Politics And Prose

Two reviews of the new book,Daniel Patrick Moynihan: a portrait in letters of an American visionary / edited by Steven R. Weisman. , one by Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker, and by David Brooks in the Times begin differently, and that is quite telling:

Despite the well-established American loathing of politicians as a class, everything seems to get named after them, begins Hertzberg in his 3,969 word essay, not using the first-person pronoun until the 1,109th word. Brooks, juxtaposed, uses it as his 6th (of 1,881) word: Sometime in the late 1980s, I had lunch...

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Mengestu, Dinaw. (2006). The beautiful things that heaven bears. New York: Riverhead Books.

 A wonderful read.

Mengestu has a fine ear for the way immigrants from damaged places talk in the sanctuary of their own company, free from the exhausting courtesies of self-anthropologizing explanation. He gets, pitch perfect, the warmly abrasive wit of the violently displaced and their need to keep alive some textured memories — even memories that wound — amid America’s demanding amnesia. Mengestu understands the threats these men face, not least the threat of expectations. Ken can finally afford to buy himself some dental work that would help him assimilate upward, but he chooses not to: “ ‘You can never forget where you came from if you have teeth as ugly as these,’ he said. He grinned once more. He tapped a slightly brown front tooth for effect.”

Sparely described, yet fully so, Joe from Congo and Ken from Kenya are magnificent characters that round out the male side, and the African side, of Stephanos.

What more potent setting is there than Washington for a novel about the architecture of hope and memory? As Stephanos wanders, Bloom-like, down back streets and broad avenues, he takes in both the neglected statuary that attempts to do the official work of remembrance and the anonymous heroisms of ordinary people, unnoticed by anyone but a neighbor or a storekeeper or a child. Mengestu also widens his canvas by giving the novel a romantic turn, reviving an old plot device: a stranger comes to town.

All they ever share, physically, Stephanos and Judith, is a kiss; spiritually they are reluctant to get closer.

It’s rare that a novelist who can comfortably take on knotty political subjects like exile, memory and class conflict is also able to write with wisdom, wit and tenderness about the frisson of romance. Mengestu skillfully sketches the precarious attraction between Stephanos and Judith, but his portrait of the bond between Stephanos and Naomi is even more extraordinary. In our culture’s rigid judgment, a friendship between an 11-year-old girl and a 36-year-old man is creepy by default. The bravest thing about Mengestu’s novel is the way he pours such deep, nonsexual yearning into this relationship, which is life-saving for Stephanos and Naomi alike.

It is a beautiful relationship that has substance and elan.

Again and again, Stephanos’s story makes us consider what it means to be displaced: from a local community, from a distant nation, from a love you had hoped to settle into. In Mengestu’s work, there’s no such thing as the nondescript life. He notices, and there are whole worlds in his noticing. He has written a novel for an age ravaged by the moral and military fallout of cross-cultural incuriosity. In a society slick with “truthiness” — and Washington may be the capital of that — there’s something hugely hopeful about this young writer’s watchful honesty and egalitarian tenderness. This is a great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel.

Amen. 'Tis indeed.

La Misma Luna

I wasn't sure if this would work for me, what with the pretty face and all, but I was surprised by it. This is a good movie. Mexicans crossing a river are found by the Migra, and some are separated from the rest of the group. A small boy lives back in his Mexican home, his mother winds up in East LA. He's cared for by his abuelita, and gets a phone call from his mother every Sunday morning at 10. When his abuelita dies, Carlitos decides he'll go and find his mother. He's shown helping a woman who is a sort of broker {Doña Carmen 'La Coyota' } for those hoping to cross the border. That is a topic that is not discussed anywhere, that I know.

Going to a young couple who had contacted Doña Carmen, offering to smuggle peopleacross the border, as they are US citizens, Carlos pays them to smuggle him across. but they are stopped at the border, their nervousness giving them away. Cleared, they go, only to be stopped, and their car impounded, as they have outstanding tickets.

Carlitos loses his money, is almost sold to a child pornographer or pimp, and is rescued by Reyna, a woman who feeds Mexicanaborers who need the help. This is also a topic not commonly discussed; in fact, both are (and aren't).

The movie is a bit of a tear-jerker, and melodramatic, but it works. It is well made, the story flows, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Take out

A day in the life of Ming Ding begins as a pair of hammer-wielding loan sharks come to the door of Ming's squalid apartment. Their ultimatum, delivered in Mandarin, is as simple as it is virtually impossible to fulfill, needing to give them $800 by the evening or the debt will be doubled. With the family he supports half a world away, Ming has a single rain-soaked shift at his job in which to pay off his thuggish creditors. Ming Ding anonymously and almost wordlessly delivers Chinese food on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

That's from the DVD's description. And it had a sort of grittiness to it (though at times it seemed amateurish). Then, as it is about to end, he gets into an elevator and two hip-hoppers start to rob him, one pulls out a gun, and I turned it off.

