Shlepping the Exile
Michael Wex, 150pp
A fun and funny novella, by the author of Born to Kvetch. The story is touchingly autobiographical, although my sense is that the success in getting a girl, and avenging the abuse of bullies, is wish fulfillment.

Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning Parts I and II (Teaching Company Great Courses)
(David Zarefsky, 12 cassettes -- Only listened to 2)
I admire Zarefsky as a teacher: he taught the best history course I took as an undergrad. I am also intrigued (still) by his mind: he ran the debate camp I attended my last summer in high school. The deep respect others held for him made me want to study him for the source of his charisma. In spite of his inscrutability, I realize he systematically misunderstood certain ideas. He elevated his interpretation of Thomas Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions into an absurd game he labeled hypothesis testing, and there's even a brief mention of his understanding in these tapes. This particular course is truly odd. Z's lectures have titles such as "Moving from Cause to Effect" or "What Makes a Sound Argument?" I couldn't fathom listening to such topics, but I did hear the first and last tapes.

Boomsday
(Christopher Buckley, 9 CDs)
This started well, in a wonky way, but it began to lose focus before the half point, and after that, the story was a frenzy of shark jumps.

The Kid Stays in the Picture
(Robert Evans, 6 CDs)
Fantastic tales told by a supreme womanizer and Hollywood operator. Toward the end, the disintegration of his life is echoed in the bizarre doggerel that attempts to describe the motives of the 'seducer'.

Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist
(Tyler Cowen, 245pp)
Tyler Cowen is an economist, aptly self-described "curious intellectual nerd polymath," and a gifted blogger. His new book is the only one I've ever pre-purchased through Amazon. This in itself is a tribute to Cowen's capacity to mobilize appropriate incentives: He secreted a second blog, and advertised on Marginal Revolution that access was available only to those who wrote to say they'd pre-purchased a copy of DYIC. I spent this afternoon reading the book, and my overall impression is that "Sometimes, a bunch of appetizers does not make a meal." Because Cowen's brain brims with creative ways to approach life from an idiosyncratic angle, his blog has marvelous little jags, lists, apercus gleaned from his vast reading. This book is not quite a blook, but it would have greatly benefited from a co-author whose strength was more inclined to thoroughness. While he admits that his habit is to "stop writing just a bit before I have said everything I want to. I find it better to approach the next writing day 'hungry'..." (123), I was left hungry for more detail or resolution on almost every topic. As a troubling example, he introduces the concept of the "Me factor", and deploys it in several instances, but the only explanation provided was this very skimpy account, that focusing "our attention on ourselves ... is in fact our favorite topic. Me, me, me. ... [T]he 'Me factor', as I will call it." (52-3) There are tons of ideas broached here, and the chapters on Art and Food are particularly stimulating. The defense of self-deception felt self-indulgently sketchy, and the final account of how to deal with torture piffles into "Quite simply, it is hard to show other people, in a convincing manner, that we are telling the truth. In the meantime, file this problem under 'Difficult to Solve' and stay out of the wrong cities." (104). If truth in subtitles were enforced, it should be noted that Cowen offers very little to help survive your next meeting, nor do his thoughts on motivating your dentist inspire much confidence. My attention was not held at all from Chapter 8, Avoiding the 7 deadly sins (or not), onward.

Firehouse
(David Halberstam, 4 CDs)
I listened to this, in part to know more about Halberstam, who recently died, and also to learn more about firemen, since my cousin is training to join their ranks. Since the story is about a firehouse that was wiped out in 9/11, it has a very sad undercurrent. The writing conveys a lot of the camraderie and masculine impulse to protect and save that forms the core of the fireman's duties. As an instance of the incredible poignancy of the language, I quote the following passage, which even now causes me to feel emotional: "I'm your brother," he said to the barely conscious Shea, using the phrase by which firemen refer to one another, "and I'll be with you until we can get you out of this." (The exact reference was reached through Google books on Page 112.)

Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
(Daniel Tammet, 256pp - stopped at the halfway point)
I became aware of the author by viewing a BBC documentary, where DT demonstrated his capacity to learn a language (Icelandic) in just 7 days. Available here on youtube. This book is his own internal account of his upbringing, the difficulties he faced as a boy, the teasing made tolerable only by his indifference to other's opinions. This book has many interesting descriptions of the author's synesthesia, his predilection for primes, and the work he's invested in learning to combine his compulsion for precision with the world of others.

The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation
(David Kamp, 416pp -- decided to buy it, returned this to the library after first 165pp)
This is a lot more racy than the Alice Waters bio published earlier this year. It's fascinating, super gossipy, and a pleasure to read.

World party : the rough guide to the world's best festivals
Not terribly interesting. Mostly a list of bacchanals. The one festival I'd not been aware of, that I am now interested in: Fiesta de Santo Tomas, Chichicastenango, Guatemala, in the 7 days leading up to December 21st.

The 10 Best of Everything: An Ultimate Guide for Travelers (Passport to the Best)
(Nathaniel & Andrew Lande, 480pp)
I have a weakness for this sort of absurd list-making. It's naked balderdash in vastly multi-dimensional matters such as the 10 best wines, and even in an area such as the best chocolate, there's no real surprises. Best paged through in a dash giving the book under an hour of attention. Nevertheless, here's places in the Bay Area that were added to my radar: Miette - 3rd greatest patisserie, in the Ferry Building (take it to Sausalito). Victorian Home Walk 415.252.9485 and San Jose Flea Market Sundays 408.453.1110
Elsewhere: Venice-Simplon Orient; ExpressSierramadreexpress.com; and for tips, PassportNewsletter.com.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel
(Michael Chabon, 10 cassettes)
An amazing alternative world, where Israel imploded in 1948, and most Jewish refugees ended up in Sitka, Alaska, speaking and living in Yiddish. Throughout this entire novel, I was entranced, fascinated with Chabon's playful language, intrigued by the intricacies of the plot, and interested in the lives of these fleshy characters. Best book I've read this year, and even better than Kavalier and Klay.

The Lonely Planet Guide to the Middle of Nowhere
(Lonely Planet Publications, 272pp)
Awesome. A very substantial tour of places that are far from everywhere (the one sucker punch inclusion is Las Vegas, which still fits the bill of being in the middle of nowhere). The essays that are attached to each far away place are well written and thought provoking. The coordinates are included for each site, and it would be fun to use them to tour via Google Earth.

The Years with Ross
(James Thurber, 336 pp)
Great stories, about the founding editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross, as recounted by James Thurber. It's fascinating to read that Ross had no ear for poetry, little education, and as an autodidact, a tendency to misspell and mispronounce words (a favorite of Thurber's was Ross's pronunciation of prodigal as "prodgidal"). The man clearly had great gifts, since he inspired hundreds of great friends to be loyal and produce great work for him.

Storage: Get Organized
(Terence Conran, 224 pp)
Interesting ideas on how to deal with stuff. Pretty anal, but valuable precisely due to that orientation.

Horse Heaven
(Jane Smiley, 9 of 18 cassettes)
Smiley's prose is easy to read, and this big fat novel also includes a lot of horse characters. I enjoyed learning about the world of horse racing, with its various tiers: owner, trainer, jockeys, and all the ancillary people (masseuses, horse readers, and more). I decided to bail when the spaghetti spool of characters and narrative threads threatened to overwhelm my ability to care.

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
(Jeffrey J. Kripal, 588pp)
This book is far too long, written as it is by a prolix historian of World Religions. The stories are fascinating, but the actual facts can quickly be gleaned from looking at wikipedia's entry on Esalen, which boils down the story to a few thousand words, and includes almost all the essentials. Who would have realized that Esalen was the offspring of 2 Stanford undergraduates, both too wealthy to know better, and one, Dick Price, a manic depressive whose greatest insights came on the verge of his psychotic breakdowns?

Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002
(Salman Rushdie, 6 cassettes)
This collection includes a superb opening piece on the Wizard of Oz, some personal pieces about Rushdie's soccer fandom, and then at the close, a very moving account of Rushdie's return to India, after years of being a persona non grata due to politicians groveling for the Moslem vote in India.

Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life
(Allen Shawn, 288 pp)
An interesting account of a life constrained by profound phobic anxieties. Shawn's writing about his own family life fascinated me (his father was the renowned New Yorker editor, and his older brother is Wallace Shawn). He had a twin sister who was autistic, and she was put into an institution at the age of 8. There's more musings about Freud than seemed necessary, since in the end, he realizes that his father, and many other relatives, had very similar phobias, without having anything like his unique childhood climate. Although I'd believed that conquering phobias was a solved problem for cognitive behavioral therapy, Shawn describes, at the end, attending a workshop for fear of flyers, and it's clear that the work required to to confront phobias is no easier than the solved problem of losing, say, 50 pounds of overweight.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883
(Simon Winchester, 10 CDs)
Quite a fascinating book, written by an historian who studied geology as an Oxford undergrad. The explosion, east of Java, helped spawn the theories of plate tectonics a half century later, the understanding of meteorological jet streams, and was the first instance of the entire globe becoming conscious of the environment's interconnectedness. A great tale.

A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward
(edited by Alana Newhouse, 350pp)
Interesting to page through, esp the first section on the late 19th century, with chilling photos of the aftermath of a pogrom. One annoying design choice was the failure to include the exact date, or at least the year, of the photos, since it would be very useful information when each section is broken up into greater than 20 year chapters. The mini-essays, by super-Jews such as Alan Dershowitz and Leon Wieseltier, are almost a distraction. One hilarious zing was the insistence on listing Chaim Grade on the same page as a portrait of IB Singer, with the note that most Yiddish readers felt the former was a greater writer.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
(Nora Ephron, 3 CDs)
Even though I've read some of these essays when they were first printed in the New Yorker, it was pure pleasure to hear Nora Ephron read them. Her work brims with honest disclosures about the struggles of "maintenance" for a woman, and who'd have guessed that one of her favorite cities is Las Vegas? Listening to this made me want to seek out her earlier work.

Naked
(David Sedaris, abridged, 3 CDs)
This was the break out book (published 10 years ago in 1997), and listening to him deliver the essays confirms his flawless sense of humor and poignant self-disclosure. Now, he's moved from This American Life to the New Yorker, from oral to written, from obscure to a name-brand. His latest story in the New Yorker (7/9-16/07) makes a nod at the close to accusations that he spins and buffs up his tales. Clearly, he writes to be amusing, and it's a big win. When I quickly looked at the print version, the very first story (ommitted in Sedaris' reading), about his beautiful and intelligent family, struck me as quite different from his current work, since it was purely tongue-in-cheek.

Don Quixote
(Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman; stopped at 9 CDs)
I've read DQ about 3 or 4 times; the interactions between Quixote and Sancho Panza are superb and hilarious. Jim March's summation has always encapsulated the whole in one sentence: Don Quixote is not mad; his problem is that he believes more in what he's read in books than in his senses. I stopped after 9 CDs since I am trying to focus a little more than when I listened to this while writing my dissertation. Grossman has done a fine job, although my previous exposures, in English and once in Spain in Spanish, were just as pleasurable.

The Cities Book: A Journey Through The Best Cities In The World
(Lonely Planet, 428pp)
I take a dim view of these repurposed Lonely Planet coffee table books, even though they're attractive enough to pick up at the library and page through. The guide to 200 greatest cities puts Paris at #1, which is pretty uncontentious. But how do 2 Australian cities (Sydney and Melbourne) make it into the top 15? My only explanation, without experiencing either, is to assume that Lonely Planet is published from Australia. Within the US, I'd rank the great cities as NY, SF, LA, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, and then add a bunch of second tier cities. Their ranking excludes Boston, puts Chicago above LA, and includes a scad of places such as Austin that may be worth talking about, but don't seem like the world's great cities. The format for this book is really dumb: 4 photos, and a formula of exports (famous people), and a silly quintessential moment that doesn't make much more sense than any post card photo. Here's their top 20: (1) Paris; (2) New York; (3) Sydney (4) Barcelona; (5) London; (6) Rome; (7) San Francisco; (8) Bangkok; (9) Cape Town; (10) Istanbul; (11) Melbourne; (12) Hong Kong; (13) Kathmandu; (14) Prague; (15) Vancouver; (16) Buenos Aires; (17) Rio de Janeiro; (18) Berlin; (19) Jerusalem; (20) Montreal.

Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
(Robert Stone, 240 pp)
I'm a fan of Stone's fiction, and this partial autobiography is funny, open, and searching about the sources of the haze and fervor that defined the 60s. At the end of A Scanner Darkly, PK Dick's epilogue mentions how the loss of many friends to drugs drove him to write that book. To be honest, who could top Robert Stone, friend of Ken Kesey, first exposed to LSD by Ram Dass in his Richard Alpert days, and aficionado of many exciting trips, many of which are recounted in telling prose here. Yet again, there's a surprise to realize how cool Palo Alto/Menlo Park was in the early 60s, when Kesey & Stone (and also Larry McMurtry, who does not figure prominently in the tale, but is mentioned in passing as a Stegner fellow) were all there.

The Big Book of Hell
(Matt Groening, 176pp)
When I was in college at Northwestern, one of the best parts of my education involved weekly seminars with the Chicago Reader, where I would open the last part of the paper, and read Lynda Barry and Matt Groening (both apparently Evergreen College grads). This tome (another bookmooch score) captures so many of LIH's brilliant and hilarious phrases. For over 20 years, I've kept in mind the warm hearted cheer for anyone who relays that they've been laid off: "Let's bump into one another randomly on a street corner in a few years, and not remember one another's names." (Groening since the day I read it.) Also: "Let's get drunk and make love on the front lawn. I've dunnit before. It's lotsa fun." And finally: "My friends call me Chunk-style." As a double bonus, MG did the index himself, and explicitly calls out fascinating little bits, such as the two early cameos of Bart Simpson on TVs in the background.

Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
(Paul Graham, 271 pp)
Paul Graham thinks, and writes, about the design of computer programs with an original approach, frequently via funny and original metaphors. There's not a lot of connections with his time studying painting in Florence, but the very fact that he did decide to learn to paint underscores his vitality as a thinker. This was one of the very first books I gleaned from Bookmooch, and although it took a few plane flights and late nights to munch, I recommend it highly. I skipped the essay on defeating spam, since it seems quaint now that spammers exploit the financial impact of their information pollution distorting mass behavior, without asking for any specific action on the part of spam-ees.

Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur: Why I can't stop starting over
(Stuart Skorman, 224 pp)
An interesting life, but this book was a little padded. I enjoyed the tale of his 3000 mile bike ride after being exiled from Bread & Circus. I was particularly interested to learn that he had chosen the location of the Prospect St store in Cambridge, just a couple of years before I moved to Boston, and came to know that very store. His tales of poker playing don't have the same weight, but it was fun to read of someone making 17 million during the dot com frenzy, simply by setting up Reel video (the famous store in Berkeley remains, and was always the only profitable part of that business). Naturally, after scoring so big, it was inevitable that he lost half his nut by trying to start another whiz-bang dot com, but it all ends well. There's strong parallels with Kinky Orfalea's tale of his own mega startup, although I found the kink-ster's unique tendency to give partial ownership to each of his partners more original and thought provoking.

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
(Sandy Tolan, 9 CDs)
This tells the conflict between an Arab family that planted a lemon tree before 1948, and ended up refugees whose home was later occupied by refugees from the Holocaust who had fled to Israel. Dramatizes the conflict of aspirations, in particular the hard edge that blocks resolution over the Palestinian aim to establish a right of return.

Anger-Free: Ten Basic Steps to Managing Your Anger
(W. Doyle Gentry, 211 pp)
This book is so bad I had to look through the whole thing to fathom just how narcissistic and narrow the author's approach to anger actually was. Obviously, the topic is important; humans get angry, and if techniques for managing and modulating anger were better held within my own grasp, my life would be be smoother and happier. What's shocking about this shallow treatment is that it begins with a trite epigraph (The best time to manage anger is before it happens) attributed to WDG. I've never read a book where the author quoted himself before starting the book. It gets worse, since over half the anecdotes of recovery from anger are drawn from the author's own life. In the final chapter, one of the few sources for anecdotes, John, is revealed to be a beard, since "If you've read this book from cover to cover, you realize John's story is my story."

