Bible baby names : spiritual choices from Judeo-Christian tradition
(Anita Diamant, 144pp)
This little book is similar to the first half of the New Jewish Baby book, although in this beefy pamphlet, names from the new testament are included as well to bulk it up, and perhaps to reach a wider demographic. It's not really necessary as a stand-alone if one looks at the other book of Anita Diamant's.

The new Jewish baby book : names, ceremonies, customs : a guide for today's families
(Anita Diamant, 288pp)
I read the 1993 version, but this apparently has been continuously updated to reflect the evolving climate of customs and outlooks on anticipating a baby. There's a nice discussion of the evil eye, and where that fits in with the current push to enroll your baby in preschool just about the same time they are conceived.

Six Days of War: June 1967 And the Making of the Modern Middle East
(Michael B. Oren, unabridged, 15 CDs [446pp])
I looked at this book on a cross country flight back when it came out in 2003, and all I wanted to learn was the detail that everyone asks about a fight, namely "Who started it?" I came away with a vague sense that the 6 day war was sparked when the Egyptians blockaded the Straits of Tiran, thus isolating the Israelis from receiving imports at Eilat. This little detail didn't go far in helping me grasp the situation. The drama of the war's outbreak is vividly drawn here. Apparently, the stress was so great that Yitzhak Rabin had a nervous breakdown in late May (p91), which was described publicly as "nicotine poisoning", but was in fact so great that he submitted his resignation to Eshkol, who refused it. As is well known, the Israeli air force struck first, knocking out virtually the entire Egyptian air force, and bombing the run ways with cratering missiles that prevented any surviving planes from taking off. Absurdly, the Egyptians publicized that they had won the first day's battle, and went on to claim that the Israelis had been tricked by "balsa wood" versions of airplanes. Today, one wonders if Americans aren't being similarly duped about Iraq's current state of affairs. It's essential to have the paper version alongside the CDs, since the book includes useful maps and photos. The narrator, Robert Whitfield, read this book in British English, which leads to nice turns of pronunciation, such as s-edjule for schedule, etc. It became more comic when MacNamara, the secretary of defense under Johnson, gets a Scottish inflected name.

Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods
(Michael Wex, 2006, 336pp)
The updated paperback, "now with more kvetching", was worth revisiting, after listening to it back in April. Wex's book struck me, upon second glance, as even more dense, full of insight, and shimmering with precision and perfect humor. The more kvetching appendix gives a few bits of personal history of the author, as well as a list of resources for pursuing further information.

Indecision
(Benjamin Kunkel, 8;11)
This is a re-read, a year or so after first becoming entranced with this funny and incisively brilliant book. Since I'd strongly recommended it to a friend, I decided to listen again, and again. It still strikes me as a superbly well-crafted novel. My original comments ">back in September '05 don't demand any major revision.

Quick index to the origin of Berkeley's names: Streets, creeks, paths, walks, parks
(John Aronovici, editor, unnumbered pages)
This pamphlet, sold by the Berkeley Historical Society, speaks to nuts like me, who bike past streets wondering, "But who was Shattuck?" etc. My biggest surprise about this town is not explicitly called out, namely, that Bishop Berkeley is the town's namesake.

Self Taught Artists of the 20th Century
(Wertkin and Longhauser, 300 pp)
Interesting collection of naive or folk artist with a wide range of styles. Mostly kooks of one variant or another, but what artist isn't? The writers of the individual artist essays appear to be a very heterogeneous lot; one person is a VP at Varian Labs in Palo Alto, another's a professor of social psychology in the midwest, many others are humanities professors or PhDs, but few belong to the art history apparatus.

The baby name wizard : a magical method for finding the perfect name for your baby
(Laura Wattenberg, 368pp)
Great resource, with a nifty info-graphic, inscribed beside each name paragraph, showing the relative frequency of the anme in the US population database since the beginning of the century. This is a superb book, limited only by the fact that it cannot reach very far beyond the top 5,000 or so names. Wattenberg also runs a fun blog suggesting ways to have fun with this project.

The Complete Book of Hebrew Baby Names
(Smadar Shir Sidi, 176pp)
This book was published in 1989, so it doesn't express the current obsessions of naming's great import. Without these anxieties, it still has a large number of interesting suggestions, and even has a page or two at the end for giving twins book-end complementary names.

