Books Archive

I took a break of my tour of Scandinavian mysteries and picked up Peter Lovesey's The Last Detective. I enjoyed it as a nice change of page. But I really loved this money quote at the beginning of Chapter 5 where Lovesey takes him most famous predecessor to task:

In the modern police, as any detective will tell you, a murder mystery is rarely, if ever, solved by scintillating deductions from clues that baffle inferior minds. Unless the killer's identity is so obvious that the case is cleared up in the first hours, the investigative process is likely to be laborious, involving hundreds of man-hours by police officers, forensic scientists and clerical staff. If any credit attaches ultimately to a conviction, it is diffused among numerous individuals, and has to be qualified by administrative delays, false assumptions, and sometimes fatal errors. These days criminal investigation is not a sport for glory hunters.

A friend at work turned me on goodreads.com, a great to to keep track of the books you read, make suggestions to others and find out what your friends are reading.

You can create custom bookshelves, join groups and create lists.

Please join up and add me as a friend so I can see what your reading.

Any day you fail to carve out out even a short time to spend doing what you really want to do is a wasted day.

--Hakan Nesser, Borkmann's Point

Words to live by.

Lately I've become enmeshed in the world of Nordic mysteries. I just can't get enough of them. They are so dark and compelling. I picked up one of Henning Mankel's Kurt Wallender mysteries and was immediately sucked into his murky, sullen world.

After that, I sought out other Scandinavian writers and have found nothing but pleasure. Unlike many of our (American) mystery writers who are mystery writers first and writers second, the Swedes, Norwegians, et al. are firmly planted in the world of literature. They are writers who happen to write mysteries. It makes a world of difference. Henning Mankell. Karin Fossom. Kjell Ericksson. Ake Edwardson. These and many more are all excellent, but but my favorite is Icelander Arnaldur Indriðason with his phlegmatic and morose inspector Erlendur Sveinsson.

Erlendur's life is a mess. His daughter is a junkie. His son won't talk to him. His ex-wife won't have anything to do him— Erlendur walked out on his family when the kids were young. He has no friends. He despises his mentor. Best of all, his pastime is to read stories about people who get lost in the snow. This is from Voices:

Sometimes he bought a bottle of Chartreuse at Christmas and had a glass beside him while he read about the ordeals and death in the days when people travelled everywhere on foot and Christmas could be the most treacherous time of the year. Determined to visit to visit their loved ones, people would battle with the forces of nature, go astray and perish; for those awaiting them back home, Christmas turned from a celebration of salvation to a nightmare. The bodies of some travelers were found. Others were not. They were never found.

These were Erlendur's Christmas carols.

You have to love this guy.

Most of my high school classmates became lawyers and real estate moguls, chasing the almighty buck. Hard to blame them considering where we all came from and what was expected of us. A select few put aside their materialistic impulses and went into noble profession of teaching. None are likely to be better than my old friend Steve Reifman, a 3rd grade teacher at Roosevelt in Santa Monica.

Steve's one of the most intense guy's you're likely to meet. He's in incredible shape. He's got a great sense of humor. He can quote every line of Fletch and Caddyshack. More importantly, Steve is the sort of guy we'd all like to have a for teacher. He's not just dedicated to his student's learning and growth. He wants to make sure they have a good time along the way. He's funny. He cares. He probably keeps his kids in stitches. I have no doubt that Steve's former students consider him a major influence in their lives and come back to visit him again and again. He is, was, and always will be "The Total Package".

Back when I lived in LA for a brief while in 1998, I helped Steve edit his book, at the time called 12 Keys to Classroom Success. I'm not much of an editor (as anyone who reads this blog will know), but I was happy to help in any way that I could. 10 years later (and 4 keys lighter - something of a devaluation must have taken place over the last ten years), Steve's book, Eight Essentials for Empowered Teaching and Learning, has been published by Corwin Press.

Obviosusly, this book is not for everyone, but rather has a very targeted audience. However, if you're a teacher grade school teacher who wants to fine tune your performance in the classroom, you'd do yourself a world of good by giving Steve a read.

Steve iss working on a series of children's books about a terrorism fighting kid named Chase that will be sure to have a wider audience. I look forward to seeing them on the shelves.

This is the advice from Michael Pollan in his new book, In Defense of Food. The basic idea is that most of what Americans buy at the supermarket and consume is not food, but food-like substances created in the labs of places like General Mills. Most of this crap is sold in the middle aisles of the market, so if you want to eat healthy, stick to the perimeter where you'll find dairy, meat, fruit and veggies. Sound advice.

