One Planet: See It for Yourself (Armchair Reading)
(Lonely Planet)
Not nearly as valuable in showing you the world as reading the Lonely Planet guides to specific places-- perhaps they should just put together a greatest places collection, where readers can transport themselves with text, rather than images. The photos lean toward tribes in remote areas; I can't definitely recall any of the images, even though I looked through every page yesterday.

Content
(Rem Koolhaas, editor; along with a posse of his associates; 544 pp)
A glossy advertorial of Koolhaas's work since the mid 1990s. The book "contains" provocative info-graphics, esp. concerning urbanization and shopping activity. The articles on each project (e.g., the Seattle Library or the HQ for China's Central TV) are not always readable, but the throw-away idea feel as if you're meeting an interesting madman at a cocktail party. The perspective of a megalomaniac architect leak through, and that has its own fascination: Rather than describe buildings, Koolhaas positions his work as world-changing, and he's willing to tackle the shifting place of the book in a digital age, the amplification of urban slums in the Third World in his Lagos Project, or the consumer impulse in his Prada store in NY. Since his ideas are so eccentric, it doesn't seem plausible that he could build sufficient consensus to really solve these problems, but he does hurl his perspective into the pot. His proposal for Cambridge to take over part of Allston, and shift the Charles River, is a great example of how he's 'mixing it up.'

Slab Rat
(Ted Heller, 10 CDs, punted after 4)
Clever, very arch description of the world of NY magazine sub-sub-editors: envy, polished backgrounds that are fabricated to fit in with the posturing senior editors, and anxiety are well described. I punted before finishing once I lost interest in the high envy, high anxiety, high hatred cubicle world that is depicted with art here.

The Best of Broadside
(5 CDs with extensive liner notes)
A time capsule of topical protest songs: The first place to publish Bob Dylan, and an outlet from 1962 to 1988 for folk singers as varied as Janis Ian, Pete Seeger, and late in its day, Lucinda Williams. Pete Seeger was virtually blacklisted for taking the 5th in front of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee; the editors, Gordon Friesen & Sis Cunningham, were also dogged for their radical politics. It's difficult, from the liner notes to have a precise sense of what Broadside was like while it was published. They seem to have reprinted clippings from other newspapers, and of course, the lyrics and musical notes made the proto-zine so valuable to Washington Square Folksingers. There are some comments on how Broadside differed from Moe Asch's *Sing Out*, but it will likely require a book to fully document the role each played in feeding the underground folk movement.

The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management
(Peter Drucker, 10 cassettes)
Since this collection reprises his entire body of writing, it may be best to dip into only the parts that are new. I've been listening to the entire book, and it is never trite. Effective work can be likened to learning the multiplication tables; it requires repetition. A person should work at being effective until the skills of project management and effective work become a habit. Drucker emphasizes that as a knowledge worker, you should learn what you do well, and invest in those areas. On top of that, know what areas are weaknesses, and stop trying to become mediocre.

Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament
(Kay Redfield Jamison, jumped around)
Most interesting: the piece on Byron. Want to read more about his life.

An Unquiet Mind : A Memoir of Moods and Madness
(Kay Redfield Jamison, paused after first 95 pp)
Valuable, honest, lucid writing of a clinical psychologist who now teaches in the Psychiatric Dept at Johns Hopkins.

Diego Rivera: A Retrospective
(Linda Downs, 372 pp)
Not the best writing, but a valuable index of the murals. Especially valuable pointers to the murals in SF: The SF Art Institute, the Pacific Exchange, and a mural that was painted in the Atherton residence of the Stern family, and which now hangs in the Stern Hall at Berkeley.

The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time
(Will Durant, 3 CDs, unabridged)
I've enjoyed Durant's Story of Philosophy. I've no real argument with rating the top 10 "thinkers" in all time. But this book is lame; perhaps this can be explained by the fact that Durant was near death while composing this. I couldn't listen to the 3rd CD, which absurdly attempts to "outline history" by speculating wildly about cumulative progress in our species' biological evolution.

Living History
(Hillary Rodham Clinton, abridged on 6 CDs, read by Hillary)
It's difficult for me to skim this on an iPod. I'm trying to find the juicy parts--> Jump to the 5th CD, track 13. Bill told Hillary immediately after waking her up, a little late in the game. It's mind boggling to me that Hillary would be angry at her husband, but still report that she was glad Clinton was "my President." I never really think of anyone as "my President."