The Century
(Peter Jennings, narrator, unabridged, 14 CDs)
The project of turning 100 years of the 20th century into radio/tv coverage is rather amusing, and there are some nuggets of fascination. I had no idea, e.g., that after the Kent State riots in the early 1970s, 58% of polled Americans supported the National Guard responsible for killing 5 students, and only 11% sympathized with the students. Now, Neil Young's version of Ohio dominates. This single event highlights how majorities can be war-crazed. The intros to each disc are ridiculous time waster, since it's unnecessary to treat the transition between CDs as an occasion to chew through a minute of repetitive sounds evoking "the century"

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
(Feynman, unabridged, 8 CDs)
A couple of classics: Plenty of room at the bottom; the Challenger minority report. There was a fascinating recollection of Feynman's pursuing psychological self-experimentation during grad school, focused on learning what the limits of his own attention were. The project involved tracking his sense of time, which he performed by steadily counting to 60. Feynman learned that he couldn't read aloud or talk while doing this, but then Tukey performed the task while talking. This revealed that Tukey visualized a tape rolling by, rather than counting internally. Feynman's curiosity, and methodological scrupulosity, shine through this tale. Most of the other selections were rewarding, for example, the last piece on science and religion. The serious, almost insurmountable flaw, was the narrator's voice, which was so tony and urbane that it really clashed with the earthy and direct reality of Feynman's actual voice.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman
(Richard P. Feynman, unabridged, 7 cassettes)
I read about half this book on paper over a year ago, and it was a great pleasure, even though I did not have time to finish then. I listened to the entire book anew, and it was pure pleasure. Feynman's kindness to strangers, his joy in a life of thinking, and his distaste for all honors show clearly how his personality worked. The collection of letters, curated by his daughter Michelle, highlights his willingness to answer random queries from strangers. I was impressed greatly by his deft ability to communicate kind and caring words, without slipping into any kind of formality. For example, there's a note that arrived informing him of a physicist friend in England who was suffering from inoperable brain cancer. Feynman wrote a light note, which tactfully concealed his understanding of the grim situation.

The subject Steve
(Sam Lipsyte, 224pp)
This was Lipsyte's second book, which had the poor luck to be released on 9/11/01 (the same day as Josh Kornbluth's film, Haiku Tunnel, and who knows what other important works). The book is full of clever lines, hilarious circumstances, and over the top settings. The book is frequently on the verge of success, and it was impossible for me to stop reading, since every page has some phrasing or joke that could only come from Lipsyte.

A Scanner Darkly
(Philip K. Dick, read by Paul Giamatti, unabridged, 7 CDs)
This novel is uncanny in its prophetic paranoiac tone, but the story line barely makes sense. The title alludes to the New Testmant line "we are looking through a mirror darkly", and the implication in this novel is that all the reality tracking machinery doesn't grant direct access to thoughts, but only opaquely. I gave this novel the whole slog, but it's clear I'm not imaginative enough to spackle over the discontinuities and bumpy riding involved in following Dick's work.

Venus Drive
(Sam Lipsyte, 164pp)
I was compelled to read more Lipsyte, after being so impressed by Homeland. Lipsyte's first book, from 2000, collects 13 stories with an autobiographical twist, as it covers the life of a former punk rocker, crushed into a job cold calling people to answer poorly designed phone surveys. Gary, the sidekick in Homeland, shows up with the very same severed thumb, so something of significance (or perhaps factuality) lives in that detail. These early stories have some fine, funny lines, as well as a lot of metaphysically sad, if somewhat sketchy, exposures to vein-popping drug highs. About half way through the stories, I detected a particular tone, the sound of a young child's epiphany that is preternaturally mature, that made me sure that Gordon Lish was a major influenced. And in fact, Lish is thanked first in the afterword. Since it only takes a couple of hours to read (there's plenty of white pages in between each story), it was too fun to put down before I finished, though it didn't show the sweet and tender knowingness of Homeland.

The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love, And Faith of an American Legend
(Steve Turner, intro Kris Kristofferson, unabridged, 7 CDs)
I never knew the man in black, but I've long been a fan of his music. This bio, published in 2004 on the verge of the movie made by James Mangold, covers a lot more info than Joaquin Phoenix could convey in 2 hours. The most surprising discovery is that Johnny Cash spent a great deal of his life addled by drugs, after a clean living youth. Speed started it, when Cash had to drive around the country before the interstate highways made that easy. One doesn't get a good sense of who Cash really was, but the facts of his actions, the appearances, albums, TV shows, and the final connection with Rick Rubin are all reported.

Twinspiration: Real-Life Advice From Pregnancy Through the First Year for Parents of Twins and Multiples
(Cheryl Lage, 321pp)
If you were told that twins were going to arrive in a few months, you might feel like reading up on what to expect. This book is a well written, personable account of all the tricks that the author has accumulated from raising her boy-girl combo. Since she gave birth just a few days before 9/11, her experience maps onto the century's cataclysmic shifts. At times, her attention to the poo journal'ing seems anal, but overall, she speaks with openness about her own experience, and I appreciated hearing about what she's learned, tried, and tested.

