Update: Fordlandia

I finally got around to reading the book about this.  I think the 21st century will be hardpressed to produce a fabulously wealthy innovator who is as barking crazy as Henry Ford was.  I'm no longer bitter about the lack of a consumer-priced jetpack- it's amazing we weren't back to wagons by 1940.

Taking one (several) for the team

Roald Dahl, known to children around the world for whimsical and slightly gross yarns, was assigned by the British government to drum up sympathy for England during WWII by seducing wealthy American women.  Maybe this book was the most autobiographical of all his fiction.

Roald Dahl: The Spy Who Loved Me

Concord Free Press

The mailman just brought IOU: New Writing on Money, my book from Concord Free Press.  I heard about this organization on Morning Edition- they send you a free book, you agree to make a donation to a local organization and pass on the book when you're finished.  SEEDS was my cause but I haven't figured who to send the book to when I'm done.  Should it be you?

Werebears

I wish more books had commercials.

Thanks Freakonomics.

In the Army now (reading)

I know almost nothing about US military history but for professional reasons have decided it would behoove me to start picking up a little.  Fiddling around on the National Defense University website I found the Professional Military Reading List for each branch of the Armed Forces, with sub-lists for various ranks.  The recommendations aren't limited to military history- Tom Friedmand, Khaled Hosseini, and Steven R. Covey (his book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is recommended for Junior Enlisted members of the Navy) are all represented.  The Marine Corps even includes discussion guides for their picks!  These lists are a good place to start my learning journey, they're also an interesting glimpse at how the military is trying to prepare its members intellectually for their tasks.

Take a look, it's in a book

I read a lot, but I think that has less to do with my powers of reflection (nonexistent) and desire for knowledge (spotty) than with the fact that it emerged in my youth as the best way to pass an otherwise useless period of time.  Someone seems to agree.


"An interesting book will keep you from chain smoking at bus stops, blacking your fingers with free newspapers or making an ass of yourself trying to start conversations with strangers in bars. It will keep you company during meals, make you unattainable to random panhandlers (who, for some reason respect the written word more than headphones) and almost invariably give someone of the opposite sex an excuse to talk to you."


The Bold Italic: Northern Exposure

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday

For foreign correspondents who write books explaining their beats to American readers, one of the greatest challenges seems to be pruning and arranging an unwieldy bouquet of anecdotes into an organized, thoughtful narrative.  In this book, former NYTimes Cairo bureau chief Neil MacFarquhar does so nicely.  He doesn't skimp on revealing or humorous images-like Saudi women lifting their veils in a waiting room to get a better look at an Oprah segment he calls "Hunks Building Houses" until a grumbling man changes the channel- but for the most part they're arranged logically around easily identified themes.  The primary questions are why democracy has such a difficult time taking root in the Arab world and, to a lesser extent, how the United States could encourage it.  The first part of the book doesn't really address these issues, focusing instead on MacFarquhar's childhood on an oil company's compound in pre-Qadafi Libya.  During this period there don't seem to be too many Libyans involved in the industry that would transform their country, and MacFarquhar has almost no contact with any.  In a way, the presence of the compound in Libya and its insulation from the rest of the country until the dramatic moment when most of its residents have to be evacuated embodies a lot of the missteps and misunderstandings between the United States and the Arab world; and this book skillfully tries to illuminate them.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

This book read less like a standard work of nonfiction than a very long magazine article or "This American Life" segment. Eggers tells the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a quiet, respectable house painter who decides to stay behind in New Orleans when his wife and children flee from Hurricane Katrina. For the first few days he's invigorated- gloating to his wife how serene the city is while she crawls through traffic to Baton Rouge with antsy kids and a flatulent dog; then paddling through the streets in his canoe giving help where he can. But like the water covering the city, things start turning dark and dirty. He's arrested in one of his own properties and brought to a nightmarish holding facility where he's told he's suspected of hatching a terrorist plot. He's given no chance to call his wife; and the account of her emotional turmoil in the week before he's able to contact her through a helpful missionary is nearly as harrowing as the appalling conditions in Zeitoun's prison- a prison, he realizes, that was constructed immediately after the storm at great expense of human and material resources while law-abiding citizens went without food, shelter, or rescue. The horrors of Zeitoun's imprisonment, and of what happened to the city itself, are softened by the sections of the book that describe the Zeitouns' loving family and the happy life they had built from humble beginnings. But the theme, one that Zeitoun repeats to himself in prison, is unquestionably troubling- how could this have happened in America?