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
(Michael Lewis, 10 CDs)
I only follow sports that Michael Lewis writes about. His description of sabermetrics in MoneyBall was a fascinating tour of statistics in triumph. This book takes a Lewisian odd angle on football, viz., the change introduced by massive linebackers sacking quarterbacks. To deal with this, the offensive linemen (esp the left tackle who protects the QB's blind side) have a value that's directly connected to the QB's value, since without the protection of a tackle, the QB gets injured. This part of the book is only about 1/4 of the pages, and the majority is dedicated to one single promising high school student (Michael Oher) who was rescued from the ghetto of W. Memphis. Michael was adopted by a friend of Lewis's, Sean Tuohy, and popped into an evangelical school. Some of the hard questions (how football redeems the value of this human being) aren't directly addressed. Nevertheless, the prose surrounding the turn-around is quite moving.

A Year of Adventures: Lonely Planet's Guide to Where, What And When to Do It
(Andrew Bain, 218 pp)
This is an interesting book to page through, although another version is just waiting to be done, since rather than tell you simply when to show up iron-man marathons, or iditarods (that last 1800 km), it would be great to be told about the best festivals and events around the globe. I recall showing up in Basque country at the end of August, which just happened to be the feria for Ignatius; it was the right time to be in the twin towns of Azpetia and Azkoitia. The items of greatest interest to me from this book: Canyoneer in Paria Canyon, UT (avoid summer or winter floods, p71); Watch chimpanzees at Gombe stream ( between Feb and June, p73); Gorilla tracking in Bwindi, Uganda (January's the middle of the dry season, p10); Mountain Bike in Moab (p170); Snorkel with Manatees in Florida (p177); Train surf El Nariz del Diablo in Ecuador (p196); Zorb in NZ (p197); Canopy tour zip lines in Monte Verde Costa Rica (p201). There's links to some online resources at http://www.yearofadventures.com

The Ghost Map
(Steven Johnson, 8:38)
Fascinating tale of the work that enabled John Snow to demonstrate that the source of cholera was water-borne. I resisted reading this book for quite some time, since I assumed I knew this story from Tufte's discussion of the map as a seminal instance of info-graphics. In fact, this book is chock-full of fascinating information. Here's just one example: By living in cities, humans concentrated the epidemic risks of typhoid, cholera, and other diseases from impure water; the solution, hit upon about 10,000 years ago, was to drink beer & wine instead of water. This pushed the selection for alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme production that enables the liver to better metabolize alcohol. Aboriginal people (such as Native Americans) never lived in cities, and consequently, never were exposed to selective pressures to acquire this enzyme. Consequently, today, those peoples are much less successful at metabolizing alcohol. (p107-8) This was the first book I've read by Johnson, and it was so well designed that I am going to seek out others. Wait, I have to add one further point made here: The recycling of a waste product in biological metabolism, namely the excess calcium, gave rise to bones, shells, and the whole articulation of hard bodies. Johnson makes the latter point while discussing the complex economy of Victorian London, where night soil men (rakers of cess pits) where nearly at the top of a whole set of castes for recovering waste.

The Inheritance of Loss
(Kiran Desai, 12:13)
Bitter bummer of a book. The author appeared to hate every one of her characters. Could that contempt have helped earn her the Booker? I listened to this on two cross-country flights, and at times, I harbored a dim hope that I'd learn something about the lives of Nepalese and Indians living through the 1980s. When I think of how rich and profound a world is shown through the films of Satjait Ray, this book suffers even more from the comparison with a true master. The book isn't even well-edited, since there's multiple repetitions, with no resonance, simply agglomeration with nearly identical phrasing, separated by hundreds of pages. Often, the Booker prize has been a baloney award: the Life of Pi was unreadable, and this at least brought me in contact with one Indian woman's contempt for every person she casts her literary eye upon.

Vineland
(Thomas Pynchon, punted after 100 pp)
This is the third time I've tried to read this since it came out in 1990. Pynchon's 2 insterstitial books, Crying of Lot 49, and Vineland, are both California based. He hates the first, and after trying three times to get into the latter, I give up. I was up at an organic farm, and the moldy hard back copy beckoned as something to read. In a conversation with a bookstore clerk while buying Against The Day, I recall his trenchant observation that Pynchon's writing in V is amazing when he's evoking the era before WWI, but the stuff about NY city in the early '60's is unmemorable. It may be that Pynchon wraps his mind around things most grippingly by surrounding them with his omatidia reading perspectives. The description of Mendocino in the Reagan years did not really click for me, and I gave up yet again.

Emma Lazarus (Jewish Encounters)
(Esther Schor, 368pp)
I didn't even recall who this poet was until I began reading this. Her poem, at the base of the Statue of Liberty, is a little tired, weary, and teary-eyed, but it does capture an authentic emotion behind America's powerhouse, drawing upon immigrant genius. This bio would be of great interest to someone who'd like to learn about well-to-do Sephardic Jews in 19th century New York city. Emma L's intensely driven ambition enabled her to draw in Emerson as a tutor, and even though he felt a little queasy at her poetry, she finagled him into accepting a dedication, "To my friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson". The author, Esther Schor, has lavished her own affection on her subject, but I didn't really want to spend the time to learn about such an ambitious, but only moderately talented, Jewish woman.

The Life of David
(Robert Pinsky, 224 pp -- stopped after 120)
Since I've enjoyed several other Schocken books, I eagerly sought out Pinsky's volume. Unfortunately, I never really got into it. The language is odd, perhaps poetic, but not transparent, and the biography doesn't really build to tell the life in a coherent, gripping way.

Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation
(Naomi Seidman, 312pp)
Amazing tour of the Jewish diaspora's experience, as seen through language. Every chapter of this book brims with wit, insightful scholarship and rewarding observations about how the language of the Bible has filtered the relationship of Jews to the cultures in which they've found themselves. The opening chapter discusses the hotly contested impact of translating a "young maid" as "virgin" (parthenos in the Greek Septuagint). Following chapters build in a natural way, hitting upon fascinating topics such as how the early Christian Church's adoption of the Septuagint pushed the Jews into a particularist insistence on Hebrew, rejecting the translation that had originally been made for Greek Jews. The last two chapters, about Elie Wiesel and IB Singer, are full of fascinating revelations.

I Married My Mother-In-Law: And Other Tales of In-laws We can't Live With--and Can't Live Without
(edited by Ilena Silverman, 320 pp)
With chapters by Michael Chabon and his wife, Ayelet Waldman, this seemed promising. In fact, most of the pieces sound pretty whiny, especially the many that memorialize conflicts with inlaws of marriages that themselves foundered (ex-in-laws must be a tenuous category indeed). There's some interesting questions about how to balance the fact that your in-laws incarnate all that is wonderful and annoying in your spouse, but this book didn't seem to have even the one essay that nailed that issue.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
(Timothy Ferriss, 7:04)
This guy will become the new Tony Robbins, as a more humane, less scary incarnation of sheer will to power.

The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play
(Neil Fiore, 7:29)
Very useful, and the author walks his talk.

Maimonides
(Sherwin Nuland, 256 pp)
This is a fine entry point into Moses, the son of Maimon (the Greek form is to add -ides to the namesake). Nuland's a surgeon, and crisp writer, and this is the third in the series edited by Jonathan Rosen that I've read (along with Rebecca Goldstein's equally worthy work on Spinoza and David Mamet's vociferating Wicked Son. I am quite impressed with these concise, personal accounts written by super Jews, so I will seek out Pinsky's biography of David soon.

Kiss me like a stranger
(Gene Wilder, 6 CDs)
Mad genius, friend and colleague of Mel Brooks, and writer of Young Frankenstein, as well as the husband of Gilda Radner. His account of his life shows the neuroses, without obsessing about them in the prose. For example, he chose Gene Wilder as his screen name, and only after assuming the name did he realize that he'd adopted his own mother's name as his.

The places in between
(Rory Stewart, 8 CDs)
Pretty interesting story, told by a guy ballsy enough to walk hundreds of miles through Afghanistan just two weeks after the Taliban fell.

Alternadad
(Neil Pollack, 7 CDs)
Superb, interesting, honest, and fun-loving discussion of what it means to become a parent when you still want to rock out. Although I'm not an intransigent hipster, I immensely appreciated Pollack's discussion of issues such as disciplining your son, schooling him in non-simpy music, and trying to make the world you live in reflect the world you want your offspring to spring into.

