Loving Frank
(Nancy Horan, 13:40 -- stopped after 10 hours)
I wanted to listen to this since it first came out in 2007. The story of Frank Lloyd Wright's love affair with one of his clients Mamah Borthwick Cheney cannot fully evoke his genius, but it does capture the conflict and duress that a woman faced in breaking conventions. Mamah was by Wright considered his intellectual equal -- she left her husband and children to travel to Europe. In Europe, she chose her vocation, to translate the work of a prominent feminist, Ellen Key. There is a similarity between her chosen career, translator, and her role in Wright's life. As the book began to flag, I read the wikipedia entry on Wright, teased as I was by the recollection from the Oak Park tour of his studio that he'd once been prosecuted under the Mann Act (for transporting an under age woman across state lines). SPOILER HERE: This was in fact something that occurred much later in his life. But his biography recorded that his beloved Mamah, as well as 6 other people, were all murdered by a man servant in a fire that burned down Taliesin. Once I knew how the story turned out, I didn't have the mojo to continue with the tale.

Peel: The Art of the Sticker
(Dave Combs & Holly Combs, 160pp)
I hadn't been aware of the magazine PEEL, but this book collects the best from the first 8 issues, and includes 4 sheets of sample stickers. Will I ever have the inclination to use the stickers? Some are really interesting, but one of the things I value about stickers is their link to the terroir of the adhesive glue I sniff whenever I find new designs.

A Good Rat
(Jimmy Breslin, 6:54)
An interesting mafia story, about the two bad cops who performed hits for the mob. The book exposes the pettiness of their work (usually, they charged between $20 and $40K for a murder) and their lying ways. Breslin argues clearly that the mafia's unraveled, and the families have spun out into informers turning on one another.

Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited
(Elyse Schein & Paula Bernstein, punted after 2 CDs)
An interesting topic (two women, adopted into families with an older brother, turn out to be identical twins separated at birth). In spite of the topical interest, their collective strength is not analytical, and it's far too long to deserve being read in full.

H.L. Mencken: Disturber of the Peace
(William Manchester, 15 hours, pause after 10)
Mencken was such a firehose of words and clarity. I stopped reading because I knew how it was going to turn out, but it was still a pleasure to follow his life. Not quite as good as Mencken's own memoirs of his own childhood, but Manchester's prose stands as a fine guide to HLM.

Mothers and Sons
(Colm Toibin)
Fine, diverse collection of stories, wandering around (or at least touching upon) the complex theme of sons' relationships with their mothers. Most are set in Ireland, although the final, longest tale occurs in the mountains of Italy.

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
(Michael Pollan, 6:23)
A manifesto that should more appropriately be titled "a North Berkeley eater's approach to food issues." Pollan's shorter followup to the Omnivore's Dilemma analyzes how poorly served Americans have been by nutritionists. Dietary science techniques and analytical tools are no stronger than sociology or econometrics, which is just to say, that they frequently collect a basket of fuzzy correlations that get reported as causation. He cogently argues that whenever a foodlike item makes nutrient claims on its packaging, you are more than likely to be eating a bunch of chemicals pushed by the food industry. Our family has attempted to hew to his pithy maxim: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants, and more leaves than seeds." The glaring exceptions are diet Pepsi and Nestle's skinny cows, which are true vices.

All the sad young literary men
(Keith Gessen, 6;45)
This was not nearly as much fun as Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision, but perhaps it is an unfair comparison to lump Gessen with his n+1 editorial colleague. I found the book depressing, rather than witty, and some of the attempts to sketch the character's limitations (e.g., a Jew who aspires to write the ultimate Zionist novel, in spite of his inability to understand Hebrew) to verge on a straw man characterization. Maybe Gessen is really an essayist, who cut himself into three strands to create a sort of novel.

The Hard Life
(Flann O'Brien, 132pp)
A minor work, with some humorous passages. After enjoying the Third Policeman so intensely, I've been on a quest to experience more Flann O'Brien. This is sort of his Portrait of the Artist, although it's written at the end of his life (and his Ulysses/Wake, At Swim Two Birds, was his first work).

Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
(Chip and Dan Heath, 8:43)
Even though it's impossible to come up with a taxonomy of concepts, and how to best communicate ideas, this book delivered well enough to hold my attention throughout. It's a textual equivalent of Tufte's tour of graphic hits, without the heavy hand of the Pope of Cheshire.

Beautiful Boy
(David Sheff, 11:31)
A father's recollection of his experiences with a son addicted to methamphetamine. (His son has also published his memoir, in a sort of parody of the father's writerly life. I studied this book to learn about the father's mistakes, which shows how naive and arrogant my approach was. I do think the story records numerous instances where the parental response to problems seemed lax. (As one example, the son got drunk at 12, and barfed all night. How would a parent not attend to the sick child, and then notice the alcohol odor?)

No country for old men
(Cormac McCarthy, 7:33)
The Coen brothers' film faithfully rendered this spare dark tale, and they did such a powerful job, it's difficult to read the book apart from their production. There are some ambiguities in the film that are made explicit, and one strand (regarding the Sheriff's self-doubts, which traces back to his experience in WWII, and goes straight up to his conflict with the psychopath Anton Chigurh).

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
(Atul Gawande, 7:34)
This collection of essays pushes on the drive for improved performance. The book includes a fine chapter on obstetrics and the drive toward caesareans that was published in the New Yorker while my wife was pregnant. The later chapters were particularly fascinating to me, especially the twin chapters on survival rates for Cystic Fibrosis and the description of how resourceful doctors in India are with their limited resources. The CF survival differs greatly by center, and the highest surviving center, in Minnesota, succeeds by going from 99.5 to 99.95% compliance. The relevance to India, and to the wider world, is that new technology and research are not nearly as important as intensive approaches to scrupulous practice. The final chapter, on how to become a Positive Deviant, is a summary of the lessons extracted from the observations made throughout the surgeon's young career.

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
(William D. Cohan, 32 hours)
Not quite as enthralling as Barbarians at the Gates, but the story is still more than fascinating. The first 60% of the book is focused on Felix Rohantyn, a brilliant refugee banker who "saved New York" when Ford told the city to drop dead, and who had been the key rainmaker at Lazard in the post-war era. His life story has many interesting turns; the one thing that isn't sufficiently detailed is his involvement in the aglommeration, ITT, which enabled him to spin many of his deals. Among its crimes, ITT tried to depose Allende and secretly funded Nixon's CREEP. There is a small rivulet of this massive book that treats of the history of Lazard, and the genius, Andre Meyer. The final 38% discusses the way the glutton, Bruce Wasserstein, managed to dupe all the partners, and particularly, the greatest single owner, Michel David-Weill. There's an amusing discussion of Wasserstein's communist revolution, since his insidious strategy enabled him to dissipate the capital of the owners, and give the equity to the workers. I'm sure I'll often quote this line, mentioned about the career of investment bankers: "You won't get to know your children, but you'll get to know your grandchildren really well."

