Kaddish
(Leon Weiseltier, abridged, narrated by Theodore Bikel, 4 cassettes)
Excellent discussion of the Kaddish, from the personal point of view of the author as he went through a year of mourning for his father, beginning in 1996. The writing does not try to characterize this one son's relationship with his father; rather, Weiseltier probes the historical texts that illuminate the Jewish tradition, and then he discusses how those readings align with his own wrestling. I had been very impressed with the interview he had with Abigail Pogrebin in her book. In that interview, he asked if she had read his 'turgid' book, Kaddish. With that as a wrapper, I felt more comfortable listening to an abridgement, which is superbly read by Theodore Bikel. Two themes of particular value to me stood out in this book: 1- The Kaddish emerged as a practice for mourners in the 12th to 14th century; and 2- The practice of saying the Kaddish brings about a spiritual redemption for the parent, not because of any biological tie, nor by virtue of some performative act of penance or mercantile exchange. Instead, Weiseltier argues with clarity that the perfomance of the ritual obligation brings merit to the parent, because, eo ipso, the son who can perform the ritual effectively demonstrates the father's success in raising a Jew who acts with understanding and knowledge of his heritage.

Holes
(Louis Sachar, unabridged, 4 CDs)
A pleasant and fun fantasy, which transforms the schoolyard hardship story into a prison breakout.

The Year of Magical Thinking
(Joan Didion, unabridged, 4 CDs)
This didn't do it for me. Didion is supremely accomplished, with finely tuned up sentences marching along, as she recounts a total bummer: Husband croaks at dinner, out of the blue, and this occurs while her daughter is in a coma in the hospital. Some of her chilly observations could be called insights and she peppers the book with nuggets of technical facts about neurological diagnostics. With so much death, I hungered for a little irony, wit, or even vividly bitter emoting. Not included.

The Great Bridge : The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
(David McCullough, unabridged, 10:09)
Although this book was published in 2001, I only discovered it recently when a friend raved about it. The Brooklyn Bridge is indeed an epic feat of engineering, and the story of John Roebling, the immigrant who designed the bridge, and his son, Washington Roebling, who built it, covers a lot of fascinating territory. The father was an engineering genius, who built the first suspended bridges in America, and then proposed extending the construction to cover the East River to Brooklyn, with a suspended bridge using the new wonder metal, steel. Besides the awe-inspiring sketches of the engineering involved, there's a tragic dimension to the tale, since men worked to construct the caissons (supporting structure) in highly pressurized environment, deep under water, with no knowledge of the risks of emerging rapidly without de-pressurizing. Washington Roebling himself underwent a horrific bout of the bends, within 7 years of the bridge's initial construction, and it left him wracked in agony for the rest of his life. Another thread in the twisted wires of history includes the role of Boss Tweed, who aimed to use the bridge's construction to milk fantastic amounts of graft. Tweed's undoing transpired early enough in the story to prevent his greedy hand from blocking the project's completion, even though his typical method was to endlessly protract public works projects. An excellent story that makes me wonder where to find the Golden Gate complement.

The metamorphosis and other stories
(Franz Kafka, translator Joachim Neugroschel; 6 cassettes)
I skipped the Metamorphosis, to which I wasn't in the mood to listen. I've read these stories before, but this time, I was shocked at how viscerally disgusting some of Kafka's images are. 'In the Penal Colony' no longer seems like a parable, since we are living in an era of state-sanctioned torture.

PIXAR: At The Museum of Modern Art
(Foreword by Steven Higgins and Ronald S. Magliozzi, 175pp)
This book records only a slim portion of the amazing MoMA exhibit. It does show a little of the awe-inspiring detail that goes into each story, but it is no substitute (or even complete record) of the exhibit. One of the most impressive tools used at the studio: "Colorscripts", which Bill Cone appears to have invented for A Bug's Life. The technique looks a lot like a storyboard, but instead of showing event by event sequencing, the highly compressed, abstract colorscript represents the emotional tone of light and dominant color through the movie. In a large panel, the entire movie appears synoptically with keys to guiding the story, and this device coordinates and inspires the thousands of collaborative artists as they build the film.

