so he chose to leave in 1969, and the gang changed the pronunciation of their name to American-voweled Mime, even though that invariably causes the uninitiated to expect wordless theater. I haven't read the plays that are included, although I am working through Ripped van Winkle, their 1988 ode to psychedelic shagginess, and the boho values' rude transformation into pumped up event promotion for the Man.

A day of pleasure: stories of a boy growing up in Warsaw
(Isaac Bashevis Singer, 4 cassettes)
What a day of pleasure, to listen to the scintillations of the young curious mind of IB Singer, recalled in this brief memoir of incidents on Krochmalna Street. Every event, every personality, shines through the perspective of his young marveling glance. His impish nature continually comes through, for example, in the joy he described feeling in viewing the flames licking at the furniture in his family's apartment.

Tooth And Claw
(T. Coraghessan Boyle, unabridged, 9:53)
Read by the author, this collection of stories continues to deliver on the boyle'ing universe, which flamboyantly narrates the physical or metaphysical slide to the bottom. Many of the stories evoke, with near perfect pitch, the lax quivering surrender to the siren song of alcohol. Boyle's imaginative range is vast, indeed cosmic, and his humorous pathos succeeds 9 times out of 10. The one story that I never really got into involved a woman who wants to become canine. But against that one exercise of the naturalistic fallacy, other stories moved me with fear for the suffering of parents, or rocked my world with the shimmering insights into ecosystems, cranky humans, weak men. The audible.com version closes with a nice interview with TC.

The Way to Cook
(Julia Child, 512 pp)
It's vital to go to the sources, and after reading about her life, I wanted to taste her work. This Saturday, I prepared a dinner that included: Filet of sole (i.e, John Dory) sauteed in wine, cooked cucumber salad, and french puff pastry (wangdoodles). Lots of butter, but also, loads of fun. The writing is light and direct, the technique is attentive to fine turns, and each item offered insights. As a bonus, I came across a DVD of her greatest hits, Julia Child's Kitchen Wisdom, which enabled me to finally hear her distinctive voice and accent. In a near complete immersion of the Julia cosmos, I also encountered the latest issue of Gastronomica, (summer 2005) devoted solely to Julia, with poems from Paul Child, reminiscences from many heavy-hitters, and loads of great photos taken throughout her life. The single most valuable item in the magazine's trove would be the duplication of the 2 page type-written map that the Childs sent to friends who would want to visit them in the south of France. Someday, perhaps, I'll make the pilgrimage.

First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley : Bernard Maybeck
(Edward Bosley, 60 pp)
Beautiful pointer toward a local building, which was constructed to exalt, in wood and stone, an upper crust cult of the early 20th century.

Sacred places around the world : 108 destinations
(Brad Olsen, 280 pp)
Kind of kooky, but ok for what it stands to be, since the author has also provided the photographs and illustrations of travels he has taken as well as reading he has done. I don't think I discovered any unheard-of sites, although I enjoyed looking through this catalog of the newage tourist zones. (It could have been more closely copy-edited, but I don't think anyone will be seriously misled by the mistakes I caught.)

The Roald Dahl Audio Collection
(Roald Dahl, abridged, 4 cassettes)
It's a pleasure to hear the reedy voice of the author, intoning his classic stories of the classic Charlie and the chocolate factory, James and the giant peach, along with a couple of other little tales. Like Willie Wonka, Dahl takes a true delight in the suffering of ill bred children, and can pack a withering metaphysical finger of revenge on parents as well.

Appetite for Life: The biography of Julia Child
(Noel Riley Fitch, unabridged, 16 cassettes)
Many people's favorite WASP, Julia Child grew up in a wealthy Pasadena family in the Depression era. She launched herself from Smith College into the OSS (WWII's tony version of the CIA), and while living in France, married a precise littler man, Paul Child, but then she made everyone shorter than 6'2" came. photographic avocation enabled them to intertwine their careers more tightly as she became famous. Her education at Cordon Bleu was a career making choice, and she threw herself into mastering French culinary arts. Her books, initially co-authored with 2 other women, really took off once she appeared on WGBH TV in 1963. Her life is a font of energy, good cheer, and enthusiastic zeal for collaboration. Her success enabled her to be tri-coastal (with houses in the South of France, Cambridge, and California). Her family connections were so blue blood that the Weatherman woman who blew herself up, Diana Oughton, was a second cousin. The one tragic streak in her life: Her insouciance about fat may have contributed to her husband's arteriosclerosis, although her dislike of the ascetic fear of food is right on. In the late 1970s, she linked up with young Alice Waters, to launch the American Institute of Food and Wine. (On p423, it's revealed that 3 architecture students from Cambridge came West to begin a food cult, one of whom was Alice Waters, another Jerry Tower).

Camp
(Mike Eisner, unabridged, 3 CDs -- stopped before ending the 2nd)
After listening to the excellent DisneyWars, I was tempted to hear how a lame-duck CEO spins his way into understanding the importance of "teamwork". There's not enough personal revelation to make this interesting. It's padded with a kind of fake story of kids sent today by the Eisner scholarship fund. True to form, Eisner's dedication is encoded in camp speak, encrypting the love he apparently thinks himself able to express in some flavor of pig-Latin. Another nice note-- the liner notes mention that children who are 'underserved' now get sent to Keewaydin by the Eisner family trust. Surely only entitled snobs can use such a niggardly term, one which all too easily can be misread as "undeserved."

You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook For Grown-up Girls
(Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas, Yvette Bozzini, Julia Breckenreid, 495 pp)
Cool idea, inspired by a woman who died on Flight 93, and executed by her surviving sister. The step by step instructions, along with the mentoring opportunities drawn from success stories from women who have mastered the area for each chapter, makes this a fine example of cognitive apprenticeship in action.