Comedian Lewis Black, on the other hand, thinks it's all bullshit. You can't believe what the experts tell you because they don't fucking know anything. Instead he offers his wisdom on health:

• The good die young, but pricks live forever
• If you masterbate 20 times a day, you'll never make it out your front door.

Hard to argue with either of those.

More than 50% of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who don't believe in God. 70% think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious."

"A person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is genuinely terrifying."

44% of Americans think Jesus Christ will return in the next 50 years. (22% are "certain" that he will, another 22% think he "probably" will.)

"According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency."

Only 28% of Americans believe in evolution (and two-thirds of these believe evolution was "guided by God"). 53% are actually creationists.

"Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue."

87% of Americans say they "never doubt the existence of God."

"Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn't have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces, but a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80% of Katrina survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God."

28% of Americans believe that every word of the Bible is literally true. 49% believe that it is the "inspired word" of God.

"We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God's teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father's doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21)."

80% of Americans expect to be called before God on Judgment Day to answer for their sins. 90% believe in heaven. 77% rate their chances of going to heaven as "excellent" or "good."

"In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise. Western secularists, liberals, and moderates have been very slow to understand this. The cause of their confusion is simple: they don't know what is like to really believe in God."

65% of Americans believe in the literal existence of Satan. 73% believe in Hell.

"It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion-to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources-is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity."

83% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. (11% disbelieve. 6% don't know.)

"The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive."

These are quotes from Sam Harris' new book, Letter to a Christian Nation, written in response to feedback he received following the publication of his first book The End of Faith. I read the former over the weekend (it's quite concise) and finished the latter last week. Both are at the same time frightening and heartening.

They are frightening because Sam Harris in his brilliant points out the quite obvious problem that many of the most important decisions being made in the world today are being made by people who firmly believe their holy books are the literal word of god. They are heartening because Sam Harris is articulating what many people like me who live in a reality based world where evidence trumps faith is leading the charge against the dark age thinking that drives this country and much of the rest of the world.

One of the main problems with faith, and there are so many, is that the underlying beliefs are used to justify some of the most egregious affronts to humanity--the Crusades, the Holocaust, the Inquisition, suicide bombing. Each of these has a single common thread--they have been justifyed in the mind of the perpetrators by a firm belief that they were doing god's will.

Mr. Harris writes with far more eloquence and intelligence on this topic than I will ever be able to muster. I urge you to Check is books out of the library, go down to you local book monger or buy them from Amazon today.

And to the 50% of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" of my atheism, I say, wholeheartedly, FUCK YOU. My faith that your belief system is irrational and dangerous will never kill a single human being. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU.

*Irony

If you want to keep up to date with the all the legal machinations of the Bush Administration and the twisted logic of his one-eyed defenders, there is no better place than Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory. Glenn's insightful commentary rooted in his remarkably deep understanding of constitutional law and keen eye for hypocrisy makes for some of the best reading on the web.

His entries are not short, so you'll need to devote some amount of time to keep up, but it will be time well spent, because a few years from now when our rights and the democracy that we are so proud of and zealously try to "export" are appreciably eroded, you'll wonder how it happened. But only if you do not read Glenn religiously, like so many people who are worried that our country is headed in a radically wrong direction.

If you like what you read there and want to support him, pick up a copy of his recently published book, How Would A Patriot Act?. I ordered from Amazon. It just came. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I will very shortly and let you know what I think.

I finally finished Tom Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which I had been reading for a few weeks now in fits and starts. I have mixed feelings about Tom Friedman's work. Sometimes I find his NYT columns to be oversimplified, condescending and often downright wrong. Sometimes I find them interesting, compelling, and informative. Such it is with The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

On the whole, I'd say the book is not great. Friedman is too caught up in presenting what he thinks of as his clever metaphors (equating institutions of democracy with operating systems) and name-dropping (I was in Bangalore the other day having lunch with X). Even the name of the book itself is one of Friedman's annoyingly cute (so he thinks) metaphors.

However, if you read the book for the anecdotal evidence of the issues surrounding globalization and ignore all the garbage that surrounds it, Lexus is well worth your time.

Because of the recent passage of the Bankruptcy Bill which makes it harder for Americans to declare bankruptcy and start over with a clean slate as in the past, I found this section in which Friedman posits an a geo-political architect fashioning an ideal financial landscape interesting:

He would have designed a country with a system of bankruptcy laws and courts that actually encourages people who fail in a business venture so declare bankruptcy and then try again, perhaps fail again, declare bankruptcy again, and then try again, before succeeding and starting the next Amazon.com - without having to carry the stigma of their initial bankruptcies for the rest of their lives.