Striking Back : The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response
(Aaron Klein, unabridged, 7:44)
A fascinating account of the real story behind the Israeli response to the Munich Olympic games. The Palestinian terrorists organized an attack strategy, labeled Black September, and of course, their most media-catching attack involved the murder of 9 Israeli athletes in Sept of 1972. Unlike the Tony Kushner/Spielberg movie version, this book presents an accurate and plausible account. The author attests that Golda Meir, as well as each subsequent Prime Minister through Barak, authorized particular assassinations. Eshkol, the PM in the mid-1960s, was apparently the only PM to refuse to authorize assassinations. This history of the secret retaliation shows that the Israelis did not kill all those responsible for the hostage-taking, that they had to target weak rather than hard targets, and that they made mistakes. Two revelations are particularly disturbing: first, that an innocent Moroccan was killed in Norway, and 6 of the 8 Israeli agents were publicly tried for this murder (the two men who were directly engaged in the killing escaped Norway and so were not tried). The second revelation is even more upsetting: apparently the Germans were not only incompetent in responding to the hostage crisis, but even worse, they actively collaborated with Palestinians afterwards. Within 2 years of the tragedy, Germany hostage-swapped the 3 terrorists they held in prison, in return for the freedom of a Lufthansa airline. Klein presents evidence suggesting the Germans deliberately staged a fake highjacking so that they could get the Palestinians out of their country, in order to minimize their exposure to future problems.

The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1)
(Philip Pullman, unabridged, 9 CDs)
Harry Potter is a pisher, and Pullman does the job much better. The conceits that spin this fantasy are quite engaging: Calvin moved the Papacy to Geneva, and the whole world is now oppresed beneath a vast array of theological courts and murky administrative boards; there seems to be a many worlds element, and quantum particles have been theologized as 'dust'. Even more psychologically rich is the idea that each person has a demon, who in adolescence exhibits plasticity of form, but as people age, their demon ossifies into a single animal. I wasn't sure I would finish this book, but the pace quickens, and it was impossible to stop. As an extra treat, the final pages make the Miltonian homage explicit.

Oblivion : Stories
(David Foster Wallace, 336pp)
I bought this book in hardcover when it arrived in June 2004, but I got bogged down in the first story, and didn't try again until around New Years. The author is the literary equivalent of 'witty ticcy Ray', since he has so many aberrant fixations (e.g., abbreviations, massively apostrophized dependent possessives, weird squiggly notation), and in spite of all this distracting machinery, he mobilizes his ticks into a dazzling display. The opening story, Mr. Squishy, parodies the world view of market researchers who use devious mathematical tricks to get people to eat snackfoods. I bought the book to see how DFW (he deserves his own abbrev) would describe my work world. Instead of understanding, or lampooning market research, he actually manages to make it less interesting by assuming that what's devious about the field involves incredible feats of intellect. He might've done a little homework to dispel this fictionalization, but in many of his stories, he spins the tale of a world which looks like ours, except the people in it bring much more intellectual firepower into the battle. I can't figure out if it's a joke, or another of his ticks, that he writes about Style magazine interns all having unusually high analytical test scores. (In what alternative universe would that obtain?) I enjoyed the stories, esp the finale, where a man creates art work by pooping, surely a metaphorical translation of the DFW enterprise. DFW deserves to be remixed, since it would be a pure pleasure to read his penetrating noodle-tangents, redacted by an editor who teased out the weird abbreviations and other distracting .

Nog
(Rudolph Wurlitzer, 164 pp-- punted at 91)
A very well-crafted string of sentences about a mysterious melancholic adrift near the ocean in the late 1960s. There's an unusual relationship with a fake octopus, and very weird intro-extro-spection (I mean to convey that there's psychological insights about consciousness, but they're so adrift and estranged that it doesn't seem right to attribute them to self-understanding.) Donald Barthelme was a big fan (this book show up on his syllabus). The language clearly influenced Barthelme's craft, since many of the sentences in this book could be dropped into his blague-ier rants, but I found myself missing the humor that makes Don B a master.

In Cold Blood
(Truman Capote, unabridged, 14:36, stopped after 8 hours)
The movie, Capote, made this book too interesting to not try. I have to admit that it's better as the background to a film about Truman, than as a flamboyantly documented fat book about the 2 murderers. I listened for a while, but lost interest before the story resolved. The writing's fine, as it stands, but it didn't compel me to follow it through.

Don't Get Too Comfortable : The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems
(David Rakoff, unabridged, 4 cassettes)
This author suffers by inevitable comparison with David Sedaris, but as I listened to him discuss Log Cabin Republicans, traveling on the SST, and Alcor cryonics freaks, I began to appreciate his own quirky take. The scavenger hunt chapter could definitely have been left out, and I think the better essays are at the end.

As a Driven Leaf
(Milton Steinberg, unabridged, 6:43)
An interesting tale of the rabbi, Elisha Ben Abuya, who has a few cryptic appearances in the Talmud. I've never read a book that was so utterly without irony or nuance; this takes the cake, since the dialogue and interactions are schematic, single-dimensional, but still, somehow, Jewish. He is cursed with living in interesting times, in an era where Hadrian planned to replace the Temple in Jerusalem with a Roman temple. The seeker, Elisha, begins by studying Torah, but then fools around with Aristotle, and seems to even glimpse the possibility of non-Euclidean geometry.