Maximum City by Suketu Mehta

One of Suketu Mehta's themes is that the physical infrastructure of Mumbau is so awful and overcrowded that only immaterial attractions could persuade people to live there. Maximum City is crowded, but not unpleasantly so, with people who embody some of the forces that give Mumbai its character- the leader and the footsoldiers of a Hindu nationalist movement, a dazzling and tragic dancer, her cross-dressing colleague, and a teenage poet, among others. Some of the people Mehta interviewed seemed eerily familiar, and in a few cases it was with good reason. First there was a whole chapter about the police chief who is portrayed in the movie "Black Friday"; during which I learned that Indian censors will bleep obscenities (I couldn't understand the dialog and there were no captions so I assume that's what was happening), but have no problem with showing beatings of such ferocity that the subject's fingernails fall off. Then in the chapter "Black-collared Workers", I began to notice a lot of similarities between the gangsters Suketu Mehta interviewed and the characters in Vikram Chandra's "Sacred Games". Then I see this sentence: "I am with my friend Vikram, who is writing a novel about the underworld and who has asked to come along." Synergies! There were things I found mildly irritating about this book about Mumbai- when he uses four letter words I could just imagine his face from the book jacked smirking slightly as if to say "Look what I did there!"- but on the whole it was sufficiently gripping that I started arriving places early just because then I'd have time to read it while I was waiting.

Fatherland by Robert Harris

This book was recommended by a history professor of mine when I was in college. He said that while reading the book on the train in Berlin the swastika-emblazoned cover earned him several disapproving looks and, more troubling, the occasional thumbs-up. But while the novel is set in an alternative reality in which Hitler won World War Two, it's certainly not wishful thinking. Instead, the elements of a classic detective story (hardboiled detective with a broken home and running afoul of his superiors, plucky heroine with a few secrets) are set within a thoroughly researched imagining of what 1964 would be like if Hitler was celebrating his 75th birthday, President Joseph Kennedy was taking the first steps towards detente with Germany, and the carefully guarded secret of the reality of the Holocaust was threatening to break loose. In addition to the history porn, nerds will appreciate the prominence of paperwork and government bureaucracies in the plot's climax. Sold?

Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It

"Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It", by Geoff Dyer, initially seemed like the type of travel book for which I have the least patience- the kind in which the locations are incidental and the real focus is on the author's drug-induced mishaps, relationships with women named Dazed and Circle, and existential crises. But while I wouldn't exactly leap at the chance to join Dyer on his next trip to Bali, passages like this (in which, under the influence of mushrooms in Amsterdam, he tries to change his pants) kept me with him at least through 257 pages:

"In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most rules of basic arithmetic no longer held true. Two into two simply would not go. It was insane, it took a terrible toll on my head. I concentrated hard, applied myself with a vengeance to the task in hand. I got one leg in and I got the other in. Hooray! A man who has finally put behind him the spectre of thirty years of unwanted celibacy-I'm in!-cannot have felt a greater surge of triumph and self-vindication than I I did at that point.

Such exultation was short-lived, however, for these trousers were wet too. Somehow, I had put back on the wet pair I had just taken off."

Libertarian on the Prairie

My love on Little House on the Prairie dates back to the early nineties when I asked my mom if we could try making butter for Thanksgiving, thereby condemning my brother and I to almost a decade of shaking plastic containers of cream on November Thursday mornings. Aside from some un-PC illustrations of Native Americans I didn't know there was much political subtext to the books. Turns out I was wrong!

"This emphasis on self-sufficiency may not have been a coincidence: by the time she collaborated on Little House, Rose [daughter of Laura and a major contributor to the series] had already become fiercely political, and would come to be known as one of the "founding mothers" of the Libertarian movement. Infuriated by what she saw as the infantilization of the New Deal, Rose was surely glad to have such a bully pulpit for the spread of her message, organically housed in the context of another era's privations."

Jezebel: Little House on the Fountainhead?

New Yorker: WILDER WOMEN

Insert cliche about great minds here.