In Silicon Valley, says renowned venture capitalist John Doerr, "it is O.K. to fail and in fact it might even be important that you failed before on someone else's money." In Silicon Valley, bankruptcy is viewed as a necessary and inevitable cost of innovation, and this attitude encourages people to take chances. If you can't fail, you won't start. Harry Saal, who founded one of the most successful software diagnostic systems in Silicon Valley, after being involved in several start-up ventures that went belly-up, once told me over coffee in Palo Alto: "The view here is that you are always better and wiser for having failed. Which is why when people here fail after having tried something, they often have an easier time raising money the next time around. People say, 'Oh. he went bankrupt on that first venture? I bet he learned something from that, so I'll bankroll him again.'"

In Europe, bankruptcy carries a lifelong stigma. Whatever you do, do not declare bankruptcy in Germany: you, your children and your children's children will all carry a lasting mark of Cain in the eyes of German society. If you must declare bankruptcy in Germany, you are better off leaving the country. (And you'll be welcomed with open arms in Palo Alto.)

If you've been out of high school a long time, like more than 10 years, most of what Bill Bryson writes about in his magnum opus science survey A Short History of Nearly Everything will come as a revelation to you. It did to me, even though I had the benefit of some really great science teachers. I just have forgotten most of the details and a few days after finishing his book, I've forgotten them all over again, but that's besides the point. The point is that Bryson can hold your attention like no secondary school science teacher you've ever met.

Bryson explains in detail everything from the Big Bang to the rise of Homo Sapiens with chapters that flow seamlessly from one to another. But the book doesn't just regurgitate mindnumbing facts. There are plenty of facts to be sure, but the meat of the book is made up of anecdote, such as Linnaeus' bizarre preoccupation with sex, accident, like the German scientist Hennig Brand who in 1675 thought he could distill gold from human urine and in the process managed to discover phosphorus, and simile, such as the number of protons in the dot of this i is equal to the number of seconds in half a million years, to render comprehensible material that would have most of us face down on a desk in a puddle of drool. And not just comprehensible, interesting and funny too.

Something I really liked about the way Bryson handled the material is that for each discipline, physics, chemistry, paleontology or astronomy, geology, microbiology and everything in between, he writes not just how the world works, but how we came to understand how the world works. He tells about scientists who died in obscurity, like Clair Patterson, maybe the most influential geologist in the 20th century who the first person to accurately give an age to the Earth (4,550 million years) and brought to everyone's attention the dangerous of lead poisoning. We read about infighting the arguments and discussions that took place. About how few scientists believed, for example, in Plate Tectonics when it was first proposed. The idea was dismissed out of hand by a noted geologist named Charles Hapgood in a book entitled Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science (AKA "A New Cure For Insomnia: Read This Book") which featured a glowing forward by none other than Albert Einstein. Despite Hapgood's skepticism, Plate Tectonics is now universally accepted. And so it goes whether you're talking about planetary motion, the existence of electrons or evolution.

Short History is quite a revelation. Everyone should have this book on their shelf.

I just finished reading One Man's Wilderness, Sam Keith's presentation of Dick Proenneke's Alaskan Journals. I caught the PBS special, Alone in the Wilderness back in March, and quickly became enamored with the Proenneke world. I picked up the book at the library. With a few notable exceptions, the book pretty much reads like a transcript of the documentary. Proenneke's words, like his lifestyle, are very simple. You won't find any metaphor or simile or clever turns of phrase. But you will find straightforward, honest writing from a modern mountain of Emersonian self-reliance. It's very impressive. In fact, the whole book is a commentary on the evils of materialism. Here's how Proenneke sums it up in his Reflections section.

Needs? I guess that is what bothers so many folks. They keep expanding their needs until they are dependent on too many things and too many other people. I don't understand economics, and I suppose the country would be in a real mess if people suddenly cut out a lot of things they don't need. I wonder how many things in the average American home could be eliminated if the question were asked, "Must I really have this?" I guess most of the extras are chalked up to comfort or saving time.

This is the exact same sentiment embodied by Tyler Durden in Fight Club when he tells Jack (just before they pummel each other for the first time), "The things you own, they end up owning you."

I don't know about you, but I feel trapped by the things I own. My books. My music. My furniture. And now my cats (although, truth be told, they really do own me). I had to pay for a storage place when I was in the Peace Corps. And now my things don't quite overwhelm me, but they keep me pinned down, unable to make the decisions I want, to do the things I want, when I want.

It's a choice I've made to sacrifice the some of the mobility of my past on the altar of stability. We'll see how long it lasts, probably as long as I'm responsible for the Samoan Fighting Kittens, which could be a long, long time.

