The Secret Life of Bees
(Sue Monk Kidd, unabridged, 11 CDs)
Few books get a chance with me to wobble at the outset. But this started a little weak on the bee-allegory, and yet came into focus as a beautiful story of a white girl growing up in the South in 1964. Praise the black Madonna!

Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
(Jim Collins & Jerry I. Porras, unabridged 9 CDs)
Business books are a particular genre of history plus pep talk. This one is not terrible, and it actually has a few sporty nuggets. 1) Many significant companies (Sony, HP) had no "business plan" when they began, simply a plan to find some way to be a business. 2) It can be very motivating to have a big hairy audacious goal. Almost every other generalization draws from their sociological method of picking winners, and matching them against comparably ancient companies that don't make the grade. One serious gap in their recommendations: They glorify HP for promoting from within, and predict dire things for IBM because of the going outside to Gerstner. But look who made the late '90s with flair, and who copied who.
I would not have read this book in entirety had it not come with a recommendation from Jared Spool. This could definitely be improved through abridgement.

At home with pictures : arranging & displaying photos, artwork & collections
(Paige Gilchrist, 160 pp)
Fresh, useful and interesting suggestions for ways to display pictures.

Pottery Barn Storage & Display
(Martha Fay, 192pp)
Trite prose packed chock full with campy cliches. Some helpful ideas can be gleaned from the photos, but this book lives up to the pedestrian aspirations of its mother Brand. The biggest flaw in this factory-extruded book is its failure to even address home offices.

Things Fall Apart
(Chinua Achebe, 6 CDs; stopped after 1 CD)
Flinty novel about life in Ibo village. I punted because the wife-beating and harsh competitive drive of the main character was not what I am about these days.

DNA: The Secret of Life
(James Watson & Andrew Berry, unabridged, 18 hours)
It would be unfair to compare the lean, fast-paced *Double Helix* with this more portly tome, since a lot has happened in the last 50 years. James Watson is THE person to review that span of history; he begins by reprising his co-discovery of DNA with Crick, and then reviews the unfolding that lead to the Human Genome Project. His account of running the HGP makes for the best stories, and he ultimately was forced out because of his objections to the rampant patenting that was blocking productive research. In the last chapters, he vents his opinions on the ethical implications of genetic research, which come as no surprise. I frequently wished it were shorter, more technical, yet just as wide-ranging.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
(Mark Haddon, 6 CDs, unabridged; quit after 1 CD)
The Hound of the Baskervilles re-cast with an Asperger syndrome kid as Holmes. I can think of much more interesting ways to find out about the experience of those with high functioning autism (Asperger syndrome); read Dawn Prince-Hughes collection of autobiographical essays, *Aquamarine Blue 5: Personal Stories of College Students With Autism*

The Making of Modern Economics: The Lives and Ideas of the Great Thinkers
(Mark Skousen, unabridged, 21 hours)
Many economists were brilliant, and their life stories are worth a listen. The book seems to have come from the lecture notes of a motivated teacher, who opens each biographical essay with a chosen musical piece (e.g., Adam Smith is coupled to Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man). The notes are occasionally repetitious, and often too list-like in their accounting of the relevant points. Still, on the whole, this is an interesting brief tour of the men (there's only one woman included) and their ideas. There are very colorful anecdotes about Schumpeter, Thorsten Veblen, and Mises and Hayek. In terms of ideas, this historical review is strongest on the 19th century, with an account of Malthus, Marshall, and the marginal men.

Samadhi : Personal Journeys to Spiritual Truth
(Derek Biermann, 150 pages)
A set of photo essays that could be compared to my favorite, *I'm not crazy, I just lost my glasses*. There are brief stories from each Samadhi, although this term is used inclusively, to cover Tibetan Buddhists, Muslim devotees, and even one Christian aspirant.

The Kalahari Typing School for Men
(Alexander McCall-Smith, unabridged, stopped after 1 CD)
I couldn't get interested in this, although I blame the narrator's voice rather than the prose.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
(David Sedaris, unabridged, 6 hours)
More funny vignettes, this time leavened with a greater depth of exposed nerves. While listening to this, I occasionally laughed so loud that bystanders must have known that I was mad. For reasons mysterious, I find the stories about his little brother The Rooster to be unbearably hilarious.

Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
(20 hours and 46 minutes, plus the 1 hour press conference)
Compelling narrative of the terrorist actions that built up to 9.11. I wouldn't have expected the government commission to tell a story, but that is what the first 500 pages do just that. Rarely does the commission say anything at all controversial, and the document presents facts that are not typically new to those who obsessively needed to read the news for the first year after the attacks. Ashcroft is mutedly marked as a liar, since only his testimony is remarked to have been contested. Another witness reported that the defender of Infinite Justice supposedly asked that all mention of terrorist threats be dropped, after hearing too much about it in the first two meetings after he was sworn in. Clarke is recognized to be the voice of reason, who occasionally irritated his peers with his alarm calls. It is heartening to read the Commission's recommendation that society openly debate the balance to strike with respect to the Patriot Act.

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (Brian Greene, unabridged, 22 hours)
Not everyone would multitask to the vibrations of theoretical physics, but I've enjoyed having this flow through me. The first 2/3 is a tour of relativity and quantum mechanics, but finally gets string theoretical in the last 7 hours. This book's exalted perspective encompasses those things that are smaller than a Planck distance all the way to those as big as multiple universes. Greene's continual stream of metaphors did not seem strained, although I'd had that impression from skimming his first book. His description of a tight rope finally helped explain how theories of space might have more than 3 dimensions, while making the extra dimensions very small; a tight rope seems one dimensional to the tight rope walker, but a little bug could crawl clockwise around the rope at any point, as well as moving left-right.

Democratic National Convention Days 3 & 4
(3: Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, John Edwards & 4: Joseph Biden, Wesley Clark, Madeleine Albright, John Kerry)
Clearly NOT a book, but audible.com has made it possible to hear, for free, the main speeches without using a TV or exposing myself to the drivel of the wage-earning punditry. I was surprised to hear Democrats lavish such praise on the military accomplishments of Kerry. I could add my own driveling commentary, but the distinctive idea here is that I am in thrall to the possibility of mainlining more direct news sources via my iPod.

Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel
(Scott Adams, unabridged, 6 cassettes, narrated by Norman Dietz)
Rancid cynicism. This book is no more fun than getting a back street gall-bladder transplant to mainline Scott Adams' bile. I jumped around and listened to about a 1/3 of this. If my iPod weren't in the Apple shop, I would have punted after 30 minutes.

Minority Report and Other Stories
(Philip K. Dick, 6 CDs)
Interesting, but... Most of the stories have an Escherian reverb that makes it possible to anticipate the twisted endings. Apparently, Dickians claim that the novels are the best place to trip over his mind's unique fears.

Getting to Yes
(Roger Fisher, William Ury, Bruce Patton; unabridged, 5 CDs)
I was surprised, while listening to this book, to realize that I have not mastered many of the techniques just because I'd already read the book 20 years ago. In fact, throwing tantrums and hissy fits are not even recommended as tactics. Perhaps this omission underscores the ways in which the tone of this book is a little *too* even-handed. E.g., these pie-expanders say something like "many people feel that genocide is wrong." Nevertheless, their exalted perspective articulates an emotional outlook that would be the ideal state to aim for when entering a negotiation.

Andy Warhol: A Penguin Life
(Wayne Koestenbaum, 224 pp)
Although this author's literary flaired nostrils occasionally get in the way of the story, there are many interesting stories about Andy Paperbag. There's almost nothing about the Velvet Underground, and I skimped over the first 30pp, and jumped in at the point of his late 50s book about pussy (cats). Given how "abstract" sex, people, and most social settings struck Warhol, he ought to be nominated to the Asperger hall of fame.

Hardball
(Chris Matthews, 240pp)
A quick tour of politics told through a stream of anecdotes. Without being superficial, it's pop-Machiavelli, illustrated almost entirely through funny stories about post-WWII politicians. Since the author worked for Tip O'Neill, he can speak with authority about how the game is played. There's a maxim that goes back to Benjamin Franklin, that's always mystified me: "If you want to make a person your friend, ask him for a favor." This book treats this in more detail, and helps illuminate how to build support for your own cause by making others your patrons.

Body and soul
(Frank Conroy, abridged to 3 hours, but I stopped after 90 minutes)
I heard about this book while watching the Stone Reader, a documentary paean to a middlebrow's Pynchon. Enthusiastic readers cannot make a bad book better. I was profoundly grateful that this little dud had been harvested from an originally much fatter thud.