Indecision
(Benjamin Kunkel, unabridged, 8:11)
Jay McInerney praised Kunkel's book in the NYT last week, and I began looking for someone to decrypt it from paper. This title hit audible.com quickly, and I've spent Sunday and Labor day happily chipping away at menial tasks, in drugged delight as I listened to the clever tone and distancing humor of this novel. In one way, it can be read as a hilarious, 21st century version of the Great Gatsby. The lead character, Dwight Wilmerding, is "the facile American" wandering through the world charming others by dint of his lack of clear opinions or strong desires. This is a pharmaceutically driven (as opposed to character-driven) novel. Kunkel's masterful tone deftly alludes to Delillo's classic, White Noise, where the drug du jour had been designed to banish Jack Gladney's fear of death. (Indecision's scene of father and son, where the father demands his son get in touch with his "duck and cover" instinct, seemed to explicitly allude to the Willy Mink shoot out in White Noise.) Wilmerding floats through his life, consulting a coin-toss for his big decisions. His glib ignorance shimmers with a natural's insouciance, but his ill-formed thoughts express longings and vague anxieties that would sound too heavy were they articulated straight up. At every important stage in his life (e.g., the night before the day of 9/11), he manages to boff it. Ecstasy use kickstarts one cosmic bad trip. Later, off in the jungles of Ecuador, he consumes a hallucinogen that counsels him to abandon his blithe consumerist impulses, and convert to "Democratic Socialism". Near the book's closing, there's a slight bump, as we read his publicly formulated philosophical incoherence in the speech delivered at his 10 year high school reunion. The use of prose to instantiate the fagged out fumbling didn't work well for Joyce, and it is the least funny part of this book. Even when it hits this relative rough patch, the tone is still artfully balanced and smooth. (Kunkel, it turns out, is a Deep Springs grad, about 15 years post-Vollman.)

1000 Tiles: Ten Centuries of Decorative Ceramics
(Paul Atterbury, 320 pp)
Beautiful examples of tiles, the most amazing of which seem to come from Persia. There's a British bias here, so that only one mosaic from the beautiful NY subway is shown in the Subway section. Hurray for ceramic glaze!

All I Did Was Ask : Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists
(Terry Gross, 384 pages)
I picked this up to read the interview with Jodie Foster. The liner notes from Terry Gross are quite funny, self-mocking, and organized around her apparent deep obsession with Taxi Driver. I jumped around and learned a lot about various topics. Her management of Gene Simmons of KISS is awesome.

Lost in America: A Journey with My Father
(Sherwin Nuland, unabridged, 7 CDs)
Fascinating, nuanced memoir of a 70-something doctor, organized around his memories of his raging immigrant father. The yiddish-ized language is beautifully recalled. The anger and resentment the son still harbors toward his long-dead dad is very well described. His recollections of growing up on Jerome Ave in the Bronx, squished into an apartment with his aunt and grandmother, evoke an emotionally charged, complex and difficult atmosphere. The pressurized environment may very well have contributed to the author's serious depression, which marks the opening of the book. The subtle combinations of love and rage get captured clearly, in an unsentimental but honest light. Incredibly, anger and rage is transformed by a bizarre twist into a medicalized diagnosis of what underlies his father's continual complaint, "Aym ah seeck mahn."

Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure
(Victor Nell, 336 pp)
Interesting psychological stabs at understanding "ludic" reading, the activity of reading for pleasure. The author, a South African psychologist, pokes about with some limited methodologies that explore whether one can discern what makes for pleasurable reading. Several modifications would make his research more solid: 1) Vastly increase the sample size; 2) Use non-paper presentation of the texts, preferably online with timed exposure. I had never heard of Apter's reversal theory, but it apparently pre-dates Csikszentmihalyi's work on Beyond Boredom and Anxiety.

Kiddush Hashem
(Sholem Asch, unabridged, 5:34)
Part of the flood tide of yiddishkeit that has recently come tumbling into audible.com; the Weidman book is part of the same series. This tale does not strike me as particularly well realized. The narrative doesn't help the reader get inside the skin of the Poles who are struggling in the face of Chelmnitsky's pogroms. It feels one level removed from the reality of the experience, and I found myself yearning for the story to become more concrete.

Fourth Street East: Tales of a New York Boyhood
(Jerome Weidman, unabridged, 5:44)
Because it's a good book, I found myself continually wishing that it were a better book. Still, the tone and topics do evoke life on the Lower East Side in the 1920's. The book stands in the shadow of Joseph Roth's *Call it sleep,* which mesmerizes readers with its images of a young boy growing up in the immigrant Jewish community of New York. If one avoids measuring Weidman's novel by contrasting it with Roth's, there is plenty to enjoy here in its own right. One of the more memorable vignettes: Weidman describes the hours of haggling that his father invested in buying a suit, and then the same experience accompanying his gentile school teacher, which lasts less than 20 minutes in the department store, and ends up costing 20% more (11.50 rather than $11).

Lunar Park
(Brett Easton Ellis, unabridged, 11:30 -- hiccuped after ~7)
After I saw the film of American Psycho, my interest in BEE went up a bump. The tone of this novel is as finely handled as the wizened faces that Bill Murray serves up these days; the self-mocking narcissism hits all the right notes -- e.g., in a throw-away, he confesses to having acquired for his daughter the fetish toy du jour via his drug dealer. The novel's atmospherics perfectly evoke the disconnect hollowing out the author's life as he wanders around in search of stimulation while evading intimacy. I found the level of emotion he directs toward his dead father quite intelligible, although the choice of how the novel weaves through his consciousness ultimately brought me to a place where I had to opt out. The novel is first rate, but didn't like how I felt (similar to floating around after a shot of vitamin K) while reading it.

Tender at the Bone : Growing Up at the Table
(Ruth Reichl, 304pp -- only read the first and last bits)
Sort of gross, hysterical, occasionally interesting, but mainly a stomach-turner. The family dynamic is yucky: the author's mother debuts in the opening pages as a lunatic, and is confirmed in one of the closing chapters to be a manic depressive. I'd thought the stories of Berkeley in the early 1970s would be of value, but they sound like a pastiche of the easy caricatures everyone makes about our little town's leftish-ish leanings. Since the author admits to compositing and interpolating to heighten the story, it's a shame that the decision to lie in her memoir only drains the tale of any edge.

