Mark Twain : A Life
(Ron Powers, abridged, 9 CDs)
The beautiful dreamer, Mark Twain, chased a full life brimming with events of historical significance: Mississippi riverboating before the railroads changed America, the wild west and San Francisco in the 60s, wide travel to Hawaii, Palestine, all over Europe. He persuaded Ulysses Grant to write his memoirs, and in between these rambles, also managed to write Huck Finn, among other works. This abridged biography discusses Twain's projects, his indefatigable drive to lose money on inventor's schemes, and the emotional exhaustion he inflicted on those around him. One thing that seems worth remarking for its absence, especially after having spent a camping trip near the river: Not once does Huck, or any other character, complain about the mosquitoes on the Mississippi, but it would seem that in little eddies near the shore, they'd swarm. This might simply be read as proof of the habituation of 19th century Americans.

Warren Beatty : A Private Man
(Suzanne Finstad, abridged, 7 CDs)
Warren Beatty's life, particularly his early years, is extensively described in this book, without any effort to look beneath the claims he himself has advanced about himself. That's probably just as well, since he's an intelligent and highly intentional being, who has pursued a life that enabled him to become a producer, director, and actor. He has managed to get what he wanted. The abridged version doesn't include what I consider to be the essence of Beatty's approach to life, which he described as being bold enough to "get slapped a lot, but you also get lucky a lot". There's a recognition that he was a philanderer, but no explanation of how he pursued this activity, nor how he tried to explain it to women with whom he carried on long term relationships (Joan Collins, Judie Christie, Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Madonna).

The Informant
(Kurt Eichenwald, unabridged, 20 CDs)
ADM, sponsor of NPR commercials, and major corporate criminal, grabbed my attention after I'd finished the Omnivore's Dilemma, since that book focused an incredible light on how American diet is built on cheap corn, and the derivatives that can be extracted from it (e.g., citric acid). Executives at ADM are caught on tape saying something quite like "the competitor is our friend, and the customer is our enemy." This book starts off with a weird report from a president of a division (who was trained as a PhD in biochemistry) that the plant producing lysine was infiltrated by a Japanese mole, and that for $10 million, the Japanese would reveal the mole, as well as sell a bug that was immune to the contaminant introduced into their factory. The FBI starts an investigation, but then ADM tries to call it off, because they don't like having the law seeing into their doings. The president, Mark Whitacre, turns out to be a full blown sociopath. He eventually admits to the FBI that he'd fabricated the story of the Japanese mole, to cover for the problems his factory had been facing. Before this admission, though, the FBI discovers a widespread corporate policy of price-fixing, and Whitacre consents to be wired to record significant acts of collusion. Whitacre is a very irritating personality, and it's somewhat surprising to see that such a lying shit heel could ascend to senior management. (I don't grant that corporate structures actively seek such eals and reward them for their capacity to dissemble and cheat.) The Japanese and European companies apparently collude with much greater facility. The savvy Japanese executives resisted coming to a golf meeting in Hawaii, since they were aware that US laws were much stronger on anti-trust. In the book's final chapters, Whitacre goes down, first by throwing money into a Nigerian scam (in the pre-email early '90s, he was apparently suckered in by a fax offer). While throwing tons of dollars down this ditch, ADM mobilized its political chits and managed to prosecute their whistleblower for his own embezzlements, and extracted over $10 million that he had stolen, as well as the forfeit of all his salary. Whitacre, a real life Eddy Haskell, was sentenced to 9 years in prison, much more time than the family heir, Mick Andreas, who held the position of vice-chairman during all this corporate vice. One thread in the story that undermines the reporter Eichenwald's fact-finding: he simply describes, without assessment, the FBI's keenness to get the pathological liar to submit to lie detector tests. I would have thought witchcraft was over and done for, but that's clearly not the case yet.

Arthur and George
(Julian Barnes, unabridged, 17:14)
Barnes has been a favored author of mine, dating back to his playful Flaubert's Parrot. This novel weaves together the true story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a man who would be all-but lost to history, George Eddalji, were it not for Doyle's late life quest to save George from a flagrantly injust imprisonment. For the first half of the book, both characters unfold without awareness of one another. Doyle's persona is not quite likable, but neither, then, is George's. The story succeeds in exploring the private worlds of two men, each of whom aspires to be connected to a world of progress: Eddalji aspired to live the life of common law, and Doyle hoped somehow to detect the laws of hidden vibrations behind spiritualism. As the last pages remark, Eddalji was Britain's Dreyfus, and Doyle the Zola in the affair; but because it was Britain, there was no fuss, no lasting awareness of a wrong done, and an impressive procedural response (the invention of a court of criminal appeals) that made everything (except Eddalji's three years in prison) all for the better.

The San Francisco century: a city rises from the ruins of the 1906 earthquake and fire (Carl Nolte and the San Francisco chronicle staff, 255 pp)
Not at all penetrating about the city's history; the depth of the coverage is more on the lines of a post card memento. The book doesn' aim to be history, since, as the title claims, it's really just boosterism. Even on areas which are quintessentially San Francisco, e.g., the summer of love or the centrality of the city to gay rights, there's little more than a few photos interleaved among a couple of pages.

Don't Forget to Write: 54 Enthralling and Effective Writing Lessons for Students 6-18
(Contributors: Jenny Traig, Sarah Vowell, Neal Pollack, Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida, and more!; 208pp)
826Valencia is the writing program for kids that brought Dave Eggers back to San Francisco (or was it Eggers who brought the tutoring program?). It's an inspiring space, where kids can participate in every kind of writing workshop: Write a guidebook of your neighborhood, make your own jokes, invent your own country, sportswriting, short-short stories, and scores more. Jenny Traig, the comedic voice behind Devil in the Details, contributed significantly, as she's the creator or co-creator of 5 exercises here. Most have been road-tested, and come with very clear guidelines and helpful tricks for staying on-track. Neal Pollack's plan for Bad writing is thinner than most of the others, and reads more like a plan for a plan. This exception highlights how substantial, even crunchy, most of the lessons are. Many include writing samples from earlier participants. I bought this book for my own self-instruction, rather than to share with a young writer. Almost any of the tips, techniques, and tricks offered here would be perfectly appropriate for an adult writing workshop, and I'm sure the accomplished authors who have donated lesson plans here could use these same exercises when teaching at expensive writing retreats.

The Bob Dylan scrapbook : 1956-1966
(Robert Santelli, editor, 64pp)
A scrapbook of Experience Music Project memorabilia, combined with extended liner notes, and a nice CD of radio interviews from the young trickster, along with about 40 minutes clipped from the recent Scorsese documentary on Dylan. This adult-pop-out book apparently could only be accomplished with assemblers in Malaysia.