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
(Michael Pollan, 8:49)
This is the precursor to the Omnivore's Dilemma, and is equally well written. I did not find the range of topics as fascinating to me. I enjoyed reading Pollan's fanciful take on how angiosperms have manipulated humans into cultivating them, and the pieces on potatoes and pot were also interesting. The chapter on the apple introduces a fascinating concept, "the center of diversity", which refers to the place of origin for a particular species. Apples came originally from Kazakhstan, and when breeders wanted to seek new varieties, they went back to the origin, the center of diversity, where the range of genes exemplified far outstripped those that had traveled to North America. It was a similar trip back to the COD that saved the potato, after the Irish famine, since the Peruvian mountains contained wild ranges of options, one of which was resistant to the blight.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints: A Memoir
(Dito Montiel, unabridged, 5:05)
I have a weakness for Astoria Queens, since I worked there after college, and found the intact ethnic lifestyles fascinating. This book seemed to promise to be a growing up in Astoria story, but in fact, it starts there, and in a flash, jumps over to Manhattan, where the author's experience as part of Gutterboy, the most successful unsuccessful punk band. Dito befriended Allen Ginsberg, and a few other famosos, but the story isn't at all vivid.

The Second Jewish Book of Why
(Alfred J. Kolatch, read by Theodor Bikel, unabridged, 8:56)
Arcana, wrapped up in a series of questions, read by the superb narrator Bikel. This book is a wikipedia of judaica, before that particular medium existed for organizing and annotating. Since the wiki is a direct descendant of the Talmud, this book stands at the midpoint, articulating a lot of arguments that come from the talmud, as well as many customs and practices that emerged in later times.

The pruning of trees, shrubs, and conifers
(George E. Brown (Author), updated by Tony Kirkham, 340pp)
I'd thought I might be able to learn how to trim our own shrubbery after scanning this book. Instead, the book instills an edifying sense of the many ways things can go wrong, yet does not provide sufficient information for someone to take this book into the field. It appears that tree surgeons and other professional groundskeepers can use this guide to value, but it would not provide sufficient information for a newcomer to know what and how to proceed with trimming their bushes.

Homeland
(Sam Lipsyte, 229 pp)
This incredibly funny novel owes a great deal of its impact to Lipsyte's uniquely hilarious sharp turns of phrase (e.g., the description of breeders as people seeking satisfaction in "poop-smeared approximations of themselves"). In addition, I confess a weakness for tales about people whose lives are in tailspin; this particular novel takes the form of epistolary confessions sent as updates to the high school class of '89 of the narrator, Lewis "Teabag" Miner. I owe the discovery of this book to N+1, which excerpted the novel in their first volume, and then ran an ad about the novel on the back cover of their 2nd number. This is the second time in as many months that I've read a redacted version of a novel as an excerpt; it's a strange format, to see a novel boiled down into its highlights, with a foreshortened narrative arc.

Talk talk
(T.C. Boyle, read by the author, unabridged, 13 hours)
Yet another superb dumpster dive into the psychic depths of harried untermenschen, shysters, and the vivid struggles to cope with daily life. The novel draws a particularly complex portrait of one strong willed woman, Dana Halter, who can talk-talk like all her alumni friends from Gallaudet college. This tale of identity theft is handled in a more straightforward fashion than I'd expected from Boyle, who might easily have portrayed the identity thief without revealing whether the name referred to the true holder or the impostor. Nevertheless, the theme is a rich one for demonstrating the hardships that blow up an innocent person's life when they're ripped off by a weasel. The trickster rat bastard, Peck Wilson, comes across as a high flying man of some savoir faire, driven and hobbled by bottomless self-entitlement. His easy life involves gleaning identities and trashing other peoples' credit to indulge his palate for fine food and wine, nice cars, flashy clothes. Last year to the day, I'd finished Boyle's last collection of stories. In this novel, Boyle's panache for worse turning into the worst was expressed aptly in this passage "then he met Gina, and it all shit after that. Or no: to give her credit, ... she took him on more of a shit-slide, a whole roller-coastering hold your breath and look-out plunge into a vast vat of shit, and on shit-greased wheels too." (p79) It's an added pleasure to hear Boyle himself reading the book; his vast vocabulary arrives with a faint Hudson valley inflection.

Tales of the Alhambra
(Washington Irving, unabridged, 7 CDs)
One of the most serene spaces I've ever experienced was the courtyard of the Lions in the Alhambra. I was curious to see if any of that experience was captured by Irving. Written 175 years ago, the tales encapsulate a rather contemporary bias: the Arabs are evil, the Catholics venial, but other Christians valiant and triumphant, and well, the local Spaniards are dreamers.

Gilgamesh: A New English Version
(translated by Stephen Mitchell, 4 CDs)
I've put off reading this story for 4,000 years, but I enjoyed Stephen Mitchell's translation (more technically, a collation/gloss, since he created this version without knowing Akkadian). The opening scenes are surprisingly sexual, and then there's an overt machismo inthe initial conflict between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Their match turns them into allies, and they go raging around the globe killing to magnify their own glory. Given that Gilgamesh was a tale told in what today is Iraq, there's an additional level of meaning to this war-glorifying epic. Gilgamesh strives, ever refusing to be satisfied, and quests to overcome his own mortality. A wise woman advises him to follow a path that does not seem to have dated much: "Humans are born, they live, then they die,/ this is the order that the gods have decreed./ But until the end comes, enjoy your life,/ spend it in happiness, not despair./ Savor your food, make each of your days/ a delight, bathe and anoint yourself,/ wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean, let music and dancing fill your house,/ love the child who holds you by the hand,/ and give your wife pleasure in your embrace./ That is the best way for a man to live." The final CDs are devoted to Mitchell's analytical essay, but many may prefer this cartoon panel that's nearly as articulate on all the points covered in the essay.