A History of the Jews
(Heinrich Graetz, abridged 1 vol, 380pp)
The massive history, written in the 1890s in German, has been cut down so that it starts with Maimonides, and stops right after the formation of the Reform movement. I just jumped around skimming, but the tone is high dudgeon, which equals fun for the reader. While admiring of Maimonides' scholarship, Graetz faults him for importing too much philosophy, and to ossifying the Talmud with his commentary. His treatment of the Baal Shem Tov is far more scathing. Jump ahead to the founding of the Reform movement in Hamburg and Frankfurt; once more, Graetz blasts the movement for being evangelized by charlatans.

America's painted ladies : the ultimate celebration of our Victorians
(Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen, Douglas Keister (photographer); 303 pp)
These guys started the 'painted lady' renaissance. I first came across their celebration of Victorians (and Queen Annes) about 10 years ago, and this is a compendium as of 1992. I had no idea that Alameda has more well-documented Victorians than anywhere; note to self-- track down Gunn's *Documentation of Victorian and post Victorian residential and commercial buildings, City of Alameda, 1854-1904*. One thing that was annoying about the book's layout: The geographic locale of the houses was not clearly indicated, and the name of the state was only mentioned once, rather than alongside each house. I still haven't figured out what town Mark Twain's Victorian is located in.

Texas Hold 'Em : How I Was Born in a Manger, Died in the Saddle, and Came Back as a Horny Toad
(Kinky Friedman, 240 pp)
Texas Hold 'em is a metaphor for playing to win when you're dealt a bad hand. This is the Kinkster's platform for governor. Like Jonathan Richman's famous claim on one of his albums, "if you liked the last one, here's more of the same." The chapter on prison slang was bent. A fresh Kink (to me) is his self-characterization as a Red Sea pedestrian. It's surprising how many times the future Governor of TX mentions his relationship with the past Governor. I would not have been able to understand how one of my favorite people could like one of my least favorite, until I saw Alexandra Pelosi's documentary *Journeys with George.* It demonstrates that the anti-Christian is quite charming up close.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
(Jonathan Safran Foer, 8 cassettes, stopped after 2)
Err, how about "extremely posed and incredibly cloying." What's cute about a boy prodigy who fashions his manner on the "genius" Steven Hawking? What ironic distance does the author, a 28 year old phenom, sustain in relation to the dweeby little 9 year old's voice? In order for the tale to feel real, the child's choice of Hawking should somehow be indicative of his immature sense of what is really smart. In fact, choosing Hawking as the "genius" does betray a lack of discrimination about intelligence. But it is the author's failure, not the fictional child's. Another lapses comes in the kid's claim to be stuck on the math in Hawking's popular *Brief History,* when in fact, there's only 2 equations in that book. The tone never escapes from the cloyingly precious. As a typical what-a-good-boy-am-I line, the narrator finds himself amazing for being able to perform the Flight of the Bumblebee on tambourine. Instead of being amazing, it's a nearly funny formulation that klangs because of the wink-wink-nudge-nudge from the author.

Assassination Vacation
(Sarah Vowell, unabridged, 7:24)
Loving Sara Vowell is probably the way I most resemble Brad Bird. I enjoyed this audible, although I had a migraine during the first few hours of listening, and found the sound effectual musical accompaniment distracting/annoying. Miss Vowell's voice is certainly as distinctive and all-American as her passion for dead presidents; riding along with her as she nerds out on details of American history is a lot of fun.

Julia Morgan, Architect
(Sara Holmes Boutelle & Richard Barnes (Photographer), 271 pp)
Nice treatment of one of the most important architects involved in building Berkeley in the early 20th century. She designed San Simeon for Hearst, but her early involvement with the Hearsts also enabled her to build big in Berkeley.

Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life
(Michael Lewis, unabridged, 1 CD = 93pp)
This should have been privately published as a tribute to an educator/coach. It's a magazine article length book, with nice writing and an interesting topic (the drive and competitive urgency that a man of yore instilled in Mr. Lewis as a boy).

DisneyWar
(James B. Stewart, unabridged, 24 hours)
If this book had been twice as long, I would still have gobbled up every detail. The documented venality of Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney for 20+ years, fascinates. Perhaps not everyone would be surprised that the leader of a huge company is such an arrogant, domineering, icy and manipulative personality. The best parts surely focus on how Eisner devoted himself to undermining the people who helped him. His assistant, Jeff Katzenberg, nicknamed "Eisner's golden retriever," followed him over to Disney from Paramount, and became the guiding hand behind the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and the Lion King. Because this is a business book, the creative genius of people such as John Lasseter does not get show-cased. Rather than being able to apportion creative credit, the book simply documents who "green-lit" projects, and who shepherded them through the corporate bureaucracy. By that standard, Katzenberg was wildly productive. He was also lied to, falsely being lead to expect that he would inherit the presidency. Eisner relied upon the organizational man, Frank Wells, to keep things rational. When he suddenly died, Katzenberg learned that he would not be promoted, and so, he chose to leave to start Dreamworks with his best friend, Geffen. Just as twisted, and just as extensively documented in the litigation that it unleashed, was Eisner's selection of his best friend, Mike Ovitz, to be his second in command. From the very day their deal was consummated, both Eisner and Ovitz sensed the doom inherent in the arrangement. Eisner immediately viewed his "partner" as a competitor. Eisner mounted a manipulative and underhanded campaign to vitiate Ovitz' authority. It took more than a year to depose Ovitz, ending a 30-year friendship that interwove the 2 men's families in vacationing together and celebrating every Christmas together. The sheer arrogance of Eisner can scarcely be appreciated. His self-confidence was grounded in his success with great TV, such as Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy. In movies, under Barry Diller, Eisner distinguished himself by keeping budgets tight. For the rest of his career, he considered himself a creative genius who knew how to say "No." So, he said No to producing the Lord of the Rings, to the TV show Survivor, and to merging with Time Warner. These failures of judgment complement Eisner's profound failure to manage the firm's executive team.

The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
(Will Eisner, 148 pp)
It's possible to learn arcanae of the locus classicus of anti-semitic stupidities. The book is a little thin, and I couldn't say I was able to learn much about Will Eisner's technique from looking this over.