Secrets of Power Negotiating
(Roger Dawson, 5:01)
I suppose it's always useful to hear people discuss negotiation, since it's endlessly difficult to get it right. This is not a very rigorous treatment, but I didn't mind hearing this, inspite of the corny jokes that were spliced in.

Guards! Guards! Guards!
(Terry Pratchett, 10:30)
Great fun, and very intelligent. I especially enjoyed the absurd discussions around a million to one shot, which is sure to always turn out successfully, but if there's a mistake, and the odds are merely 948,000 to one, there's a certainty that it won't succeed.

Condoleeza Rice: An American Life
(Elizabeth Bumiller, 14:09)
It's not easy to admire Condi, and ever since I was a grad student underneath her provost-dom, I've found myself harboring a pretty intense dislike for her careerist singlemindedness. This book shows her to be Bush's Golem, while also revealing how intensely she ran into conflict with both Rumsfeld and Cheney, who felt comfortable bristling with old school sexist attitudes. To know her is not to love her.

Russian Debutante's Handbook
(Gary Shteyngart, 16 hours)
This is just as funny as Absurdistan, and in many ways, just as similar to the later book as it is to itself. I'm surprised that Shteyngart had to write the same book twice to get the recognition he deserves. I mean no criticism in saying Shteyngart's workign the same groove, because it's a hilarious and very interesting groove.

This is your brain on music
(Dan Levitin, 6:10, abridged)
Great fun to read, and even though abridged, this audible book had musical demonstrations that would have made The Rest is Noise, and even Musicophilia, much more instructive.

The Swimming Pool Library
(Alan Hollinghurst, 14 CDs)
Amazing freshman effort, even more engaging and intricately woven than the Line of Beauty, which had been one of my favorite books of 2005. Hollinghurst handles gay sexuality with as much fascination as Updike brings to infidelity, but I would rate him as much more deft at describing all the details of cruising without creating the awkwardness and embarrassment that I often feel with Updike.

The Dead Father
(Donald Barthelme, 256pp)
I've been picnicking with this novel most nights before bed for the past several months. It was a challenge for this seminal book to live up to the vast reputation I attached to it, based on my readings of it 20 years ago. I think it's quite fine, a true delight in parts. I hadn't been sensitive before to how intensely DB's anger is focused upon the father. The physical abuse that convicts the father seered my eyes to read.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
(Oliver Sacks, 9 CDs)
Definitely the best Oliver Sacks book since his signature Man who mistook his wife for a hat. It's fascinating to hear all the ways music can be a life preserver for those who've lost so much of their mind; surely the most fascinating life is Clive Wearing, who has even less capacity to store memory than HM, but still conducts choirs beautifully. Sacks reveals more of his own biography than usual, especially about his own family background.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness
(Elyn Saks, 352pp -- stopped after 150p)
A unique internal account of the experience of schizophrenia, written by a woman with great academic powers (valedictorian in college, Marshall scholar to Oxford, Yale Law School). Her brain started going haywire when she was quite young, and she could easily have been mis-diagnosed as anorexic. Her academic powerhouse skills in part required a familiar structure to be expressed. Each school shift did trigger a serious outbreak, but eventually, she managed to receive sufficient support to motor through. I stopped reading after the Yale Law School episode, since it seemed clear she would always have psychotic episodes, voices and premonitions, and each outbreak resembled the earlier ones. Instead of finishing the book, I read Jay Neugeboren's NYRB discussion of the book, which arrived while I was just finishing the first half. He quotes the anecdote her asking "Will aliens be attending the reception?", and her partner's kind answer. Although Neugeboren reads her story as a vindication of psychoanalysis, that goes beyond the evidence: Saks clearly shows how valuable it can be to talk to someone every day. In England, psychoanalyst she visited charged only $6/hour (in the early 1980s). Perhaps people could benefit more if analysis were not so expensive in the US (which must be due to its medicalization here).

Tree of Smoke
(Denis Johnson, 23:05)
Amazing tour of the tunnels of Vietnam, from the time that Kennedy was shot, the Tet offensive, and times following. Johnson is the heir to Delillo, with his acute ear for dialog and fascinating quirks of the Psy-Ops world. I don't exactly understand how the book ended, although I found some of the earlier endings inside the massive novel to be quite rewarding. On the day I wrapped this up, I discovered that Gary Shteyngart judged TOS in a tournament hosted by Powells against a book I've been neglecting (Then we came to the end). But since he judged TOS to be vanquished by the other title, I'll try to track this down.

Lake of the Woods
(Tim O'Brien, 306pp read about 1/2)
This book has been highly praised in some circles, and I was tricked by the extensive wikipedia page it has. Had I thought for any length of time, the lengthy wiki homage would be a tip that this is a book for puzzle fans, rather than literary types. The book is an unsolved mystery, with "evidence" deposed from various characters. But the author heavy-handedly footnotes his own inability to solve the mystery, both at the beginning and end of the book.

Captain Blood
(Rafael Sabatini, 12:30)
I read this novel by Sabatini as a further path toward understanding Don Barthelme. DB frequently mentioned in interviews that his style borrows from Sabatini, and he even has a short story titled Captain Blood. The heroic Irish captain, Peter Blood, overcomes numerous injustices that forced him into slavery in the Caribbean. Blood's style, cool and ironic, is well drawn, and the range of his adventures includes Irish depressions and drunken despondency. I look forward to reading more Sabatini with my sons, since the writing style is quite good, and the adventures will surely rivet a young boy's attention.

Boswell's Life of Johnson
(James Boswell, unabridged, 36 hours)
I had listened to a different version 10 years ago, and it sparked a radical deep dive into Johnsoniana. I bought this from audible.com 5 years ago, but couldn't mobilize for the big listen. During a migraine, I fell in, and ended up listening to over 80% of this. Since there's several editions that Boswell published, this version sounded like a later, more comprehensive ball, with specific attacks on Mrs. Thrale as evidence that Boswell was positioning his life as superior to her recollections.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
(Dan Ariely, 304 pp)
Great tour of the experiments that Ariely has done, with some interesting remarks about his own personal experience, in particular, the accident that caused burns over 70% of his body.

From Crib to Kindergarten: The Essential Child Safety Guide
(Dorothy A. Drago, 208pp)
Useful, as it presents a description of the range of risks that children face without inducing hysteria.

Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley
(Richard Schwartz, 244pp)
Quaint, but hardly riveting. I skimmed this but didn't find the old eccentrics to hold a candle to current Berkeley nuts.

Getting Things Done
(David Allen, 7:13)
As soon as this came out as an unabridged audiobook, I decided to mainline it. And although listening to Getting Things Done is not the same as actually getting things done, I was pumped enough to actually build my own filing system this time round. Next time I listen, I'll tickle up 31 + 12 month folders.