Zuckerman Unbound
(Philip Roth, 5 CDs, unabridged)
Great threads, but not a great tapestry.

It's not about the bike
(Lance Armstrong, 4 CDs, abridged)
Largest VO2 Max ever recorded at an athletic camp (mentioned in the first pages). Survivor of testicular cancer. Comeback champion of the Tour de France. Father of a son born with cancer. A Texan.

Library: An Unquiet History
(Matthew Battles, 6 CDs, unabridged)
Widener, the library that surged up from the depths of the Titanic, is the star here, but only gets a cameo. Some of the historical info is good, but it's not a great read. One haunting image: That libraries "breathe", exhaling volumes in the fall, and inhaling them again at semester's end.

Against All Enemies
(read by the author, Richard Clarke; 6 CDs, abridged)
The first chapter is a fascinating portrayal of how the day of 9/11 was actually steered by Clarke. Then, the book steps back to cover terrorist assaults back through the 90s, including the Oklahoma bombing, the sarin attack in Tokyo, and the cruise missiles shot at Al Qaeda during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. When the Bush world comes into the late chapters, Clarke makes a cogent claim that Clinton fought against terrorism even when accused of wagging the dog, whereas the Bush attack on Iraq, advanced as an election-winning strategem by Rove, is the true dog-wagger.

Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship
(Jon Meacham, unabridged, 11 CDs)
Churchill's my hero, and FDR, although not as great a personality, deserved to be a close friend of the great bulldog who defeated Hitler.

The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court
(John Dean, unabridged, 10 CDs)
Nixon's own henchman comes clean, reveals the rat bastard motives and underhanded tricks that gave Nixon a disproportionate impact on Court, with 4 seats appointed in his first term. Amazingly, Nixon dreamed of revenging himself on the liberals by deliberately putting Byrd on the Court, precisely because he had once been in the KKK. In the end, it's Rehnquist, who did so much dirty work, who got the last laugh and the key appointment. The last chapter is the most amazing, when Dean reveals the lies that Rehnquist chose to make to cover up his advocacy of 'separate but equal' schooling when he clerked for the Court, as well as his denying his role as a vote 'challenger' in the 1960s, when Blacks would try to register for the vote in Arizona.

The Second Coming of Steve Jobs
(Alan Deutschman; unabridged, 8 hours)
The icon of Silivalley, he's a bad boy who deprives himself of food, is such a perfectionist that he couldn't put any furniture in his house because only nothing could live up to his rigorous esthetic aspirations. This book covers the Pixar resurrection, which is presented as a near accident that saved him from his NEXT obsession. I eagerly await the 3rd coming, which will cover the iPod revolt.

Revolution for the Hell of It
("Free" [Abbie Hoffman], published 1970)
After reading about the yippie antics in 1968, I decided to go to the source. Abbie Hoffman's playful genius is fresh and inspiring, even 3 decades later. Using the pseudonym "Free", he displaced all attention upon his own person by dropping in photos of women, old men, and random strangers, all of which are said to refer to the personality "Free." Hoffman pipes an alluring tune even when message is as naive as the Digger take on the economy.

Never Mind the Pollacks : A Rock and Roll Novel

(Neal Pollack, 272 pp)
Funny (Onion level parody), but only 1/10 as much fun as his amazing first book.

The Noblest Invention : An Illustrated History of the Bicycle
(Editors of Bicycling Magazine, 320pp)
Some nice photos, a few interesting historical anecdotes, but it does not live up to the promised paean to the greatest pair of shoes a person can own.

The Purpose-Driven Life (Rick Warren; 8 CDs; bailed after 30 min)
It's not implausible that someone could write a valid self-help book from a Christian perspective; Steven Covey's 7 Habits, e.g., isn't useless. But after listening to the first few 'days' of guidance, I could not soldier on with exhortations to see humans as the point of the entire Universe, with my own self as the cherry on top.

Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family
(Patricia Volk, 7 CDs; quit after 1 hour)
Not at all interesting. It falsely claims to be focused on restaurant life, when it turns out to be as close to the NY world of foodies as a small dry cleaner stands to high fashion. Before I quit listening, Volk had covered her own adult sibling rivalry, and recycled disorganized anecdotes w/o any point or true pungency.