The Omnivore's Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals
(Michael Pollan, unabridged, 15:58)
Mollie Katzen recommended this highly when she recently visited Berkeley's Black Oak bookstore. It was a pleasure to listen to, almost immediately after I'd had a chance to visit an inspiring community supported farm, Full Belly, in Yolo county. Pollan mobilizes superb intelligence and critical self-awareness, as he traces the origins of his food, uncovering the damage done to cows when they're fed on corn rather than grass, how that changes the fat chemistry, and may well create 'bad fat' in the same way that margarine turned out to be bad saturated fats. He turns over the moral dilemmas of vegetarians, tracking down Peter Singer, who admits in email that healthy farms, rather than torturous abbatoirs, may well make meat eating defensible. In the final chapter, Pollan hunts his own wild boar, gathers his own fungi, fishes his own abalone, and gardens his own faba beans and cherries, all toward creating the Perfect Meal. This meal, held in Berkeley on June 18th (2005, apparently), is mobilized to involve as many 'kingdoms' as possible. It's unfortunate that Pollan didn't expose himself to a little more background on what makes a kingdom; if he had, the 'mineral' kingdom (sic) which draws from sea salt, would not count. I loved his tails of tracking mushrooms, and found it fascinating that he could culture yeast from the air (apparently, that's just another fungus).

Game of Shadows : Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports
(Mark Fainaru-Wada & Lance Williams, unabridged, 9 CDs)
A riveting tale of cheating in baseball, track and field, and the NFL. This book was mentioned on Malcolm Gladwell's blog, and it sounded quite interesting. As a non-baseball fan, this counts as the second sports book that held my attention; Moneyball ranks as a more interesting and thought-provoking tale, but this account of adequate hitters and runners turning themselves into record holders deserves to be heard. Scott Brick's staccato narration suits the just-the-facts history, with Bonds succumbing to temptation in 1999, after years of being fueled by pure arrogrance. Once he began juicing, the home run records just began tumbling. I had only been remotely familiar with the brouhaha surrounding this story, and felt that the jury was still out; with this book's documentary evidence, there's grounds for convictions. Some day there will have to be an asterisk next to each of Bonds' records, or every athlete in the future will have to take the same drugs to have any hope of competing.

The simple home
(Charles Keeler, with a new intro by Dimitri Shipounoff; 72pp)
This 1904 book was republished in 1977. It's a delightful big pamphlet, capturing a lot of the enthusiasms of the Northern California of the '90s: sunlight, gardens, jogging (or 'running around the block'), vegetable food, simplicity. All that's missing is meditation and bio-diesel, but since this book hails from the 1890's, it's nice to see that Berkeley-ites of the last 100 years have added a few twists.

Sweet and Low: A Family Story
(Rich Cohen, unabridged, 7:39)
A great tell-all, written by the author of Tough Jews, and the son of Herb "You can negotiate anything" Cohen. The writing is fine, and the family saga covers the bittersweet tale of a grandfather who built the Sweet n' Low saccharine packet brand, and the eventual disinheritance of Rich Cohen's mother from this million dollar cash geyser. Further tragedy (or schadenfreude-ish karmic satisfaction) transpired when the favored first son, uncle Marvin, ended up embroiled with mafia-types, who helped the uncle steal from the factory. This dirty laundry came out, and resulted in a conviction that sent the uncle to jail for a spell. As the author makes clear, because of his mother's disinheritance, all he got was the 'story', and he mines this with compassion and articulate balance, while never holding back on the punches that fate dished out to every member of his extended family.

At Canaan's Edge : America in the King Years, 1965-68
(Taylor Branch, abridged, 8 CDs)
This book discusses a time, about 40 years ago, when Americans were being brutally treated by the state, poorly protected by the Federal Government, and spied upon without justification by the FBI. (Sounds a lot like today, when state-sponsored violence is undercutting some of the very tenets of what our Constitution upholds.) It was very disturbing to hear about the horrific brutality that police in the South directed toward Blacks who were protesting for their civil rights. By the later 1960s, King's linkage of civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, and poverty exposed him to oppression even in Chicago. This book is the third volume in the life of King, and it's unfortunate that it was abridged. One thing that seems much clearer to me after listening to this: A lot of the reactions of the 1960s, especially the anti-authoritarian impulses, must have sprung from seeing the Southern Police upholding a brutal and injust social order.

Hey Nostradamus
(Doug Coupland, unabridged, 6 CDs)
An exploration of Columbine, from the perspective of some of the victims, as well as a parent, and a stranger who encounters a wounded survivor years later. Glib, occasionally brilliant, but not terrifically engaging. The first and last parts (of two true believers, although each struggles with doubts) were especially hard to click into. I was surprised to discover that Coupland has written 10 books, and this is only the 3rd I've read. Compared with Microserfs and Generation X, this was the least of the three.

The arts & crafts companion
(Pamela Todd,
A useful tome that pulls together different reference chapters. One section has capsule paragraph-length bios on the major players, organized alphabetically. Other sections cover architecture, furniture, textiles, ceramics, gardens. Paging through this provides a nice overview, although this volume does not aim to be the ultimate resource, but rather a brief go-to for overviews. I learned items of interest while paging through each chapter.

Outwitting history: the amazing adventures of a man who rescued a million Yiddish books (Aaron Lansky, unabridged, 7 cassettes)
This is a poignant tale, which began as a young student's obsession to collect and save Yiddish books on the edge of annihilation. The story necessarily lives in the shadow of the Holocaust; in one anecdote, Lansky discusses his experiencing the rage of an old man upset at the Yiddish books being collected for an archive. The man admitted that his rage was really directed at Hitler, who had killed almost all the readers of the books now being carted off. Lansky devoted an awesome amount of energy to truck drives toward NY, NJ, and the Eastern seaboard, saving books that were literally in the dumpster. He also met and learned the stories of many old Leftist yiddish writers, who, even at the end of their lives, refused to reconcile rifts with other yiddish writers. One person savored the phrase "I used to wake up early every morning, just so I could devote a few extra hours to hating Asch." Woody Guthrie's wife played a pivotal supportive role in the early days. (One odd little fact: Arlene hired a Hebrew teacher for Arlo and sister, who was kicked out of his yeshiva for being too fanatical. Arlene kept him on as the tutor, and years later, saw him (Meir Kahane) on TV news.) Lansky's tale complements the linguistic analysis of Wex's Born to Kvetch, and Lansky devotes energy to describing his efforts to assist in saving Yiddish books for future generations, even as he is self-consciously aware of his own limitations as a yiddish speaker.