Unheroic conduct

Ran across this one whilst doing RFID work on the 290s.

Cristofo Colon

After reading Flotsametrics, by Curt Ebbesmeyer, I got this Columbus biography; Ebbesmeyer praised Columbus as an important navigator and an antecedent in flotsametrics. This book is not so much a biography of the man as a biographical sketch of the explorer and sailor. Well written, it flowed easily and was a good read.  John Noble Wilford has written a number of other books.

Nobel a platform for outspoken Vargas Llosa

The Nobel Prize in literature brings a long-awaited accolade to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, and also a new platform for him to assail leftist leaders Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba.

Fidel is an anachronism, as he himself recognizes.

Vargas Llosa has regularly directed barbs at Chavez, denouncing him as autocratic. When the novelist visited Venezuela last year to attend a pro-democracy forum, he was stopped by authorities at the airport for nearly two hours. He said he was questioned and told that as a foreigner he didn't "have the right to make political statements" in Venezuela.

What a bunch of mierda. People who are afraid of words are cowards, and will, in the long run, lose.

Chavez disputed that account at the time, saying his critics were putting on a show to discredit his government. Chavez invited Vargas Llosa and other intellectuals to debate on live television, then backed away from a direct debate after critics suggested a one-on-one contest with Vargas Llosa — with equal time for each.

Chávez would look a fool debating Llosa one-on-one. In a gaggle, he could let pandemonium and disorder be his allies, as he usually does.

He burst onto the literary scene in the early 1960s with the novel "The Time of the Hero" (the Spanish title was "La Ciudad y los Perros") — a book that drew on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy and angered the country's military. One thousand copies of the novel were burned by military authorities, with some generals calling the book false and Vargas Llosa a communist.

How ironic. Then again, irony is the stuff of life.

Vargas Llosa Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”


In an interview with The Times in 2002, Mr. Vargas Llosa said that it was the novelist’s obligation to question real life. “I don’t think there is a great fiction that is not an essential contradiction of the world as it is,” he said. “The Inquisition forbade the novel for 300 years in Latin America. I think they understood very well the seditious consequence that fiction can have on the human spirit.’”

Free food for millionaires

Really good book. Read it in four days (Monday was a rainy off day). Koreans live all around me in Flushing, and I wanted to read a book about Koreans in America. This one takes place in New York. The family of the main character, Casey Han, lives in Queens (Maspeth, between the gas tanks {does anyone not a New Yorker recognize that landmark?} and Queens Boulevard). She has graduated Princeton, has no job, an Anglo boyfriend and no plans to go to law school; the last three rankle her traditional father. Punched, tossed out, Casey goes to Manhattan, stays at the Carlyle Hotel (as would an aunt, or grandmother, of her best friend), and begins an adventure. There are numerous characters, many fleshed out nicely, and the narrative technique of going inside each head is used effectively.

Reviews are mixed, but I found it a wonderful read.

The Hezbollah project

Joe Klein reviews a book about Hizbullah by journalist Thannasis Cambanis.


Created in the early 1980s, Hezbollah was a joint venture of Israel and Iran. Israel inadvertently provided the motivation with its brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon and attempt to establish a pro-Israeli puppet government there — undoubtedly, the worst foreign policy decision the Jewish state ever made. Iran, intoxicated by the euphoria of its 1979 revolution, provided the money, military training and equipment to its fellow Shiites in south Lebanon who, up till then, had been a disdained underclass in Lebanon’s polyglot ethnic mash-up. Israel continued to provide the motivation, by occupying a sliver of southern Lebanon until 2000, and Iran — using its Syrian ally as a go-between — continued to provide money and arms. But along the way, an extraordinary thing happened: Hezbollah developed a successful formula for governing the Shiite districts in southern Lebanon.

Klein is a shrewd observer of US politics, and has written numerous books, including the infamous Primary Colors.