1968: The Year That Rocked the World (Mark Kurlansky, 17 hours, unabridged)
Rag-tag whirl around the world: the Prague Spring seemed the most revolutionary, but there was also the Chicago demonstrations led by the Yippees, the Mexico City Olympics, Paris, the precursor Berkeley Free Speech Music from 1964. Running around the planet doesn't illuminate what was the spark that made this year a peer of the 1848 Revolutions.

Fear No Evil
(Natan Sharansky; 464 pp; 1998 edition)
On Friday [April 16], Sharansky visited Berkeley Hillel, and we heard him speak about his experience fighting for human rights. His humor and intelligence were so powerful; I knew I would read his life story. Last Friday [April 23], I stayed up all night reading Fear No Evil.
Sharansky focuses on the 9 years [1977 to 1986] spent in prison and labor camps (over 400 days in solitary confinement, and over 200 days on hunger strikes). The Soviets signed the Helsinki human rights accord in 1975. Sharansky, as a founding member of Helsinki Watch, openly called for them to go beyond lip service. For this, he was accused of treason (a capital crime).
Once arrested, Sharansky formulated precise principles that safeguarded him from falling into negotiating with his interrogators. The KGB diligently worked to maintain all formal appearances of being legal (e.g., investigators claimed they had no influence the prison conditions, since that was under a separate administrator). Yet, at the moments of truth, the KGB resorted to threats, harassed and attempted to humiliate him. Sharansky responded by framing the encounter as a chess game, an absurdist theater performance, but also, fundamentally, as an expression of his own freedom.
The 1998 edition has a brief afterward on Sharansky's life as an Israeli political leader. Because he holds a hardline on negotiating with the Palestinians, few in Berkeley see him as a hero. Yet his refusal to bend to the Soviets marks a moral triumph on a par with Frederick Douglass's Autobiography of a Slave.

The Anatomy Lesson
(Philip Roth, 6 cassettes)
Apparently, in 1983, carpal tunnel was not yet well-known enough for Nathan Zuckerman to receive the apt diagnosis. He suffers an inverted menorah, radiating down his neck into his shoulders. An interesting probe on pain. Pain sucks by being so boring.

Native Speaker
(Chang-Rae Lee; 8 cassettes, 11 hours)
Very well written, which may explain why it held faint echoes of Motherless Brooklyn. At the beginning, i also thought of the Emperor of Ocean Park, although the tone of the Emperor was off-putting for me. A fascinating account of one man's tae-kwando bout with his own Korean-American identity.

The Chrysler Building : creating a New York icon, day by day
(David Stravitz)
Most of the photos are interesting, showing the start before the Crash, and its continual progress. The centerfold of the New York sky line is spectacular. For some reason, the NYC skyline looks even more impressive, more Gothic, in the 1930s, than it does today.

River Town : Two Years on the Yangtze
(Peter Hessler; 11 cassettes, unabridged)
Fascinating trip to Fuling, seen through the eyes of Peace corps volunteer a few years after Tienamen square. Great term: "Capitalist roader" (i heard it as "rotor", which would be even more of a put-down.)

Sandy Koufax : A Lefty's Legacy
(read by Jane Leavy (Author) & Robert Pinsky (poet); 4 cassettes, abridged)
Great story, with beautiful descriptions of the way Koufax used his mind to guide his body. His refusal to pitch the opening game of the 1965 world series on Yom Kippur makes him not just a great pitcher, but a legend. Yet his lack of religious observance meant that he just spent the day in his hotel room.

About Schmidt (Louis Begley; 7 tapes, unabridged)
Ndugu does NOT inhabit this book, even though he was my favorite character in the film! Schmidt's entire life is haunted by ghosts of his own anti-semitic impulses. It's surprising how easy it was to listen to a novel about an old man w/o humor, locked inside his resentments.

Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (Peter Maas, unabridged, 9 tapes)
I had read pieces of this before, but never concentrated long enough to absorb the entire book. This strips away the illusion that Clinton's involvement in Bosnia was anything but a fancy form of appeasement.

The Meaning of Everything : The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (Simon Winchester, 7 CDs, ripped for iPod)
This story has just the right scope, with a wide ranging themes, including a major role for the Earth's favorite language. This biography of the OED is far better than the Professor and the Madman, even though the madman makes a walk-on, and both books were written by Winchester. It's surprising how many insane obsessives supported the development of the dictionary. [On my latest trip to the East Coast, I flew solely with my iPod. There were problems (battery ran out w/o my use; static that continues]

Cosmopolis: A Novel (Don Delillo; unabridged, 5 CDs)

I listened to this novella at least 5 times. Each time, the shiny sentences had the strange appearance of reprocessed plutonium. Delillo's syntax could have been spun smooth in a centrifuge. Each incidental remark sounds so clever that just understanding them made me feel smart. How could I listen so many times? This tight little book is on beyond poetry.