Everyone I know has been reading The Davinci Code, so I finally borrowed my sister's copy to see what all the fuss was about. I was hooked quickly. Not because it's well written, because it's not. Not even because the story was that compelling, because, well, it isn't. Not about the secret societies, which Dan Brown obviously loves since he's woven at least two of books around them (see Angels & Demons, which is a superior novel). But because it fits so perfectly into my anti-church sentiments. I also love art history, but that's really secondary.

What's amazing to me about the book is not that the anti-Catholic Church, well, it's hard to call them undertones, overtones, that form the subtext of this novel. What I'm amazed about is not that they are there, but that there is more made of it in the media considering what a huge phenomenon this book has become.

A huge crux of The Davinci Code is that the Catholic Church has been cherry picking documents, Gospels in particular, to disseminate to the public in the form of the New Testament, for example, that fit into their vision for what people should think about Catholicism in general and Jesus in particular. None is this new news. But the fact that it plays a major role in a seriously popular form of mass media is.

But where is the backlash? Where are the Christians demanding to see the Books of Fatima or the missing Gospels? If it's there, I haven't seen or heard it.

You're looking at him.

I didn't really know Gordo Cooper, but I felt like I did. Almost everything I know about this man comes from reading Tom Wolfe'sThe Right Stuff and repeatedly watching the movie in which he was played with great charm by Dennis Quaid. The power of both the performance and the time have etched Gordo Cooper indelibly in my mind.

Gordo Cooper died yesterday. Via Con Dios, Hot Dog

I came across this passage to the right on the day that the report of the 9/11 Commission was released. And was interesting to me that my reading of this blurb about the inadequacies of intelligence coincided with a report on perhaps the greatest intelligence failure this country has ever known.

Interestingly here Littell is writing about the problems implicit with the Soviet intelligence services. The speaker, a Soviet agent placed deep in the highest echelon of the CIA, is explaining the relative ease that western societies, because of their openness and freedom, can be penetrated by agents against the fact that their leaders don't get the real intelligence because the information that "gets passed up tends to reinforce misconceptions instead of correcting them."

Doesn't that sounds eerily familiar to what happened that lead us to invade Iraq?

There can be no finer book to pick up in the middle of the TV coverage of Binion's WSOP. McManus's tales of how he parlayed his 4G advance from Harper's first to a seat at the WSOP Big Game and then made it all the way to the final table all with the backdrop of the heroin laced/circus sex Ted Binion murder trial. It makes for a compelling read. But it's McManus's literary flourishes, his background as a Catholic altar boy that inform his decision making on so many levels, his references to Dante, Joyce and other literary greats, his reliance on book knowledge from Doyle Brunson, T.J. Cloutier and other poker giants and his ultimate devotion to his family turn what would otherwise be an interesting piece of nonfiction into brilliant literature.

The WSOP is back on ESPN tonight and every Tuesday night at 6PST (check your local listings). The first few weeks of the programming shows the many ganes that lead up the WSOP "Big Game", what, in fact, makes the series a series. It's not as compelling because the stakes are lower and the games can be slightly different variations of poker (i.e. not necessarily Texas Hold 'em), but who cares? It's still great poker action. I know where I'll be at 6pm. Ass firmly glued to the couch with eyes similarly glued to the telly.

I'm not exactly sure why I feel this way, but I feel guilty about reading fiction when I could spend the time reading non-fiction. I just picked up I, Robot, to reread the Asimov classic before the movie comes out later this month. For some reason, while I extremely enjoy and appreciate fiction, I feel like in some ways that I'm wasting my time when I could be reading one of the dozens of interesting books out there now about current events or any of a number of histories, biographies or social commentaries that I have on my shelf or available to me in the fantastic public library system here in Contra Costa county. It's not like I'm losing sleep over it or anything, but it is weird that I'm even feeling anything like that at all.

Did anyone see former FBI consultant Paul Williams on Fox today Hawking his book Osama's Revenge? The basis of the book is that bin Laden has several mobile nuclear devices that he squirreled away from the former Soviet Union and that there are 5,000 al Qaeda sleepers already in place in the United States ready to unleash Armageddon upon us.

Here's the abstract from the dust jacket:

Does Osama bin Laden have nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction? If so, where are they? Are they in the hands of al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States? Should Americans be bracing for a nuclear attack?

Former consultant for the FBI an organized crime and international terrorism and a seasoned investigative reporter, Paul L. Williams reveals the potential for nuclear terrorism on US soil in this shocking expose. Based on the findings of US, Israeli, Pakistani, and British intelligence, Williams describes how the theft of tactical nuclear weapons from Russian arsenals have in all likelihood made their way to al Qaeda cells throughout the United States in preparation for the next terrorist attack.