I'm only through the first few paragraphs of this interview with President Obama but I've already come across the most exciting part- he's reading one of the books I picked for my book club! As a book I was able to finish in a few trips to Barnes and Noble I'd say it's a good choice for a busy guy.

The Last Days of Old Beijing

When I was in China, one day after a field trip (was it to the marriage bureau or the prison?) a classmate invited me to her host parents' nearby home in a hutong. I begged off, saying I had to study for a test. That was partly true. The other part was that I felt deep anxiety about the trip back to my dorm, which would require multiple buses and subways and probably a lot of asking for directions that I wouldn't be able to understand. I regretted it almost immediately and feel that even more acutely now that I've read this book by Michael Meyer about the Beijing government's systematic destruction of these neighborhoods. Meyer first came to China as a Peace Corps volunteer, as did the New Yorker's Beijing bureau chief Peter Hessler; and his account of his salt-of-the-earth neighbors and the whirlwind changes taking place around them reminded me a lot of Hessler's excellent books River Town and Oracle Bones. The salt-of-the-earth neighbors are interesting, but I thought the most fascinating part was the changing status of Beijing as a city with each wave of Chinese history culminating in the national fervor caused by the Olympics. This snippy article about Americans' lack of interest in reading books about other countries unless they were written by Americans made me feel a little sheepish about reading this book instead of one on the same topic by a Chinese author, but Meyer's book indicates that gathering research on this topic was not the simplest task logistically or politically so I'm glad I didn't wait until such a book appears in translation and available through the DC public library system.

How to Keep Awake While Reading

No matter how engrossed I can be by a book when I'm sitting on the train or the sofa, if I try to read it in bed I rarely make it longer than 10 minutes before I pass out. I wake up at 4 am, still dressed and lights blazing, with a book crumpled next to me probably about once a month and it's a disorienting experience I'd prefer to avoid. Dr. Mortimer J. Adler limits his advice to books "with which the movies cannot compete", but I'd have the same problem with an Archie digest so a few tweaks will be in order to suit my needs.

The art of reading consists in the habit of asking the right questions in the right order. Let me illustrate this by giving you the four main questions you must ask about any book or, to make it more concrete, about any nonfiction book.

• What is the book as a whole about? Here you must try to discover the leading theme of the books. And how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate topics.
• What in detail is being said, and how? Here you must try to underline for yourself -- with a pencil, perhaps, or mentally if the book is borrowed -- the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitute the author's message.
• Is it true, in whole or part? You cannot answer this question until you have answered the first two. You have to know what is being said -- and to do that you must know how it is being said, for you must be able to penetrate through the author's language of his mind -- before you can sit in judgment and decide whether you agree or disagree. When you do understand a point, however, you are obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make up your own mind. Knowing the author's is not enough.
• What of it? If the book has given you information, and especially if it is true, you must certainly ask about its significance. Why does the author think it is important to know these facts? If the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is still necessary to seek further enlightenment by asking what follows next, what is further implied or suggested.

The School of Life: How to Keep Awake While Reading

The Wordy Shipmates

Writer, and NPR contributor, and one-time cartoon voice Sarah Vowell's last book, "Assassination Vacation," charted her journey across the country to sites of note in the first three presidential assassinations, and her study of said events. In this book, she turns her attention to a group of people that have, if possible, an even worse image than homicidal maniacs- the Puritans. In particular, the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay colony. And as you may guess, she concludes that while they probably weren't a lot of fun, particularly if you happened to be a Pequot; and while some of their less pleasant traits are more prevalent in our country today than we like to admit; they're sorely underrated for their respect for knowledge- a value on which our nation was eventually built and of which, she suggests, America could use a refill. Vowell's style, mixing history with liberal dashes of personal revelation and pop culture references, might not appeal to everyone; but the woman has logged some serious library time and her research turns up gems such as this which are both revealing of her subject and reflective of her wry sense of humor:

...Endecott will send Governor Winthrop a letter complaining about how it's frowned upon for a justice of the peace to hit someone. Because Endecott, a justice of the peace, has just punched a defendant- in court. "If you had seen the manner of his carriage," continues Endecott, "with such daring of me, with his arms akimbo, it would have provoked a very patient man." He says that if it were suddenly legal for a judge to go around clocking people, "you should not hear me complain."