The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s
(David Lance Goines, 767 pp)
A fascinating personal memoir, with extensive documentation, that tells the great story of the FSM, as well as various shock waves that followed, e.g., the Berkeley Barb, and the birth of the Hieronymous press that Goines runs today. Link here goes to the archival version, online at the Bancroft library

Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York
(Hilary Ballon & Kenneth T. Jackson, editors; 304pp)
This book, produced in tandem with current museum exhibitions in NY, has been part of a project to "rehabilitate" Moses' reputation. Although the different essays do advance claims to "contextualize" Robert Caro's indictments (racism, neighborhood razing, and car-fetishism struck me as his 3 worst crimes), this book provides more than enough evidence to believe that Caro was not biased. Here are several stories left out of the Powerbroker, which are mentioned here: 1) When Metropolitan Life began to plan in 1943 to construct the massive housing known as Stuyvesant Town, Moses helped establish legislation authorizing the exclusion of non-whites from access (p117). 2) Moses conspired to cut Washington Square Park in half, placing a freeway that would run through the Village -- The neighborhood group that mobilized to oppose this devastation included Jane Jacobs (p124), who later went on to write her incisive and anti-Mosaic theories of urban life. Although Caro never mentioned the details of this campaign against the Village, the horrific plans that Moses drew up show how ugly the city could have become if he'd been allowed to shove his highways into the center of Manhattan. The book itself, apart from Moses' reputation, is full of interesting details, although it could have been better produced. The opening pages, a photo portfolio of Moses' legacy, would have been greatly improved had the editors simply added one line of information about when the particular projects had been built. The very last section of the book is dense with an assessment of many of the projects undertaken, including those never built, and to my mind, the unbuilt projects stand as a clear demonstration of how dangerous Moses' power actually was.

Against the Day
(Thomas Pynchon, 53 hours/1085 pp)
I've been listening to this since late January, and it's impossible to excessively praise the experience I've been magically granted. I have enjoyed every Pynchon book, with the exception of Vineland, but this one struck me as the funniest of them all. It's also profoundly interesting, arcane, overwhelming, and endlessly intricate. I've been whittling away concurrently at a wiki that provides a great online guide to scan, after the fact. The book's tales stream so charmingly that no guide is required in advance. (I wasn't able to read Ulysses the first time without a crib, but Pynchon's work is far less architectonic, much more immediate). At every page, ideas scintillate, and I kept feeling as if I was sitting beside the craziest, most over-educated lunatic in Berkeley. The audible version is amazingly well produced, and highly recommended. I expect to re-read this again (and probably again).

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution
(Thomas McNamee, 400pp)
Alice Waters' story is told with grace and compelling detail. The biography tells her life story so well that the reader also learns about the trajectory of the delicious revolution, with close attention to the tale of Berkeley over the last 30+ years. The big lesson: To live an inspiring life, be inspired by those you meet along the way. Alice clearly pursued her dream, from the moment she experienced French food in her junior year abroad.

He: Understanding Masculine Psychology
(Robert Johnson, 83 pp)
Besides his life as a devilish blues guitarist, the author shows a facility with Jungian theorizing. The story that drives this little book is the myth of Parsifal, or the Grail, which is also the tale of the Fisher King. The device, story telling by talking about another story, can be suggestive and interesting. Surely it's an overstatement to say that Jung "proved" anything, other than the demonstration that talking about myths can fascinate and excite audiences. I am not closed to such speculative play, although at times, I found the explicit focus on Christian imagery and symbols to elude my own capacity to connect. Since this book was published in the early 1970s, the discussion of male versus female roles betrays its own era. Although people in the noughties may not be any better at understanding the difference between men and women, today we use different gestures to conceal our mystification.

MY BRAIN IS OPEN: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdos
(Bruce Schechter, 224 pp)
Erdos was the supremely sociable Hungarian mathematician, whose quirks and love for math problems is well treated here. This is a better book than the "Man who loved only numbers", since the very title of that book is refuted by the anecdotes about his fondness for epsilons, his interest in history, and his delight in teaching and collaborating. His brilliance included an uncanny aptitude at identifying who would be the right person for a problem ("For different courses, you need different horses"). The author describes the math behind several interesting problems in number theory. The analysis, toward the end of the book, of Erdos-numbering (creating a graph of collaborators centered on Erdos, see this page for more) suggests that Erdos may have helped to transform mathematics from an activity done alone to the kind of thing that gets done at parties. A bonus for me in reading this was a little more depth on the Riemann hypothesis, concerning the distribution of primes; since my primary reading for February and March has been Pynchon's Against the Day, it was a pleasant discovery to encounter some discussion of how the Riemann space is constructed.

The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk About It
(Susan Maushart, 288pp)
It's difficult to imagine the right phase in which to recommend reading this. It won't make sense before a baby arrives, and immediately after that, there's very little time to read. The book gives an accurate account of how imbalanced American culture is in fixating upon preparing for the birth, when that fraction of parenting is infinitesimal. The other message: Mothering has many wonderful dimensions to it, and this leaves women mute to discuss all the difficulties involved.

Spy: The funny years
(Kurt Andersen,Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis, 304pp)
I didn't subscribe to Spy in the late 80's but paging through this archive revealed what a significant influence they had on many cultural streams I thought were original to others. The most striking example of how I fell for the Pat Boone cover, when Spy had done the true rock n roll original, must surely be David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise (2000), which identified many sociological patterns of affluent earnestness. That entire book is covered in a Dec 1988 two-page diagram subtitled "How America got from Father Knows Best to Universal Gourmet Lifestyle" (pp125-6). Their research went deeper than Candid Camera, in getting millionaires like Trump to cash thirteen cent checks, and the arch and cunning style rewards close study. One very interesting confession they make is how terrifically underpaid their writers were (making less than 40 cents a word, according to the footnote on p129). The model for the magazine was to build such cache that their staff could earn real money writing elsewhere. Looking at the people who went on to positions of prominence, the scheme worked.

Crawling: A Father's First Year
(Elisha Cooper, 176pp)
This little book is a bitter pill. Written and illustrated by a new dad, its tone aspires to be searingly honest. It may well be, since I never liked the water-color-painting, former Yale jock, who muses openly about the conflicts in new fatherhood. For me, it rang false from the opening, when he described the birth as a head coming out of his "best friend." To resort to such a roundabout way of naming his wife is typical of Cooper's puer eternis tone; he knocks about with his daughter, visiting the Cheese Board, Chez Panisse, Royal Cafe in Rockridge. I liked Berkeley in his book, but I couldn't stand him. There definitely are fine turns of phrasing speckling the otherwise self-enamored prose, which aims to give the author's character flaws a pass (arrogance, irritability, selfishness) by disclosing them.

Jewish With Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice
(Zalman Schachter & Joel Segel, 288pp)
I read about half this wonderful book in January, and looked at it again last night, realizing that I won't likely be able to read more for a while. This is a great and inspiring discussion of how to re-enter Judaism. Surely one of the most memorable instances of Zalman's ability to sacralize the mundane is encapsulated in his dialog with a teenager who is awkward about his masturbation, and Zalman exhorts him to save some of that for shabbos, and "invite G-d into that."

P.S.1 Symposium: A Practical Avant-Garde
(Mark Greif, Eliza Newman-Saul, Dushko Petrovich, moderated by Keith Gessen)
If you're looking for interesting, look to N+1. This symposium on the role of the avant-garde, which fits nicely in 64 pp, has a lot of provocative and sharp ideas. Greif's opening places the avant-garde in a relation to what can be called the 'perennial', or to my ears, the canon. Dushko lays out a very interesting argument about how all modern art is avant-garde, and thereby, seems weightless and insubstantial, lacking any traction with any evaluative stance. Newman-Saul instantiates an evocation of radical imagination that makes her work and approach sound interesting. This pamphlet is not a manifesto, but is published by N+1's research branch, with an eye toward the big prize, namely art that is worth our full consciousness.

The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding: Sixth Revised Edition
(Gwen Gotsch & Judy Torgus, 465pp)
This is not a technical guide to answer any hard questions about lactation. It's structured more along the lines of an exhortation to breastfeed, with lots of quotes from women who say how great it was to breastfeed. This book may be of value as an introduction, but the level of information rarely goes beyond what one is likely to receive from pamphlets. I also must add: I got the version of the book for parents of boys; throughout, all references to a baby used the masculine.