Williams presents clear evidence showing that, in the chaos following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Chechen Mafia got its hands on portable Russian nuclear weapons. Between 1996 and 2001, mafia members negotiated the sale of twenty nuclear "suitcase bombs" to representatives of Osama bin Laden. Far worse than so-called "dirty bombs," each suitcase bomb is capable of killing millions of Americans while exposing millions more to deadly radioactive fallout. According to Williams, reliable sources indicate that these bombs may already be in the possession of al Qaeda operatives in such major cities as New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Las Vegas, Houston, and Los Angeles.

Now. normally, I'm not one driven to panic, but the prospect of 20 nukes blowing up simultaneously across the United States is freaky. Our borders are porous enough for any number of sleepers to get across. They probably all already have student visas anyway.

The big question for me is, if the terrorists have the bomb, in fact many, if you believe Williams, why haven't they used them yet? On the other hand, if they do have them and Paul Williams knows about it ,who else must know and why are we not being told? It might have an adverse affect consumer confidence, but at the point of annihilation, that hardly seems an important concern.

Makes you want to pack it in and move to Australia.

I was sitting in a doctor's office in New York, waiting for my friend to get through his appointment so I picked up some magazines, amongst them Vanity Fair (the one with George Clooney on the cover) and was thumbing through it when I came across this interesting blurb on page 112 or 114, I can't remember.

The story was about this artist who came to New York and was having limited success with her tiny dioramas until she introduced anthropomorphic chickens into the scenes. She now has a book entitled, Bitter With Baggage Seeks Same featuring the said dioramas.

What's interesting is that the artist in question, Sloane Tanen, is a classmate from Brentwood School, my super-exclusive LA westside high school. My class was small. We had only 64 students graduate my year. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw her face in the pages of Vanity Fair. I also managed to get through 6 years of school with Sloane without either having a class with her or even speaking a single word to her, which should tell you something about the nature of Brentwood School.

I was wandering around the back alleys of the lower east side of Manhattan and I came across a little tapas bar called Suba which was tucked into a little nondescript building. The menu, posted behind glass in a brushed steel frame included, amongst other things, ATUN en SALSA de CHIPOTLE, which was described thusly:

Chipotle marinated grilled Yellow Fin tuna with spinach aioli and butternut squash tortilla.

All this for a mere 26 bucks. Keep in mind that this is an appetizer. It's not hard to imagine Patrick Bateman and the boys stoking up their cigars and appraising the waitresses after sucking down a few bottles of Cristal and gorging themselves on free range squid at this hot little joint.

You can find Suba at 109 Ludlow Street in the East Village. You can find “American Psycho" at half.com and if you aren't familiar with it, I highly recommend it. Let me know how far you get before you feel like throwing up.

There's a code in the bible that predicts every major event in world histroy from Jesus to 9/11 and everything in between, or so says Michael Drosnin in The Bible Code.

The book has been around for years, it was even a New York Times bestseller, but I only heard about when my friend Josh handed it me yesterday. It's a quick read, full of charts that explain the code and not particularly well-written. It's interesting, but only if you're the type to laugh at end-of-the-world doomsayers and sky is falling paranoids.

Drosnin posits that existence of the code is the proof of some non-human super-intelligent being (aka God), but his assumptions are specious at best. Even the Israeli mathematician, Eliyahu Rips, who discovered the code, and whom Drosnin claims he worked very closely in producing the conclusions he divulges in the book, denies they ever worked together. Rips has said, "I do not support the book as it is or the conclusions it derives."

One of Drosnin's major thesis is that the assasination of Rabin signaled the beginning of the "End of Days" as discussed in the book of Daniel and Relavation.

What do you think? Do you think that the end of the world is upon us and it was all revealed beforehand in code buried deep in the deep that could only be extracted with the aid of powerful computer programs?

I'm skeptical.

Mihi placent, O Pincerna!
Virent ova! Viret perna!
Dapem posthac non arcebo.
Gratum tibi me praebebo.

In the realm of the "really important news for former Classics students" comes the story that two professors from the University of Kentucky have translated the Dr. Seuss classic, Green Eggs and Ham into Latin. Green Eggs follows such greats as Winnie Ille Pooh and Alice in Wonderland as books deemed worthy of being finessed into the ancient Roman language.

You can find the full story on Yahoo! here

If only they could translate it in Samoan. Then someone might actually read it.

I'm fascinated by the lives led by other Peace Corps volunteers around the world. I scour the Internet, reading web logs, journals and all sorts of info about PCVs. I've read most of the stories in the officially published Peace Corps books, like, "The Great Adventure", but they are all some damn positive, they don't seem real.