Stumbling on Happiness
(Daniel Gilbert, 7:26)
A free ranging review of psych experiments without a lot about happiness per se. Rather, Gilbert discusses phenomena revealing biases and distortions, many revolving around failures in prediction. It's interesting to learn about our tendency to believe that our own case is exceptional, even in the face of evidence showing that other people make the most accurate predictions when they use a randomly selected proxy as a predictor of their own response to an experience. The book's greatest strength comes from the earthy examples used to demonstrate studies which I'm rather familiar with. The author's over-reliance on Shakespeare quotes, on the other hand, is a quirk that rarely pays off. Although his humor is occasionally grating, there's a world of difference between this edited book, and the style with which he presented an overview of his book in a podcast I heard from SXSW. In the 1 hour talk, Gilbert's almost always annoying, whereas in the book, it's exceptional to find his reach for yucks grating.

My Life in France
(Julia Child & Alex Prud'Homme, unabridged, 10 CDs)
A very interesting work, pieced together from Julia's letters as well as tales shared with her grand-nephew, Alex. The light movement across decades focuses most clearly on the early years in France, when Julia became committed to French cuisine. After that, the pace quickens, and she dives in to detail her first TV shows on public television in Boston. Her collaboration with Simcha (Simone Beck) is well treated: the Child's home in the South of France was built on Beck's own property. Over the years, the two collaborators began to be at odds, perhaps due to the ascendancy of Julia's star, and the refusal of Simone to share equally in the decisionmaking. One thing shines on every page, and that is the incredibly hard work that went into the original volume of Mastering French Cooking. As but one example, Paul Child was responsible for representing the US at the Cannes Film Festival, and although the book was still years from completion, Julia denied herself all but one or two parties across the two week gala, so that she could put in solid devotion to her book. It is a true inspiration to read of someone so devoted to the details of her craft, and to hear of the many times she had to fight to get the first volume into the hands of a respectful publisher.

New Games Book
(Stewart Brand, George Leonard, and others, 1976, 193pp)
This book shows its roots in the late 60s, early 70s, and yet it still holds a great deal of originality. Stewart Brand reveals in the opening essay that he wanted to get hippies out of their heads, when they were busy protesting the war. So he organized a physical game, called Slaughter, where people had to work to pull (not push) each other off a mat. The games outlined in this book include some new, some old (British bull dog), and some that may have been new at the time but now are classics (Frisbee golf). Another aspect of this that seems dated is the attempt to bind in a book a lot of social practices that were evolving; it seems so compelling today to think of how much such a write up would benefit from being a web site rather than a paperback. Besides Brand and Leonard, another interesting person involved in this book is Bernie De Koven, who is listed as the founder of a play space/retreat named The New Games Foundation.

Spies
(Michael Frayn, unabridged, 6 CDs)
Everything Michael Frayn does is guaranteed to be well-written and thought provoking, but this story doesn't have a lot of fascination for me. The plot turns on the world view of young children in WWII England, who insist that someone in their neighborhood is a German spy. All the children reveal themselves to be little pitchers with parabolic eyes, whose misunderstandings reflect interesting or humorous readings on the adults under their watch. Like Frayn's novel about the mistaken Brueghel painting (Headlong), the whole tale turns on a leap of thought. As a reader, it's not a very compelling leap to pursue.

The Truth (with jokes)
(Al Franken, unabridged, 9 CDs)
Each book that Franken publishes on politics distills the quintessence of his intelligent wonkitude. Just as I have with his earlier think pieces (Limbaugh's fat) and (Lies and the lying liars) I learned a lot. Since the world has been nosediving into a cesspit, this book taught me some very discouraging facts underlying Bush's incompetence and the cavalier manipulators who have tried to escape reality by invoking their own pat dogma.

Rodin: A Biography
(Frederic V. Grunfeld, unabridged, 19 cassettes)
A master's life in a panoramic setting that covers his long struggle to be recognized. The book is rather free-ranging, rather than scholarly, yet there's a vivid sense of Rodin that comes through the anecdotes. It's strange to discover that the revolutionary sculptor read right-wing newspapers, and even years after Dreyfus had been freed, Rodin remained convinced of his guilt. As the Dreyfus affair occurred when Rodin was on the verge of universal acclaim, it put a kink in his ascendancy. The fate of Rodin's Gates of Hell presents an amusing tale of taking a weakness and turning it around; Rodin apparently had no overall scheme for the Gate, and planted virtually every item his fancy alighted upon. Eventually, it became impossible for him to declare it was finished, and after decades of procrastination, he announced to visitors of his studios that his refusal to finish was a mark of his exacting nature.

Handsome Is: Adventures With Saul Bellow: A Memoir
(Harriet Wasserman, 194pp)
I bought this after re-reading Augie March, since the title expresses well the charm that Bellow must have worked on others, and I'd wanted to dip into his biography. Harriet Wasserman was his agent for 25 years, and this brief book (with ample blank pages between each chapter) does not aspire to be a tell-all, yet conveys much of the particularity of his wiles and allures. As an agent, she saw a lot of Bellow, even spoke with him daily on the phone, and her distinctive mind earned her the significant role of playing Bellow's first reader. She reveals a certain fastidiousness: in one anecdote, she charily recalled the rather repulsive offer that Bellow made to her of a portion of 'an already opened chocolate bar.' He hooked her into agent'ing for Allan Bloom, virtually against her will, and the shower of cash that rained down on her and Bloom is well described in Bellow's Ravelstein. The tale ends awkwardly, since Bellow is courted by a jackal agent, and he contrived to have Harriet negotiate his current contracts, and have the Wylie jackal milk his previous publications. She stridently refused to cooperate, and as she eventually realized, her final act as Bellow's agent was to fire herself.

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor--and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!
(Tim Harford, unabridged, 12:30)
Adequate, occasionally interesting tour of ideas drawn from economics, mapped onto the vernacular and urgent topics such as Fair Trade coffee. The explanations are not consistently lucid (e.g., the discussion of Ken Arrow's 'head start theorem', about which I'd never heard, hardly helped me understand what was supposedly proved). Many interesting ideas are tossed about -- For example, I had never considered the possibility that low barriers to entry into the coffee market means that Fair Trade in that commodity will only encourage more farmers to pursue that precarious means of supporting themselves.