Beatles: The biography
(Bob Spitz, abridged, 9 CDs)
This cannot possibly be the definitive story of the Beatles, as the writing has no edge. If Paul McCartney is your favorite Beatle, then perhaps this account will suffice. John Lennon's caustic wit and cutting humor never come into clear focus. At every important instance (e.g., the childhood years of the 'lads' or the discovery of pot and psychedelics through Dylan's friendship), the account feels at least one level removed from the facts. Not once did the story sparkle with the frantic energy and cheek that launched the band and changed the world. As a sign of the times, it is impossible to hear the word 'Beatlemania' without having the Clash howl echo in the background ('phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust'). The book, like the Beatles, ends on the ugly part where all onlookers can only say "Oh no! Ono!" Yoko, performance art pip, really knew how to get her hooks in. When she had married John, pregnancy required her to maintain constant bedrest. She had a large bed delivered from Harrod's to Abbey Road studio, and asked that it be miked up so all the Beatles could hear her comments and suggestions.

Stars of David : Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish
(Abigail Pogrebin, 400pp)
This interesting project (interview 60+ famous jews about their Jewish identity) turns out to be a great book. The author cast a wide net, and spoke to a lot of interesting famous Jews. The book has an American cultural bias toward oversampling the performing arts, yet that is also part of its appeal. Everyone wants to know about the upbringing of Seinfeld actor, Jason Alexander (George Costanza), and he delivers an interesting riff on being forced to keep kosher at home, while eating shellfish and pork at a Chinese restaurant every Sunday. The centerpiece of the book is the interview with Leon Wieseltier, who is foreshadowed in the interview with the diplomat James Rubin, who refers to Wieseltier as an super-Jew who blessed his wedding a gentile. At the very middle of the book, Wieseltier speaks with great authority and clarity, about the need for Jews to recognize that the essence of Judaism is "Judaism." He advises those who can't marry a Jew to "make a Jew"; his attitude toward conversion is also quite adulatory. Since most American Jews, especially those who are successful in the public sphere, have only a tangential connection to religious practice, the ways in which many interviews run is almost painful: Each celebrity mouths something about feeling connected to Jewish identity through social justice, and the lack of other links to jewish culture make this claim ring rather empty. I think it would add value to include a tabulation of the interviewees' answers, showing the proportion who married gentiles, who celebrate Christmas, and who report being alienated from religious ritual and liturgy.

Les Miserables
(Victor Hugo, uanbridged, stopped at 4;40 into 33:19)
I bought this after enjoying the Hunchback of Notre Dame so much. This novel didn't draw me in. The saintly monsignor is much less interesting than the twisted priest; the oppressed Valjean was still a cookie-cut outline when I punted.

The World on Sunday : Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper (1898 - 1911)
(Margaret Brentano and Nicholson Baker, 144pp)
An amazing peek into the vivid (and not infrequently lurid) images and text purveyed by Pulitzer's Sunday World newspaper at the turn of the 20th century. Paging through this volume shows the ambitiously crafty ends toward which the paper used their 4-color miracle machine. Of course there are photographs and line drawings, crazy cartoons and ads; but there's also waterpaint-boxes (enabling readers to wet the page and paint for a contest), easter egg patterns that transfer from the vinegared newsprint page, cut out dolls, boxing puppets whose clobbering fists deploy the fingers of the hand that holds them, and even a tachistoscopic thread that encouraged readers to cut out the image on a tape and make a movie at home. Brentano and Baker deserve the applause of all future generations; this book demonstrates a slice of the feast they saved from the chop shops. These rainbow images contrast starkly with the wallpaper at Subway sandwich shops, which use the bleary black and white microfiche reproductions of the same newsprint. The authors raised $150K to buy the British Library's last extant volumes archiving the golden age of America's yellow journalism, and they eventually found a hospitable archive at Duke. Nicholson Baker has written a book that describes their fight to save this trove. If you are a fan of his noodling, endlessly discursive writing, that's the one item that's not included here: the captions for each page are written by his wife and partner, Margaret Brentano, in clear descriptive terms that let the astounding pages do all the dazzling.

The snowflake : winter's secret beauty
(Kenneth Libbrecht & Patricia Rasmussen, 112pp)
Cool, beautiful, and 6-fold symmetric. I've never paid close attention to flakes, but this book dazzles with its close up photos, and lucid explanations of how crystals form, why they are frequently pattern as hexagons, and why, when each flake holds trillions of atoms, each one has probably got a thousand or so water molecules contributed by your own exhalations. Libbrecht, a Caltech physicist, gives a very good argument to support the word on the street that no ordinary snowflake will ever duplicate a previous structure (again, due to its trillions of component atoms). It appears possible that a laboratory might someday create a minimal snowflake, under sufficiently controlled conditions, to make two of a kind. But in nature, the variegation and manifold creativity is celebrated, and Rasmussen's photos do a marvelous job of showing the amazing range generated by a little dust and water vapor.