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Barry Schwartz, 288pp)
A nice enough popularization and review of the field, which I read to prepare for my own talk on 'Strange Tales from the Lab.' I came to understand these popularizations, not to praise them. Tom Gilovich is funnier and sharper, but I will find myself mentioning this title for people who don't have time to read the original psych and economics literature. (It is not a comprehensive review, but more of a starter course).

America's Queen: A Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Sarah Bradford; abridged, 8 CDs)
Embarrassing to learn this much about Jackie O, but it's comparable to the store of gossip I harbor about Barbra Streisand or Edie Sedgwick. Hated her sister, Lee Radziwill (who slept with Onassis before he married Jackie O), adored her philandering father, and was resigned to male infidelity, which she coped with in the White House years with JFK by punishing him via massive purchases. She spent over $100K/year on clothes in the early 60s, which would be equivalent to about $1K/day. Once the Kennedy years pass (which includes her close relationship to RFK), the book flags. Very little about her relationship with her kids

Someone to run with (David Grossman; paused after 85 pp)
The tale's unfolding requires an actual shaggy dog to weave the themes together. Assaf is "a stories-child", mesmerized by tales, lost in day dreams; Tamar has another quest, which is much scarier.

Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises (Weldon Owen, 240pp; 1999)
This is a very lucid, well organized, and fascinating book about whales and other cetaceans. This has been around the house since before we whale-watched in February, and it's been great to dip into. Fun fact: Francis Crick hypothesizes that cetaceans have huge brains because they don't have REM sleep, and so need to hold a lot of garbage that gets flushed nightly by our brains.

Sister Wendy's 1000 Masterpieces (512pp)
Concise writing with great pictures to page through. The reproductions are vivid. Since the Sister organized the images by artist's last name, there's incongruities, a few family lines (the Brueghels), and a clump of Masters of X, Y, Z.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (Al Franken; 7 hours, audible.com digital file)

Not everyone can be as smart or funny as Al Franken, so it's not fair to say that our opponents often sound dumb. This book exposes the inexcusable extent to which the right's spokespeople (Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan, O'Reilly, et al) are lazy, deceptive, and stridently hypocritical. Not every conservative is an idiot (read David Brooks, e.g.). I was not keen on rehearsing the injustices suffered since the hijacked election. Franken opens with an evenhanded and objective chapter, "Ann Coulter is a nut-case". Her bald lies, slandering opponents in *Slander*, exemplifies "irony of the unintentional sort." He and Team Franken perform strenuous research to catch the lies (for example, reading a Time Magazine article to catch up Condy Rice's denial that she was briefed on terrorism). The most surprising chapter covered how seriously Clinton took terrorism, and how criminally negligent the Bush-Cheney gang was before 9.11

Blues City : A Walk in Oakland
(Ishmael Reed; abridged, 3 out 4 tapes heard)
I learned things about my home town, esp. concerning the history of the Black Panther Party. After a while, I felt as if I was reading a local newspaper that didn't like Jerry Brown, and then I stopped. This series, writers on cities, coughed up Chuck Palahniuk's take on Portland, which I tried to read, but couldn't figure out how to cut through the cant. Ishmael Reed does a better job, but still doesn't outdo Lonely Planet for urban info/background.

The Case for Israel (Alan M. Dershowitz; 9 hours on cassette)
A very concise and lucid history. Dershowitz's scrappy reputation precedes him; is he trying to defend the "Claus von Bulow" among nations? Dershowitz makes a well-reasoned case that Israel has managed to maintain a nation ruled by law in a climate of terrorism. The evidence shows tragically that the Palestinian people have been victimized by their political leaders, who have bet on the wrong side of virtually every war in the 20th century: they backed the Germans in WWI, their leader was pro-Nazi in WWII, and then Arafat threw in with Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. The consequences of such bad bets do not mean that the Palestinians should be dis-enfranchised, but their political leaders should bear the weight of choosing such bad company. Although there is a presumption among academics (taking their cue from Noam Chomsky) that Israel is a bully state, the evidence reviewed in this book powerfully refutes that facile presumption. Israel has a strong Supreme Court, one which outlawed the use of torture over 2 years ago. The US, France, Spain, and certainly every Arab country, cannot claim it has responded with as much clarity of principle.