When I came across Souvenirs de Nancy in the PC bookcase, I knew immediately I found a little gem of a book. It's a very sad story about a volunteer, Nancy Coutu who was raped and murdered in Madagascar the mid 1990s. The book contains both entries from her journal and letters that she wrote home to friends, family and her World Wise Schools Class.

It almost feels voyeuristic to read through the personal thoughts of a deceased Peace Corps volunteer. If it were me, I don't think I'd want anyone combing through my journals after my death. But the writing is so insightful and Nancy is so full of life that you almost forget the tragedy that is waiting for you at the book's end and instead you are carried along on her journey of discovery about herself and the culture of her small village in Madagascar.

Nancy's experience is both so similar and incredibly foreign. All Peace Corps volunteers around the world share a few common experiences despite the incredible range of countries where they live and work the perform. All suffered through the application. All were probably surprised at the opulence of the hotel chosen for the Staging event that takes place in the 2 to 3 days before departare. All go through training in country in language and cuture. All cope with the coming and going of other volunteers. All get dropped off at their site and start to fend for themselves and make a new life.

Nancy's life in Madagascar is so diametrically opposed to mine. No electricity. No runnung water. No amenities at all. Very distant from the closest town. Her village is even

"I'm helping the village where I live in with stuff like rebuilding the school and hospital that got hit by cylcones last year, and planting trees and vegetables. The village is called Bereketa, which means "Big Cactus", and it's 47km from the nearest town, which I bike to every other week for flour and sugar and to see other volunteers. (The bike ride takes about 5 hours, s the road is all dirt.) There is no electricity or running water in the village and the houses are mud huts with thatched roofs. Mine is an extravagant three-room hut, which is actually huge here. We go down to the river to get water, and see at night with kerosene lamps. We grow rice and vegetables by the river for our food. This is my life for two years. No English spoken here whatsoever." (November 10, 1995)

I really enjoyed this book, although I was laughing at it initially. The book is divided into two parts. The first has three types of chapters that alternate: those that follow Howard's life, those that follow Lucy's life, and intercalary chapters about the history of Callimbia. In the second part, Howard (a palaeontologist) and Lucy (a travel writer) meet (and fall in love) when they are taken hostage on their way to Nairobi.

If you haven't heard of Callimbia, don't worry. Penelope Lively made it up. It's a small country tucked in between Egypt and Lybia. I was laughing at this book because in order to give Callimbia veracity, Lively calls upon historians and writers famous for being in Egypt to give accounts of the history of the Callimbia. When I first came across an except from Herodotus about the geography and people of Callimbia, I laughed out loud. It was not a pleasurable, oh this is funny, sort of laughter. It was a derisive, oh this is absurd, sort.

Then I got over it, because the characters are interesting and the subsequent excerpts from Plutarch and Flaubert didn't bother me much. In fact, the one from Flaubert is great because it pokes fun at his penchant for whoring.

This is the second book I've read in short order about love during a hostage situation in a fictional or vague developing country (Bel Canto is the other). I think I enjoy this genre. I wonder if there are any other novels out there with this theme.

Here's a quote from the book about travel that I really enjoyed:

We do indeed live in global times, she thought. That is the problem. The globe has lost its mystery and its terrors. It no longer has oceans, deserts and forests, it is reduced to time zones, flight numbers and the logo of an airline. We are all travelers now. In the airport departure lounges she contemplated the boredom and the composure of those who circumnavigate the world today, in tracksuits and anoraks, slung about with electronic goods and cheap liquor, surprised by nothing, lords of the universe. It has come to this. Once upon a time a stranger was to be wondered at, questioned, attacked maybe, but never, for heaven's sake, accepted with indifference and a yawn. In the linguistic babel of arrivals and departures the itinerant hordes are barely aware of one another, moving between destinations as impervious as the baggage trundling around the carousel. Only language survives, and the cast of an eye, the color skin.

This book, Balzac and the Little Seamstress, is a little treasure. It was such a surprise find. One of friends had it on her shelf and I read it one morning. It's less than 200 pages, so it's a quick read.

Packed in those few pages is a great story of defiance in the face of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The tale centers around two friends from the city who are shipped off to one of the most remote parts of China to work in the fields. Their struggle for survival is helped along with the find of a cache of outlawed western novels including some, of course, from Balzac.

This is one of my favorite passages from the novel:

Watching them during fittings, Luo and I were amazed to see how agitated they were, how impatient, how physical their desire for new clothes was. It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.

The book really turns the Cultural Revolution on its ear. These youths who are sent to the countryside are not only not "re-educated", but instead infect the villagers with their "western" ways through their storytelling.