Urgent 2nd Class: Creating Curious Collage, Dubious Documents, And Other Art From Ephemera
(Nick Bantock, 115 pp)
This is an interesting account of the craft used by the creator of the rather twee series of onanistic Hallmark cards, such as Griffin and Sabine. Although his sense of humor is often off, he has a very keen sense of how to forge mail art of stunning intricacy.

Our inner ape : a leading primatologist explains why we are who we are
(Frans de Waal, unabridged, 9;28)
Excellent synthesis of De Waal's decades of primatology. His writing is even more lucid and evocative than his photography. De Waal draws on the observations he has published in his excellent earlier books, with plenty of additional insights grounded in watching humans at academic or military conferences on peacemaking. (The library recalled this book when I was on page 141, but I have now listened to the whole book on my ipod).

Anansi Boys
(Neil Gaiman, unabridged, 8 CDs)
What a great delight! I sense this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship, and I am so happy to have had the chance to listen to this fascinating and playful story. This fantastickal tale weaves together folk tales of Anansi, the African trickster who shows up as Br'er Rabbit, with a rich story of two brothers living in the shadow of their wily father. Every tangent in this tale brims with wisdom and wise-cracks. Although this story stands as its own unique genre, in every paragraph I felt the twinkling winking pleasures I'd once found in the best moments of the Illuminatus Trilogy.

Vincent Van Gogh : The Drawings
(Metropolitan Museum of Art Series, 392 pp)
I spent an hour paging through this lovely catalog, reminiscing upon the awe-inspiring exhibit that I was lucky enough to view at the Metropolitan Museum in December. This makes a wonderful gift, both for those who've seen the exhibit and want to recall the amazing diligence and acuity of van Gogh's drawing, and esp for those who were not able to view the powerful drawings. It's fascinating to view the multiple copies van Gogh drew of his paintings, typically to send by post to correspondents, since each copy differs in emphasis and attitude.

Wooton Patent Desks: A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place
(Camille Showalter & Janice Driesbach, 94pp)
This beautiful little book does a fine job of documenting the physical culture of mid-to-late 19th century office culture, with special attention to the masterful joinery that created intricate pigeon-holed desks. The photos in the back show gorgeous examples, including the Rockefeller Extra, the elaborate desk used by John D.

The Experts' Guide to 100 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do
(Samantha Ettus, 336pp)
I have a weakness for books that offer organized lists of skill-based knowledge. I paged through this, and since each chaplet is 2 or 3 pages, penned by an expert in the field, few of the treatments actually convey real expertise. This would be about right for a curious teenager, who wants to read, e.g., about making coffee from the head beaner at Starbucks. Mark Bittman's short piece on buying fish had one nice point (go to the store looking for a type, but without prejudging which kind you'll plump for), but is too cursory to give a person confidence. The very best advice came from Larry King on how to listen; his pithy recommendation is to go to where a person lives emotionally, and give them a chance to speak from that living emotion.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
(John Battelle, 320 pp = 10:09)
I bought this on paper before Thanksgiving, and yet I only managed to finish it after the words were made audible. This is first rate journalism, and scarcely overlaps at all with the other Google book. Battelle went into this investigating the topic of Search, which realizes a first cut on his vision that the most powerful technology would be 'database of intentions'. This is not the story of Larry and Sergey. Given Google's dominance in the search industry, the personality quirks of its 2 founders matter more than a tittle. (Update on March 10: John Battelle blogs his audible experience in creating this book.)

Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life
(Arlene Blum, 336pp)
I bought this book at an author reading given in Berkeley last September. I've been chipping away at this ever since, reading a few pages a week. The stories are often quite fascinating. Blum covered an amazing amount of ground, since graduating from Reed in the 1960s. She successfully weaves together her research in physical chemistry with climbing, and reveals that her greatest insight into protein folding came to her while viewing a frozen pile of rocks on top of a mountain. This book documents her strength in the face of flagrant sexism on the part of many climbing teams. It is painful to read about her being excluded from the summit team after an exhausting slog to climb an 8K mountains. Her stories show how resilient and resourceful she was. Even if a trip results in the death of teammates, or the icky fights reminiscent of roommate squabbles, Arlene Blum would go back to the maps, and plan another amazing voyage around the planet. Besides her original Endless Winter, she also organized and carried out a trans-Himalayan hike, and managed to travel across the European Alps with her infant daughter and Aussie husband. The accounts of Berkeley were particularly interesting to me: Arlene records her experience carrying the Torah at a Beyt Chesed high holiday service, her success founding the Himalayan fair at Live Oak Park, and little nuggets about jogging in the hills.