Bee Season (Myla Goldberg; 9 hours on cassette)
Good subjects (hippy psychedelic impulses sublimated through Judaism, reform observance, spelling, f*d up family life). The dysfunction was exhibited, rather than explored: inarticulately awkward family members are at times irretrievably opaque about their motives. I can't object to the book, since I managed to finish it. If you find these topics fascinating, you might enjoy Goldberg's treatment, which is occasionally quite funny.

Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina(David Hadju; 328 pp-- Stopped after 160 pp)
Inspite of the fascinating personalities, the writer seems to dislike Bob Dylan intensely, disdain Joan Baez, and still fails to bring into focus the spark that makes Richard Farin~a such a mysterious personality. I stopped reading at the point that RF began to woo Mimi Baez. I doubt that the 2nd half of the book gets better. A Saturday afternoon read that should have been put down for something better.

The Fatal Shore: The epic of Australia's founding (Robert Hughes; 752 pp; 31 hours on cassette)
A fascinating tale of Georgian England's solution to their criminal class (begun in 1788, and running til 1850). Hughes remarks that Australia is a nation that refutes genetic determinism: virtually every citizen can trace their family back to felons. It is apparently popular to assume today that their forebears were mostly innocent poachers transported for petty crimes. Hughes data shows that 4 out of 5 had been convicted at least once prior to being transported. England's main object was simply to insure intense suffering, without regard to reform. The biographies of the various personalities who stepped up to implement this objective are well-drawn. The most haunting image: Since those who were transported were treated to the greatest degradation and hardship, the only thing that kept prisoners from killing themselves was a fear of eternal damnation. A practice emerged where groups of men would draw lots; the short straw would be dispatched in cold blood by the man who drew the 2nd shortest. The other men vowed to serve as witnesses, guaranteeing the hanging of the killer, with the incentive that they could be temporarily released from prison to testify in Sydney.

Inventing the Middle Ages (Norman Cantor; 21 hours on cassette; read by Frederick Davidson)
What a great history of historians! Intoned by the supremely snotty narrator, Frederick Davidson. This is a meta-history, reporting on the lives of various 20th centurian Medievalists. The only time I've read a similar sort of work was Donna Haraway's Primate Visions; she wrote with a very sharp tongue about the academic lineages within primatology, and which advisors had impressed their dogmas into the field through their posse of grad students. The defunct gossip sheet, Lingua Franca, used to discuss rumbles within the ivory tower, and Cantor has written a fascinating account of the intellectual biographies of historians who were American, European, and English. The Germans of the 1920s who aimed to build a case for strong kings contrasts with the vision of the two most renowned fantasists, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, who took their variant visions of the past and projected them into explicitly nostalgic fictions.

Soul Mountain (Gao Xingjian; very long; bailed after 2 tapes)
Very diffuse divagations from the 2000 Nobel Prize winner. There was not a lot to hold onto, and I could not hold my breath long enough to discern if Gao was going to be another Pearl Buck, Dario Fo, or Pasternak.

Fortress of Solitude (Jonathan Lethem, 2003, unabridged, 18.5 hours on tape)
Dylan and Mingus, childhood best friends in Brooklyn, grow up together in the early 70s, reading each others' comic books and playing arcane street games. They come from two broken sets of parents who've inscribed their separate cultures' icons (white hippie folk v. black crypto cool) into their own names. Their story is set in Gowanus, a gradually gentrifying neighborhood not far from Park Slope. Half-way through the book, it felt like this novel was going to surpass The Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, which first transformed the childhood fascination of the comicbook world into a universe of referents with sufficient muscle to make a great novel. By the last 2 tapes, Fortress of Solitude began to lose the arm-wrestling contest to Michael Chabon, whose own superheroes struggled more with the ironies implicit in their superpowers. Lethem's novel has an ambitious range: He encompasses the birth of rap, the graffiti culture of the streets, the destructive impact of crack, while contrasting the Brooklyn street with the white inflected literary pretensions of a punk music critic who writes liner notes, hangs out in Emeryville and gets "yoked" after a Jonathan Richman show in Berkeley. The force of the contrastive black/white identities loses steam before the book closes, even though the writing is always disciplined and uncliched. The superheroic twists also require a leap on the reader's part that does not end in flight.