Schocken Guide to Jewish Books: Where to Start Reading about Jewish History, Culture, & Religion
(Barry W. Holtz, 357pp)
The historical overview chapters are of interest, as an annotated bibliographic guide to finding specific texts on dimensions of Jewish history and theology. This book ends in a terrible klinker: The final chapter, on Jewish American Literature, is turgid, judgmental, and pretty useless to consult for new finds. Instead of guiding readers, the literary guide codifies the importance of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth, while attacking some of the best books of both Bellow and Roth.

Madam Secretary: A memoir
(Madeline Albright, unabridged, 20 CDs -- stopped after 10)
Her account of her experience is modest, honest, yet less self-deprecating that Kate Graham's autobiography, which suggests that there is some feminist progress in 20 years or so. Albright was a refugee from Czechoslovakia, and her father ended up a prominent cold war theorist at Denver University, who later advised Condy Rice on her dissertation. In the 10th CD, Albright discusses the revelations of her own Jewish heritage, and her response. In this, as in all her discussions, she is averse to psychologizing, and focused mainly on the work at hand, which in this case, was her new appointment as Secretary of State.

n+1, Number 2: Happiness
(eds Benjamin Kunkel, Keith Gessen, Marco Roth, Mark Greif)
Another solid turn by the n+1 gang, which rewards cover-to-cover reading. A great essay on Isaac Babel by Elif Batuman, a Zeno-esque discussion of smoking by Marco Roth, and a quasi-fictional memoir of being an undergrad at Harvard trying to hook up with Al Gore's daughter. The least congruous article was "Trends in Network Television" which lacked the power found in the comic reviews, art commentary, or poetry.

The Master
(Colm Toibin, unabridged, 10 CDs)
Very rewarding psycho-literary experiment, where Colm Toibin inhabits the perspective of the Master, during the interval from 1895 to 1898. At the outset, Henry James aspires to jump from the lonely life of a fiction writer, with the 'breakout' hit of his first play. Of course, James' one play is recalled as a flop, and so there is a crush of hope at the beginning. The delicacy of depiction is interesting, and goes a long way toward illuminating why Henry had to place an ocean between his older brother and his own life.

Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings
(Italo Calvino, 272 pp)
I bought this last year at Shakespeare and Co, and read Calvino's essay about living in Paris. Lately, I've dipped in to finish the autobiographical essays and the long diary of life in America, when Calvin was a Ford scholar in 1959-60. One conflict I've had with this Calvino is how intensely committed to politics he was, and alas, the sort of politics that would be very hard for me to engage in fruitful dialog. It's almost absurd to read about his experience in New Orleans, where he reported "I got bored and ended up going from one burlesque joint to another, drinking awful whiskey and trying to start discussions with the girl dancers about unionization..." (p108) His revulsion at the ugly, unsophisticated Americans would of course not have been changed had he and I tried to find common ground. The essay on Paris is more whimsical and less didactic: "Yesterday on the Metro there was a man with bare feet; not a gipsy or a hippie, a man with glasses like me and so many others, reading the paper, looking a bit like an academic, the usual absent-minded professor type who had forgotten to put on his socks and shoes. And it was rainy day, and he was walking about barefoot, and nobody was looking at him, no one seemed interested. The dream of being invisible..." (170)

Owen Coon and the American Dream
(Richard Cahan, 186pp)
This biography was apparently commissioned by the Coon family foundation, and I read through parts of it with considerable interest. You'd probably have to be a Northwestern graduate, who received a Hardy scholarship, and suffer a proclivity for seeking the history behind the names of things, in order to read this. Since the book was recently mailed to all Hardy scholars (whose names were on record with the alumni association), it is not probable that there will be a large secondary market. The story told is objective, if rather dry. Owen Coon enjoyed his three years at NU (class of 1915), especially his experience on the debate team. At that time, the debaters would prepare for one match a season, traveling to Hyde Park or Ann Arbor for the big match. Coon could apparently continue to debate while attending the law school. The short story is that he was a savvy businessman, who put his whole energy into auto finance, at a time when banks refused to make loans on cars. This generated a geyser of income (with annual interest of 12%), and he began giving back to NU. His own family life was unhappy-- court records show he hit and threw an ashtray at his first wife, who was hospitalized for mental illness. He found his second wife at the Walgreens, but his children scarcely remember him.