Death in Venice
(Thomas Mann, 3 hours)
Because this story was assigned in high school, I was blocked from fully appreciating it before now. The new translation (by Joachim Neugroschel) flowed with supple ease.

The Black Swan
(Nassim Taleb, 12 CDs)
I could not bring myself to read Taleb's first book, Fooled by Randomness, even though I was quite sympathetic to its thesis. His writing style is incredibly irksome and arrogantly self-congratulatory -- his tone should be compared to the voice of Quasimodo, it is so ugly to behold. The current book is slightly less sophomoric, even though its jabs at economists, the French, academics fatigue. The worst part of the book are flaccid chunks of fictionalized projection, inventing idealized characters with less depth than Ayn Rand bestowed upon her giants. Notwithstanding all these superficial flaws, the idea that we can't normalize the future, that the most important facts are proverbial black swans (rare, unexpected, and hugely impactful). The author vociferates, repeating his theme (not really distinct from his earlier book), but still manages to toss out points worth considering. E.g., for all the risk management theorists hired by the MGM Mirage Vegas casino, the actual exposure they underwent was almost entirely due to items outside their models. Hundreds of millions of dollars was invested on gambling theory and high-tech surveillance, but the real losses were true black swans: the tiger that attacked its trainer Roy cost the casino $100 million. An owner broke the laws to pay his kidnapped daughter's ransom. "The dollar value of these Black Swans, the off-model hits and potential hits, swamp the on-model risks by a factor of close to 1,000-to-one."

The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty
(Julia Flynn Siler, 15 CDs)
This story of intra-family conflict, repeated anew across 3 generations has the quality of a Greek tragedy, since the reader fully expects to see the problems again, and then again. Robert Mondavi comes out as a charismatic personality, who triggered the first family fight by neglecting to share the limelight with his younger brother. Exiled from Krug, he started a high end vineyard in the mid-1960s, and worked to transform America's attitude about wine. His own sons ended up dueling in very much the same way. Ultimately, the family was forced to sell their vineyard in order for the grand father, Robert, to honor the philanthropic bequests he'd signed up to make. In discussing California's cuisine, the author mistakenly claims that Chez Panisse began in 1969 (it was actually 1971).

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
(Amity Shlaes, 15;30)
I found the writing pretty uneven, with clotted sentences, poor choice of detail, overly specific in directions that never take off. This is a history chock-a-block with personalities, and that is indeed the best value here. Ms. Shlaes hates FDR so much, that in a novel twist, she lumps Hoover in with FDR as a meddler. She celebrates Calvin Coolidge as a do-nothing president, and also reveres Andrew Mellon and Bill W. (the private person who founded AA). Her critique of FDR does highlight the 1930s enthusiasm for collectivism that would shock people today: Rex Tugwell, one of the brain trust, actually established a quasi-kibbutz in Casa Grande AZ. Even more surprising, the NRA insisted upon standardization that made it impossible for a kosher butchery to function, and the tale of the Schechter brothers' fight all the way to the Supreme Court is quite fascinating. Benjamin Friedman's review in the NYRB, FDR & the Depression: The Big Debate (preview only online), demonstrates that Shlaes' reading of the macroeconomics is unreliable: every drop in the Dow is read by her as proof that business/capital got scared, and every up movement reads as a deliberate celebration of FDR's retreat from his New Dealing ways. Even more telling, Friedman points out that the actual boost in productivity in the 1930's was perhaps the greatest of any decade within the 20th century, although that involved labor-saving substitutions that kept unemployment high. So, her economics can't be trusted, but the tales she tells often highlight novel or neglected aspects of the traditional story.

Heal your headache : the 1-2-3 program for taking charge of your pain
(David Buchholz, 224pp)
This book claims that almost all forms of headaches (except cluster headaches) are migraines, including hangovers. A lot of emphasis on diet, without explicit experimental support, but more along the lines of a doctor's clinical experience. His program advises people to quit all forms of: #1 - caffeine; #2 - MSG; #3 - Chocolate; #4 - A strange melange of other items, such as raspberries and Nutrasweet (aspartame). His evidence for some items comes in the following form: "when I see texturized vegetable protein, it makes me very nervous." Since he is the chief Migraine guy at Johns Hopkins, he can't be completely clueless. I am sufficiently persuaded that I'm going to ratchet down my aspartame intake, monitor MSG, and measure how much chocolate I take in.

No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories
(Miranda July, 224pp)
16 quirky stories-- after reading a couple, I thought I'd discerned the pattern, but I ended up wanting to read them all. "This Person" is a personal favorite of mine, and it's possible to hear Miranda July read it at the NYPL podcast.

The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952
(Charles M. Schulz, 320pp)
Fantagraphics resurrects the very first Charlie Brown -- and appropriately, in the very first comic, the punchline is, "How I hate him!" Lucy and Schroeder were little babies, rather than perennial first graders, at the start, and Linus couldn't speak. Snoopy looked quite different. I always had a big chip on my shoulder about the boy as perfect loser. The tiny bio at the end, which foreshadowed the major work written by the same author recently, does sketch in outline how impossible it was for Schulz to be happy.

Supercrunchers
(Ian Ayres, 7;34)
An ode to regression. Notwithstanding, it's quite interesting, ranging over a number of instances where regression produces the best bet. One area I'd never heard about was "direct instruction," where teachers follow scripts to step through the lessons. A little searching reveals that SRA, which I used in 4th grade.

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
(Steve Martin, 7 hours)
Though never a fan of his comedy (or films), I was intrigued enough to read SM's story. I admire his craftsmanship, and wanted to hear how he connected his comedy to his art collecting and undergrad philosophy studies. The book is single-mindedly focused on his comedy, with only glancing mentions of either art or philosophy. He grew up in a pressure cooker family, where little was expressed overtly. His real childhood began in Disneyland, and later, as a performer at Knott's Berry Farm. When he did Saturday Night Live, he invited Dan Akroyd to go shopping at Saks...

The Man Who Loved Children
(Christina Stead, punted one hour into the 20)
I believe this is a NYRB undiscovered masterpiece, but I had paged through it once, and didn't like it. Today, I tried to go from the start, and here are my objections: 1- The father's incestuous flirtation with the daughter is untenable in today's puritan age; 2- The author lacks courage in her transcription of family baby talk/slang, since she inserts redundant translations immediately following the terms; 3- Heavy handed 'irony' deployed by having the father praise a story for ending well, with all the characters managing somehow to love one another, when it's clearly set out as a naked and overt contrast with the machinery of this novel, where it seems everyone hates everyone else, and all end worse off. There is something rancid about the perspective, the dislike of the characters' lives, that explains quite easily why few can bring themselves to read this book.

Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews
(Donald Barthelme, edited by Kim Herzinger, intro from John Barth)
DB's searching and intense intelligence. They also reveal the shift in his understanding of fiction, from a very Beckettian take that each story or novel exists as an object in the world, to the later, more experienced sense that a fundamental aspect of the writer is the practice of exploring the world of sentences about characters, without knowing what will come next. The essays are mostly minor: advertising reviews from the early 1960s (more significant when one realizes that his wife at the time, Helen Moore Barthelme, was in advertising), thoughtful pamphlets about specific art shows in the 1980s, and the pieces that were once published in the New Yorker as Talk of the Town. The interviews at the end are extremely rewarding, esp the very long KPFA trialog, where DB shows his sparkling humor, as well as revealing at moments a glint from the steely anger that underlies his sharp discriminating sensibilities.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
(Alan Greenspan, 20 hours)
Instead of an opaque (or self-congratulatory) autobiography, Greenspan demonstrates what the world looks like from his perspective: abstract, very data-driven, with an intense attention to the dynamics of markets. I enjoyed the entire survey of the universe. He admits to being duped by the Bush administration, which had promised to curtail tax cuts if the budget began to ran over. He states baldly that the Iraq war was all about oil. He comes across as a technician, and this explains his weakness for Ayn Rand, since she was a charismatic leader who could conceive of a big picture for deploying his technical skills.

The Genesis of a Cool Sound
(Helen Moore Barthelme, 210pp)
A sensitive and caring monograph (or fittingly, for a writer who was tagged by his fictional character's claim to trust only fragments, a fragment of a biography). Helen Moore Barthelme was married to DB at the launch of his fiction writing career. She writes with astute attention to the origins of many stories, particularly those collected in his first book, Come Back Dr. Caligari. Those seminal, incredibly cosmopolitan objects were all crafted in Houston. Shortly afterwards, DB moved to NY, their marriage foundered, and his life unfolded as the master re-builder of the infinite possibilities of the short story. Her own dedication to a life in the arts clearly reveals what would have attracted DB. The dissolution of the marriage is a sad story, and after DB once used a character named Helen, she requested he not use her name again, although she believes herself to be the basis of Hilda. At later moment of reconciliation, DB slips into "School" (1972), the children propose an act of life-affirmation by having the teacher demonstrate the love act with the teaching assistant, Helen. His later alcoholism is discussed without being gossipy, and the entire family of Barthelme brothers make appearances as unique intelligences.

McSweeney's #24
While reading "Flying to America" I learned that this issue has a section entirely devoted to memories of DB. It's touching to read the emotions of many of his students, although the mass of recollections does not fully evoke his personality. The best anecdote was Kim Herzinger's recollection of taking DB to a restaurant with students, and after he ordered a burger medium rare, the waiter came back to say that they were out of "medium rare".

Our Band Could Be Your Life
(Michael Azerrad, 522pp)
So engrossing, I stayed up until 4am today finishing this. The bands I grew up on are all here (the Replacements, Husker Du, Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth), along with the estimable Mission of Burma, great but not as fun for me as the Volcano Suns incarnation. Reading Forced Exposure in the mid-80s, I was also exhorted to give the Minutemen a spin, but they weren't for me. Each chapter discusses a band, weaves the context of the time, and explains how so much great music was created by kids who were still living with their parents (mostly the Minneapolis twins, Husker Du and the Replacements). This book came to me on my latest Replacements binge, but that particular chapter isn't at all the most interesting. My interest started to flag with Dinosaur, which also marks the time when I stopped following the scene so intently, although I found Azerrad's discussion of the band worth reading. Mudhoney, the second to the last band, meant splotz to me, and I was on the verge of quitting, when I peaked at the Beat Happening chapter, and was exposed to a band I want to learn more about. Any group that cites Jonathan Richman and Maureen Tucker as influences is worth a listen.

Sam's Bar
(Drawn by Seymour Chwast with story by Donald Barthelme)
Fun to see this book, which came out near the end of DB's life. Chwast illustrates a crowd that hang out at a local bar, and DB gives the various characters little snippets of overheard dialogue.

Banker to the Poor
(Muhammad Yunus, 7 CDs)
Fascinating account of the commitment this man has had. At first, it was mobilized to his country (the Pakistan- Bangladesh (civil?) war began while he was attending grad school in the US, and he was a fervent supporter of his as yet un-named nation). Once he returned to teach economics, he decided to observe real poor people, to learn about their challenges, rather than rely upon theories that never touched them. He met a woman who made 2 cents a day weaving chairs, because of the amount she had to pay to borrow the straw she used. This motivated him to begin what was ultimately called the Grameen bank (the word Grameen is Bengali for Village). The book is full of fascinating insights into Yunus' discoveries of how to empower the poor, without condescending attempts to train or educate them about "better" aproaches.

A Short History of Everything
(Bill Bryson, abridged, 5;51)
A great tour of the universe, so succinct, so fun. Thanks to Kevin Kelly for recommending it on cooltools.

Flying to America
(Donald Barthelme, 432pp)
This volume of 45 stories completes the canonization of Donald B. If you already own each of his individual works, then this would be the only way to squeeze out a little more of his unique word magic. The rubric "previously uncollected" draws a surprising number of stories from *Come Back, Dr. Caligari* (1966), DB's first book of stories. If you haven't read that, go directly to Caligari, since his profound, twinkling, knowing humor is on perfect display, and the number of stories from Caligari excluded from either 60 Stories or 40 Stories may reveal Barthelme's own self-doubt regarding his freshman effort. If you already own the original books, some interesting items can be found: his first published story (many characters draw their names from typefaces, besides the beloved Baskerville); a couple of unpublished stories in various stages of polish; and several stories that are not in any of the collected volumes.

Water for Elephants
(Sara Gruen, stopped after 3 hours)
I don't care how many people praised this, it's a clinking cliche, woven thinly from a few terms of circus jargon. I punted after the final offense of being introduced to the soul of Kinko, a midget who reads Shakespeare on the sly.

The Nine
(Jeffrey Toobin, 15:51)
I didn't think a Supreme Court book could be too interesting, but after this title was listed frequently as one of the best books of '07, I dove in. It is quite a rewarding portrait, justice by justice, of the court. It has some historical depth, which includes explaining how Rehnquist endeared himself to the other justices by transforming the Burger court into a productive process, after the years of frustration felt by those who suffered Burger's inability to lead conferences. An intensive analysis of the Gore v. Bush 2000 ruling highlights how damaging the court's hubristic intervention was (and also reveals that a key architect in designing the brief to engage the court was the then appellate judge, John G. Roberts). After the collective loss of face in this decision, Toobin claims that O'Connor moved further away from the right. By the time she resigned, apparently Rehnquist and Scalia had become quite cynical about the Court's role. Rehnquist explicitly said that all that mattered was the votes, and that future justices would pay little to no attention to the written decision. If you're opposed to Bush's vision, this book is quite depressing, since he succeeded in installing two stallwarts for executive power and disdain for the little man.