Henry Darger : art and selected writings
(edited bb Michael Bonesteel, 254pp)
I was exposed to Darger's work at the Museum of American Folk Art, and the tableau of little naked girls with penises disturbed me enough that I sought to learn more. This book opens with a 35 page essay about his life, and the remainder excerpts from his vast writings that created a fantasy "Realm of the Unreal" in which he spent most of his time. What can be said about a person who started a biographical "The History of My life" that runs for 5,084 pages, the great majority of which concerns the first person perspective of a tornado named 'Sweetie Pie'? This book raises a lot more questions than it can possibly answer.

Killing Pablo : The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw
(Mark Bowden, unabridged, 9 cassettes)
Fascinating story of a narco-terrorist, and these days, the latter half of that epithet looms larger than it did when Pablo Escobar operated up through the early 1990s. Escobar maintained his cool even while pursued by death squads and US special ops. His charm concealed a bottomless capacity for cruelty: his most heinous crime was to trick a man into carrying a 'recording device' onto an Avianca flight; when it was activated, it blew up the unwitting courier and killed 110 people, all of whom died in order to execute one politician. He brutally killed anyone who mentioned his arrest record, yet in his private office, proudly displayed framed photos of his mug shots. His billions enabled him to build soccer stadiums and housing projects in Medellin, which insured great loyalty in his native state. His charisma and trickster impulses cannot be ignored, although the danger he posed through his network of power, insisting that everyone either accept a "bribe or be killed" (colloquially, 'plomo o plata,' which translates as lead or silver) undermined the legitimacy of the Colombian government. The book underscores how smuggling can be allied with a language of indigenous empowerment, and how the generated wealth enables forces to become qvirtual states, with airforce, army, and massive infrastructure. Since 9/11, it's been clear that the ease of smuggling drugs demonstrates our vulnerability to more threatening infiltration. This book demonstrates that the drug war all but insures that the underground has a fluid currency for funding all their darkest projects.

Kafka on the Shore
(Haruki Murakami, unabridged, 19:30)
A weird, ghostly tale, with a prominent place for cats, a strange invocation of an Oedipal conflict, and sprinkles of whimsy. I've greatly enjoyed the short stories of Murakami's that I've come across, and so I snapped up the opportunity to listen to his new novel. I didn't find this as enjoyable as his short stories; it's also a struggle for me to grasp what the name Kafka alludes to. (It doesn't even make me think of the superiority of short stories over the novels, since both the Trial and the Castle have made me laugh almost to tears.) The story includes evocative threads, and since there's a central character who blacks out whenever his rage leads him to violence, it struck me that this may be a metaphor for Japan's amnesia about WWII.

Arts & Crafts Houses I and II
(edited by Beth Dunlop)
These two volumes are detailed studies, each looking closely at 3 houses, with architectural plans, historical context, and photographs. For all that, the erudite approach doesn't provide a deep sense of connection to the homes studied, although with the proper training, the blueprints might enable an ambitious soul to build scale models. The first volume contains McKintosh's home, as well as Greene & Greene's Gamble house, so it was much more interesting than the companion.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading : Finding and Losing Myself in Books
(Maureen Corrigan, unabridged, 6 cassettes)
As a tapeworm who spends so much time inside the many worlds of authorial voices, this title immediately caught my ear. Corrigan reviews books for NPR, so she's intimate with the ways of speaking to listeners; she also teaches lit at Georgetown, and writes reviews for the Washington Post. Her memoir weaves together her favorite reads, using those passionate readings to reflect on her own life events. Her early confession to have written her dissertation about Eric Gill the obscure hooked me, since Gill is the strange and romantic designer/typographer (whose type I thought was used by the London Underground, until wikipedia set me straight today). My one quibble with this memoir is that it's mostly about books, rather than about reading. The text, Lost in a book, was too sociological; Corrigan's is too particular, focused on the Catholic Martyr lit, as well as other books and genres she deeply appreciated. There's still room for someone to simply discuss what it means to prefer the company of books.

The Good Life
(Jay McInerney, unabridged, 10 CDs)
McInerney has written a pot-boiler, nearly a soap-operatic tele-novela, describing the lives of the jaded Tribeca crowd who are drowning in excess money, but feel caught in a cage where trips to Europe are vetoed by the petty ambition to stick around for the summer scene in the Hamptons. I am surprised to have finished this, since it's bloodless, remote, and virtually every character is an unattractive adulterer. It's my own personal flaw that I'm sufficiently fascinated by this world of investment bankers that I trawled through the novel, knowing that the rewards weren't going to ever bump upward. Jay McInerney wrote a very arch and funny first novel; nearly 20 years later, this could be classed with Woody Allen's late work, although it's at least about real people. The further I fell into this dry whine, the more I wanted to return to Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park, and finish his book, which is considerably more bitchy, cutting, and psychologically penetrating (even though it's unfortunately set in Southern California).

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently
(Marcus Buckingham, unabridged, 7 CDs)
For business books, this is very well written, with clear images, vivid examples, and useful discussions. I would not rate it as highly as Buckingham's later book, Now Discover Your Strengths, which dives into the pith of his message, namely, people are all different, and good management requires designing work to leverage the key skills and talents of the people who are going to carry that work out.

Born To Kvetch CD : Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods
(Michael Wex, read by the author)
My favorite book of the year! Michael Wex has crafted a diamond, where every sentence contains light, every paragraph shines with insight, and there is virtually not a single wasted word. The attention to the Talmud's role in soul to Yiddish is beautifully displayed throughout the book, with fascinating discussions of all sorts of arcane injunctions (e.g., that a child is prohibited in the Talmud from referring to his parents by their first names). Each point's force is amplified through an assessment of the way the language adapted to the cultural constraints of Eastern European scholars. As just one example of the dense insight that Wex lavishes on this book, in a toss-away line, he mentions the opening lines of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with their celebration of April ('in swich licour'). Wex points out that the poetry is so entrancing that no one seems to notice that April in England is pretty rotten, and that Chaucer's really invoking an allusion to Bocaccio's Italian spring, rather than actual London weather. This learned point buttresses Wex's analysis of the many-leveled debts encrypted in Yiddish, with mentions of the everyday that may have perished in Babylonia as if they were current. As an extra amazing treat, Wex reads his own book, with a unique sing-song prosody that demonstrates how even English can be spoken as Yiddish.

The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream
(Paulo Coelho, 176pp)
This very simple story exhorts young people to seek their dream, no matter how discouraging the world's response may be. I had an uncanny sense of deja vu, thinking back to the 70s version of this message, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It would be very easy to quibble with the book, since it didn't zing for me, but everyone should seek their own hot tamale. The one place where the book went from being a simple fable to a facile stereotype is surely the bone for all who pursue singlemindedly their own fulfillment: Love relationships aren't easily susceptible to such monistic summations, and the woman who loves the boy in this story apparently exists only to love him, rather than to pursue her own bliss.