Sheetrock & Shellac: A Thinking Person's Guide to the Art and Science of Home Improvement
(David Owen, 320pp)
I paged through this urbane reflection on houses and their construction. The author uses his most New Yorker-ly tone to keep every topic elevated and diffuse, genial and one or more levels removed from the grit. I imagine this is targeted to the audience that likes to think about house projects, rather than actually do them.

Guitar: an American life
(Tim Brookes, unabridged on MP3, punted after a couple of hours)
I thought this would interest me, but it must really be solely for those who play guitars. The story weaves the author's quest for his own handmade instrument with the background, history, etc.

Happiness : a guide to developing life's most important skill
(Matthieu Ricard ; translated by Jesse Browner, 281pp)
I've had this book out from the library for 3 months, and now admit I've stalled at p136. The orientation of Ricard is worth hearing (viz, how Tibetan Buddhist practices enable us to access the most authentic source of happiness). The metaphors show their provenance from a buddhist temple, as the parables typically reference homely images. For example, gold and jewels are meant to evoke the most valued items that may otherwise be neglected. I ended up losing my stamina, even though I would be open to listening to the remainder. The book has served one purpose, in re-opening my mind to the relevance of Buddhist practices to enabling me to learn how to manage negative emotions.

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
(Brian Wansink, unabridged, 6:26)
A great review of the cognitive cues that can drive us to supersized bodies. One of Wansink's most brilliant tests involved the bottomless bowl of soup (where a pipe continually maintained the level of soup), and those unlucky enough to eat at that trough greatly overconsumed. Wansink provides useful countercues that one can introduce to fight against the CostCo contextualized Cereal in a Drum.

The wicked son : anti-Semitism, self-hatred, and the Jews
(David Mamet, 208 pp)
Rather than an argument, this is a pugnacious text raring to pick a fight. I didn't quite finish the book, but it was interesting to read such a splenetically ferocious account of feelings, about 80% of which I share.

Being Martha: The Inside Story of Martha Stewart and Her Amazing Life
(Lloyd Allen, N hours on mp3)
Written by a person who's known Martha for decades, dating back to his business running a fruit stand in Westport, it should more appropriately be titled "Loving Martha." From one perspective, her uber-competency deserves admiration. The most telling anecdote, for me, was about her coming to her vacation home just hours after her husband had devoted himself to cleaning and vacuuming the place. She immediately began vaccuuming, and when pressed, explained, "You don't understand, this is what I do." She is the perfect Stepford wife, although this bio compresses her divorce into a paragraph.

Betraying Spinoza : the renegade Jew who gave us modernity
(Rebecca Goldstein, 304pp)
This was a terrific book to read while waiting for my sons to be born. Goldstein writes very well, and manages to balance the personal (her own education in a girls yeshiva, and then briefly, her graduate training) with the biographical.

Greek Drama: Tragedy and Comedy
(Peter Meineck, 7 CDs)
This is a fascinating course on Greek Drama produced by The Modern Scholar. The original course packager, The Learning Company, stands as the PageMaker to the Modern Scholar's Quark. The first mover in this space seems a little cheesy, with its literal trumpet fanfare at the beginning of each lecture, and canned applause at the end.

Past Tents: The Way We Camped
(Susan Snyder, 145pp)
Based on historical photos from the Bancroft Library, this slim volume jolts the reader into thinking about camping in snowy Yosemite before Goretex, nylon, and other tools of modern camping. On the upside, it appears that many people wealthy enough to snap photos of their camping trips also had packmules and servants to whip up meals. No amount of money protected even the wealthiest, such as Phoebe Hearst, from the mosquitoes. It was a lot of fun to see this glimpse of the past.

The Emperor's Children
(Claire Messud, unabridged, 21 hours -- stopped after 6 hours)
What a pretentious stinker! The New Yorker praised this as a comedy of manners, and many lists celebrated this as one of the year's best. This praise nudged me to taste for myself, but there's nothing but oodles of nicely crafted sentences, without a real personality in the whole heap of words. The 3 best friends from Brown float like 30-something fetuses in the womb of NY City, buffered with their entitlement. In the first quarter of the book, not one conversation between friends seemed intelligent, connected, or friendly. Among the characters, much is claimed for them, but not once did anyone say anything memorable. I can't imagine how anyone could care for such a lengthy novel, when there's no wit, no charm, no real people in the whole story.

The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer
(Harvey Karp, 288pp)
Although the title is pure Hollywood, the book's content itself is very valuable and taps a great deal of common sense about how to use the 5 S's (swaddle, shhh, side, swing, suck) to maintain the calm that will get newborn babies to acclimate to the proverbial fourth trimester. By emulating the sounds and swaddle tight orientation of the womb that the babies just left, Karp demonstrates how newborns can be eased into sleep.

Between Cross and Crescent: Jewish Civilization from Mohammed to Spinoza, pt I
(David Ruderman, 6 CDs)
Ruderman's a thorough lecturer who covers Jewish History well. This first part ended with the loss of the benign Muslim rulers at the end of the 11th century, when fanatical ideologues chased brilliant Jews such as Maimonides from Spain toward Egypt for safety's sake.

Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890
(Larry McMurtry, unabridged, 4 hours)
This book virtually had to be written by McMurtry: he persists in trying to make sense of the mythology of the West. His concision here manages to achieve balance, and he writes with a fine sense of historical perspective. Personally, my curiosity about the Mormon massacre, which Jon Krakauer devoted an entire book to, was slaked by McMurtry's brief review of the perfidy and deception. Although the 6 massacres described here killed far fewer people than died in 9/11, their historical importance and the light they shed on attitudes towards Native Americans is quite illuminating.

Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side
(Bruce Davidson, & Ilan Stavans, 128 pp)
Davidson is a renowned photographer who had a solo show of his work at the MOMA in 1963. In 1972, he worked with IB Singer, and was introduced by him to the Garden Cafeteria of the Lower East Side. The reminiscences of Davidson are touching, and some of his photographs of Singer are quite piercing. The most memorable, in my estimation, is the one of Singer laughing, with his gappy Polish teeth showing through his wide mouthed smile. Although other photos of the Lower East side are included, I don't think many people would associate IB Singer with this neighborhood, since he frequently stated that he often delivered his work to the Forward late at night, and certainly he didn't hang out with other writers there.

The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer
(edited by Seth Wolitz, 240pp)
Mentioned in Noiville's bio of IBS, I was able to get this through Berkeley's inter-library loan. The papers didn't reveal truly shocking disparities between the Yiddish versions of IB and the English translation. Janet Hadda's chapter on Cahan v. IB was quite interesting, and the very last part, on the geography of IB Singer's stories, was very illuminating. The penultimate chapter is a previously untranslated piece from IB's serialized gangster tale, Yarme and Keyle. The translator, Joseph Sherman, also worked on Shadows of the Hudson. The chapter here was more choppy, showing the workaday quality of some of Singer's Forward serializations. In many ways, it sounded like a rougher version of the Magician of Lublin.

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker
(edited by David Remnick, unabridged, 6 cassettes)
A collection of biographical essays, which opens with a 1950 piece on "Papa" Hemingway. I used to think that Woody Allen's shtick on casting the novelist as pugilist was a joke, but the way Hemingway spoke really was that macho. He said things like "My latest work knocks Sunrise out of the ring," and the posture clearly foreshadowed his alcoholic suicide. The piece from '57 on Marlon Brando is similarly prescient in identifying weaknesses and wobbles in his personality that ballooned into the man's full life. The only essay I couldn't listen to was Malcolm Gladwell's Coolwatchers, an excellent tale that has totally infiltrated popular culture. The one flaw in this collection is that Remnick focused on showing how writers re-defined, stretched, and expanded the scope of bio essays, so the very fun, vanilla write ups of lives got left out.

Dylan Thomas: A New Life
(Andrew Lycett, unabridged, 18:03)
I found this a tough go: alcoholism, philandering, and wife-battering all offend my bourgie sensibilities. Nevertheless, Lycett does a good job balancing the self-destructive life story with the poetic genius that haunted Thomas's weak-chinned fiz and frame. It was interesting to learn that Dylan's name was pronounced in the English manner, whereas in Welsh it would be pronounced "Dullan." He knew that he should not come to America, because he was celebrated, according to the author, in much the same way as a rock star would be in the 1960s.