Out of Our Kitchen Closets: San Francisco Gay Jewish Cooking
(Shaar Zahav members)
Reading through this is a delight, as well as a time capsule to how considerably less foody people were back in 1987. The recipe for putanesca, for example, includes a can of tuna, where today that would have to be updated to a chichi slice of sashimi grade tuna. I've always enjoyed the challah recipes, but I'd never sat down and read through the whole volume.

Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals
(Robert Sapolsky, 224pp)
These essays, written for magazines, show Sapolsky's omnivorous interest, his light touch with funny metaphors, and his obsessive use of the term 'gazillion'. My favorite factoid came in one of the many essays that exercise the facile contrast between nature and nurture, where he quotes a Nature Neuroscience study from 2003 that swapped mice embryos, implanting those genetically prone to anxiety insto the wombs of mice with a propensity to be relaxed, and vice versa. "When the supposedly genetically hardwired 'relaxed' mice went through both featal development and early puphood with timid-strain moms, they grew up to be just as timid as any other timid strain mice." (p52) [The original study was done by Darlene Francis, and can be found here: Francis, D.D, Szegda, K., Campbell, G., Martin, W.D. and Insel, T.R. (2003) Epigenetic sources of behavioral differences in mice. Nature Neuroscience. 6 (5): 445-446.]

The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide: The inner path to finding your work in the world
(Rick Jarow, 6 cassettes)
Jarow's approach asks you to view your work life from a perspective of abundance, and see if that framing can jolt a new view of what you really want to do. He makes an inspirational exhortation to consider the question: What if they fought a war of meaningless jobs, and nobody conscripted themselves to fight? I liked this set of talks quite a lot, even though its use of a chakra-based exploration wasn't immediately congenial to my own outlook.

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
(Charles Seife, unabridged, 6 hours)
A fun if occasionally rambling tour of my hero, Zero. The early chapters highlight the Greek and Roman abhorrence of the null set, contrasted with Indian and later Arabic mathematicians' facility with handling nothing. The later chapters visit issues in Quantum Mechanics, relativity theory, and even explain how string theory resulted from the desire to get away from zero dimensional particles, by transforming them into tiny little loops.

n+1, Number One: Negation
(Editors: Benjamin Kunkel, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Marco Roth)
I became aware of this literary journal after reading Indecision, and I subscribed beginning with issue 3. Not too long afterwards, they reprinted volumes 1 & 2, and after reading through this first issue, it's very clear why my dalliance with McSweeney's has ended. This journal raises sharply focused questions, and in this first volume, critiques the McSweeney's team for their regressive vision, the celebration of childhood as the supreme value, and the tendency for the graphic treatment to quote typographic twirls of the 19th century. The short fiction is interesting, especially the excerpt by Sam Lipsyte.

Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick
(Lawrence Sutin, 368pp)
I picked this up from City Lights bookstore at the beginning of the month, and it's been fun to chip with it each night. I am not Dick-obsessed, but the bio rewards those who like reading about a man who was utterly mad yet managed to channel his insanity in a productive manner. He grew up in Berkeley, and even tried to attend Cal (although panic attacks forced him to withdraw before the first semester ended). His only real job was in a record store off University Ave in the early 1950s, at a time when record stores were high-faluting. Once he had his first story accepted, he quit his job, and devoted the remainder of his life to earnings made as a hack writer. His method was quite distinctive: he'd sit and fantasize a story for a sustained period of time, and once the story gestated, he'd pound it out on the typewriter at 120 words per minute. Amphetamine definitely assisted, and gave him glimpses of the underworld that he drew upon in his stories. He never learned to be easy to live with, even after 5 marriages practice. He died of a series of strokes at the age of 51, just 4 months prior to the release of Blade Runner, which sparked his high reputation in Hollywood. Ridley Scott did show him the special effects, which PKD judged veridical to his vision. His obsessive fixation on religious imagery isn't too accessible to me, yet his dystopic paranoia is nearly as prophetic of the 21st century reality as Kafka's fears were of the 20th. As one example, the author's foreword (re-initiating the book first published in 1989) admits that he had doubted Dick's concept of a "news clown", but now, Jon Stewart clearly seems to be more trusted than Walter Cronkite was in the 1960s.

Here's a list of Berkeley addresses: June 1938 birthplace 560 Colusa Ave (p30); went to 4th Grade at the Hillside School; during WWII: 1212 Walnut Street, cottage in back (p35); 1944: 1711 Allston Way (p45); began working, age 15, at University Radio, on Shattuck and Center (p51); 1947 - first apt on his own: 2208 McKinley (p56); Spring 1948 (first marriage)- somewhere on Addison Way (p59); 1949: 1931 Dwight Way; May 1950 (2nd marriage): 1126 Francisco (p68); June 1964: 3919 Lyon Ave, Oakland (p134).