Favorite Fiction in 2005:
The Line of Beauty (Alan Hollinghurst)
Subtle glances into a world now gone.

Indecision (Benjamin Kunkel)
Extremely funny take on the lame modern male.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Alice Munro)
Tightly woven tales of big dark emotions in small lives.

The Plot Against America (Philip Roth)
A stark parable of a not-too-counterfactual past

Non-fiction: (My bias is toward large personalities, with flaws in high detail)
1. The Power Broker (Robert Caro)
Until Cheney's dark mind gets spelunked, this will stand as naked power's most vivid portrait.
2. Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage (Diane Middlebrook)
The symbiotic intertwining of these two great poets is a true Greek tragedy.
3. Appetite for Life: The biography of Julia Child (Noel Riley Fitch)
Julia Child is the only personality powerful enough to inspire an un-conflicted, non-neurotic biography that I could love to read.
4. DisneyWar (James B. Stewart)
Eisner's puny world and massive ego get spotlighted here.
5. What the dormouse said (John Markoff)
The personal growth movement apparently triggered the personal computer revolution in Northern California.
6. The World's Banker (Sebastian Mallaby)
While examining the profound problems of development, this book also illuminates the magnetic personality (and court struggles) of the man who tried to change the World (Bank).
7. The Smartest Guys in the Room (Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind)
This book x-rays the black box that was Enron, and reveals the amazing distortions endemic to corporate culture.
8. Empire (Niall Ferguson)
How piracy begot corporate rule (and only belatedly, military administration) of the British Empire.
9. All the Shah's men (Stephen Kinzer)
What a surprise: America staged a coup in '53 in Iran, and the troubles in the Persian Gulf continue to fallout from this short-sighted violation of democracy.
10. The City of Falling Angels (John Behrendt)
A delightful dance around Venice at the end of the 20th century.
11. Freakonomics (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)
A quick tour through an intriguing use of economic analysis to pound through a pile of empirical data, in education, real estate, and crime.
12. Our inner ape (Frans de Waal)
The latest write up of incisive insights gleaned from decades watching apes.
13. Live From New York (James Miller & Tom Shales)
A documentary history of the never-ending farm team for American popular culture.

The hunchback of Notre Dame
(Victor Hugo, unabridged, 16 cassettes)
I thought I would just dip into this classic for a while, after having spent a weekend in Paris at the Hotel Esmeralda, looking out upon the Notre Dame Cathedral. The vast book is quite engrossing, with a story that's a real pot-boiler. Hugo dedicates a whole chapter (the start of cassette 4) to the architecture of the Cathedral, and apparently, it was his passionate defense of the building that saved it from negligent decay. The tale is set in the 1480s, and portrays Quasimodo as a non-PC monster whose tough life does not fully exculpate his hideous nature. The cast includes a twisted priest, the tormented gypsy girl Esmeralda, and a debauching soldier. My curiosity is now piqued to see how Disney could possibly have bowdlerized this dark tale into a film for kids.

Collage sourcebook : exploring the art and techniques of collage
(Holly Harrison, Jennifer Atkinson, Paula Grasdal, 240pp)
A crafty little book, with some interesting instructions on how to use fabrics. There are about a dozen New England collage artists whose work gets quoted. A personal favorite of mine, the collagist Donna Kossy, is not the sort of artiste favored by this book.

United States and the Middle East: 1914 to 9/11
(Salim Yaqub, 12 CDs)
I found this difficult to listen to, even though the tone struck is deliberately calm and measured. I learned valuable background information about things such as the Iranian student revolution. I didn't know, e.g., that the president in 1980, Beni Sadr, was disgraced by the carpet weavers who pieced together shredded documents, which revealed that the CIA had established a covert connection to him, unbeknownst to Beni Sadr. This strengthened the hand of Khomeini. The lecturer interprets the struggle between Israel and Palestine in a way that aims to be evenhanded; it goes without saying that his point of view must surely be the moderate angle among the Arab community. It distresses me that Yaqub grants that the politicians of the Arab countries used "bloodthirsty" rhetoric leading into the '67 war, but he still believes that such language was not a decisive factor in driving Israel to pre-emptively attack. It also seems dubious, even Yaqub advances this claim, that Arafat was not involved in inciting the two waves of Intifida. Nevertheless, exposing myself to this set of lectures helped deepen my understanding of the Palestinian point of view.

Steinberg at the New Yorker
(Joel Smith, 240pp)
Fun to page through. I was personally gratified to see that Kansas City, but not San Francisco, gets explicit mention in his most famous map, the view of New York from 9th Ave (published on the March 29 1976 cover). It seems that KC served as a placeholder for that stuff below Nebraska, since the up-to-date metropolis shows up in other Steinbergian topographies (such as a Euclidean diagram linking Venice, London and NY to KC).