The Man Who Listens to Horses
(Monty Roberts, unabridged, 8 cassettes (stopped at 5))
This book has a very winning thesis, that it's possible to learn the nonverbal language of horses, and that such knowledge would enable a person to train a horse without resorting to physical force. Its appeal has made it a huge best seller. From the opening pages, I was intrigued by Monty Roberts' claim to have learned how horses communicate through his observations of wild mustangs. He interlaces bitter reproofs of his own father for being abusive, and states that he was sent to the hospital multiple times with broken bones inflicted by his father. The first incredible claim he made was that a stallion, once it loses a battle, will move away from the herd to pursue its own suicide. (I wondered to myself: How can any such behavior ever evolve? What could possibly explain such a perverse action by an animal?) My desire to assess the author's accuracy was provoked next by his claims to have been the intimate of James Dean (not impossible, but certainly a grand-standing claim). The book maintains that when Dean was killed, the mechanic whose jaw was broken in the same crash made his first call to, of all people, Monty Roberts. In the 4th cassette, the story unfolds of how he became intertwined with an heir of the Harcourt publishing family, and he advances the fanciful notion that Hastings Harcourt suffered from "sand-castle syndrome", which is defined as behaving like a child who delights as much in destroying as they do in creating. While the DSM contains hundreds of strange categories, it lacks this very useful diagnostic classification. Once Monty Roberts stated that he was "falsely arrested" for failing to kill some of Harcourt's horses, I decided to consult my friend Google. And sure enough, there is a website titled Horse Whispers and Lies, which contains an extensive rebuttal to scads of the assertions made in the book. Paging through the site persuaded me that the author was completely unreliable. The rebuttal site contains especially impressive quotations from Monty's father's training manuals, which have numerous parallels to texts of Monty's. Instead of a brute who abuses horses, the father was an advocate for gentle psychological management much in the same vein as Monty. My interest in finishing the book evaporated once I saw the numerous inconsistencies between his stories and the interviews and records of others who knew him in Salinas. Instead of helping me to understand horses, I am left wondering, why would a person make such scurrilous attacks on his own father?

Dreams from My Father : A Story of Race and Inheritance
(Barack Obama, abridged, 6 CDs)
Inspiring, clear-eyed, articulate account of the complex emotions "Barry" Obama felt growing up, born in Hawaii as the son of a Kenyan college student and a mother from Kansas whose family had moved far west. His parents divorced before he was 2, and then his mother remarried, this time to an Indonesian, who took the family to his native land. Obama grew up, until about 10, in a country with a far different atmosphere than America in the 1970s. Obama writes with direct, vivid prose, and turns over the questions of racism, responsibility, and the challenges of making a political impact in the world. The book closes with his travel to Africa before he starts law school at Harvard, so that the life that culminated in his political debut before the Kerry DNC was still at least 10 years in the future.

The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank
(David Plotz, unabridged, 10:11)
A Slate-stylized exploration of the hyped "Center for Germinal Choice", the volunteer sperm bank launched in 1980, and "granddaddy" of all those striving artificers who use technical means to spawn great babies. Only 3 Nobelists ever filled dixie cups, and none of those geezers ever conceived a child. But the press coverage enabled the center to hook in many a willing mother. In its 19 years, it held out for moms who were married and mensa-eligible (the latter requirement was eventually punted). As Plotz recognizes, no nature/nurture conclusions can be drawn, since mothers had to actively seek out the good genes, and so were also the sort who would try hard to provide everything for their offspring. At times, the lurch for humorous tone clangs insensitively, since the fertility industry today doesn't cater to crazy Extropian strivers. As journalism, the best parts of the book are vignettes of some broken souls who came from the nitrogen cooled dewers. It is not very strong on its arm chair sociologizing; Plotz hazards the claim, e.g., that "social fathers" (non-genetic relationships) are estranged from their families, without bothering to evaluate the natural comparisons, namely, adoptive families and lesbian mothers who are not the birth mother. The chapter on "practicing sperm donation" struck me as gratuitous padding.

What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
(Thomas Frank, 320pp)
Well written account of how Kansas, once the heartland of populist progressives, has been hijacked by the extreme right wing. The people now vote for naked Free Market-izing with zealous tax-slashing, even though it's killing their own best interests. Why do so many working class people identify with and support extremist Republicans? Frank's account focuses on the way the Right has used unwinnable combat zones (Hollywood's trashy culture, evolution in the schools, and overthrowing Roe v. Wade) to galvanize the underclass. Whipped into an angry mob, the rubes then vote for glad-handing corporateers, who vitiate government support for schools, training, and job security, while grandstanding on topics that enable them to fob themselves off as populist. I grew up in the same late-1970's Johnson County as Frank (in Overland Park rather than Mission Hills). I had no idea that Kansas politics slid into the mire of extremism; Frank attributes the watershed moment to the Wichita anti-abortion protests of 1991. Fearing violence, the FBI advised clinics to shut down for a week, and rather than averting trouble, this sparked the pro-lifers to exult in their power, and their frenzied enthusiasm ultimately catalyzed the overthrow of the moderate elites. Frank's cogent analysis is grounded in conversations with the people who seem so loony. Brooks' bobo-ized view is utterly demolished by the facts on the ground, as does most of the ersatz sociologizing that attempts to explain the conservative shift to Red as something driven by subtle racism (not a plausible account of Kansas' shift). This book would have been better if it had reckoned more deeply with what I believe is a truism of political science, namely, that people don't directly vote for their pocketbooks.

Wry Martinis
(Chris Buckley, unabridged cassettes, punted after 2)
I usually enjoy the humor, but this one unfortunately started with a dull essay about how hard it was to pick the book's title. It's possible to eat too much kreplach, and it's not at all difficult to quickly find the jocose otiose.

Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader
(William T. Vollman, 512pp -- really poorly bound!)
I've scanned this, which does not create the awe and shock I experienced when trying to understand the 3,000 page set of 7 volumes secreted by Vollman and beautifully published by McSweeney's. Vollman's graphomania is kept in bay by the tactic of making selections (something he himself argues against, based on the letters included where he wheedles editors to allow his books to lumber in at massive scales). Based on my desultory reading through here, it seems Vollman is an earnest mole, legally blind even after wearing corrective lenses, who has been pounding out an incredible amount of words since at least college. He spent two years at Deep Springs College, the mysterious and isolated institute straight out of an Ayn Rand novel. His list of favorite novels gives pride of place to Steinbeck, and in my estimation, he seems to be of similar scale: Focused on moral issues, he turns them over like a worry stone for heaps of pages, without hitting upon an un-cliched formulation. Christlike in his willingness to hang out with the whores, his writing on prostitution doesn't seem particularly insightful, although it bristles with a contrarian moralism.

Prep
(Curtis Sittenfeld, unabridged, 12 cassettes; flagged after 7)
My interest in this book was piqued by all the press; Ms. Sittenfeld won a Scholastic writing prize in high school, and has done a craftsman job of turning out good sentences. The focus of this book is upon a wallflower of a girl, who is not quite an anti-hero, but is also never capable of mustering the resolve or strong feeling. Only the mind of God, and the author, would care about such a superbly realized mediocrity. As my little brother Ricardo asked once, what are all these other people FOR? I don't think this book succeeds in answering that question. At times, the author's insistence upon her lead character's lack of distinction seems too heavy handed: how can a full-scholarship student from Indiana only get Bs and Cs or have a brother who only goes to community college? Maybe this book, like Nixon's mediocre Supreme Court nominee, is targeted toward the middle of the hump. (The famous quote on that maligned heap of humanity: "Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?" - Roman Hruska in defense of Harold Carswell)

The Girl Who Married a Lion : and Other Tales from Africa
(Alexander McCall Smith, unabridged, 4 CDs -- paused after 2)
Kind of interesting, but I found my attention wandered. These stories were collected by Africans, and distilled by a Scotsman. Some of the more pungent stories, of parents' longing for children, or worrying about providing for their offspring, grabbed my attention. But I stopped before finishing, although I will give this another wack sometime.

Adam's Curse: A Future without Men
(Bryan Sykes, unabridged, 10 CDs)
Fascinating report from an Oxford geneticist who has tracked the divagations of the little squiggle known as the Y-chromosome. Once you think about it, every person in a patriline has to have the same Y-chromosome, since out of the 23 donated by a father, only one is the Y, and the father only has one Y. This fact sparked Sykes to undertake a research program that began by looking at a whole bunch of DNA from British men named "Sykes." Surprisingly, over 70% of the sample had the same Y, even though the people came from all over Britain. There's a lot of interesting info about genetics, as well as a lot of overly heated rhetoric about the selfish Y-guy. I didn't object to the rhetorical device, since it was consciously deployed to make the argument stark and exciting. Nevertheless, I would have advised editing some of the more excited language out.

An end to evil: Strategies for Victory in the War on Terror
(Richard Perle and David Frum, abridged, 6 CDs, punt after 1)
Know your enemy. I tried to listen to this, on the possibility that Perle does not deserve his reputation as a dark star who has exploited his defense ties for personal gain. This is toxic vitriol, with so little reasoning that it's impossible to listen to. It salutes Bush, attacks all Democrats (with a weak pass for Lieberman), and celebrates the victory in Iraq.

The World's Banker : A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations
(Sebastian Mallaby, 480pp)
If you want to know the Economist's point of view on the state of aid and development, read this book. As a bonus, the book includes a portrait of the President of the World Bank for 10 years, James Wolfensohn. Gleaned from the cumulative perspectives of dozens of World Bank executives who worked under Wolfensohn (as well as 20 hours of interviews with Wolfensohn himself), it's impossible to gainsay its accuracy; yet, as a record of underlings' resentment, it describes how the implementation of Wolfensohn's vision and ambition affected those called on to carry it out. It also covers the major world events of the '90s and early noughties, such as currency crises, AIDs epidemic, and the Yugoslavian and Iraq wars. Since I've only read a smidge in the past 20 years about development economics, I assumed that the World Bank was still an instrument of the West, inflicting debt on poor countries, funding environmentally destructive projects that lined only the pockets of kleptocrats. In fact, when Wolfensohn took over in 1994, he immediately aimed to address all these problems. Corruption was made a central focus, dialog with NGOs became an essential process, and to increase participatory development, the directorships of each country were moved to the local capitals, away from remote administration in Washington. In other words, almost anything you might imagine the World Bank needs to do, Jim Wolfensohn begun trying to do over 10 years ago. This book documents how much more complicated this turns out to be. The charismatic personality of the President of the World Bank was able to create storms of resentment. An excellent review of the state of the World, although I feel like I now need to read Joe Stiglitz point of view to get some balance.

Frost on My Moustache: The Arctic Exploits of a Lord and a Loafer
(Tim Moore, unabridged, 7 cassettes)
Too droll to be fun for the long haul. There's also nobility worship in a roundabout way, anti-German jokes, and other tropes of British humor.

Art of the printed book, 1455-1955; masterpieces of typography through five centuries from the collections of the Pierpont Morgan Library. With an essay by Joseph Blumenthal(Pierpont Morgan Library staff, 192 pp)
I didn't read the essay, but I did look at all the pictures of pretty pages. I am not convinced by the claim that Aldus Manutius' Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is the most beautiful book ever printed. Even though Tufte has joined forces with Daniel Berkeley Updike of yore, and the editors of this book to boot, in claiming this to be a matter of fact. (To check my spelling of the title, I discovered that the entirety of the book can be viewed online, and so I've linked to it.)

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
(Alice Munro, unabridged, 8 CDs)
Great stories from the heart of Canada. Many of the tales kink in subtle directions, or take a sudden turn inside the line of a single sentence. Munro's language is un-ostentatious, direct, vivid, and a source of awesome power.