My life as a fake (Peter Carey 2003, unabridged, 9.5 hours on CD)
Peter Carey is an extraordinarily gifted writer, but this novel failed to really hold my attention. A literary fraud, perpetrated against the editor of a pretentious poetry journal called Personae, spawns an Escher-like loop: the fabricated bicycle mechanic becomes incarnate, and seeks revenge upon his fabricator. Carey alludes to Satan's anger in Paradise Lost and the rage of Frankenstein's monster, but his tale fails to carry anything like the weight of either precursor. Perhaps the most serious critique of Carey's new novel is that it cannot compare with the bold and amazing power of The True History of the Kelly Gang. It's unfair, of course, to demand that every novel be an awesome re-imagining of a fascinating underground folk hero. But if you haven't read the Kelly Gang, start there. This work, while lucid and well delivered, just isn't a great deal of fun.

Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film
(Peter Biskind; Simon & Schuster; 2004; 544pp)
A biting record of the span from 1989 to the present, Biskind wittily recounts the rise of Miramax and the way the brothers Weinstein (Harvey and Bob) have transformed the indie films. Robert Redford's Sundance is significant, but only as the backdrop. Redford's passive aggressive "lack of people skills" comes in for a critique, but the foreground is invariably Harvey & Bob's passionate aggression. The writing is superbly funny. Introducing the brothers, Biskind says: "Harvey Weinstein, born in 1952, was a paler, doughier version of Bob, who was two years younger. He looked like what he was, the first pancake off the griddle, before it's quite hot enough." p13 I bought this book just before flying off to Sundance this year; I must've seen a dozen people reading it in Park City, although one director, John Curran, who'd just sold his movie that day, told me on the shuttle bus that the book was impossible to find in Park City.
The 2 brothers (who named their company after their parents, Miriam and Max) express love through abuse, and hatred through higher levels of hostility. Unknown to most viewers, the brother Harvey has long earned the nickname "scissorhands" for his tendency to re-cut and shape a director's film to suit his own marketing plan. Amazingly, he managed to promote the utter Scandinavian downer film, "Pelle the Conqueror", as an action film that successfully ran in malls. The story of directors such as Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino is enmeshed with Miramax' own story; smaller fry are mentioned too, such as the distribution company October Films, which turns out to brought out some of my favorite films (The Celebration, Breaking the Waves, Happiness).
The paradoxes of "selling out" to promote your art have rarely been so explicitly articulated. It's apparently not atypical that the brothers Weinstein grossed over $200 Million on a film like the English Patient, yet did not pay out a penny beyond the initial $10 Million purchase price. Similar stories are told by Kevin Smith, the writer-director-silent actor behind Clerks and Dogma, as well as by the two jamokes who wrote and acted in Good Will Hunting.
The end of the book seems to anticipate yet another wave in the revolution, since Miramax drive for dominance has caused them to become almost another studio, with revenue goals per picture that undermine risk aversion, and push them toward releasing the same sort of bland features that currently come from large studios.

Orson Welles: A biography
(Barbara Leaming; Penguin; 1985; 700pp -- 24 hours On tape)
Orson Welles' image, like Clinton's, is inseparable from the appetites that brought about his fall. Until I read this book, I knew him as a peddler of wine on TV commercials, who had possibly earned these slots based on his earlier role as director of Citizen Kane. In fact, (according to this quasi-autobiography, based on Leaming's collation of Orson Welles' version of the story) he was a performer whose genius appeared in every forum he touched: upon the stage as an actor, soon thereafter as a theater director, then in radio, and finally in his first film, Citizen Kane. Immediately following high school, he wandered through Ireland, and ended up on the stage in Dublin, where he managed to get rave reviews in his first stage appearance.
At least part of Welles' secret was sparked by a manic need to fight against overwhelming opposition; by multiplying his projects, and juggling razors, his mind was brought to a focus. In 1939, he was TWA's most traveled customer, since he flew weekly between LA and NY, directing Kane while performing on radio and stage. Unfortunately, almost as soon as Kane was finished, his tendency to generate multiple distractions began to work against him. After bringing one film to completion, film per se no longer created sufficient challenges to hold his attention. He ran off to Brazil while his 2nd film, the Magnificent Ambersons, was in the final stages of being cut. The resulting delays damaged his reputation, and eventually so undermined his credibility that he never again was given sufficient free rein to generate the kind of madness necessary for his creative juices to flow. Just read the first 300 pages to learn about the astonishing accomplishments that are buried beneath the mass of Welles' ham-handed drive to re-establish himself. It's not just Citizen Kane, nor the War of the Worlds radio broadcast: he staged a WPA production of Macbeth in the Harlem renaissance that temporarily made him the "king of Harlem," and followed that with an infamous Cradle will Rock production that provoked the government to censor him.