Pragmatism : a reader
(edited and with an introduction by Louis Menand, 522pp)
After reading Menand's Metaphysical Club, it made sense to dive into the actual texts of the principals. This is a very fine reader, and the selected passages from Dewey were less mushy than my general sense of his style. The passage from Jane Addams was pretty vigorous. The only author whose selections I read in full was Oliver Wendell Holmes; I was surprised at how unclear and direct his arguments seemed to me, esp given his reputation as a vigorous stylist.

Toilets of the world
(Morna Gregory & Sian James, 256pp)
These two women have put together the book that I've heard many a first time traveler speak about doing to fill a gap in the library. The loos photographed do show a wide range of approaches, and my personal favorite was in Legoland in England, where the water conservation enables the 4 primary colored urinals to use no water: "Instead a cartridge of liquid sealant is placed in the bottom. The sealant is lighter than water, so liquid is immediately trapped beneath and released into the drain, eliminating the need to flush." (p127) The most fantastical toilets are in Shinjuku, from a restaurant named "Ten & Chi" (pp248-251)

Beware of God
(Shalom Auslander, 208pp)
I read the first 2 stories, where the jokey tone wasn't very engaging. The battle between an overly observant husband and his frustrated wife did not sound true to my image of Jewish Orthodox culture. I paged through other stories, and they weren't as weak as the two openers, but still, not ready for prime time. One of the last stories, "They're All the Same," portrays God focus-grouping his message with an ad agency, using all the wiles of market research. Better than average joke: "Where's McCabe?" asked God. "We should at least have one goy in the room, shouldn't we?" (p144) This isn't as good as Sam Lipsyte's first book of stories, but I'd take a look at his next collection. I remember feeling similarly uninterested in Nathan Englander's first book of stories, so it's difficult to please me.

Favorite Fiction of 2006

1- Absurdistan, by Gary Shteyngart -- Hilarity, intelligence, and cosmopolitan scope. My favorite novel. It should be clear that for me, fiction absolutely must have humor in it to really rate.

2- Homeland, by Sam Lipsyte -- Published in 2005, but it took a while for this truly funny novel to reach me.

3- Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman

4- Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace. Some very fine stories, which becomes all the clearer if one compares almost any other short story writer's output to DFW's.

Nonfiction
1- Born to Kvetch, by Michael Wex. Superb scholarship, fascinating ideas, great development.

2- From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner. Amazing documentation, with a very penetrating look at one of THE key characters of the Bay Area Renaissances.

3- The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. An excellent analysis of where food comes from, which points towards a way of meat-eating that even Peter Singer would approve of.

4- Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad, by David Zucchino. This book describes how things can go wrong in a war zone, even when the odds are so preponderantly stacked in our favor.

5- The Great Book of Chocolate by David Lebovitz. Reading this slim volume converted me from an eater of Milke brand milk chocolate to a guy who never touches anything below 60% cacao solids.

6- Kaddish, by Leon Weiseltier. One abridgment that is better than the original.

7- The perfect thing, by Steven Levy. Insane, and great.

8- Stumbling on Happiness, Dan Gilbert. A good random walk through a lot of current psychology, although very little is directly about getting happy.

9- Six Days of War, Michael Oren. A great history of a war that continues to be relevant.

10- Heat, by Bill Buford. I loved listening to him obsess about cooking.

Not mentioned, but highly influential in 2006: All the Feynman I uploaded. The best is the CD, Los Alamos from the Bottom, because it's in Feynman's own voice.

Honorable mentions: Setting the Table, on hospitality; The world is flat (too long, but filled with telling stories about the tides of globalization); Linked, a good treatment of the science of networks.

Thomas Paine: enlightenment, revolution, and the birth of modern nations
(Craig Nelson, unabridged, 13 CDs)
I've always been impressed with the clarity of language and direct expression that I recall reading in Common Sense. Tom Paine, author of that inspiring pamphlet, lived an amazing life: bankrupt in England, he left for America with letters of introduction from Ben Franklin. He met great companions in Philadelphia, and was soon writing Common Sense (which he'd originally intended to title Plain Truth). A great rhetorician, he was never effectual in the world, yet he participated in the two great revolutions of the 18th century. His journalism during the American Revolutionary war is highly praised by the author, and the piece that begins "These are the times that try men's souls" was esteemed so highly by Washington that he had the entire piece read aloud to his soldiers as they prepared to cross the Delaware on Christmas Day. (Once across, the Hessians hired by the Brits were so drunken that it was a phenomenal rout, the first real victory for America.) Paine should be a hero to the Creative Commons movement, since he repeatedly renounced the copyright to his moving essays, both Common Sense and later, The Age of Reason. Paine's life story is quite dramatic: after being the rhetorical spark for the American Revolution, he went back to England to toodle around on bridge engineering; he went off to France to participate in their Revolution, and after being a legislator, ended up being imprisoned for 10 months, and just missed losing his neck to the guillotine. His final years were embittered, as most people turned against him after his deist pamphlet, the Age of Reason. A surprising note that this book hit: Many of the Founding Fathers, in particular Ben Franklin, were mocked and ridiculed at the end of their life.

Isaac B. Singer: A Life
(Florence Noiville, translated from the French by Catherine Temerson, 208pp)
When I started this book, I thought "this is just a collation of information from Singer's own autobiographical essays, along with some information from the biographies that have been published." By the second chapter, my opinion hadn't really changed, but my appreciation of what Noiville had accomplished was much higher. This fine, short bio summarizes many strands of Singer's psychological complexity, whose own internal conflicts were amplified by his relationship with his older brother, his first translator (Saul Bellow), and surprisingly, even extended to his relationship to Yiddish. I learned for the first time that not only did Singer extensively revise and modify his stories as they were moved into English (this was well-known), but he has forbidden that translations be made of the Yiddish versions, and all foreign translations use the English texts. "A writer who gives up the text he has produced in his own language, a very strong, subtle, linguistically rich text; who forbids using it, consigns it to the dust, dooms it to oblivion..." (p98, quoting Henri Lewi). I may track down a recent book, edited by Seth Wolitz, called The Hidden IB Singer (2001). I also found a list of IB's favorite books (on p161): second only to the Bible, is "The Best of Pearls, by Moses Hayyim Luzzato", above Crime & Punishment (3rd), and Knut Hamsun's Pan (8th).

Isaac Bashevis Singer : an album
(ed Ilan Stavans, 200pp)
The best thing about this short book is the photographic documentation of the imp that inhabited Singer. One can't exactly say that the photos show the twinkle in his eye, since in at least one ID photo, IB Singer wore dark sunglasses. There's a beautiful full spread color photo of his work room, about which Singer used to joke "I can say I have accomplished vone thing in my life, my chaos has reached perfection." (The quote is from Dvorah Telushkin's Singer biography). I didn't find the mini-essays particularly interesting, with the exception of Cynthia Ozick's.

Fifty Years: Farrar, Straus Giroux Reader 1996
I've owned this book for a long while, and paging through it was a pleasure. FSG is the premier publishing house in the US, and it was fascinating to wander through an essay/short story/poem by many of their toplist authors. The only selection I read in full was Jesus Son, since I'd never read anything that Denis Johnson had written. My impression is that it's not anything of the caliber of Donald Barthelme or IB Singer, two other FSG authors who are personal favorites.

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
(Louis Menand, abridged, 6:58)
This is a superb cultural history, describing two of my favorite Cambridge kooks (Wm James and CS Peirce -- alas, the reader doesn't pronounce the latter's name correctly, which should sound like "purse"). I was fascinated to be reminded that James revealed the term "pragmatism" for the first time outside of Cambridge at a lecture at Cal, Berkeley in 1898. True to form, the spiny Pierce shortly thereafter renamed his own view "pragmaticism", 'a name too ugly to be kidnapped.'

iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It
(Steve Wozniak, with Gina Smith, 313pp)
The *other* Steve finally tells his story, and he does it well. His personality comes across with with a sweetness of tone, and ingenuous playfulness, that is utterly charming. The tales of his pranks really made me laugh; e.g., in his freshman year, he developed a device to interfere with TV reception, and then, when someone would get up to bang the TV, Woz would manipulate the clarity and fuzz to drive the person to absurd bodily maneuvers. His early education, learning boolean logic as a fifth grader, leads toward his incredibly creative chip designs. Steve Jobs, while working at Atari, got Woz to design the game Breakout. Instead of sharing the pay fifty-fifty, "He got paid one amount, and told me he got paid another. He wasn't honest with me, and I was hurt. But I didn't make a big deal about it or anything." (p148) When Apple was about to IPO, Woz sold shares to people inside the company for $5/share, which enabled more millionaires to be created on the IPO day than ever before in history. He also had a fateful airplane crash in 1981, and at that point, he stopped working fulltime at Apple. Woz has always remained an employee of Apple, and he continues to be an advocate for the company. If you want to hear Woz talk, there's a good interview with Guy Kawasaki here.

Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character
(Richard P. Feynman, Freeman Dyson (Foreword), Ralph Leighton (Editor), 608pp)
I skimmed through this, with great pleasure. It compiles (most?/all of?) *Surely you're joking* with *What do you care what other people think?", and also adds a foreword by Dyson, some extras that only Ralph Leighton had seen before, and a CD with Feynman's unique accent describing "Los Alamos from the bottom."

The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926-1930
(Scott Eyman, unabridged, 14:07)
This history of how sound revolutionized the movies does a thorough job of talking about the technologies that competed (and explains why precursor sound systems failed). Since Jack Warner, and the Warner Brothers collectively, instigated the revolution by slapping sound into The Jazz Singer, this history does a good job talking about their family and business dynamics. Left out of the story, and surely just as fascinating, would be a full analysis of the impact it had on actors who resisted, and those who failed to make, the transition. There are indeed stories of some losers, and the passages describing how silents were evocative and gestural, while talkies were forced to make every detail concrete, are quite interesting. But it is strange to not read much at all about Chaplin, the one exception who proved the rule that silents were dead. I'd make a natural connection to the concepts of Clayton Christiansen, who identified the "innovator's dilemma" as arising from how high profitability of any current dominant fashion prevents the top profitmaking companies from being able to exploit the new wave. Since "talkies" erupted in such a brief span, all the movie producers made the transition.

Stranger in a strange land
(Robert Heinlein, unabridged, 12 cassettes; stopped after 6)
Although this book was published before I was born, I've never "grokked" it (yes, this is where that hippie term first appeared). The story spins from some rather weird premises: that a human born on Mars could be socialized to perform all sorts of miracles, and is also, by virtue of his being the lone human survivor, the sole owner of that planet. The other major player, Jubal Harshaw, is Heinlein's sock puppet, making speeches that alas, sound quaint today, since he vociferously defends his right to not be invaded without a warrant & to have an inviolable right of habeas corpus. The treatment of women is certainly the stalest part of the story (there's still hope that Habeas Corpus will be resurrected). Jubal is effectively the real miracle man, and his sermonizing fatigued me. I also don't see where polyamory fits in to the future.

This American life
(Ira Glass, the first 25 hours)
It's fascinating to listen to a trove of TAL, starting back in the early '90s (a friend holds the entire 8 GB archive, with just a few gaps). I was amazed by the very first story, in the very first episode, in which Kevin Kelly explains how he had a religious epiphany in Jerusalem that turned him into a born-again. He gets emotionally choked up describing how he lived the next 6 months as if his life would end after that span. Besides #1, the opening story in #20 zoomed onto an obscure artist (Bas Jan Adder) who intrigued me long before I'd heard this tale. This deep dive left me feeling as if I ate Nutella for a solid day, and one a week may be the more appropriate dosage.

Tevye the Dairy Farmer
(Sholem Aleichem, narrated by Theodore Bikel, 4 hours)
Bikel beautifully reads these tales, which are brilliant transformations of pain that lies right on the surface of almost everyone of the stories.

The Shangri La Diet: The No Hunger Eat Anything Weight Loss Program
(Seth Roberts, 194pp)
This book was published in May of this year, and outlines ideas that Seth Roberts initially hit upon through self-experimentation. This book is really a bulked up pamphlet. Although I read it from front to back, the best part of the book is the research appendix, which references the nutrition (and associative learning) research that provided the following interesting data points: 1 - If fed on a diet that was artificially sweetened (ie, saccharine taste was novel) then rats gain weight vs rats fed on the same kibble unsweetened. 2- Saccharine flavor, when already familiar, disrupted the tendency for rats to gain weight. 3- Rats get fatter on the same diet when the very same food is presented with water baked in rather than as the dry meal (which is hypothesized to be due to the increased flavorfulness due to adding water). Roberts' analysis runs thus: Flavor, when connected closely with calorie absorption, triggers the body to read (and remember that) the environment has abundant food stores. If food is abundant, then the body's set point moves up, to pack on pounds. Novel flavors do not initially trigger that association. Finally, and the shangri la leap: Flavorless absorption of calories will trick your body to misread the environment's abundance, and this flavorlessness can drop your body's set point. Since I've already experimented with how much weight I can put on, the proposal to try drinking 3 flavorless tablespoons of oil a day, to moderate hunger, is worth a trial.

Gilead
(Marilyn Robinson, unabridged, 7 CDs)
This book has been widely praised, and I tried once before to listen to it, although it requires more powers of concentration than I gave it the first round. The book takes the form of a very long letter of an octogenarian preacher, who writes as the father of a 7 year old boy who's otherwise sure to never know the man who chose to bring him into the world. The structure of the story is finely developed, and it spans generations, since the almost dead preacher can recall his own father and grandfather, and toss in tales about their own forms of zealotry. Sin is the key to the old father's life view, which may explain why at times it was a stretch for me to grasp the urgency of his point.

The Prometheus deception
(Robert Ludlum, unabridged, 14 cassettes-- stopped after 7)
I don't think I'd ever read a Ludlum novel, and so I took a spin with this one, published right after 9/11/01, but written without much attention to anything but nefarious Russians. The tone relies on hyperbole (chess masters who could have beat Spassky or Fisher had they not switched to intelligence work, a hero who is the best history student ever to attend Stanford, etc). One aspect of the story is increasingly plausible, namely, that as our government sponsors deep dark projects, the people involved will have no reason to believe that they are in fact working for the government, rather than some impostor force that has deluded them.

Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
(Danny Meyer, 320pp)
I would never use the term 'fine dining' to describe the few restaurants that are favorites of mine, yet this title interested me because of its focus on hospitality. Slate slammed this book as another fatuous blob of business advice, but in fact, it is well-written, with intense autobiographical disclosure. Some important details of Meyer's personal development include the fact that his father went bankrupt twice, that he developed Bells Palsy (a facial paralysis) for 6 months due to the stress in opening Union Sq Restaurant, and just as he was planning to expand, he and his wife lost twins due to prematurity. I started skimming the halfway point, not because there's anything flawed with this book, but simply because it's addictive to read, and wanted to experience a moment of self-control. In the last part of the book, Meyer adds some great tales of how he operates from an assumption of abundance, giving and gifting a lot, with the expectation that relationships will be built that will sustain his initial acts of generosity. I liked this book enough to take some detailed notes:
p26 view all employees as essentially volunteers [DM managed John Anderson's campaign in 1980]
p35 began to follow the careers of Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters, Paul Prudhomme, Jeremiah Tower, Joyce Goldstein, Mark Miller, Bradley Ogden, Michael McCarty, Larry Forgione, Jonathan Waxman, Anne Rosenzweig, and Barry Wine.
p37 stagiare, or chef's apprentice
p42 I decided not to play ... chef
p49 Union Sq Cafe is the least sexy and most ergonomically clumsy restaurant space that I own. .... I believe it became a wonderful restaraunt because of its imperfections.
p51 [Job app q] "How has your sense of humor been useful to you in your service career?"
p56 In my obsession for big numbers, I'd created hideous logjams. But it was oddly exciting to manufacture challenges and then surmount them. ... [That] continues to be a pattern in the way I work.
p57 [Reservationist language] -- 'Can you give me a range that would work for you, so that I can root for a cancellation?' The point was to keep the dialogue open while sending the message: I am your agent, not the gatekeeper.
p61 my own early experiences at restaurants with my family, when I had been urged to read the menu 'from right to left' -- that is, prices first.
p65 Service is a monologue -- we decide how we want to do things and set our own standards for service. Hospitality is a dialogue. To be on a guest's side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response.
p68 I developed a case of Bell's palsy. I was just two months into the restaraunt business
p80 The best way I can do this [build community] is to first gather as much information as I can about our guests. I call this collecting dots. In fact, I urge our managers to ABCD -- always be collecting dots.
p97 I will throw myself into a venture only when certain criteria are met:
I am passionate about the subject matter (ie, early American folk antiques, modern art, jazz, barbecue)
I know I will derive some combination of challenge, satisfaction, and pleasure from the venture.
It presents meaningful opportunities for professional growth for my colleagues and me.
The new business will add something to the dialogue in a specific context, such as luxury dining (Gramercy Tavern)...
p98 watching me in the process of creating a new rest reminds her [wife Audrey] of what she goes through becoming and being a mom. Like rests, kids are a lot of fun to conceive and significantly less fun to festate over the next 9 months. You don't get much sleeep for the first 6 months after they arrive, and you feel as if you're never going to get your nose above water.
p108 [lost twins in 1995]
p109 Nothing would ever matter more to me than how we expressed hospitality to one another. (Who ever wrote the rule that the customer is always first?) And then, in descending order, our next core values would be to extend gracious hospitality to our guests, our community, our suppliers, and finally our investors.
p142 People duck as a natural reflex when something is hurled at them. Similarly, the excellence reflex is a natural reaction to fix something that isn't right, or to improve something that could be better.
p143 [5 core emotional skills for servers]
1. Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full)
2. Intelligence (not just 'smarts' but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning)
3. Work ethic (a natural tendency to do something as well as it can possibly be done)
4. Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel)
5. Self-awareness and integrity (an understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment)
p151 In building my first team for USQ in 1985, I did something that now sounds insane: I decided not to hire anyone from NY City.
p191 "the word on the street is that you've got the single best management style of any restaurant company... I'd call it constant, gentle, pressure."
p219 The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.
p223 The 5 A's for Effectively Addressing Mistakes
Awareness - Many mistakes go unaddressed because no one is even aware they have happened...
Acknowledgement - "Our server had an accident, and we are going to prepare a new plate for you as quickly as possible"
Apology - "I am so sorry this happened to you." Alibis are not one of the Five A's. It is not appropriate or useful to make excuses ("We're short-staffed.")
Action - "Please enjoy this for now. We'll have your fresh order out in just a few minutes." Say what you are going to do to make amends and then follow through.
Additional generosity - Unless the mistake had to do with slow timing, I would instruct my staff to send out something additional (a complimentary dessert or dessert wine) to thank the guests for having been good sports.