Exit Ghost
(Philip Roth, 7:38)
Not a big joy. OK, Zuckerman's finished, he wets his pants, he's losing his marbles, he still lusts after women who appear in his life to drive the last words. I didn't find the stuff about diapers very convincing, esp the conceit that someone would forget to change theirs for 36 hours. This lack of versimilitude may only stick in the craw of the parent of a baby, since I change my sons' diapers every few hours.

The Fever
(Wallace Shawn 1:42)
This theatre piece, performed by its writer, raises a lot of interesting questions about how it feels to "make money" and then travel to countries where people are instead making misery and despair.

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
(Alex Ross, 23:22)
A true lover of 20th cent sounds shares his ecumenical enthusiasms, from Strauss & Mahler through Stockhausen. The impact reported for John Cage upon numerous composers, made me reconsider him as the naif who contributed the useful claim that the emperor was naked. The book is an enormous pleasure, and it has excited my interest in listening to composers, especially Arnold Schonberg.

Samuel Beckett
(Deirdre Bair, 736pp)
This is not as colorful, vivid, or interesting as Cronin. I began this volume first, but then switched after 100 pages to Cronin, which was far better written. After finishing Cronin, I skimmed this, without ever encountering any items of lasting interest here.

Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
(Anthony Cronin, 672 pp)
As I finished this fascinating life which closed with Beckett's death on 12/22/89, I was amused to learn that I finished him on the anniversary of his finishing with life. The texture of his life comes through quite well, even if it's still mind-boggling to envision what it actually felt like to be in his presence during the many times he chose to dilate upon silence. Beckett's artistic breakthrough, which lead to the 2 year 'siege in a room' which produced the trilogy, as well as Godot, is fascinating. His early life was an aloof jock in school; only in his third year at Trinity was he fired up by Dante. He graduated with a first, and was sent to Paris as a lecturer/fellow. There, he famously became acquainted with Joyce, although Cronin makes clear that at no time was he Joyce's secretary, but rather, a young Irishman who, like all who came into the master's vortex, got drafted to carry out various errands. Obviously, he dispatched himself with great competence, since he was asked to write an essay on the "Work in Progress" in the journal, transitions, along with 11 others. His piece, "Dante...Vico...Bruno...Joyce" was a lucid and significant contribution. Lucia Joyce's desire for him created a rift with the Joyce family, and when he returned to lecture at Trinity, he found the academic life depressing. His capacity for depression was nearly limitless, and even in his late thirties, he'd return to Ireland and spend months in bed, only getting up to get drunk at night. By leaving Ireland, he managed to be more than a man in the pubs. His entire trajectory shows great moral integrity, even though he was doomed from the moment he was in the womb.

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's
(John Elder Robison, 12 hours)
Not so great; at least half the book is about the author's crazy family, made famous by his fictionalizing memoirist brother, Augusten Burroughs. The parts that are about Asperger's are OK, but not nearly of the caliber of Temple-Grandin's autobiographical works. I kept jumping ahead, hoping to hear less family and more tweakiness. But it's questionable in its accuracy, and not particularly interesting when it is claiming to be honest.

The Third Policeman
(Flann O'Brien, 6;45)
In one word, this book is palaver, beautiful, amusing, tangential, tangled, and endlessly clever, palaver. It also demonstrates that alcohol is a psychedelic drug, when ingested and channeled by Flann O'Brien. I've begun, but never gotten through At Swim Two Birds several times, since it was recommended by the Barthelme. This audible book was a delight to swim through, one and a half times. The ceiling of potential delight in the book was the patent absurdity of the de Selby's theories, such as that night is an accretion of blackness. Instead of being mind-blowing, these form a sort of straw man for the inanity of academic researchers, which hardly needs to be established. The moral dimension of the novel is the more interesting, since the primary character is an Irishman's Raskolnikov, killing to get the funds to publish his scholarly work, and this act unleashes the vertiginous spiral of weird interactions.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
(Junot Diaz, 10:55)
When this novel is funny, it's quite funny. The slang and creolized Dominican language is beautifully rendered, even if there's a ton more invocations than I'm comfortable with of phrases such as 'n*gger please!' When it's grim, like his earlier set of stories, Drown, it's so grim it is almost unbearable.

Einstein: His Life and Universe
(Walter Isaacson, 18 CDs)
An enjoyable tour of Einstein's life, without being overwhelmingly detailed, in spite of its bulk. This covers tale of his first wife, their 3 children (one of whom was given up for adoption without Einstein ever seeing her, then 2 boys after the couple legally married), the wonder year of 1905, and the work that led to the General Theory in 1915 are all interesting. It's clear that Einstein was a charismatic personality, aware of but unmotivated by social conventions. The description of tensors was vetted by several important physicists (Weinberg and Brian Greene are mentioned, and another physicist is thanked for tutoring the author in tensors). It's a fascinating fact that nevertheless, the wikipedia article is more detailed and descriptive than the book's treatment. The book gives a better picture of how there's an honesty to his statement to a little girl, "Do not worry about your problems in mathematics. I assure you, my problems with mathematics are much greater than yours." Einstein was obviously gifted, but neglected math in college, and only in working toward the General Theory did he appreciate the need for a formalism that would express the generalization he sought. Unfortunately, that success caused him to shift toward purely mathematical explorations for a unified field theory, abandoning his strong physical intuitions and wandering from then on in utter darkness.

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life

(Steven Johnson, 7:45)
Sometimes interesting, but also at times, surprisingly informal and casual about what is known, what is speculative, and what is purely commonly circulated as truths. The book ends on a real wimper, claiming that Freudian psychological constructs will be a bridge in the 21st century. Perhaps this book deserves a pass since Johnson mentions in the text that he finished it during the birth of his second child. I had been so impressed with the Ghost Map that I wanted to read more of his work, but this slakes my thirst.

Drown
(Junot Diaz, 5:04)
I felt these stories were uneven, with some very engaging, others raw in a way that left me remote. One of the amazing things about Diaz's writing is that he is conveying a Dominican world heretofore untapped. The brutality that he manages to describe is very disturbing and honest; in one funny story, he describes a teacher returning his own childhood essay "My father the torturer" and insisting he submit a "real" essay.

Samuel Beckett: Overlook Illustrated Lives
(Gerry Dukes, 161 pp)
A quick scan of the life, and it arrived at an uncanny time, right after I'd ordered a couple of big bios of Sam the Man. The photos are quite good, proving the moral impact of thinness. His life, in this quick story, is also nicely recapped, although it can't really supply rich anecdotes in such a sketch.