At first the village headman sends the boys into the closest town to watch North Korean movies and retell the stories to the peasants. When they find a suitcase full of books, they start reinacting the stories from this library of classics. This all has dramatic effects for everyone they come in contact with, especially the Little Seamstress.

My cousin Lisa just sent me this book and it flew through it. It's sort of a historical, financial, thriller of a murder mystery set in 18th century London with a Jewish subplot, if you can believe that.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is that the main character and his family are all from Portugal, therefore Sephardic Jews. In the story, it's the Sephardic Jewry who are ascendendant while the Tudesco Jews, or Askenazhim, are the downtrodden emigrees from Eastern Europe.

It's interesting how things have turned around. These days, generally speaking the Askenazi jews pretty much run everything (in Israel, I mean), while the Sephardim are marginalized.

Here's the blurb from author David Liss's website:

Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: A Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London’s gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves.

In A Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver becomes entangled with a crime of the most personal sort, involving the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stock-jobber. To find the answers he seeks, Weaver must contend with a garrulous prostitute who knows too much about his past, estranged relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish faith, and a cabal of powerful men in the world of British finance who have disguised their business dealings with an intricate web of deception and violence.

Relying on brains and brawn, Weaver uncovers the beginnings of a strange new economic order based on stock speculation – a way of life that poses great risks for investors, but real dangers for Weaver and his family.

There's a story online this morning about how even the highly antiicipated release of the new Harry Potter opus from J.K. Rowling is not going to be enough to pull U.S. bookstores out of their financial slump.

I don't like hearing news that bookstores are in trouble, especially if local retailers are hurting. However if this "slump" takes down Borders or Barnes & Noble, I won't shed a tear, and I doubt many other people will.

I also think a huge part of the problem is that books are just too damn expensive. This new Potter book is listed at $29.99 which is criminal. When I was working at a bookstore in college, new hardbacks came out at $19.95. We're talking a 50% increase in price over about a 10 year period of time. Who can afford that? I certainly can't. Even if I had a real job.

Harry Potter Not Magic Enough for U.S. Bookstores

Wed June 11, 2003 06:21 PM ET
By Ellis Mnyandu NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. bookstores, facing weak sales and profits, will need more than just Harry Potter's wizardry to turn around their business as there is also concern that the book series may be starting to lose its magic among some fans.

At best, the June 21 launch of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" would lure shoppers into bookstores so they can promote other items to bring relief from the market downturn, analysts said.

A recent survey conducted by J.P. Morgan, points out that some Harry Potter fans do not intend to buy the upcoming edition, possibly signaling that the latest J.K. Rowling installment may struggle to live up to its prelaunch hype.

"Based on our research, we do not believe that the release itself will be enough," J.P. Morgan analyst Danielle Fox said.

"To us, the biggest surprise from our survey is the fall-off in the intent to purchase (the new book) among existing Harry Potter fans," Fox said in a report entitled, "Harry Potter Survey: Do you believe in magic?."

Even though pre-orders of the latest Harry Potter have topped a million at online retailer Amazon.com Inc. -- as well as thousands more at other book chains like Barnes & Noble Inc. and Borders Group Inc. -- J.P. Morgan noted that the book was being heavily discounted, at times 40 percent off the list price of $29.99.

"In sum, we think heavy promotions will be crucial in making the latest Harry Potter release a success," said Fox.

She added that "consequently, we forecast modest gross margin compression for the book retailers in the second and third quarters."

"Our historical analysis shows that other factors, including (same-store sales growth comparisons) and the overall spending environment, will be key in producing a sustained sales and earnings per share lift."

Fox said in an effort to identify the impact that the new Harry Potter release will have on the book retailing industry, her company surveyed sixth and seventh grade children and their parents.

Roughly 32 respondents, or 91 percent of those surveyed, said they had previously purchased earlier Harry Potter books, but 16 percent of them also said they do not plan to buy the upcoming release, according to the J.P. Morgan report.

For bookstores, and even courier firms, every Harry Potter book, now in its 5th installment, has marked a feeding frenzy as businesses jostle to cash in on the action.

But this time around, getting a real boost from the new book's launch may prove elusive for hard-pressed booksellers, according to analysts. "Expectations have been built so high (for the new book) that one gets worried about how it will actually (do)," said William Blair analyst David Ricci.

Backed by a multimillion dollar marketing push, the new book boasts over 255,000 words, 38 chapters and about 896 pages, compared to its predecessor "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" -- released in July 2000 -- with over 191.000 words, 37 chapters and 752 pages in hardcover.

