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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bunch of Sunset books on homes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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