The Line of Beauty
(Alan Hollinghurst, unabridged, 14 CDs)
Superb writing that covers enough ground concerning class, race, religion (swapping sexuality for gender) that it forces a comparison with Zadie Smith's latest. Hollinghurst studies the world of a gay aesthete, dabbling with a dissertation on Henry James, who ends up rooming in the family house of his college friend. Set during the Thatcher era in Britain, the upper class family's patriarch gets elected to parliament as a Tory, and there's a quite amusing take on The Lady Thatcher, studied solely as an esthetic object, without any moral assessment. The language and subtle turns of observation amaze, without ever seeming flashy or self-conscious. The peppering of cocaine and pre-AIDS gay sexuality capture an era with stunning clarity. I once heard Nicholson Baker reveal an intense penis envy towards gay novelists, who he believed were writing the best books. Although I wasn't familiar with Hollinghurst at that time (around the speaking tour for the Fermata), he must surely have been one of the talents who was undercutting Baker's self-confidence.

Julie and Julia : 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
(Julie Powell, abridged, 5 CDs -- paused at 2)
This is a blook (blog that grew up to be a book, and I believe one of the first in what should surely become quite common). The author's self-imposed task: cook every recipe in The Art of French Cooking. She was right that it's a better way to develop a career line than going to cooking school, although it's not certain that she's a master chef after all the dishes served. The language is good, the jokes are fine, though I am incapable of grasping the humor of yukking it up about getting drunk, hung-over, and such, which is a deep pond of hilarity for this author.

On Beauty
(Zadie Smith, unabridged, 19:01)
A rich pleasure to listen to. Zadie Smith has always flashed her gift for peopling each of her novels with fascinating characters, but this third try is the story that hangs together well enough for me to reach the last page. Apparently the author spent a year fellowshipping at Harvard, and she sends up the language and life of humanities scholars. Her story also riffs on the psychological conflicts wrapped up in race, gender, religion and a teeny bit of class. I was surprised that by the end of the novel, I was no longer in love with the characters or the story. I still haven't figured out why it felt like it whimpered out, since there's a lot happening toward the end. This fimpression could be due at least in part to the bittersweet turns at the tale's end, but the story just stopped feeling engaging, and began to seem like a cranked out finale.

Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground
(Robert D. Kaplan, unabridged, 10 CDs-- pause at 7)
This book boils up a perspective that is presented as that of the boots on the ground, celebrating the troops-eye angle on America's vast outposts, in Colombia, the Philippines, the Balkans, and everywhere else that special ops can drop from the sky. I'm not persuaded by Kaplan's analysis of how we must be imperialists. When he referenced the travel writer Jan Morris as a "historian," I became concerned with his grasp of the facts. Nevertheless, the book is based on extensive interviews with the myriad "iron majors" and staff sergeants who administer our military empire, and works hard at conveying their attitudes and judgments. Kaplan doesn't even pretend to write a balanced account of complex issues, since he's more interested in writing with affection about the soldiers who seem ego-less and infinitely more valuable than the DC wonks who architect the wars we're fighting.

Hungry planet : what the world eats
(Peter Menzel & Faith D'Aluisio, 288pp)
Pretty interesting to page through, although it did not trigger the omigod epiphanies that I recall feeling when I first saw their earlier work, The Material World. It's surprising to read that many 4-member families in the West spend so much in a single week: the 3 US families portrayed in the book spend from $159 to $342 every week.

The American Revolution : A History (Modern Library Chronicles)
(Gordon S. Wood, unabridged, 6 CDs)
Fine and tidy! While there's no surprises (the good guys win, but they turn out to be devoted slaveholders), this evenhanded history analyzes the origins and outcome of the American Revolution in fresh and insightful terms.

Law in America : A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles)
(Lawrence M. Friedman, unabridged, 5 CDs)
Intelligent and pithy discussion of how law shapes society in America. The contents include a telling summary of how those societies with Roman law (which rely upon theoretically more coherent bodies of law, administered and ruled by prosecutors) differ from those ruled by English common law, with its reliance on juries. Friedman incisively reviews the evolution of family law, which in part reflected the increasing empowerment of women. The tone is even-handed, the language sharp and clear, and the range is superb. This is the single best instance of the Modern Library histories that I have yet read.

A Venetian Affair : A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century
(Andrea Di Robilant, unabridged, 10 CDs, stopped after 4)
Beautiful story of lovers who sustained their affair in Venice for decades, with a little help from Casanova. The author's ancestor, Andrea Memmo, intrigued with a young woman who was not part of the Venetian elite to which he owed his public self. Although it was interesting, and Venice-y, my desire to know the details of their infidelity ended before the trove of letters ran out.