Fragments of a future scroll: Hassidism for the here and now
(Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, 161pp)
This book, published in 1975, evokes the Aquarian spirit that reb Zalman aimed to inscribe. The second half of the short book is composed of translated selections from Hassidic rabbis, the range and choice tracing to whether Zalman believed the text managed to "re-turn-on." Initially, I'd thought that was meant only to evoke the hippie ideal of turning on, but on second thought, it struck me that the whole spiritual mission of renewal judaism is to return to traditions, and turn them on with a new approach to returning.

Bernard Maybeck: Artisan, architect, artist
(Kenneth H Cardwell, 256pp)
The text contains a lot of valuable biographical details, which was originally sparked by the author's relationship to a (nearly)-octogenarian Maybeck, starting in 1940. The information about Maybeck's family, his own education, the disappointments he faced with unflinching optimism. His response to viewing so many of his works go up in smoke in the 1922 Berkeley fire was to focus on re-building and improving. After he crafted the Christian Science building near campus, his workload tapered off, and he was forced to take work as a draftsman in a colleague's office. Amazingly, in this menial post, he drew up a stunning sketch of the Palace of Fine Arts, and his friend generously insisted that Maybeck take over the role of architect. I hadn't realized that the original Palace was built of sham materials, and it wasn't until 1962 that the decaying structure was rebuilt with real pink marble. Another discovery, at least to me, is that Maybeck's responsible for designing an entire college campus outside of St. Louis, called Principia.

Bar Mitzvah Disco : The Music May Have Stopped, but the Party's Never Over
(Roger Bennett, Nick Kroll & Jules Shell, with dozens of contributors, 256pp)
This photo album with essays achieves an almost miraculous level of compassion toward the zitty, awkward, leisure-suited earlier selves displayed for all the world to see. Even looking at the 70s, 80s, and early 90s hairstyles of strangers can make a person wince, and yet this book comes out a winner, celebrating the awkwardness, exploring the angst and distractions, while capturing a wide range of experiences with guest essays from writers (AJ Jacobs, author of The Know It All), comedians (such as Sarah Silverman), and others with adult life bios that record their successful transition to designers, teachers, investment bankers, sitcom writers. Although this could bloom into a massive web site with literally tens of thousands of personal stories, the editors have done an excellent job of making the essays cumulate to reveal many facets of the glitzy bar mitzvah experience: competition with peers, coping with ultra-assimilated Reform shuls, harboring great hopes of being successful for one hour, faking a stumble over the transliterated Heeblish to trick the audience into believing the text was actually being read in Hebrew.

Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad
(David Zucchino, unabridged, 11 cassettes)
This book transformed my understanding of what soldiers faced as they took Baghdad -- I began reading this April 4, and as it covered events which occurred exactly 3 years earlier. Like most Americans, I spent the last 3 years assuming that the capture of Iraq's capital was a cake walk. This book corrects that facile assumption, by recounting exactly what kind of chaos the soldiers faced, and the intense, suicidal opposition they faced as they closed in on the airport and palaces. Zucchino's writing is so vivid, and his information so detailed, that one almost can't help assuming that this gives direct understanding of what it felt like to be there. That's a tribute to the writing, even though all the book can possibly convey is the unpredictability of injury, the horrifically graphic carnage, and the lack of guaranteed safety that was bought by the massive power superiority of the US over Iraqi forces. Even though American soldiers killed their opponents with as much ease as in a video game, it's obvious that the work atmosphere of rocket-propelled grenades, flying shrapnel, explosions and fires is not a calm and safe environment. Ultimately, 148 soldiers died taking Baghdad, and although far more have died since, and orders of magnitude more Iraqis have died in each span of time, this book is the best account of what dangers feel like, and exactly what happened in that combat. The book, Imperial Grunts makes a telling contrast: Zucchino shows the day to day details, without ever explicitly evaluating the stance of the soldiers on either side; Kaplan's book praises them, without ever making his adoration persuasive or concrete. I came to profoundly empathize with the complex fate of our soldiers by hearing this story.

The Island at the Center of the World : The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
(Russell Shorto, unabridged, 15 CDs)
This is a great story, told in pedestrian prose that initially put me off when I tried to listen. But I gave it another poke, and was drawn in by the surprising discoveries that are revealed about the Dutch contribution to America's tradition of religious tolerance and jealous protection of rights. Our Puritan heritage has obscured the fact that the Dutch prevented the Protestant Taliban from 'purifying' our country of its diversity. The author is a hack writer, who invariably reaches for a cliche when he needs to describe something abstract or psychological. But the original documents, which have been ignored until the 1970's, and now translated, show an exciting and heretofore neglected dimension of the city at 'the center of the world.' One well-educated lawyer, Adriaen van der Donck, is the all-but-forgotten hero behind the story. (The way he appears at every turn reminded me of the ubiquitous Leo Szilard, who was Richard Rhodes' favored mensch in the Making of the Atomic Bomb). Not only did van der Donck set up an estate that eventually became Yonkers-- he also studied law in Leyden when it was the hotbed of tolerance, where he *must have* read Descartes, and possibly even Spinoza. This book does a great service in multi-culturalizing the early history of America, and although I wish it had been better written, the compelling quality of the story speaks through the limited prose style of the writer.

Yiddish Radio Project
(NPR, 2 cassettes)
A pretty interesting glimpse into the world of Yiddish radio. It's an unfortunate reality that to be understood, the Yiddish must be voiced over with simultaneous English translation. This gives a listener a slight chance to catch the prosody and inflection, as well as some of the more Yinglish-y inflections, but the majority of the broadcasts must be described rather than experienced. Still, the project conveys the aroma, if not the flavor, of a world of popular radio that is no more. The NPR production also pulls together some glimpses of the grand and grandiose personalities involved in making the shows (one man created 20 fifteen minute segments every week), and another, the Yiddish Philosopher, handled Bintel Brief style letters, and was bold enough to launch his own magazine (one issue only, pre-O of Oprah).

Galactic Pot-Healer
(Philip K. Dick, unabridged, 4 cassettes)
PKD didn't capture me in my youth, or even my twenties, but there's every reason to catch up now. The story, which has fascinating threads about fatalism and precognition, includes uncannily prescient notions about a world where smoking tobacco is illegal, and radio ads offer a pill to handle impotence. The travel to the future, and the weird Glimmung, don't always add up, but the story contains some great ideas.