Secrets
(Daniel Ellsberg, unabridged, read in parts by the author)
Even after one concedes that Iraq is not Arabic for Vietnam, this autobiography is compelling: Ellsberg was a brilliant Harvard Fellow who joined the Defense Dept in the early 1960s and received almost unlimited clearance to secret documents. His first day exposed him to the original cables reporting the Gulf of Tonkin incident. To seek better grounding, he traveled through Vietnam in a Jeep, at a time when most American troops where too scared to go anywhere without helicopter coverage. (A detail that evokes deja vu.) At every stage in his participation in the war, he reports his shock at peeling away the secrecy, to discover that even more confidential reports had pessimistically (and much more accurately) assessed the Vietnam war as un-winnable. Ellsberg speaks clearly about the allure of being in the loop. In contrast to the Wisdom of Crowds, here is the sad story of the idiocy and dangers of being ruled by secretive cabals. His stance, to heroically seek to unmask the emperor, triggered the Nixon plumbers to break into Ellsberg's shrink's office. Thus began the unraveling of the previous dirty trickster.

Hollywood Animal
(Joe Ezsterhas, unabridged, 28 hours -- started jumping around after 4, read about 7 hours)
Better stories than Bill Clinton's autobio, but also massively more self-indulgent, lacking in structure, and completely haphazard in presentation. This big fat cheeseburger hides inside itself juicy anecdotes, but should only be read in toto by dweebs who hope they can grow screenwriter cojones by imitating the master of macho. The tone is beyond self-parody, and so, is perhaps deliberate. E.g., wouldn't you love to hear some movie type brag that his Malibu house is better than neighbor Bob Dylan's, "because I have my own exposed cliff"? Ezsterhas treats his craft of screenwriting with respect, and although I haven't seen any of his movies, it is admirable to hear him say that he demands to write in solitude, submit his work as completed scripts, and refuse to be sucked into servicing producers and directors by allowing them to decompose his words.

Getting Things Done Fast
(David Allen, 12 cassettes)
Drucker recommends learning how to manage your time, consistent with your own personal style. I am not atypical in finding the task of project-managing the 10 claims on my time to be a battle field. Much of this stuff is profoundly obvious (write lists, step back to ask whether you should NOT do a task, create work structures that push things out of mind and onto paper). It's still worth reading, since I am not a 'black-belt' in mastering time. Because these tapes are aimed at "businessmen", it's a little tough to digest: Jazzy upbeat music which must have been OSHA-approved for keeping traveling salesmen awake, peppery anecdotes, down-home-isms that seem too varnished to be sincere. But the tips are worth the travel.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
(James Surowiecki, unabridged, 9 hours)
A pretty straightforward idea described in a compelling way. It overthrows the naive idea of a tipping point, and substitutes the statistical concept that the average notion of a dumb crowd is a smart bet. Hence, this book will not be nearly as popular as Malcolm Gladwell's. There is some re-treading of the New Yorker articles that Surowiecki publishes regularly on economics, but in this venue, they seem better developed and more cogent.

Pure Drivel
(Steve Martin, 2 CDs, unabridged)
Although some of these little notes struck me as funny when they ran in the New Yorker, I found it impossible to listen to them without feeling impatient.

Plan of Attack
(Bob Woodward, abridged, 6 CDs)
Is he tactful or just a sycophant? Either way, it's obvious that Woodward has the formula for gaining access to power. The book assiduously aims to report facts, without judgment. Every description refrains from drawing what seem to be inescapable conclusions about the Bush team's rush into war. Woodward even documents (or is it just CYA?) that he wrote a story for the Post about the lack of intelligence pointing to WMD. He says something like "maybe I should have pushed for this to be on the front page." The report of hours mingling with 'rock star'-like titans (Rice, Cheney, et al) reveals very little reflective discussion. Wolfowitz, the intriguing personality in the pack, has almost no mentions..