The City : A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles)
(Joel Kotkin, unabridged, 7 CDs)
This should just be called A list of big cities, throughout the past 10,000 years. Instead of being an analysis of cities, this book hops around without saying anything particularly persuasive about what makes for a successful/vibrant city. Not recommended at all.

The Bluest Eye
(Toni Morrison, unabridged, 5 cassettes)
Toni Morrison's first novel (published in 1969) is an intensely searing account of life of African Americans in a small town in Ohio. My recollection of reading Toni Morrison is tinged with the visceral shock of despair, and yet the dread in memory had caused me to overlook the beauty of the language. The story line focuses on a young girl who lives in a household ravaged by domestic violence, and she is eventually raped by her father. The author provides an afterword, reflecting on the difficulties of her portrayal of the people who victimize the girl who aspires to view the world from the perspective of blue eyes.

The Hungry Tide
(Amitav Ghosh, unabridged, paused after 4 CDs)
There's a story here of intriguing complexity, and I hope to return to it at a point when the themes of India, dolphins, and the dispossessed converge to pull me back. I heard about this while reading Rushdie's Shalimar, and it is powerfully written; Ghosh demands close attention to follow the strands of his story, and it would be a pleasure to attend to this when my mind is ready. (Reviewing books that I've hiccupped on, in almost 2 years, I've only polished off one that paused -- the only instance of a double attractor was the history of Saturday Night Live).

The Power of Light: Eight Stories for Hanukkah
(Isaac Bashevis Singer, unabridged, 2 cassettes)
These Hanukah stories are pleasant and pretty, but do not zing with the incredible vividness that shined through IB Singer's own childhood memoirs. These miracle tales for children, though wonderful to listen to, aren't the real deal.

Wickett's remedy
(Myla Goldberg, unabridged, 9 CDs)
Miss Goldberg narrates this audioversion, which is spiced up with a male interlocutor, and sound effects to add extra bells and whistles to quotes from period newspapers. This book is better put together than Bee Season, although it still shows the threads of the author's artifice. Even though I find many of her quirks annoying, I let myself be charmed by her choice of matter (this time, her story revolves around Boston around the time of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918). The book's use of ghost voices seriously undermines the dramatic impact of death, even though it is used to narrate perspectives other than the victimized Lydia Wickett.

Collage : the making of modern art
(Brandon Taylor, 224 pp)
This book covers the period beginning with Picasso's collaboration with Braque, through the Dada cutups and on into the 1960's. There's some interesting information about Picasso, but little contact with either pop culture or historical antecedents.

Good business: leadership, flow, and the making of meaning
(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, unabridged, 8 CDs-- stopped before 2)
One can't be sure that this book isn't deliberately exploiting a cynical belief that most business books are so bad, that if this weren't crappy, it wouldn't sell. Even for someone who believes in Csik's theory of flow, this book is a no-win blow-out. Instead of making clear statements backed by evidence, the book's tone and presentation are mere editorializing gaseous assertions. There is no reason to read this, when the original popularization, Flow, more carefully and clearly summarizes Csikszentmihalyi's interesting research.

The Google Story
(David Vise & Mark Malseed, unabridged, 10:32)
I wanted to read Batelle's bio of Google, but it's not audible, so I gave this one a listen. At times, the language is a bit too wild (for example, it opens by claiming without qualification that Google is the most important breakthrough since Gutenberg). There's plenty of interesting material, and the writing is solid journalism. The authors seem somewhat partial to Sergey Brin, who is the more charismatic of the founders, although they recognize the significance of the two temperaments. As an instance of this favoritism, they devote the final chapter to the potential extension of Google to bio-informatics (a Brin project). The book demonstrates how carefully the corporate culture has learned to exemplify a commitment to the workers, by hybridizing the academic allowance of 20% time to pursue an independent project with the dot-com luxury of gourmet meals on campus.

Fugitive Pieces
(Anne Michaels, unabridged, 8 cassettes, stopped after 6)
There is a lot of beautiful language in this novel, but most of the characters wisp away into evocations of word smoke. The opening episodes are most dramatic, recounting the Nazi invasion of Poland. The young boy narrator is saved by a Greek geologist, who carries him away to a Greek isle, and then, after the war, travels with the boy to Toronto. Once the old Greek dies, the drama is all but drained away, and I gave up trying to care.

Oh the Glory of It All
(Sean Wilsey, unabridged, 18 CDs -- started skimming after 9, gave up at 16)
This highly publicized memoir of a poor little rich kid hit the press with a splash. It starts quite strongly, with good clear writing. But it's a bildungsroman that doesn't build, and once the life is laid out, it goes into a holding pattern. A kind editor would have left one or two representative incidents (the first and the last time he gets kicked out of a prep school, e.g.) and removed the repetitions that demonstrate how strongly the author resisted learning from his mistakes.