What the dormouse said : how the sixties counterculture shaped the personal computer industry
(John Markoff, 310pp)
Amazing story of how Menlo Park once was hip! Sleepy Menlo Park was a nexus of LSD experimentation, human potential movements, and the innovative explosion that created the personal computer. Doug Engelbart's team at SRI was pounding out the arcane technical developments that linked the mouse to the graphical display to the online system that would enable remote work groups to coordinate their knowledge work. Engelbart gave a demo for 90 minutes later described as if he were "dealing lightning with both hands." The demonstration was videotaped by a young Stewart Brand, fresh from merry prankster trips, and just before he began to put together the Whole Earth Catalog (near Kepler's bookstore). Unfortunately, Engelbart emphasized expertise over ease of use, and so, eventually saw his dream taken away and run by a young Alan Kay over at PARC. The second half of the book is less crunchy, and the era of the Home Brew Computer Club probably deserves its own book. Markoff's thesis is fascinating, and though he has identified an amazing confluence of odd experiences, there is much more that ought to be said about the era. The first inkling of this hippie confluence came from a conversation I'd had with Alan Cooper, who told me that Fire in the Valley was the closest account to the truth. Cooper said that he began his technical career making light shows with another Marin engineer, Gary Snyder. Although Alan Cooper is famous in the world of interaction design, it was surprising to discover that the Mountain Bike emerged from the same spark as the 'bicycle for the mind.' (Markoff says this phrase was first used by Alan Kay while he biked to and from PARC).

Paddy Clarke ha ha
(Roddy Doyle, unabridged, 8 cassettes)
This is my all-time favorite audiobook. The experience of a young (9-year-old?) boy is perfectly drawn. Every facet of young Paddy's life scintillates with a directness, an intensity of interest and confusion that is absolutely compelling. Even though I've listened to this book at least twice before, I don't recall ever fully realizing how dark the story is, how much physical aggression is encapsulated in the relationship between Paddy and his little brother Sinbad.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
(John Perkins, unabridged, 9:22; punted half way)
Listening to this book is like sitting on a flight next to a drunken, sentimental executive who tells you way more about his personal life than you ever wanted to know, and sprinkles in enough about his profession to make you sort of "get" why he's such a self-pitying worm. The topic is extremely relevant to the world's dystopian development, but the writer is utterly unreliable. He has some exalted sense of his importance, but his conspiratorial notions are so coarse and vulgar that it's useless to look to his story for the real dirt. He actually believes that academic economists publish papers that glorify the rich people who endow the university, and baldly states that they would be 'fired' if they didn't suck up. So, he has no clue about the perverse logic of academia. Strike one. He lards the book with un-reconstructed rage at his parents for sending him to an all boy's high school, and justifies his numerous acts of infidelity based on his deprived teen years. Strike two. He worked in absolute bad faith, justifying his worm's eye view with the belief that his reports, which justified the construction of big power grids, were not being listened to by the real decisionmakers. Strike three: I send thee to the compost heap, you cowardly sniveling wretch. PS: I've heard that this book was used by the SF Mime troupe to develop their summer show; although there's a sick kind of comedy in this wretched tale, it is such a bad fiction (arrogant delusions detached from the world's actual workings) that the choice seems really suspect.

The Mile High Club
(Kinky Friedman, unabridged, 4 cassettes)
Our president's favorite writer is also a personal favorite, and the only mystery writer funny enough for me to follow. Great jokes, silly plots, but no use of the phrase, "stepping on a rainbow", in this fine tale.

London : A History (Modern Library Chronicles)
(A.N. Wilson, unabridged, 4 cassettes)
A nice synoptic tour through 2 millenia, with incisive discussions of the London of Chaucer, of the Great Fire, of Johnson; there's also quick scans of the times in between, and a rather distraught nostalgia for the London prior to the firebombing in WWII. I'd agree with his disdain for modernist architectural monstrosities, although I can't assess with any knowledge his claim that the post-War years were savagely exploited by criminals.

The Woman and the Ape
(Peter Hoeg, unabridged, 6 cassettes; punted after 1)
I cannot make myself listen to this-- It has a fairly promising theme, with an ape visiting London, etc. But it is a mere dreary pile-up of words, blah blah blah.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 16
(The 826 Valencia mafia, 200pp)
On beyond the book, in yet another re-de-construction of what can fit between a binding. This time, the quarterly comes in quarters: 1 part deck of cards, 1 part fairly traditional but skinny-ish journal, 1 part novella by Ann Beattie, and fully 1 part plastic Comb, with the word "Timothy" cursively scraped into and silverized. The deck of cards involves a fun story by Robert Coover, and with a better implementation of randomness than Julio Cortazar's Rayuela (hopscotch), the reader is encouraged to shuffle the deck, keeping only the first and last card in fixed points. The shuffle is enabled by each card ending with a specific noun, and opening with an unspecified verb. Moving the cards about changes who did what, but doesn't shift the joker. And as much as I've pondered the comb, it's underlying significance is still out of reach. I haven't read the Roddy Doyle or Beattie stories yet.

Speak, Memory : An Autobiography Revisited
(Vladimir Nabokov, unabridged, 7 cassettes)
A pleasure, although at times, reading Nabokov celebrate Nabokov can seem too rich to endure. His renowned synesthesia comes through in his ability to engorge a bare abstraction with vivid color.

Conversations with a mathematician : math, art, science, and the limits of reason : a collection of his most wide-ranging and non-technical lectures and interviews
(Gregory Chaitin, 158pp)
Light but still interesting. Very redundant, since the interviews are non-technical, and many of the same anecdotes and jokes recur. Algorithmic information theory rocked my world when I was in college. One huge caveat: This is NOT a pathway into understanding Chaitin's theories of randomness. Somehow, this book flew by my eyes, and I enjoyed paging through it just to get an idea of the guy behind the ideas. On the last page, he includes for further reading a few novels I've never heard of: Doxiadis' Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture; Hafner's Elements of Style; Martinez's Regarding Roderer.

The Storage Book: Over 250 Inspirational Ideas for Creating Stylish Home Storage
(Cynthia Inions, 176pp)
Tasteful, interesting, worth a scan once a person admits they have too much stuff and too little space.