Early Bird

Rodney Rothman was a writer on "Undeclared," a favorite sitcom of mine during its short, sweet run around 2001-2002. When the show got canceled, he decided to spend several months previewing retirement by living in a senior citizens' community in Florida. Like Norah Vincent, Rothman tries to round out his experience by examining his subjects in groups; penetrating every clique from the ladies who hold court by the pool to the filthy-mouthed retired teachers at bingo and mapping the social distinctions between tennis and shuffleboard players. His observation of his neighbors' attitudes towards sex and companionship was particularly enlightening. Some of the jokes these people tell wouldn't be unusual to hear from a 13-year-old boy, if the boy was a former bra salesman named Mel who refers to himself as "king of the boobs". There's no shortage of yuks in this book, but Rothman avoids some cheap jokes about the elderly and seems to form an emotional attachment to and respect for many residents. Ultimately he finds that old people aren't any smarter or more compassionate than the rest of us but also haven't forgotten how to enjoy themselves; and the communities they live in are in many ways just more humid versions of the ones they left behind. Since my own retirement gets put off a little longer with every slip of the Dow, I found comfort in Rothman's conclusion that it won't be so different from the way I'm living now.

Heat

Bill Buford, an editor at the New Yorker, became so enthralled with Mario Batali that he left his job to work for free in the kitchen at Babbo. After working his way up from the prep kitchen to the pasta station he feels he has to look further afield to discover its secrets; and shuttles between New York and Italy to learn the foundations of Italian cooking in the tiny rural kitchens where Batali honed his art. It takes a heaping pile of tenacity topped with considerable masochism to temporarily put aside a successful career to perform such physically punishing, financially unrewarding work; and it's sometimes unclear why exactly he put himself (and his wife) through the ordeal. But Buford wisely avoids the cooking - as-vehicle-of-self-discovery theme; and focuses on the economics and mechanics of running a great restaurant, and the fundamental elements of great Italian food. Even Batali, while the subject of a few slightly man-crushy chapters in the beginning, turns out to be just one of the many complicated, passionate characters who get the food from farm to table. I forgot all about him when I got to the section about Buford's apprenticeship with Dario, the Tuscan butcher who indignantly empties bottles of nonlocal balsamic vinegar on restaurant floors. Reading "Heat" will make you hungry- no big deal, any food-porn type book can do that. But more than any book in the genre I'd ever read, it will make you profoundly grateful for the people who cook for you.

Heyday

Kurt Anderson, the host of WNYC's "Studio 360", did his homework, and wants you to know it. In his novel "Heyday", set around 1848-1849 and zigzagging across two continents, he crams more historical figures into 600 pages than my high school American History book. That is not to say the book is dry- it might be set 150 years ago, but it includes plenty of sex and violence described in 21st century detail. The story follows four friends from the events that led to their meeting in New York to California, where they go to look for gold. But to describe the plot thus- leaving out the dramatic chases, tragic back stories, pit stops at several Utopian communities, quests for vengeance, meetings with Charles Darwin, Walt Whitman and numerous other luminaries, and an assault with a stuffed penguin- is to overlook the barrage of details and detours that are usually engrossing and occasionally reminiscent of a history student persistently looking for extra credit. I enjoyed the book and certainly learned a lot, but it was a little distracting to be so often reminded that I was learning.

Self-Made Man

"Self-Made Man" was written by Norah Vincent, a columnist for the L.A. Times who quit her job to see what it's like to live as a man for eighteen months. The experiment was social, not personal- she wiped off her fake stubble when she got home from her job selling coupon books door to door, or bowling league, or her umpteenth bad date. Vincent expects that she'll uncover a world of privilege and freedom she'd never been able to experience as a woman, but soon realizes that men are forced into roles that are just as restrictive and unhealthy as those imposed on women. While most of these restrictions- particularly the discouragement of displaying emotion or weakness- are imposed by other men, Vincent reports that women are not only complicit in reinforcing these restrictions, but also hypocritical for getting upset when men aren't emotional enough, and self-righteous for acting as though women have a monopoly on the healthy display of feelings. Over the course of reading this book I cycled between sympathy for men have to put up with and irritation that I should be expected to feel sympathy when it still seems like they've gotten the better side of the deal for the past few millenia, not to mention in the division of reproductive duties. But ultimately I reached the same conclusion that Vincent does- I'd never been so grateful to be a woman.