The cultural guide to Jewish Europe
(English translation by Peter DeDomenico, Noel Schiller, and Charles Penwarden, 616 pp)
Fascinating handbook. I paged through parts, and would like to take another gander again.

The German Empire, 1870-1918
(Michael Sturmer, unabridged, 3 cassettes)
This provides the overview you may not have known you needed of how Bismarck built a nation, by using the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 to rally nationalist impulses across the divided German states. A brief history that goes back into the war that gave rise to the First World War, that created the conditions for the Second World War. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the 21st century is that Germans no longer seem to be the source of aggressions troubling the planet.

The Ape in the Corner Office : Understanding the Workplace Beast in All of Us
(Richard Conniff, unabridged, 11 CDs)
It's fairly easy, and some would say "instinctive", for people to vulgarize biology by interpreting the data as a proof text for their own personal biases. This book is a study in attempting to popularize biology (from worms to primates, with an occasional use of human psychological studies). It does not advance a tendentious sociobiological view. Even where I found the writing to be less than careful, it held my attention, since it is written fluidly by an experienced magazine editor. The various chapters could be slipped into a magazine, such as Esquire, without any incongruity. The coverage of topics deserves a B+. A recurrent speak-o (audible solecism): the name of the primatologist, De Waal, whose Peacemaking among Primates is quoted from extensively, gets teutonized into Devaal, even though he's Dutch.

The Company : A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
(John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, unabridged, 5 cassettes)
This should go mano-a-mano against the very stimulating DVD, The Corporation, which questions the prudence of granting personhood to the legal entity, here celebrated as the single most powerful idea unleashed to create wealth, viz. the limited liability company. The book starts by mentioning an amazing Gilbert & Sullivan opera, Utopia Unlimited. In 1893, G&S produced this now obscure show, which dramatizes a little island where a King decides that even the babies should become limited companies, formulated in accord with Great Britain's 1862 Companies Act. This book mobilizes the concision and perspective typical of Economist writers.

McSweeney's Issue 17
(ed David Eggers, impossible to count the pages)
McSweeney's has been "pushing the envelope" since at least issue 4, which came out as a collection of pamphlets. The last issue had a comb, and this comes with a helpful sticker letting the reader understand that this incoherent mass is designed to look like a bunch of junk that comes in the mail. The sight gags are sometimes quite funny (the holiday sausage catalog was rich), and some of the other items were definitely worth reading. One envelope began with a spam form letter, exhorting the reader to pay close attention to the Nigerian email writer's favorite story, and then the next 30 pages covered a well written story about a tragedy on the North Shore of Chicago. I didn't grasp how the spoof, Yeti Researcher, a send up of a humdrum academic journal, was any funnier than a middling sociolinguistics journal that contain real career-advancing crap. The package did not contain a DVD. On the McSweeney's web site, it states "Please note that the debut issue of Wholphin will be included with Issue 18 of McSweeney's"

The preservationist
(David Maine, unabridged, 4 cassettes, stopped after 1)
An interesting project to re-tell the story of Noah, in a form that concretizes the characters' existential and moral quandaries. I was pulled toward this book because it reminded me of a hermeneutic technique, bibliodrama, which requires participants to enact the parsha from the Torah, and to seek always a first person account of the narrative. Enacting a bibliodrama necessarily draws a person into a consideration of issues that would otherwise be easy to overlook. The author, Maine, does a fine job of making a lot of the power dynamics come alive, but I stopped after one tape, since I already knew how the tale would end.

Byzantium : faith and power (1261-1557)
(editor, Helen Evans)
Amazing distillation of the glittering exhibit held in NY at the Metropolitan Museum in 2004. Each hard bit of the Byzantine world is studied (coins, ceramics, icons, textiles, mosaics, paintings, and influences). There's an amazing photo of a church in Macedonia that shows how gaudy and gorgeous the esthetic appears in situ. The connections with Venice are explored in a late chapter, which helps explicate how the Greeks flowed into the city state, and in part enabled Aldus Manutius to access their linguistic expertise in his early publishing.

San Francisco in the Sixties
(George Perry, 128pp)
Some interesting photos, esp the digger chicks. No real surprises. Apparently, this is part of a series of books, titled Cities in the Sixties, which also includes Paris, London and New York.

The Chowhound's guide to the San Francisco Bay area
(Jim Leff, 464pp)
Flipping through this can point to some interesting places to explore. The website is a travesty of info-overload; this book skims the cream, but of course, necessarily loses recency and dynamism. As a first attempt to boil up a usable guide to overeating, it deserves a B. I was happy to see that my favorite spot in SF Chinatown was left out. Given the information included, I now aim to try a goat stew on Middlefield in Redwood City.

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.