The Grand Tour: Travelling the World with an Architect's Eye
(Harry Seidler, 703pp)
One architect's record of all the places he visited that were noteworthy in his estimation. Since he was a student of Gropius, there's a bias toward the modernist. At times it skimps (how can you have no Bauhaus buildings from Tel Aviv?), but as a scrapbook of one architect's travels, it makes an interesting scan. The biggest flaw in the book: No dates of when the photos were taken, even though the book covers 50 years.

How doctors think
(Jerome Groopman, 9 CDs)
Great attempt to humanize doctors' treatment by recognizing the tendencies they have to cognitive biases. One area that didn't seem fully explored is what kind of world we'd live in if every doctor were pushed to second guess her diagnosis, and the pressures to re-think might lead to more over-testing or false suspicions. Even so, I found the writing engaging, the stories interesting, and the honest attempt to find an improved approach to interacting with clinicians admirable.

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
(Julian Barnes, 11:30)
"Irony may be defined as what people miss," a comment thrown out by a character in an early chapter, expresses the delights accessible from reading Barnes' drollery. The shipwreck is the guiding image, starting with Noah, and wobbling back and forth across many different contexts. I found the book longish, and while some of the treatments had a certain zing, the book seemed more of an exercise than a jaunt.

The Jewish Book of Why
(Alfred Kolatch, 7:53)
I listened to the 2nd book of Why first. Since it was narrated by Theodor Bikel, the book seemed profound and moving. Listening to the first one, read by a much more pedestrian voice, I was struck by the the book's limited orbit: A string of facts and short historical glosses, crammed together for those who would otherwise not encounter any contextual accounting for many Jewish practices. If this book focused on a field about which I had extensive previous knowledge, I would arrogantly disdain such a list-approach. But I enjoyed receiving quick glimpses into the evolution of many diverse habits and practices. For instance, I'd never heard that the reason 2 candles are lit on shabbat is that on other nights, it was permissible to carry the lit candle from room to room, but not on shabbos, so on that night, 2 candles were lit.

The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(Gertrude Stein, 252pp)
Gertrude Stein was the Judith Butler of 100 years ago, intimidating the world with her formidable intellect and inscrutable prose. This book reads easily, under the conceit of being the ventriloquized voice of her partner ABT. She praises her friendship with Picasso, and it's likely true that they were bosom buddies in the early years of Pablo's career. The comments about Hemingway are all snarky, so he was on the outs by the time this book was first published in 1932. The third genius (besides Gertrude and Pablo), Alfred North Whitehead, hovers but never lands.

Just Say Nu
(Michael Wex, 6:38)
A strange but interesting sequel to Born to Kvetch. Instead of philology, this book generates a sequence of instances of Yiddish expressions. Nice to listen to, but not the sort of thing that could lead me to understand or speak the language.

Rockaby and Other Works
(Samuel Beckett, 88pp)
I can't recommend this. Late Beckeroni eludes me in this short theater pieces.

The Lay of the Land
(Richard Ford, 20 CDs, stopped after 7)
My esteem for Ford jumped to a very high level after reading his Independence Day. I punted a third of the way through this novel, although I did listen to the interview with Ford on the last CD. Ford describes his commitment to the reader as aiming to deliver one good sentence after another. He clearly lives up to this standard, but I found myself unable to sustain interest in a man suffering prostate cancer, who incisively pegs each person in his life world, with scarcely a tad of true love for anyone around him.

Theft
(Peter Carey, 8 CDs)
Enjoyable Australian tale of an artist who slides far from the success of his 30's, when he was an abstract expressionist touted in Oz (is that how people say that?). The painter has a mentally retarded brother who shadows him, and speaks in every alternate chapter.

House of Meetings
(Martin Amis, 6 CDs)
Excellent language, interesting topography, so-so character realization. Amis has found a world that lives up to his bitter vision of humanity, namely, the gulag, and according to his thesis, the post-Soviet Russia that continues to suffer from its failure to reckon with its horrific past.

Snow
(Orhan Pamuk, stopped after 3 out of 15 CDs)
Sort of interesting, but also, sort of prosaic. The tale dramatizes the conflict of Islam in Turkey, but I preferred Ayaan Hirsi's direct and vivid account, where she calls the assassins by name. The highlight of what I did read was a nuanced and fairly dramatic dialog between someone sent to kill the man who has been tasked with barring girls from attending schools with covered hair. This weekend I paged through his essays, Other Colors, and learned that Kar is the Turkish word for Snow, and read that much of what occurred to the poet in this book had actually happened to Pamuk (e.g., meeting someone who knew everything about his whereabouts simply by listening to the police radio). My interest flagged far before this novel ended. Pamuk boasts of working 10 hours a day, competing with Turgenev, et alia. I wish he'd spent those hours compressing rather than dilating.

Foreskin's Lament
(Shalom Auslander, 7;30)
A superb second effort. After I'd read his first book of stories-- too jokey to be good -- my sentiment ended up as "I'd take a look at his next collection." This is a memoir, although some of the language and interactions are a bit too symmetric and smoothed out to be the actual words and images. Nevertheless, the honesty about anxiety really impressed me; one vivid line shows the humor and pain he's captured here: 'My family and I are like oil and water, if oil could make water depressed and angry and want to kill itself.' Since the author narrates the audiobook, there's an extra fillip of interest in hearing his inflection (as well as the voice-over of his wife Orly when the stock photos omitted from the book have to be described for the blind); e.g., for the word 'ogle,' I'd say "oh-gle" where he says "ah-gle."

The essence of chocolate : recipes for baking and cooking with fine chocolate
(Robert Steinberg & John Scharffenberger, 384pp)
The first 2/3 of the book are baking recipes, which don't give me my fix. The last pages describe the effort put into scouring the earth for just the right ingredients. Another thing unknown before about the backstory: the non-Scharffenberger founding partner, Robert Steinberg, was sparked to change careers from medicine to chocolate when he faced a life-threatening cancer diagnosis. I had to return this after skimming, though I want to take more time to dive in. Belikely, that "more time" wouldn't be created if I bought this now that I've returned it to the library...

The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy
(Charles Fishman, 8 CDs)
The author is somewhat naive, but eager to raise the relevant questions. That said, he admits to being a Walmart shopper, and someone who's trying to make sense of the mega-corporation by talking to people. The company is intensely secretive, and punishes any supplier that reveals anything about their business. The push to continually cut prices has surprising impacts: it benefits consumers (qua consumers), but hurts the ecology of quality goods (for Levi's to sell jeans there, they had to re-design a cheaper pair of pants with their label slapped on it), and the hyper-competitive drive toward deflation also pushes supplying companies into positions where they must off-shore their workers. I don't object to workers in other countries taking over these manufacturing jobs; what the author highlights is the number of companies who continually reduce the quality of their goods to meet Walmart's demand to cut prices by about 5%/year, and then, eventually go bankrupt on this path.

Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives
(John Edwards, 176 pp)
These one to 3 page essays are touching recollections of the home environments that were most important to a variety of people. Naturally, the tone of the volume all but bars anyone from recalling their life as a wealthy kid in a huge house. Mario Batali and Nanci Griffith both weave their grandparents' homes into the foreground, in a way which I can immediately relate. Besides the famous, many of the essays are written by downhome types. Maya Lin's family home, in Athens OH, sounded very alluring, so if I ever get out there, it'd be fun to track down that spot.

The Tetherballs of Bougainville
(Mark Leyner, 240pp)
Outre doesn't even begin to scratch the skittering surface of this novel's sustained weirdness (the Lishian The Subject Steve by Sam Lipsyte is mere hash brownies to this speedball cocktail). It's frequently quite funny, but weird times weird to the weird power eventually overwhelms; the writing was good enough that I wondered what has happened to this author since this book came out in '98. I only read about 50 pages before I started to jump around, but I did find those pages worth the trip.

Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss--and the Myths and Realities of Dieting
(Gina Kolata, 8;20)
This reads like a multichapter NYT Sunday Magazine article, and indeed, one of the subplots involves the elevation of the low carb diet due to her colleague Gary Taubes' article in the NYT in 2002. The main organizing theme tracks a small group of people involved in a 2 year study randomly assigning subjects to either the Atkins diet or a low-calorie LEARN diet. Even though it's a clinical trial, it's a small group, and surely Kolata pursued this because of the humanizing quality of following 40 or so individuals. The book's main focus is sustained debunking: e.g., being fat is not a measurable health risk. Another heterodox nugget mentions a study that successfully taught children to know about good eating habits, and the dangers of fat, but had no impact on their weight. One hard to swallow result: If you're fat, you're overwhelmingly likely to stay fat, unless some amazing new drug or genetic intervention is invented. One fascinating thread quotes David Freedman's insight that when clinical trials fail to provide the data that people expect, they simply recommend a stronger dose; in the history of blood letting, an empirically minded doctor, Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis, found no effect for bleeding patients. His interpretation: "Bleed earlier and bleed harder." (p 201)

In her absence
(Antonio Munoz Molina, 126pp)
This brief book was not very enticing the first 80 pages, but I kept going because it had been recommended by a friend. The story, of a wimpish bureaucrat, whose sole passion in life is his adoration for his wife, is rather painful to behold. Over time, the mystery of desire, inside the question of constancy in the presence of ardor, burns brighter. Surprisingly, once I finished the book, I felt compelled to flip to the first page, and re-read the book again, faster and with greater fascination. Quite frequently, I was reminded of Alfau's Locos, although it's been so long since I've read Alfau, I'm not able to pinpoint the reason for the sense of similarity.javascript:void(0)

Infidel
(Aayan Hirsi Ali, 14 CDs)
An amazing autobiography, extremely well written, with an account of intense experiences that few could ever experience first-hand. Her clear voiced critique of fundamentalism, most particularly of Islam, comes through with the straightforward vigor that once came from the pen of Thomas Paine. Her arguments have greater force than all the armies mustered by George Bush and his private contractors, and her rhetoric so threatens existing power structures that she must be protected by security forces 24 hours a day. The author was born in Somalia, then lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. She explains the importance of clan very concretely. Her grandmother drove her to memorize her ancestral tree. When two Somalis meet, after reciting their ancestries, they know their relationship, even if it is to share a 9th-grandfather; rather than being an intellectual curiosity, it is the very basis of reciprocal hospitality and assistance. She recounts that although her family had no fundamentalist leanings, Wahabi-influenced teachers began to prevail, & she embraced the Moslem Brotherhood in her adolescence, and wore the hijab. When she was forced into a marriage with a Somali living in Canada, she flew to Europe, and through finagling and deception, received refugee status in Holland. She mastered Dutch, and pursued a Master's at Leyden in political science. Her experience as a Somali translator exposed her to the sufferings of women in Holland. By speaking out in public, she was invited to write her opinions, and soon she was elected to Parliament. She considered staging an art exhibit entitled Submission, which would represent the repressive dimensions of Islam. Theo van Gogh insisted she make her vision into a film, a 10 minute clip (readily viewable on Youtube) which he tried to get her to whittle down to 5. If there is any weakness to her style, it is due to her profusive capacity to recount so much detail, vivid and fascinating, but surely, daunting until one's drawn in by her intelligence.

The Areas of My Expertise
(John Hodgman, abridged, 6:57)
This audiobook was made free on iTunes for a brief moment, and I've been chipping away at this for months. My favorite part was the litany of 51 states and their history (e.g., NY, whose motto is "9/11 changed everything, including our state motto"). The hobo stuff received such wide coverage that I couldn't approach it for myself. The bonus section, about the joys of being the father of a newborn daughter, named only Hodgemina in his essay, amused.

Falling Man
(Don DeLillo, 6 CDs)
This is the first 9/11 novel that successfully evoked the feelings of fear and dislocation that I felt at that time. I would also rate this the most successful DeLillo novel since Underworld (and given its relative brevity, a real milestone). I enjoyed Cosmopolis. I never figured out a way into the Body Artist. This tale synthesizes the Don's fascination with performance art along with his long-sustained attention for the fanatic.

Days of awe: Being a treasury of traditions, legends and learned commentaries concerning Rosh ha-Shanah, Yom Kippur and the days between, culled from three hundred volumes, ancient and new
(S.Y. Agnon, 256pp)
The subtitle captures most of what this book accomplishes, viz., a tour of Jewish thought, Talmudic, Midrashic and Rabbinic. Agnon synthesizes all of this by weaving the passages together, with a modicum of (un-anotated) adaption to make it all flow together. It proved to be a fascinating accompaniment to the Days of Awe that began 5768.

The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
(Kati Marton, 8 CDs, narr: Anna Fields)
An interesting exploration of 9 lucky Hungarians: scientists Szilard, Wigner, Teller, and von Neumann; writer Arthur Koestler; photographers Robert Capa and Andre Kertesz; film makers Alexander Korda (who had many ups and downs, one of the last as the producer of the Third Man) and Michael Curtiz (who directed Casablanca). The most memorable shared characteristic of all these men (besides their being at risk as Jews) was their disappointment, upon leaving Hungary, to find that neither America nor England had any cafe life to speak of. Leo Szilard's knack for being ubiquitous and prescient continues to fascinate me; von Neumann is almost too brilliant to pose an interesting biography, esp. since his later life Faustian bargain consumed his energies advising the government (including his recommendation to pre-emptively nuke the Soviets before they got the bomb); Wigner is the only one of the 4 scientists in this study to have won the Nobel prize, but his life is a pale shadow compared to the color of the others. Because of the arc of talent necessarily dwindles in later life, there's a rather dismal quality to the last days of most of these men. The exceptions are notable: First, Kertesz had been relegated to photographing for architecture magazines, until France celebrated his genius, and he returned to Paris to find that all his negatives from before the 1940s were intact, safely buried until his trusted friend revealed their current location. The last of the 9, and the youngest, Edward Teller, gets to dance merrily toward death as the celebrated father of Star Wars. Interestingly, the other Hungarians, including Szilard, were loyal friends to Teller, even though they largely disagreed with his proposed solution to the arms race.