Getting things done FAST
(David Allen, 7.9 hours)
I listened to a CD version on my iPod, around the time of thanksgiving. There's a definite paradox to fiddling away time vicariously attending David Allen's seminar, but I have to admit that I have felt far more productive since I finished. I was waylayed for a while trying to get a tickler system; this audio finally pinpointed the origin of the term "43 folders," which is the sum of taking 12 month folders, and allocate 31 day folders for the current month. But the focus of David Allen's message comes across very clearly in less than 8 hours. In spite of the value (it's almost an audio equivalent of amphetamine) listening to David Allen's voice, and his feints toward humor, sound scary to me in some way that eludes exact identification just now.

Patrimony: A True Story
(Philip Roth, unabridged, 5 CDs)
I began listening to this after finishing the Corrections, and the echoes run deep, although Roth cannot do other than honor his father. There is a scene where his 86-year-old father, nearly blind, ends up wailing in Philip Roth's bathroom, upset that he has beshat himself. Roth gets his father to take a shower, and then says that the rest of the bathroom, covered in crap, reminds him of how he feels when beginning a novel.

Voices of the Shoah: Remembrances of the Holocaust
(Narrated by Elliott Gould, 4 CDs)
This is an unusual Rhino boxed set, historically documenting interviews with survivors of the Shoah. Four CDs can only represent glancing accounts of people's experiences, but each CD catpures something moving.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
(Fred Turner, 354 pp)
Stewart Brand is a high-IQ Zelig, who has been a catalyst of so many important developments throughout the last 4 decades of the 20th century. This volume is more scholarly, and more revealing of the social forces at work, than Markoff's What the Dormouse Said. It focuses with great intensity on Brand, due to Turner's unique access to Brand's diaries in the Stanford Library. SB is shown to have been central to far more moments of incipient Renaissance than anyone since Lou Salome, friend of Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud: He joined Ken Kesey as an original Prankster, was the videographer for Engelbart's 'mother of all demos,' then linked up all kinds of communes (including Ant Farm) while founding and editing the Whole Earth Catalog. Besides all the events already mentioned, Turner dives deeply into the WELL, which was the primordial "virtual community", co-founded by Brand. With his vision of power as drawn from network affiliations, Brand then built a consulting company called the Global Business Network, which used scenario planning as a form of "corporate performance art", by fusing countercultural norms with the needs of corporate board members. Turner does a fairly good job posing critical questions about how the privileged white male perspective defined the unfolding story. He flags the problem of this privilege, but isn't able to concretely identify how it could have been solved. Read this book to learn how SB helped create the world we live in, and deployed his unique social entrepreneurial skills to stay in the center of the game.

Space Colonies
(ed by Stewart Brand, 160pp)
Published in 1977, this compiles the dialog that was carried out in the pages of the Coevolution Quarterly, and documents Brand's unique style of facilitating constructive conversations. I looked over this to see an instance of his capacious enthusiasm at work, and it is curious that in this case, the path ran dry. I think John Holt, the advocate of unschooling, does an excellent job of posing some of the serious engineering challenges that were handwaved away. One great quote, from Wendell Berry, which Brand echoes back to him in a series of letters they published: "Humans are destructive in proportion to their supposition of abundance; if they are faced with an infinite abundance, they will become infinitely destructive." (p84)

Climb: Stories of Survival from Rock, Snow and Ice
(John Long, Hamisch Macinnes, Pete Siwclair, Galen Powell, Manrev O'Neill, Clint Willis (Editor), abridged, 4 cassettes)
I'm a fan of climbing stories, and these stories are engaging, funny, interesting meditations on the experience of the climb, the competitiveness that can occur, and the camraderie. Several of the essays memorialize particular climbers' deaths.

The Corrections
(Jonathan Franzen, unabridged, 19 CDs)
With so much attention turned toward Franzen's new autobiographical essays, The Discomfort Zone, I decided to revisit the Corrections, which rates as the best book I've read in the 21st century. Since Franzen has been so revealing about his own mean spiritedness, and written about the pettiness, e.g., that drove him to punish his parents on a family trip to DisneyWorld, it was interesting to re-assess this book in that light. A friend of mine told me of someone who cried everyday while reading this book, since it rang so true to her unhappy childhood. The book, in my opinion, still stands as a massive achievement of undeniable brilliance. Franzen's facility comes out in his accurate and incisive portrayal of so many aspects of family life, the lies of the market place, the pretensions of academia, the allures of suburbia, and the power dynamics between men and women. About a year ago, I tried reading Strong Motion, which is set in Boston, and has Franzen's voice, but not the humor and scope that the Corrections has. I didn't finish Strong Motion, even though it was set in Somerville/Boston at the very time that I had once lived there.

Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises
(Architecture for Humanity, editor, 336pp)
I looked through this book on a cross country flight. There are some interesting solutions, and yet I can't recall many occasions where the design proposals seemed astonishingly novel. It is an excellent idea, to re-direct design and architectural energies toward solving important life challenges. One element that I'd ignored, but was mentioned in several designs, was the need to design housing in refugee camps that was not "too permanent". My two favorite ideas: 1) super-adobe, which enables people to build houses by filling tubes with sand, and wrapping them up in spiral tubes, which become hardened once a fire is burned inside the desert worthy igloo; 2) an architecture that enables rubble to be transformed into the interior of wire meshing, transforming destruction into a base for new buildings.

Ice Cream Man: 25 Years at Toscanini's
(Gus Rancatore with Helen Epstein, 35 pp)
This short little PDF is cheaper than the 1981 price of an ice cream cone, and a great window on what drives Gus, the ice cream man, to make exotic and interesting flavors as he churns away at night in the center of the universe. Finding out what he's whipped up of late has always been worth the walk to his Central Square store. It's impossible to understand how anyone could resist reading this who's ever been to Toscanini's (and, of course, that would encompass every student at MIT over the past quarter century). The price is right, the story is a fast and funny read, and the voice of the ice cream man is finely captured by his collaborator. If, after consuming this little booklet, you crave more ice-cream mania, I'd recommend watching the Portuguese film, "A Comedia de Deus", from 1995, directed by Joao Cesar Monteiro.