Entanglement
(Amior Aczel, unabridged, 6 hours)
Perfectly fine lay summary of the scientists involved in Quantum Mechanics and measurement, and the way that the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox turned out to be an accurate and insightful summary of how strange QM really is. In college, I was mesmerized by the mysteries of QM, and even on a trip across Europe, carried a huge book on Quantum Theory and Measurement. The whole of my understanding could've been squeezed into a thimble, and this small book reviews the basic issues, starting each chapter with an epigram by the person who is the chapter's focus, reviewing biographical details such as their favorite cheese, and then summarizing the research work they contributed.

Los Alamos From Below
(Richard Feynman, 3 CDs)
It's always interesting to hear Richard Feynman talk. Just today, I drove behind a van whose bumper sticker read "Feynman lives", although it's hard for me to guess what that means. Perhaps it's a reminder that each time someone thinks openly, with playful intensity, and unhindered by cant or intimidation, then at that moment, Feynman pops into the picture. There's a great story from Feynman's experience running a computational group of high school graduates organized into a data factory. Once Feynman took over, he insisted on telling the group what they were working on, even though the prior arrangement insisted on separating the task-performers from the logic of their work. Once the kids learned what they were trying to do, they invented more and more creative techniques that really showed Feynman new and creative ways to solve the problems much faster.

The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism
(Ross King, unabridged, 13 CDs/464 pp)
This history of Paris painters, from the 1860s to 1870s, covers the struggle of Edouard Manet to be recognized, as a now forgotten painter, Meissonier, was celebrated by the entire establishment. Manet only became recognized after his death due to the gangrene following the amputation of his syphilitic leg. Today, of course, Meissonier is forgotten, in spite of the esteem in which he was held by such tasteful arbiters as the Parisian critic responsible for the rediscovery of Vermeer and the young Henry James. I appreciated learning that Manet initially hated Monet for sharing a too-similar name, but a major limitation of the history here is that the fixation on Meissonier fails to explain the intentions motivating the impressionists, and presents the tale more as a historical smackdown. This book cannot possibly stand in audio alone, since it's essential to look at paintings throughout as a guide. Even in the hardback, the reproductions aren't as detailed as one really needs to follow the discussion. More shocking was my discovery that the footnotes were omitted from the "unabridged" audio.

Panther in the Basement
(Amos Oz, 3 cassettes)
Written in 1994, this novelistic memoir of life in Israel in its last days as a British protectorate, touches on themes of loyalty, intrigue, and the drive for independence.

IDEO: Masters of Innovation
(Jeremy Myerson, 160 pp)
This is a very pro-IDEO publication with interesting images documenting the stages of design involved in building cool and occasionally useful items. The process is amazingly fertile and the company is shown to be nearly omnivorous in their interests.

Heir to the Glimmering World
(Cynthia Ozick, unabridged, stopped after 6 out of 9 cassettes)
Ozick's brilliance comes through in her smooth integration of ideas, history, and crazed family characters. I stopped before finishing, because I ran out of interest. The German refugee family, with a mother who'd collaborated with Erwin Schrodinger, and a father who studies the Karaites (a Jewish sect that rejected the rabbinic tradition). The Karaites, a fundamentalist strain, earned the father sponsorship by a Quaker college, owing to their misunderstanding the . I never quite grasped how the Karaitic beliefs fit into the design of the novel, but since Cynthia Ozick crafted this tale, there must be a deep rationale.

Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (Science Masters Series)
(Dan Dennett, 3 hours)
A lucid tour of the ideas swarming about consciousness. As a fine answer to Nagel's famous question, What is it like to be a bat?, Dennett asks, What is it like to tie your shoe laces, or drive home on autopilot? By posing the questions in fresh ways, he makes a strong case that there are some questions that don't have answers at all.

This Craft of Verse
(Jorge Luis Borges, 4 CDs)
This artefact of Borges' 1968 Norton lectures retains some interest simply due to the fact that it captures the voice of the blind storyteller. I actually had a chance to hear Borges speak at my college, when he was whipping around the world trying to lobby for a Nobel. In these lectures, the ideas never seem too profound, nor do the jokes seem hilarious. But the time passes painlessly, and the occasion provides Borges with a chance to review the vast library of quotes that floated inside his mind.

Everyman
(Philip Roth, unabridged, 4 CDs)
I've been listening to this, off and on, throughout the summer. I liked this more than *The Dying Animal*, another novella that Roth wrote on a single sustained point. The perseveration on death suits a man after 70. I don't really connect to that anxiety, since we have our whole lives to acclimate to the fact that we are going to die. The other aspect of Roth's anxiety that eludes me is his absolute and utter concentration on sexual satisfaction, as the summum bonum.

Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood
(Kate Simon, unabridged, 5 cassettes)
A real life story, far uptown from Henry Roth's *Call it sleep*, but in the same era, since Kate Simon came to America at the age of 4, and grew up in the Bronx before WWI. One thread of the story is a disturbing echo of Roth's life story, namely, the prevalence of sexual exploitation of the young girl, by her uncle, as well as older neighbors. She describes everything with frank and direct language, and evokes a world of complex emotions without a spec of sentimentality.