The Buildings of Berkeley
(Robert Bernhardi, 114pp)
This humble little book captures some shots (all in B&W) of how Berkeley looked in 1971. There's short write ups of the major architects, and I finally learned that Phoebe Hearst was herself the major supporter of UC Berkeley, when before now, I'd always believed that WRH, Jr had been bankrolling the pools, Greek Theater, etc, and putting his mom's name on them in an indirect but effective path to self-promotion. This book would just be a blog today, and the photos would be sharper and in color, but it has some utility as a historical Brownie snapshot.

The adventures of Augie March
(Saul Bellow, unabridged, 21:35)
It was a great pleasure to re-explore one of my favorite novels, a book I first read on a train ride back to Northwestern after a winter break when I was 18. Years later (and already now, years ago), I sat next to Saul Bellow at a Camille Paglia reading, and I confessed to him that reading Augie March practically turned me into a criminal. He responded with a twinkle that his books have corrupted many a person. Re-reading Bellow this week opened my eyes to more of the threads that he masterfully wove into this tapestry: the wandering good spirited Augie, the materialistic and cynical older brother, the attractive but never understood women, and the dazzling playfulness with ideas, generalizations, thought-schemes. I was also surprised at how I'd misremembered the proportional allocation of themes and topics within the novel: The rough-scrabble Chicago tales lasted considerably longer than I'd expected, and the Northwestern pages were rather quick. The passage to Mexico, even though it took up a big chunk of the second half, was all I really recalled before what I'd thought was the ending, which in my mind, occurred with Augie adrift on a wrecked ship, shared with a madman.

Homo Ludens
(Johan Huizinga, 251pp)
An interesting book about man's playful nature, put together by a Dutch medievalist. The etymologies of play, spiel, fun, and prize are the most interesting parts of the book. In the later chapters, the thesis is stretched past the point of intelligibility, since playfulness in law, music, art, etc do not really illuminate. For a book about fun, this isn't a terrifically fun book to read. Alas, the author neglects to say almost anything at all about fun.

Self-Made Man : One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back
(Norah Vincent, unabridged, 5:16)
Ms. Vincent wanted to shed the preconceptions and stereotypes that greeted HER everyday as she walked through the world as a woman. After bulking up at the gym, dawning stubble created through wool crepe hair, she traded these stereotypes over (no longer priviliged, post-Yentl, as "trading up"). She writes insightfully about the status and power dynamics that men create and combat on man-to-man terms. Some of the observer-anthropological choices she made may not be the most methodologically rigorous. Still, her discussions are funny and probing, as she recounts her 9 months on a men's bowling league team, the 3 jobs she took in cold-calling sales worlds that echo the balls-to-the-wall atmosphere of Glengarry Glen Ross, as well as the multiple dates she went on with women. Her final exploration, of an Iron John men's retreat, wiped her out psychologically. She reports that she needed to recover from the posturing and deception by checking into a mental hospital. I don't really understand why dressing and acting as a man is, per force, an act of deception. She may not even have needed to say "I'm a man" once on her anthropological tour. But her sensitivity and nuanced awareness may explain why she felt over-burdened by the end, and maybe only a 'man like me' would believe that posture suffices to self-authenticate.

The March
(EL Doctorow, unabridged, 10 CDs)
The first time I tried to listen to this, I didn't get caught up in the story. I gave this another listen, and found myself interested in the questions faced by the Southerners who saw their world demolished, and the Northerners who were doing the demolition of all things civilized to accomplish their goal. I am frequently left with a feeling that Doctorow's prose makes characters feel like well-cut out silhouettes.

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
(Thomas Friedman, unabridged, 19:18)
I resisted reading this for a long time, simply because I thought it would not reveal much more than was already captured in reviews of the book. I've read Friedman's earlier rallying cry for globalization, the Lexus and the Olive Tree (and I have to admit, I didn't recall his rationale for setting up the title's dualism). In this book, there's a zillion interesting facts supporting his thesis, and he even reveals that the "Olive Tree" refers to the tribalist localization that resists flat world'ing. Friedman does a superb job of journalism, which seems to be, relaying information in a synoptic format that strips out distracting subtleties, while maintaining a close enough tie to the facts on the ground that the summary still contains a valid point. Although I read the fat and chewy unabridged version (over 500 pp on paper), most may choose to opt for the short espresso over the long latte. Nevertheless, Friedman nearly always presents fascinating data, intriguing stories, and compelling questions about the future. My own summary of the flattening is essentially this: If someone can collaborate with another human in the next room, telecommunications astonishing power now means that collaboration can occur between two people anywhere in the world. Friedman milks the story of tax accountants in India who are doing Americans' tax returns as one instance of this. His story about UPS "in-sourcing" lifted the skirt on a process unknown to me: when Hitachi needs to repair its computers, UPS picks up the PC, and UPS employees do the repair, then ship it back to the customer. Finally, even though Friedman is not subtle, I agree with his claim that Developing Countries should join a twelve-step program, where they have to start by saying, "My name is Syria, and my country's people have been blocked from developing by my own dysfunctions." Although Friedman may not have the most nuanced grasp of the issues, his perceptions are more astute and compelling than the politicians who are steering so many billions of lives down the drain.

The House Book
(The Phaidon Press editors, 512pp)
Fascinating tour of homes, with most of the really rewarding images revealing the indigenous styles of homes across the globe, including the iglu, the long house, dung hovels, and dozens of other styles that incorporate the folk wisdom of humans across the centuries. The modernist austerities were less interesting, even more boring than monlithic European castles from the Hapsburgs. Some of the contemporary puzzle pieces were striking, and each page repaid the time invested pouring over the details captured by the photo, and annotated in a paragraph of text. In Huxtable's biography of F Lloyd Wright, she claimed that none of his apprentices ever amounted to much. This book includes several homes designed by his students, and at least one was quite striking in its use of shingled wood. I wish that Phaidon would double the page load, and show a representative interior of each exterior captured here.

They Marched Into Sunlight : War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967
(David Marannis, unabridged, 17 cassettes)
Reading this account of early protesters against the Vietnam War (and the soldiers who were fighting and dying in the War) gave me an eery sense of temporal echo. This book sandwiches three stories together: The Black Lions battalion, the Madison Wisconsin students enraged at Dow Chemical for manufacturing Napalm, and finally, the paralyzed LBJ and his coterie of advisers. This massive book moves between the massacre of the Black Lions on Oct 17, 1967, and the Madtown protesters whose heads were cracked by brutal cops. The vignettes that pop up have a particular fascination for me, namely, the San Francisco Mime troupe's appearance in Madison as agitprop theater, and the grad student Michael Krasny's decision to hold a teach-in during the Dow protests. Since the protests started in 1967, when only 13K soldiers had died, it's terribly upsetting to realize that 55K died before America finally withdrew in 1973. One thing I particularly enjoyed about this book was the deep dive into the 60s while focusing on a scene other than Berkeley or SF.