Independence Day
(Richard Ford; unabridged, 18 cassettes)
Not a false note in over 400 pp. (It's double bad luck for the author that his last name can easily be confounded with the other Ford, Harrison, and the title of the book may be misunderstood as a blockbuster screenplay. ) The narrator is edging into his 50s, trying to make sense of his relationship to his adolescent son, his ex-wife, his life in New England during the summer of Dukakis' sad run for the Presidency. The one solidity in his drift toward death may be his job as a real estate salesman. The book has many gems about the way people struggle to cope with the momentous obviousness of the way their home purchase will circumscribe and define their lives. In a tone of wistful sadness, Ford deftly handles the perils that a father and son face in trying to understand one another. I tried to read Chang Rae Lee's *Aloft* several times this year, since it seemed quite promising based upon the topics it floated over; in the end, I was forced to punt because it was just too dreary. Independence Day manages to touch most of the very same themes with a voice that is mesmerizing.

Harvard Design School guide to shopping
(Rem Koolhaas and GSD students, 800pp)
This is my favorite Koolhaas. Apparently each book he releases re-purposes earlier work, perhaps to instantiate archeological ruins; SMLXL quoted from Delirious New York, and Content reprinted the interview with Venturi that appears in this book, on Relearning from Las Vegas. Like the other Koolhaas' excesses, this contains weirdly visual infographics (fun fact: the retail space on the planet in 2000 equaled the surface area of 33 Manhattan Islands). The articles here are legible, informative, and full of fascinating takes on 'marketing research.' As one instance, there is more about Paco Underhill's research in here than I've been able to glean from looking at Underhill's own books.

Finding Her Voice: The saga of women in country music
(Mary Bufwack and Rober Oermann, 1993, 594 pp)
This is a great resource-- I read about half the pages, and although the first mentions of the Carter family are skimpy, there's just the right amount on Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, and tons of 2nd tier singers whose descriptions intrigued me. I wish there were a boxed set follow on to this.

My Life
(Bill Clinton, abridged to 6 CDs)
The original book is over 900 pp. Only audio readers can get his brothy self-assessment boiled down to a reasonable size. You may still want all the details for the 'climax' that opens on p800 in the unabridged paper version, but this account, read by the man himself, is a great listen. Like Hilary, I fondly recall when he was 'my president'. The stories usually move smoothly, and it is amazing how much happened in those great 8 years. For example, Newt Gingrich was fined $300K for inappropriate use of government money (how quickly I'd forgotten). The book is wrappered with allusions to Alan Lakein's *How to get control of your time and your life*. He opens the book with a story of being right out of law school when he took time to write up his A-list goals. The book closes with a rather platitudinous mention of his desire to keep motoring on.

Austerlitz
W.D. Sebald (298 pp; 6 CDs)
This is the first book I've encountered, unabridged, that should have come with an explicit warning that something crucial was lost in the read-aloud version. Sebald weaves a world around photos that is less arbitrary than Philip Greenspun's method; frequently, the text mentions details, such as the gaze or hairstyle of a person, which must surely have been written with the specific photo as its object. At times, the tangential worlds made me nostalgic for Flaubert's Parrot.

A Million Little Pieces
(James Frey, 8 CDs)
Someone who teaches high school addicts recommended this book to me as the most realistic account of addiction. The narrator opens the book at the point when he found himself on a plane he can't recall boarding, with his four front teeth knocked out from an ugly fall. Americans have a difficult time imagining a fate worse than bad teeth. But who can fathom the pain of root canals and crowns inflicted without pain killer (refused to him while he is in drug recovery)? Vivid language, which at times can sound like the muscular prose that comes from popping steroids. It's mostly focused on the life of rehab, and the arc of one tough guy's path toward full acceptance of responsibility for his decisions. (Note added in Jan 2006: Since Oprah's picked this book up, the documentary evidence for most of the tall tales has evaporated. The publishers have decided that the term "non-fiction" can be extended to cover dream sequences, Hemingway-style bragging, and better-than-life tall tales.)

The Best American Short Stories of the Century
(Updike edited this; many readers. Abridged to 8 cassettes, so many stories don't survive this 2nd winnowing, although each story read is entire)

Heard the 2nd volume of 4 cassettes first, and then flew over the first half of the century. 'The Things They Carried' read by the author, Tim O'Brien, was the most memorable of the lot. To choose Barthelme's 'A City of Churches' struck me as a bit arbitrary, and it tags the impossibility of a project to select THE BEST. Listening to Raymond Carver tales is more addictive than drinking, and still it's fun to just uncork one, 'Where I'm Calling From'. I still haven't figured out Lorrie Moore, although I mildly enjoyed her 'You're Ugly, Too'.