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
(Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, 8 hours)
Very lucid, with lots of interesting anecdotes that underscore the importance of network analysis. I had avoided this book for a long while, since the underlying theory attracts a lot of flakes who fail to grasp the difficulty of the problems posed. But the author is responsible for research that has been published in premier scientific journals, and so he is attentive to the entire range of issues. He's fairly modest about his own accomplishments, especially in emphasizing the contributions of others and the possibility of future revelations. Since this book was published in 2001, a lot of his speculations about the web have come about. He did not believe, for example, that targeted messaging would be possible to all the tiny little leaves on the web, where highly specialized groups gather; but in fact, that is what Google's AdSense now manages to do, so we see the incredible leveraging of specialized marketing that seemed inconceivable 5 years ago.

Copy This!: Lessons from a Hyperactive Dyslexic Who Turned a Bright Idea into One of America's Best Companies
(Paul Orfalea, abridged, 4 CDs)
I enjoyed hearing about how Kinko's was founded. Dyslexia drove Orfalea to see the value in partnering with others who had different skills, and he always had a bead on the market. Even today, school seems poorly designed to challenge and engage bright minds that can't process text. Very few founders I've met seem to be able to grow their potential opportunity by opening to others; perhaps in an era of open source, there's more ways for people to recognize the ways to create through collaboration. This is not a tight book, but it's about as fun as sitting in a bar with a super successful businessman.

Going sane : maps of happiness
(Adam Phillips, 224 pp)
The author is a rock star writer among the psychiatric set, and he does write clearly. This book just doesn't seem at all necessary. Is sanity boring or impoverished as a normative ideal? Not to me. But this guy makes a living off people who are concerned that they might be crazy. He's widely read, so the quotes from Carlyle, Baudelaire, Keynes are apposite and interesting. The frontispiece quote is memorable: "if, by some mischance, people understood each other, they would never be able to reach agreement. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, Intimate Journals" The last chapter is a nebbish dawning his imitation Nietzsche suit, expounding baseless generalizations about the sane in what must've been fobbed off by the editors as "aphorisms". They are without merit, unconvincing, and rather fatuous. It would be easy to parody them: "The sane do not leave the milk out overly long, recognizing as they do that milk has a complex nature, sometimes to be tasty, but sometimes, to spoil." He simply smuggles his own preferences and attitudes about life into the sane side of the sentence, while phrasing the sentence so that other outlooks are not mentioned.

The Kite Runner
(Khaled Hosseini, 360pp)
I tried listening to this, but it wasn't terrifically gripping. Then, I picked up the novel, and was pulled in by the story. It's an Afghani version of *Rich Man, Poor Man*, a potboiler I enjoyed reading on the Jersey shore long ago. The audio version had one advantage, which was that the narrator could pronounce the Afghan names and phrases with correct inflection-- e.g., Baba was pronounced much more like "Bow-ba". One tiny flaw with the audio was that the CDs failed to record the last 2 tracks when ripped, which meant that the crucial event between two friends, the loyal servant and the author, is skipped over. I moved between the audio and the paper versions, but most enjoyed reading the story before bed. The Afghan dimensions evoke the marriage rituals, the culture of honor, the brutality that can occur between men and women, as well as the war damage since 1974. Some of the psychological nuances of power dynamics are displayed, but never analyzed or discussed by the author.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
(Chris Anderson, unabridged, 7:56)
A bulked up version of the seminal Wired article by the same name. Anderson credits Jeff Bezos with the original insight, that the cumulated demand for items beyond the big hits held at a store like Walmart (the "fat head") is far greater (the long tail). A slogan of the future might be compressed into this phrase of Anderson's: "Rather than a dozen markets of millions, there will be millions of markets of dozens." The original article had a very big impact, and Anderson travelled around presenting his ideas to many companies and conferences. This talk-a-thon complemented his blog, which was an interesting forum for all the long tailsters (and some of the critics). His observation is compelling: the low cost of inventory makes it possible to offer more of everything, and as things get digitized, time and space are conquered to create an infinite bazaar. Against those who fear choice overload, Anderson incisively argues that people need filters that guide and provide context, and with that power, there's an intrinsic value to more and more options. One final point: In spite of all the information that must have been collected in speaking and blogging about the long tail, the book did not leave me feeling as if I'd gotten an advanced, deeper grasp of the idea than originally was sparked from the article. Update on July 26: The Wall Street Journal just wrote a critique, which underscores how gullible I was in buying into this story, without having seen real data: " 'Everywhere I looked the story was the same. . . . The 98 Percent Rule turned out to be nearly universal.' EXCEPT IT ISN'T. ... Anderson told me in an email that he mentioned the 98 Percent Rule only to show how he first got interested in the book's overall subject, adding, "I have no idea how broadly it applies today (or whether it should better be called 'The 90% Rule.')" ... I was thus a little surprised when Mr. Anderson told me that he didn't actually have any examples of it occurring. At Netflix and Amazon, two of his biggest case studies, misses won't be outselling hits for at least another decade, he said. ... Escan says 10% of their songs account for roughly 90% of their streams; monthly data from Rhapsody showed the top 10% songs getting 86% of streams."