The new book has a massive initial print-run, of which U.S. publisher Scholastic Corp. has earmarked an unprecedented 8.5 million copies for the United States alone.

The Tahitian Princess pulled back into Apia Harbor this morning disgorging slow moving tourists all over the island. I met one couple out in front of MD's Big Fresh supermarket by the entrance to the harbor.

They were a meaty, sun-scorched pair from Glendora, California.

They had gotten this cruise really cheap, they said. 3000 bucks for the both of them for ten nights including air fare. They had taken the tourist bus around the island but it broke down somewhere on the south side and they had to take one of the local buses which I'm sure was a kick in the ass for them. They had come overnight from Bora Bora and were headed to Pago Pago.

They couldn't pronounce any of the names of the places they had been or were going. Instead of "Pong-o Pong-o", they said, "Payng-o Payng-o". They reminded me of a quote that I had just read in a book that I'm reading by Don DeLilio called The Names.

The sun set tonight at 6:06pm and the cruise ship left the harbor at about the same time, followed out by a blue tug boat to the open ocean where it hung a right and pointed towards Payng-o Payng-o.

I just rented Snow Falling on Cedars last night. (The video store next to the Peace Corps office has over 2000 DVDs in stock.) I wasn't expecting much.

I read the book a few weeks ago and it is one of the best novels I have ever read. It's beautifully told story of forbidden love told against the backdrop of a murder trial on a small island in the Puget Sound in post-WW II America.

The author David Guterson spent 10 years researching the book to make even the tiniest details of the time accurate, especially those dealing with relations with Japanese-Americans and the emotions around the internment camps.

Usually when a book is this deeply textured and well written, the film adaptation is a terrible disappointment. Simply too much detail of the novel has to be extracted in order to fit into the 2-hour film format demanded by the minor attention spans of most Americans.

I'm not saying all inventions are good. But you notice dangerous inventions are always unnatural inventions. You want an example? I'll give you the best one I know, Cheese spread that you squirt out of an aerosol can onto your sandwich. That's about as low as you can go.

This is a quote from somewhere in the middle of the book. It spoke to me for a number of reasons. To me, invention is one of central themes of the novel. I couldn't agree more that inventions like Cheese Whiz are dangerous. They represent the worst in human nature. It's not even style over substance. It's far worse. It's quality versus ambivalence.

No one who cares about quality would ever eat cheese from a can when they could eat aged cheddar. Yet there is this demand for cheese in a can. I know this because one of my fellow volunteers in Group 69 brought two cans from the States for another volunteer in country. I could possibly understand it if there was no cheese available here and the only way to get was to find some shelf-life neutral variety. But there is cheese here in Samoa. In fact, there is really good cheese from New Zealand.

Where does this tastelessness come from? Why eat at McDonald's when you can get a far superior burger down the street for half the price? Why eat cheese from a can? If we lose repsect for quality, what does that say about us and where we are heading?

It was these questions that sped The Mosquito Coast's protagonist Allie Fox south to Honduras, eventually drove him mad and, in turn, made his family crazy.

Ok. First piece of news. Ralph "Sonny" Barger, legendary founder of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club is not a functional illiterate. In fact, get this, he actually wrote a book about his life. Well, to be honest, Sonny probably didn't do much of the writing. He had two ghost writers Keith & Kent Zimmerman help him with Hell's Angels: The Life & Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. Sort of rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it? And a clever, too.

Well, for most of the book, Sonny exlpains his draw to the open road, his love for bikes and his brotherhood with his club members. The whole book, which runs 255 pages, could be probably be condensed into a few paragraphs. Let me give it a try right here.

Hi, I'm Sonny Barger. I founded the Hell's Angels. We know you don't like us. We don't like you. We fucking kill pencil necks like you for even looking at us. People are afraid of us. We fight with anyone who wants to fight and many who don't. We deal drugs. Why won't the cops forget that we deal heroin and leave us the fuck alone? We'll do time in prision, because freedom ain't cheap.

Sonny gives a plug to his website a few times in the book, but when I tried it was down, but have fear, if you sprechen sie deutsch, you're in luck because the German version is up and running.

I am beginning, once again, to have an urge to salute my Uncle Oswald. I mean, of course, my Uncle Oswald Hendryks Cornelius deceased, the connoisseur, the bon vivant, the collector of spiders, scorpions, and walking-sticks, the lover of opera, the expert on Chinese porcelain, the seducer of women, and without much doubt the greatest fornicator of all time.

You have to love a book that begins that, especially when it was penned by one of the greatest authors of children's stories, Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Sure, My Uncle Oswald is silly in excess, but it's an incredibly fun ride. I highly recommned it.