Speedbumps: Flooring it Through Hollywood
(Terri Garr, unabridged, 7 CDs)
I listened to this, mostly on airplane flights, and I never even knew precisely who this actress was. The story did not compel me to seek out a private viewing of Tootsie, although this had Gump-like moments, where she heard the Beatles record an early song, and was in an Elvis movie. Her struggle to diagnose and deal with MS is inter-woven, without a heavy hand, and it is a touching dimension to her Hollywood story.

Beyond Reason : Using Emotions as You Negotiate
Roger Fisher & Daniel Shapiro (abridged, 6 CDs)
Not as valuable as Getting to Yes, but still of value for someone who finds that they occasionally find human interactions getting a little testy. There's a puffy Harvard-y assumption behind all these books, which implies that through appropriate management of the sticky stuff, one can end up in a white shirt, sailing smooth seas. In that sense, it doesn't sound realistic or gritty, but I found it of use to turn these proposals over in my head.

Major change in blog reviews begins in my 27th Month
To date, I have written up brief reviews of books, even when I 'bailed,' 'punted,' 'paused' or 'stalled' on the text. It's the job of my posthumous fanzine editor to count up the ratio of punts to finish lines. For 2006, I note 3 "punts", 0 stalls and 0 pauses, even though there were 6 pauses in 2005, and when the titles pop up, I realize that I would still like to finish the Hungry Tide, Living to Tell the Tale and The Speed of Sound from last year. But from now on, I am not going to obsessively annotate the losers and wimps, unless they inspire some particular animus that motivates my key-lashes.

Now, Discover Your Strengths
(Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton, abridged, 3 CDs)
Although most business books reek of unreflective cliches, this book deserves to inherit the mantle of honor from Peter Drucker. Taking a page from Drucker, this book argues that a person should find their talents/strengths, and organize their life around the things they do effortlessly and well. The writing is clear, the arguments cogent, and for once, the mobilization of personality typologies is not pure astrology. I'm sure that additional research could refine their 34 types, but the research sounds like it stands head-and-shoulders above the Myers-Brigg typology, which really only illuminates the distinction between introverts and extroverts. By using their type-casting questionnaire, there's an opportunity to more clearly tag people in terms of what they do best, and that information could greatly extend how to create functioning teams. I was motivated to buy the hard back of this by the fact that each copy includes a secret code that enables the purchaser to take the Gallup StrengthFinder(TM). After taking the test, I've come to see that Buckingham is a much better writer than methodologist: His vision is compelling, but the inputs and outputs of the online test cannot live up to the clarity of his fundamental insight. The test questions are less well posed than the sentences in his book; as outputs, one only learns 5 labels, such as Ideation, Strategic, Input, Command, Activator, for which additional fees would be required to extract their deeper significance. It's not ridiculous to suppose that whole books could be written up on powerful combinatoric recipes for success. With 34 choose 5 options, that would mean that 278,256 you-successful-combo-you-books would be generated.

American Gods
(Neil Gaiman, unabridged, 20 CDs)
I enjoyed this, although I didn't feel it was as sparkling as Anansi Boys. This precursor to Anansi explores similar themes: the twin worlding that enables Gaiman's profane characters to embody god-like talents and gifts, while nevertheless being shlumps, con artists, and archetypical shysters. At points, the story shines, especially when the characters wrangle with one another, but at other points, the pace felt more like a slog than a dance. I definitely wouldn't have read this on paper, because when a book begins to stall, it just lies on a table, clogged behind a speed hump that never gets hurdled. When listening to a book, my attention wanders away when the story isn't fully engaging. The engine of the audible treadmill is that it will continue looping, even when my feet scarcely lift from the ground. Soon enough, the rough patch is surpassed, and there's a chance to take in the next scene, and my mind weaves back into the threads of the tale. (Special treat: The 20th CD includes a lengthy interview with Neil Gaiman, exploring how he built the book out of his fascinations with middle America.)

Lonely Planet One People: many journeys
(Lonely Planet, 284pp)
Definitely worth 15 minutes to page through. A couple of things I noticed-- 1) Women in several photos didn't look "feminine" in the stereotypical sense, and I would double-take to see if they were transvestites; 2) Dani people in New Guinea 'smoke' their ancestors, so that the ancient forebears look like a mummified piece of beef jerky. This is a much better book than the earlier volume of photos from around the world , One Planet.

Planet Simpson
(Chris Turner, abridged, 10 CDs)
If this is abridged, I wonder what spare kitchen sink stocks the full book. I had been a Groening 'Life in Hell' fan for years before the Simpsons debuted in 1989, so I didn't feel compelled to see the show. This lack in my cultural sophistication was addressed several years ago, when a grab bag came my way with about 100 episodes, scrunched down to little downloadable movies. I mention my lack of deep exposure to the Simpsons to help explain how I avoided feeling too profound a sense of sadness while listening to this book. It's quite embarrassing to be exposed to the ingenuous enthusiasm with which the author firehoses old TV episodes. I listened to the whole thing because: 1- The quotes from the Simpsons were very funny; 2- My opinions mostly overlap with the author's, so that I could listen with agreement, even though it seemed almost random to toss in culture wars, Wilco, DIY punk culture, and Bush-bashing. This swarm of neuronal activity, blasted at the tube, does not inspire, although it somehow held my attention throughout.

Devil in the Details : Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood
(Jennifer Traig, unabridged, 6 CDs)
The author has written a fascinating account of her life with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). She was put behind the 8-ball by OCD, as it opportunistically linked into her incipient attempts to practice Jewish rituals. Certain Jewish dietary obligations (kashrut) can become quite obsessive, esp in preparations for passover. Traig's writing is usually quite funny (she also published a funny book of tchotchkes called Judaikitsch). Her humor runs the risk of veering to the excessively yoke-y, but I enjoyed every chapter.

Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
(Charles Kindleberger, unabridged, 10 CDs)
Although the prose is occasionally dry, and the historical panorama can seem to be over-long, the book summarizes an astonishing range of bubbles (up to, but not including, the tech stock market crash of 2000). The author recounts bubble upon bubble, with a cyclicity that seems to imply that they occurred historically every single lifespan (a doozy about once every 40 years). He summarizes the arguments against the monetarist doctrine that the 1929 Depression was caused by government mismanagement. The summary is too quick to evaluate the details of the dispute, although I'd like to believe that Milton Friedman got this wrong. The best summary of why monetarism fails is Kindleberger's claim that no matter what one specifies as the money supply (M1 or M7, or even a bigger M'), human nature will devise a means to speculate in a less-constrained medium, which will drive the booms and busts. In the Making of modern economics, the claim was advanced that only Hayek had a cogent explanation of what caused the Depression. I still can't evaluate what is the best rationalization, but I'll go out on a limb and bet that economists haven't fully pegged this yet. If I were forced to choose between this book and Irrational Exuberance, I'd recommend Shiller, simply because he's briefer, and a little more theoretical. The history here is quite comprehensive, although it mainly demonstrates that people never seem to learn from the past.

Teacher Man: A memoir
(Frank McCourt, unabridged, 9 CDs)
I dearly enjoyed Angela's Ashes, but found the sequel 'Tis to be insignificant and not worth finishing. This book completes the trilogy, and 'tis much better than the last installment, although not as mesmerizing as Angela's Ashes. The reason it's so much better than 'Tis can be explained by the fact that McCourt came into his own as a teacher, and he clearly loved his job. One of his great strengths as a teacher traces to his vivid recollections of his own childhood, his willingness to disclose that childhood to his students, and his power to alchemize the tedium and oppression inflicted upon kids into a great story. His pedagogy was very playful, encouraging students to set cookbook recipes to music, write excuse notes for historical villains, and throw their hearts into their craft. (Note: the 9th CD actually contains excerpts from McCourt's two previous books. I suppose this is in place of the typical "Author interview" which pads the final disc in audiobooks).

In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.
(Wil Haygood, unabridged, 17 cassettes; skimmed the last 7)
It's kind of hard to get Sammy Davis Jr's life to come into focus; he was a driven entertainer, a man who worked in a trio with Will Maston and his father for the first half of his life, carrying the 2 older vaudevillians along in his torrential burst of energy. The parts of his life that were most dramatic are well-covered here: his 1954 car accident, which caused him to lose an eye. In spite of the great damage to his face, his main concern was whether his legs were fine, since they were his source of livelihood. Once he knew that he would dance again, he accepted the damage without bitterness and regret. A few weeks after he left the hospital, he impulsively converted to Judaism, although here, the author clarifies that there had been no previous religious training in his life, so in a strict sense, there was an adoption of religion, rather than a conversion. The performer's motives were intimatley connected to his mimickry, which drove him to assimilate with the religion of the powerful in Hollywood. I started to skim after this, although Davis's relationship to Sinatra was always fascinating. The adulation and loyalty that he lavished upon Sinatra is a study in sycophancy. The end of his life was sad, as his damaged liver took him down.

Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
(Ben Mezrich, unabridged, 8:04 -- quit after 3 hours)
The author, formerly a writer of fictional thrillers, decided he hated "the fact checking" aspect of journalism, and managed to bump into a 'genius' MIT student who was gambling in Vegas,and he was intrigued with the kids report of how he was winning with Black Jack card-counting techniques. The writing is pedestrian, but still has some grip as the story of math geeks who win through calculation (not the highest calibre mental trick). This book is bedeviled by the non-fiction label, which is now about as sullied a term as 'intern' post-Lewinsky. See the review in the Boston Globe, where the author admits to his impatience with factual reporting. As an example of the inauthenticities in the prose, there's a reference to an erstwhile MIT math professor, "a former math prodigy" who had been one of the youngest admits in MIT history, matriculating at the age of 16 (p39). Since I personally know two people who started MIT at 16, it's likely that almost every class has one or two of these 'startingly' rare birds. House odds that most of this book is baloney, bubbled through a bong pipe, banged out under pressure once the advance money had been spent.

iCon Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business
(Jeffrey S. Young & Barton Biggs; unabridged, 3 CDs)
Jobs once said something like "A's hire other A's, but B's hire C's". This book, written by a couple of B-grade journalists, can't possibly convey the intensity & insanity that drive Steve Jobs. Nevertheless, the book delivers some value by collating the various strands of Jobs' multiple incarnations (Blue Box vendor, Apple founder, NeXT hypester, Pixar purchaser, and iPod genie). The book wraps all this up without ever achieving depth, and it fails pretty completely to give any sense of Jobs personality. There are factoids of note: Jef Raskin wanted the Macintosh to be mouse-less and graphics-free; Alan Kay is the person who recommended Jobs travel to San Rafael to look at Lucas' computer group; when laying people off at Pixar (and NeXT), Jobs never gave severance. The Second Coming of Steve Jobs is a much better book, although it ends before the iPod -- taking a page from these guys, that author should re-release his book, with an added chapter, and call it the Third Coming.

I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight
(Margaret Cho, unabridged, 6 CDs, punt after 1)
Margaret Cho's funny, and rude, and intent on sticking it to the Man. I listened to the first CD, but realized that this was not for me. Rock on, Cho, even though I'm not your target demographic.

The Great Book of Chocolate
(David Lebovitz, 164pp)
A trove of delicious revelations, described by a fanatical devotee of the sacred bean. I learned many fascinating pointers from this small Ten Speed book. The author's a former pastry chef at Chez Panisse, who divides his time between SF and Paris. After reading his chapter on Paris, as the paradise of chocolates, you will realize that this author has the passion to live his dream. I have learned a lot about beans, and am now marching through Michel Cluizel's dark secrets. I became determined to track down some of the highly praised contraband, described by Lebovitz as the supreme chocolate experience, made by Chocovic (near Barcelona).

Against Depression
(Peter Kramer, abridged, 5 CDs)
An interesting and vigorous argument about how unreflective and romantic notions of depression block us from seeing at as a true disease. Kramer writes with nuanced sensitivity, in spite of his role as a cheerleader for pharmaceutical solutions (Listening to Prozac). His anger at the trite assumption that van Gogh or Kierkegaard was profound, only because of their melancholy, is justified. It's false to believe that a little depressive suffering is ennobling. The only point I would quibble over: Kramer doesn't seem to fully appreciate that suffering, while in each particular instance it may be evitable, is inescapable in the large. As such, the experiences of suffering (whether from a broken leg, bad kidneys, or depression) can create occasions for deeper connections to life. That does not mean that psychiatrists should ever allow patients to suffer toward an "insight," nor that we should treat melancholy as a profound window on truth. Instead, depression is a particular form of pain, a psychopathology that we should do all that is possible to diminish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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