Bernard Maybeck at Principia College : the art and craft of building
(Robert Craig, 544pp)
Maybeck's life is such an inspiration, and this book captures a huge project he undertook late in his life, to build an entire college campus outside St. Louis, in the late 1920's and early 30's. His MO is demonstrated by what he told one prospective client: "I will design your new house if you will let me come visit your present home, to see how you now live, to listen to the music you like, and to learn what is important to you." (p79) This contrasts so powerfully with the other genius of architecture, FLloyd Wright, who expected the inhabitants of his buildings to live up to his style. Maybeck's temperament shines through this book: When the original site was rejected, after much initial work, his response was positively cheerful, on the order of 'This is great! We didn't think big enough the first round.' Another fine instance of his adaptive style to building: "We must not want our own way; we should think of how best to accomplish what we are hired to do. Every thing an architect works on has this problem. The design, composition, material or color are on side of the balance, and needs and policy and human experience are on the other side. The happiest architect is one who sits on a fence." p430

Ready for Anything : 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life
(David Allen, abridged, 4 CDs)
I read this in a way that would be antithetical to productivity laser beamers: While reading/writing emails, this sage ball of wisdom nattered in the background. Mostly, it's common sensical, but it's rarely essential info. If you're not living up to the rigors of GTD, maybe you should listen to this as a spurring punishment to make you toe the line.

Absurdistan
(Gary Shteyngart, narrated by Arte Johnson, 11:49)
Hilarious novel about the life of a Russian, landlocked in the former Sovier Union (initially, "St. Leninsburg," and then later, Absurdistan). He is tormented by memories formed from falling in love with the United States during his 4 years at Accidental College in the Midwest, and a year in New York City. Shteyngart's ear for the ridiculous inflections of American speech is sharp, and the hilarity of his satire is sustained for the breadth of this fat novel. The satiric Absurdistan was inspired by the truly sad Azerbijan. Shteyngart's position, as someone raised in the Soviet Union until about 7, and then brought to the US, gives him a great vantage for linking up the two former superpowers. With a main character who's 325 pounds, it's inevitable that this book would get compared to the Confederacy of Dunces. This book has a wider arc than Dunces, with a much closer fix on the linguistic ticks of "multicultural" college grads, the hipster ambitions of the Williamsburgian kids, and also includes a funny take on third world graft and the esteem among the mafiosi for Halliburton.

The Ten Faces of Innovation : IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization
(Thomas Kelley and Jonathan Littman, 256pp)
This book has a lot of interesting anecdotes, although it didn't strike me that the 10 roles were so clearly delineated that the stories about life at IDEO uniquely stuck onto one or another peg. For example, the experimentalist is the role that throws together a quick movie demo'ing a concept; that would seem to be just as much the role of director, or perhaps, the cross-pollinator. Nevertheless, the real value of the book comes from the numerous anecdotes, and only secondarily from the framework.

A Prison Diary
(Jeffrey Archer, 7 CDs)
I've never read any of Archer's thrillers, but I vaguely recall hearing that a prominent Thatcher-era conservative Lord had been put in prison. You could read this book from start to finish, without ever learning that Archer had conspired to perjure in a libel suit he brought against a tabloid all to prove he had not been with a prostitute. Instead of facing his own guilt, he snivels occasionally about the disproportion of the injustice. His account of the murderers he shared the prison with is moderately interesting; clearly, of all disciplines, being a writer best transfers to prison-- he scribbles away in his cell, 6 hours a day, in order to pass the time. He definitely benefited from his celebrity and high social class; he also clearly failed to be forced to face the error of his way. The life of a fiction writer blends indistinguishably into the actions of a perjurer; it would be impossible to discern whether this book is any more veridical than James Freys' writing.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(Mark Twain, 10 CDs)
After finishing the Twain biography, I wanted to re-read Huck Finn. This book is still fun, and the dialects, read aloud by one narrator, show how bold the book was about 125 years ago. One device that moves a considerable amount of the humor is Twain's delight in lies, and the skewering discomfort that occurs when a liar collides with one who knows that they're being lied to.

Cry, the Beloved Country
(Alan Paton, unabridged, 9 CDs)
This lovely and tragic novel, written in 1948, involves two distinct threads: a Zulu minister's trip to Johannesburg to track down lost family members (a daughter who it turns out has 'taken many wives', a son who got mixed up with thieving friends in J'burg). The second half involves the perspective of a white farmer.

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.