Night Studio: A memoir of Philip Guston
(Musa Mayer; Da Capo Press 1997; 258pp)
An amazing artist, remembered by his daughter, with moving honesty. Guston has recently had a retrospective at SFMOMA, and it's currently showing in NY. When I saw the paintings in SF, I called my friend Steven to see if he could provide a gloss on how to ride along with all the transitional shifts in Guston's career. He recommended reading this book. Guston's earliest paintings in the '30s seem indebted to Picasso; then, he made murals a la Diego Rivera. But he soon became less figurative, and was lumped in with Rothko, de Kooning, and the other tough guys. Then, most significantly, in the mid-60s, he started to make work that is very cartoon-y: ku klux klan hoods in his own self-portraits, big shoes, junk heaps. A NYT art critic famously slammed this movement as "a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum."
The book is superb on showing the great charisma of the artist, as well as the intimate sensibility that drove him to live a life isolated from most of the art world; he cared about others' feelings in a way that seems to have compelled him to cultivate a deliberative egotism. It's inspiring to read his commitment to hammer away: "Frustration is one of the greatest things in art," my father wrote, "satisfaction is nothing." p102
Hilarious anecdotes pepper the memoir: "After they had visited one another's studios, Rothko once said to my father, 'Philip, you are the best storyteller around, and I am the best organ player.' Two years before his death, my father was still puzzling over this comment. 'That was in 1957,' Philip said, 'and I still wonder what he meant.'"p67
His daughter's recollections clearly document what her father sacrificed on the altar of his art. Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that he ended up addicted to alcohol, self-medicating an ulcer by drinking vodka and milk in such quantities that he experienced DT's when he went into the hospital after a heart attack. The partnership with his wife would be inconceivable today, unless it were sex-reversed. "Musa [his wife] was a support system the likes of which most people never have." p113 This book expresses the charisma of Guston, and helps explain the awe of all of those who came into contact with his personality. Although it's an end-run toward appreciating his paintings, I found myself able to connect on a deeper level after seeing the seriousness that he poured into his life's work.

What should I do with my life (Po Bronson, on CD, abridged, read by the author):
This was the first bot I read in 2004, and it suits the reflective, big-picture questions that come up around New Year's. I'd been intrigued by the title, and have been a fan of Bronson's after reading both of his novels, Bombardiers & the First $20 Million is the Hardest.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the (abridged) book is how much it deals with what Po Bronson's thought about what to do with Po's life. He recently became a father, and describes the choices that enabled him to research this book while maximizing the time spent with his wife and new-born son. That, in itself, is a really inspirational story.
Additional life stories: The book starts with someone who was personally chosen by the Dalai Lama as a very-important-reincarnation. The guy holds a letter that told him and his family about his super-significance. Since many people aspire to achieve such high status, it's interesting to reflect on how little impact this appears to have had on the current choices made by this person, who now lives in Arizona, and appears to run a non-profit on the side, while just soaking up rays and chatting with his buddy Po.
An uber-consultant from BCG switched lives to devote himself to managing a cat-fish pond in the Mississippi delta; another person left law behind to be a truck driver with more time for his family.
The stories, while interesting enough, did not seem to sharpen how to approach what seem to be the main questions:
1- If your current work is killing you, what process will take you through the reflective stages to find a more balanced life-work arrangement?
2- How do you know when to follow your bliss, if the money doesn't follow?
The best parts of the book are Po's own autobiography. I think he wrote in the foreword to the First $20MM that he had turned down a job making $300K a year, because he saw it wasn't interesting enough. There's more detail on this, and on earlier jobs that drove him to desperate rebellious acts. I'd rate this book as less compelling than either What color is my parachute or Barbara Sher's Wishcraft. But if you've read those, and you still need more stories to jumpstart you out of a bourgeois bubble, then this is worth a scan.
[Note: I scanned the book 'on paper', unabridged, and it contains considerably more life stories than are recounted in the 5-CD abridgement. But my general rule for abridgements is: If the short version isn't amazing, then I'll wait till I've finished reading all the uncountably many compelling books before giving the unabridged version a shot.]