A bunch of Sunset books on homes

It's not worth it to link to, nor review, these titles, but I did spend a hunk of time looking them over after checking them out from the Berkeley public library.
Complete tile; Windows & skylights; Ideas for great wall systems; Decorating with interior trim. Also: Insulate and weatherize : expert advice from start to finish by Bruce Harley & Ortho's all about plumbing basics

City of the Soul : A Walk in Rome (Crown Journeys)
(William Murray, unabridged, 3 CDs)
Great talk about a city I have only driven through. Very pleasant and urbane ramble. It doesn't take a lot to write well of a great city; this particular one is as good as Chris Buckley's wander through DC, a notch better than the New Orleans tour, and nearly as good as the odes to Prague and Austin Texas.

Sideways
(Rex Pickett, unabridged, 7 CDs, stopped after 1)
This book lives in the shadow of its cinematic realization; the author is not capable of evoking character nebbishy nuance with anything like the power of the director Alexander Payne, channeled through Paul Giamatti. In fact, this book is far weaker than About Schmidt, which itself was a pale precursor to its filmed transformation. I hadn't even realized, before trying to read this, that 'sideways' refers to the state of drunkenness.

Difficult Conversations
(Stone, Patton and Heen; abridged, 5 CDs)
This is one of my favorite self-help books. Some of the dramatizations sound a tad cheesy, but it's great fun to rehearse speaking about emotions in a way that gets people to listen to one another. Remember: Start with the 3rd story (not mine, not yours, but yours AND mine).

The Dybbuk
(S. Ansky, unabridged, 2 CDs)
Inevitably, this has to be a little bit schmaltzy, but it still evokes an interesting Old World outlook. The tale, of a slaughtered yeshiva boy who inhabits the body of a young girl on her way to the huppah, is surprisingly pagan in outlook. The resolution requires an exorcism which I'd never have supposed to be Jewish.

Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
(Seymour Hersh, unabridged, 7 CDs)
I've been noshing on this off and on for a while, and even though the news is olds (the book was first published in 2004), the intensity of Hersh's indictments remain unanswered by the Rummy wolf pack. The facts speak clearly; at the highest echelons of power, there has been a deliberate plan to torture and degrade the prisoners who are being used to undercut the Bill of Rights.

Darkness at Noon
(Arthur Koestler, unabridged, 7 CDs)
A fictional account of a victim of the Stalinist Show trials, this book was celebrated as one of the 100 best of the 20th Century. A finely written account of the interior thoughts of a man who willfully contorts his conscience to serve the Party. The strange thing about reading it is that the Soviet Union is dead, and these days the US is cranking up its own Gulag.

Fairy Tales
(Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Tiina Nunnally, unabridged, 12 CDs)
I can't easily plumb these tales' inner meanings; I've come to rely on Robert Bly's twinkling hermeneutical tricks to crack fairy tales open. There are times where the stories have great twists and fascinating turns. Brutality abounds (e.g., the Little Mermaid cuts her own tongue out to make it across the watery divide). Occasionally, the notion of the "noble born" hits a tedious class-ist tone. I wanted to listen to all of the stories, but at times, my attention wandered.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Volumes 1-2
(Richard Feynman, unabridged, audio CDs)
What a pleasure to listen to the original presentation to CalTech students in the early 1960s. Feynman took such joy in explaining that he undertook to build up the entire machinery of physics, step by step. I mostly listened to this while traveling to and through Washington DC. Even without the blackboard or text, the arguments are presented with such clarity that it's often possible to follow the line of thinking without any confusion. Not all of the audiotaped lectures were given by Feynman, and the style of the one I heard from another professor was like a textbook as opposed to a conversation. Feynman's lecture on "Algebra" devotes a full hour to logarithms, calculation of roots, and the joy of calculation when fused with full understanding.

Irrational Exuberance, 2nd ed
(Robert Shiller, 344 pp)
I had to read this in time to jump into the Housing Market. The 2005 edition addresses the real estate boom-ble, esp with respect to the prestige markets that have been going up all over the world. It's surprising to me how little of the book is about economics; the interesting information is more a documentation, via survey data, of the extensiveness of the shared delusions concerning what would be a smart investment.

Prague: A Novel
(Arthur Phillips, unabridged, 10 cassettes -- quit after 2)
If someone fictionalized the claim to have written this book, it would be a tour de force: The tone and topics are quintessential American dick-wad -- self-absorbed, narrow, envious, all wrapped in an arch veneer of overly ironic distance. This book sucks, and the author is on the verge of encapsulating why his life does suck so deeply. Unfortunately, there's no humor, no real emotion, no insight. Just posing, vainly pretending to somehow have become the center of the world. The synopsis of the book clearly shows why this would have been more successful if it had been a parody of itself: A college grad ends up in Budapest, wishing he were in Prague; for some reason, he imagines that this dislocated envy would be interesting, even though he leaves out any of the reflective transformative magic worked by a writer like Doug Coupland.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(Jane Jacobs, 624pp)
Published in 1963, and a vitalizing force since then in directing attention toward the vibrant buzz of city street life, it took a cross-continental flight delay for me to finally go to the source. Jacobs opens by talking about how great the North End in Boston struck her in 1959. She heard that city planners had labeled it a "slum", that it had been blacklisted for mortgages because of defaults during the Depression, and that they were going to eventually get around to "fixing the neighborhood". Fortunately, that catastrophe never occurred. I can't imagine how someone could really understand her arguments if you've never been to the North End, or to Greenwich Village, or at least Chicago and/or Philadelphia, since those cities are the data stream for her vivid case: Cities need to be interesting to survive, and interesting means diverse, not clean, not streamlined, but alive and bustling with commerce. One of the more fascinating claims JJ advances: A city can quickly exceed the 100K inhabitant threshold, above which there's no real local feel to neighborhoods, but stay well below the vibrancy generated by a cosmopolitan mix of art and diversity generated by the multi-million city life. In her view, this middle zone is almost doomed to mediocrity, unless measures are taken to insure mix-it-up cross-roading.

All Your Worth : The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan
(Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi, 304pp)
A no-nonsense Mom & Daughter duo who go straight to the pith: Get your finances in order, so that 50% of your income is owed to rent/insurance/basic food/fixed contractual obligations (your "needs"), 30% is going to "wants", and 20% is put into savings. No fancy footwork required. Additional wisdom, based on the mother's expertise as a Harvard Law professor specializing in bankruptcy, boils down to this simple maxim: You can't pay off debt by borrowing more. They are very opposed to Home Equity Lines of Credit, and argue vigorously that debt consolidation and debt counselors are bogus.

Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
(Richard Hack, 12 CDs)
Paranoiac, obsessive file-builder, and pansy: founder of the FBI, J. Edgar deserves more psychological scrutiny than this book provides. J. Edgar's #2, Clyde Tolson, is treated in this book as even more of a cipher, in spite of the fact that he accompanied Hoover always and everywhere. (The best vision of their repressed male friendship comes from Delillo's treatment in his fantasy about Truman Capote's Black & white party). I had expected some confirmation of the cross-dressing tales, but in fact, there is no substantiation for the rumors. J. Edgar used his power to intimidate and threaten anyone who was reported to have gossiped about his being a flit. The very best story concerns his evil streak: Since JFK was going to force the old geeze to retire at 70, the assassination was a cause for celebration, capped off by the old man taking a trip to the races. He similarly celebrated the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr., and then did the same thing again 2 months later when RFK was killed.

The Iraq War
(John Keegan, unabridged, 7 CD-sized blobs)
A doomed project: to write "objectively" about the Iraq war, with the cool distance provided by looking at this road accident in 2004. There are facts and opinions, history and misguided judgments mixed in here. Blackstone is a good "house" for high caliber audio, and this book is part of the insidious bid by Microsoft to foist their media format on public libraries. I downloaded this blob of DRM content, and found it a mixed bag of very uneven value.

Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
(Niall Ferguson, unabridged, 14 CDs = 351 pp)
Fascinating post-Marxist history assessing the way the British took over the world, subjugated native peoples, and ended up using self-justifying rationales that would sound quite familiar to a 21st century American's ears. The cutting edge of the empire was piracy: the first footholds in the Indies (and India) were made by privateers. The next step led the British toward shoring up private companies' trade, and the mercantile stepping stones then led to a need to set up governing powers. It's astonishing to reflect that the East India Company was a privately chartered fund, administered for the welfare of its bond holders, making decisions in board rooms, and yet having the ultimate impact of causing the British to take over a very large part of Asia (including Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh). The demise of Great Britain is much more sketchy, and there's less of an object lesson in the way the Empire unwinded. Nevertheless, the origin story is grounded in a fascinating dollop of history, narrated with reflective awareness of the impact that the colonizing power had upon original inhabitants. This book is apparently quite controversial, since Ferguson's ultimate assessment is the legacy of English language and institutions (stitching the United States, Canada, Australia, and India into a single fabric) was a net-positive contribution.

Harlot by the Side of the Road
(Jonathan Kirsch, 14 cassettes -- stopped after 5)
The lurid bits of the Hebrew Bible, glossed with a narrative touch. The writer evokes the passages where sexual, murderous or deceitful acts drive the drama. The tone is fine, and the stories are good. Listening to Kirsch's re-tellings reminded of the technique of biblio-drama, where a group of people are tasked with enacting, rather than discussing, a portion of the Torah. This can breathe life into a text, but it's more fun to do than it is to read someone else's attempt to dramatize.

Count of Monte Cristo
(Alexander Dumas, unabridged, 12 cassettes-- stopped at 10)
A total swashbuckler. This book's been on my radar since I'd heard that Huey Long, the Kingfish, admired it greatly, because "that man really knew how to hate." The story cycles through ever escalating implausibilities, but it is such a marvelous tale, that after each gobstopping impossibility is hurdled by authorial slight of hand, the story enticed me to plunge on. Edmond Dantes, on the verge of being made captain of a ship and master of his fate, is betrayed as a Bonapartist for having stopped at the Isle of Elba. He's wickedly played, tossed into a dungeon, and spends the next seventeen years in utter despair. Fortunately, he's befriended by a wily priest, who educates him in many languages (English, Italian, German, e.g.), and abets the man in planning his escape. When the escape is made, the priest's last bequest is a mountain of jewels and gold. Appearing on the scene as the Count of Monte Cristo, he first rewards the few people who were true to him, where he performs his first whopper to repay his old merchant capitalist, who was about to be crushed by the loss of the very ship that Anton had sailed on. It's reported lost, and yet, with the wizardry of cold cash, the count bedecks a copy ship to sail in, and save the old man from ruin. After rewarding all who have been loyal, he vows to betrothe himself to white hot fury and cold blooded vengeance. Great fun. I only stopped because I wanted to read it someday with a young child and learn together how it all ends.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman
(edited by Michelle Feynman, halfway through 486 pp)
A record of a life before email. Feynman wrote funny and humane responses to all kinds of people. One of the funnier exchanges tracks his request to be allowed to quit the NAS. His warmth and humanity shine through, since he answers all sorts of random kooks by simply asking that they state their ideas precisely enough to be able to evaluate them.

Chatter : Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping
(Patrick Keefe, 7 CDs)
Explores the world of signal intelligence, the collaboration between US and Great Britain's spy agencies (NSA + GCHQ); there are interesting discussions of how secrecy compromises security, as well as the difficult question of where to draw the line between safety and liberty.

Open House: A Visual Guide to Buying or Selling Your Home
(Bryan Trandem, 144pp)
Very basic listing of items to look at when sizing up a house for sale. The layout evoked my childhood memories of "The Weekly Reader", a little newsmagazine distributed by Scholastic when I was in the 1st grade.

Beautiful America's California Victorians
(Kenneth Naversen, 79pp)
Pretty pictures of painted ladies. Apparently Eureka has some real hum-dingers.

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
(Andrew Solomon, unabridged, punted after 4 cassettes)
This memoir begins with empathy. For all its knowing turns of phrase, this New Yorker author is utterly out of his depths when muddling along about the possible treatments for bad moods. Freud was "humble" in stating that we don't really know what's going on in our heads; therapies can be divided into those that use pharmaceuticals, and those that are 'talking treatments.' Who cares how well the writing is, once a person bails on trying to assess whether a cure is due to placebo effects? At that moment, Solomon gave up on science, on clinical trials, and on being worth the time to listen to.