S,M,L,XL
(Rem Koolhaas and the gang, 1344 pp)
Beats me what this book is about, but it does touch on the topic of SIZE as a degenerate aspiration for architecture. There's flecks of ideas inside that are of interest. I didn't like it as much as the more recent Content; it felt less dense, more Wired, generally profane.

Ulysses
(James Joyce, 30 sound cassettes, 42.75 hours)
I didn't spend Bloomsday reading this, but let me point others toward this phenomenally rewarding reading. Avoid the reading by Frederick Davidson for Blackstone Audiobooks. This is the richest, most accessible, and most amazing trip you can take to Dublin. Make sure that Donal Donelly is the main narrator! Discover the oral pleasures of Joyce's prose!

My Experiments with Truth
(Gandhi, 3 CDs, abridged, read by Frederick Davidson)
Mahatma is not my main man-- he is so austere, so priggish. But it was fun to hear him intoned by the ultimate snide reader, my main man Frederick Davidson, who also reads under the pseudo-audio-nyms, David Case, Edward Raleigh, James Nelson, and Ian McKay.

American Rhapsody
(Joe Esterhaz, 12 cassettes)
A story about Bill Clinton and Monica would not seem to be a sizzler, but Joe Esterhaz crawls right inside the mind of "my President" (er, at least, into the mind of his penis). I only listened to the first 4 cassettes, and then jumped around trying to find good parts afterwards. It's never dull, and if the people who "played" the voices of Monica and Linda Tripp not been so irritating, I might have read more than half the book.

Fighting Terrorism
(Benjamin Netanyahu, 4 CDs, unabridged)
I listened to this (written in '95, but more relevant in the noughties), hoping to hear what a hard edged realist might say about how to respond to terrorism. Unfortunately, there's not enough here to improve the picture one harbors, where the world is passing through a very trying time, exposed to the threats of terrorists. Netanyahu does not offer more promise in responding to this than Ashcroft.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
(Michael Lewis, 8 CDs)
A good story, with a terribly misleading title. I thought this was about the unfairness of baseball salaries, and how it's ruining the game. So, I had little interest, until someone explained that it was about statistics, and how Billy Beane used math to exploit inefficiencies in scouts' estimations of talent. This is not as compelling as Lewis' Liar's Poker, but a lot of the tale's value comes in telling about the triumph of a nerd. Inspite of being about statistics, it has almost no real math in it, just the results of using math.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 13
(edited by Chris Ware, 264 pp)
Great gobs of depressive comics! Chris Ware, assisted by Ivan Brunetti, has collected the whole funhouse. Lynda Barry's piece on 2 questions ("Is it good?" and "Does it suck") was great. Every underground comic writer I've ever followed is in this volume: Adrian Tomine, Ivan B., July Doucette et al. Why are comix so prone to diary entries of self-loathing and despair?

Ravelstein
(Saul Bellow; 8 hours on cassette, unabridged)
Delightful memoir of friendship for the first 2/3, and then a pasted on mini-memoir of Bellow's own close brush with death. The life of Alan Bloom, raging humanist and homosexual, is well drawn, though the tale focuses almost entirely on his last years.

Mr Pine's Purple House
(Leonard P. Kessler, 61pp)
After 30+ years of mis-quotation, I have finally tracked down this locus classicus. It is not the superb little book my memory had written about a man who had to re-paint his house multiple times to overthrow his neighbors' copy-cat impulses.

The Secret Garden
(Frances Hodgson Burnett; punted after one cassette)
Positively pissy little girl, surely destined to bloom later, but I couldn't see any point in watching her grow.

Mary Poppins
(P.L. Travers, unabridged, 3 cassettes; stopped half way)
I'd become interested in children's books, after visiting a house displaying an entire library of classics. Mary Poppins is definitely worth sharing with a child, although her starchy touchiness is not quite as snappish as Willy Wonka.

Herzog
(Saul Bellow, 18 hours unabridged; stopped after 10)
A great story of a man with a PhD, who may be the modern Don Quixote, lost in books, crushed by love, attempting to align his messy life by organizing a campaign of letters. This was not the time in my life to read this, so I stopped half way to jump into a fresher Bellow.

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.]