Cartoon America: Comic Art in the Library of Congress
(ed. Harry Katz, 324pp)
Nothing great, but fun to page through. The essay on Posada was the only one I read through, although I did read most of Roz Chast and Bill Griffin's short essays as well.

'Scuse Me While I Whip This Out: Reflections on Country Singers, Presidents, and Other Troublemakers
(Kinky Friedman, 194 pp)
Really a nice little autobiographical collection of essays, covering his friendship with the famous (most interesting to me, Bob Dylan), his attitudes (esp toward cigar smoking), and his early life, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Borneo, and et cetera in a major way. His turn of phrase is fine, and the brief piece is his best medium.

The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness
(Jerome Groopman, 5 CDs)
The first 3/4 describe Groopman's interactions with patients, and the beliefs/superstitions/hopes/fears that influenced the way they approached life-threatening diagnoses. The final part opens onto his own experience with a bad back injury, and the 19 years of debilitation he suffered before undertaking rehab. This part, combined with the discussion of results on placebo response, was the most interesting to me. The entire book reveals how subtle and insightful a clinician, and person, he manages to be.

Among the Thugs
(Bill Buford, 318pp)
This book's been on my list of titles to read since I first read the opening chapter in a bookstore 10 years ago. Buford's last book was a superb account of, in part, his apprenticing at Babbo; long before, he was the founding editor of Granta, which began in 1979. I finally got a hold of a copy through bookmooch, and it was impossible to put down. Buford's writing mesmerizes, and his capacity to push on, to take himself into the scary core of hooliganism, fascinates. The two times I've been in a riot, the exhilaration thrilled me more than almost any experience outside those occasions. Buford's eye-witness experience includes the added thrill of violence. It's not clear how he avoided being banged up, but part of the magic of his prose is that he finesses this while providing an amazing narrative. File this sociological excursion under the impenetrable strangeness of the British class system. The vivid imagery of his writing whet my appetite, and then a search of Youtube uncovered documentary footage that helped shed further light on how this looked. Since this book was published, the non-seating arrangement of packing fans in like animals (the terraces) has been abolished, since it lead to the deaths of so many from crushing in Liverpool.

You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother
(Joyce Antler, 336pp)
This book would have to be funnier to hold my attention for the entire 300 pages. The book reviews popular culture, beginning with the Jazz singer, and then Molly Goldberg, the canonical Jewish mother of radio-then-TV. I skimmed most of the middle chapters, and I think the best line came from Philip Roth's mother, when pressed by the NY Times reporter upon Portnoy's publication: "All mothers are Jewish mothers."

Night
(Elie Wiesel, 3 cassettes)
A terribly moving, concise account of a young man's experience in a concentration camp. A fateful book to read the week before Rosh Hashanah.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
(Mohsin Hamid, 4 CDs)
The subject, a Pakistani from Lahore who attends Princeton on scholarship, ascends the investment banking world, but then ends back in Pakistan after 9/11, was sufficiently interesting to me that I kept jumping over the creaking structure of the book and the rather flat characterizations. Portrayed as the single side of a conversation between the narrator and a non-quoted American tourist, the armature of the novel really wheezes; the devices to somehow interpolate the missing American's comments really bored me. Is there a good reason for leaving out the American's words? Not that I could find. Is there anything more than cant to account for how the Princetonian reverts so suddenly to a Pakistani who enjoys seeing the towers collapse? Nope. Bonus trivia: Narrated by Satya Babha, who is likely be the offspring of Homi Babha

I am a strange loop
(Doug Hofstadter, 412pp)
This is Godel Escher Back, fed back into itself, with the inclusion of more frames about Hofstadter's own life. It's sad to read his description of suddenly losing his wife at 43 to a brain tumor, when their two children were just 3 and 5. I sort of agree that holding another person in memory is the way to understand survival, and if it works for others, then, in a sense, it also works for the self. Another personal disclosure is DH's revelation that his younger sister never learned to speak, and although she moved through life happily, no one in his family could ever learn what was the obstacle to her development. I did not read this book closely, but just paged through, reminding myself of the feeling of reading GEB.

Seven sins of chocolate
(Laurent Schott, photos by Thomas Dhellemmes, 128 pp)
This high concept cookbook is likely designed as a gift for others, rather than a keeper. A quick scan offers alluring views, but closer study shows that some of the photos are so conceptual that it's difficult to know what the desserts actually look like. This is especially true for Floating Islands, a dessert once described in a famous Jack London story, and a confection I've wanted to see as dearly as the main character in London's story. The book tries to compensate for its size by including a little booklet in the back that reprises all the recipes, for holding ready at hand over a stove.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
(Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin, 2 MP3 CDs)
This book does a good job of viewing the complex, neurotic, and gifted personality of Oppenheimer. When I first moved to Cambridge, I read "Oppenheimer and Lawrence", which presented Oppie as the theoretician partner of an experimentalist in one of the world's all-time great duos, a la Gilbert and Sullivan or Kahneman and Tversky. This book confirms the picture of Oppie as a polymath undergrad at Harvard, although it emphasizes that his graduating in 3 years was accomplished by grinding away for lack of any social life. His accomplishments in Europe, at the birth of quantum mechanics, appear even more impressive, and he was esteemed as highly as Dirac or Heisenberg. When he returned to the US, he started Berkeley's theoretical physics department, and he was clearly a very devoted and caring advisor. For one of the less brilliant of his students, he had laid out a problem, and when a brighter grad student found it and wanted to research the topic, Oppie told him that the specific problem had been intended for the other. His politics necessarily take up a large part of the book: his sympathies with the Communist party did not immediately abate with the Hitler-Stalin pact. Instead, he allure of power appears to have moved him further and further away from any leftist causes. His brilliance at Los Alamos exceeded mere administrative genius, since he is described as being instrumental in so many of the theoretical discussions at the outset. After the war, he devoted himself to trying to avoid a nuclear arms race, and yet, he was continually compromised in his opposition by his desire to stay in the game. His split ambition eventually made him the target of a scurrilous attack to deny his security clearance. Einstein's comment to a companion succinctly captures the trap Oppie fell into: That man's a nar. 'The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him—the United States government.' The end of Oppenheimer's life is not beautiful; married to an alcoholic, smoking more than 4 packs of cigarettes a day, and in the last years at the Institute for Advanced Studies, fighting terribly with the mathematicians. He died at 62, in 1967.

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.