Nasrallah is an extraordinarily shrewd leader. He lives modestly and has made sacrifices for the cause; he lost his oldest son in the war. He can be funny and self-deprecating in public. He has an “almost erotic” appeal for his followers, many of whom are afflicted by an eschatological delusion (the return of the Mahdi) that is remarkably similar to the Christian Rapture myth. Nasrallah’s rhetoric is fierce and his anti-Semitism flagrant, but, Cambanis writes, he has none of the pomposity that characterizes the family dynasties in the rest of the region. He makes smart decisions — refusing to take vengeance on those who collaborated with the Israelis during their occupation; allowing a looser, more permissive form of Islam to Lebanon’s Mediterranean sunbathers and beer-drinkers than his Iranian sponsors permit. And, most important of all, he is an ingenious marketer, especially in his ability to redefine success: victory is survival.

The ability to define vistory over Israel in any form is a major coup.

He also fails to put Lebanese Hezbollah in the context of Iran’s larger terrorist network — which includes Saudi Hezbollah and a surprisingly active Latin American wing. Who runs those? How does Hezbollah fit into Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force structure? 

Hezbollah, sadly, may prove over time to be the strongest indigenous response to the colonial hubris visited upon the Middle East by Western powers since the end of World War I.

Gatz

A MAN sits down at a gray metal desk one morning and tries to boot up a computer from the Flintstone age, one with a screen that looks like an old cathode-ray TV set. Nothing happens, so he pulls out a paperback and begins to read aloud. The book is “The Great Gatsby,” but this guy apparently skipped 10th-grade English when it was assigned. He reads slowly, haltingly, stumbling over pronunciations, getting the emphasis all wrong. The last time we heard “Gatsby” read this badly was in the old Andy Kaufman sketch.


This is how “Gatz,” Elevator Repair Service’s seven-hour performance now at the Public Theater, begins. When I saw it last winter, produced by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., the set was a spectacularly cluttered office that appeared to be part warehouse, part paper-pushing operation and part waiting room — not a bad metaphor, if you think about it, for the inside of your own head. And what goes on in your head is, in a way, the real subject of “Gatz,” which is not, strictly speaking, a staged reading of “The Great Gatsby,” even though every one of the book’s 47,000 words is pronounced onstage. Neither is it a dramatic adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel. It’s more a dramatization of the act of reading itself — of what happens when you immerse yourself in a book.

Book reviews

The lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story From Buchenwald to New Orleans. 940.5318 J
Mark Jacobson. Illustrated. 357 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.

Poisoning the press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture. 973.924 F
Mark Feldstein. Illustrated. 461 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, said that Anderson and the columnist Drew Pearson, his employer at the time, “shouldn’t be using a typewriter” but “a pencil on outbuilding walls.” (Pearson and Anderson had reported that some of Reagan’s staff members were gay.) J. Edgar Hoover called Anderson “a flea-ridden dog” who was “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures.” Nearly everything Richard Nixon said about Anderson — the pair were bitter 25-year antagonists — is unprintable here. But Anderson’s exposés about Nixon’s wrongdoing reduced the president’s special counsel, Charles Colson, to sputtering, as if someone had stuck a fork into his forehead, “Oh! Ach! Oh!” 

And Britt Hume, Anderson's protegé, is now a Fox News (news used ruefully) pit bull. Anderson died in 2004.

Dark harbor

A new book about the New York City waterfront was reviewed in the Times. I was reminded of a book in the recent past treating the same topic: turns out it appeared a year ago (On the Irish Waterfront), and I blogged about it then.

To the end of the land

Colm Toibin gives David Grossman's new book a glowing review. To say this is an antiwar book is to put it too mildly, and in any case such labels do an injustice to its great sweep, the levels of its sympathy. There is a plenitude of felt life in the book. There is a novelist’s notice taken of the sheer complexity not only of the characters but of the legacy of pain and conflict written into the gnarled and beautiful landscape through which Ora and Avram walk. And there is the story itself, unfolded with care and truth, wit and tenderness and rare understanding. This is one of those few novels that feel as though they have made a difference to the world.

As in other novels of love and loyalty in a time of conflict — Nadine Gordimer’s “Burger’s Daughter,” Michael Ondaatje’s “English Patient” or Shirley Hazzard’s “Great Fire” — there is a palpable urgency here about the carnal and the sexual. The portrait of Ora as a woman alive in her body is one of the triumphs of Grossman’s book.

Dominoes around the world

Cute. I wanted a refresher on the game, and this fit the bill.

Things we lost in the fire

Having started to read Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate, wherein I read that Benjamin's family goes back to Portuguese Jews by the name of Mendes, I remembered the director Sam Mendes. Searching his name led me to this film, which he produced. I know both Berry and del Toro as actors, so I took the film home. Plus, Roger Ebert gave it a positive review.

Berry's character is married to Brian, a flawless man, successful, kind, great father, great husband, and loyal friend to del Toro, a heroin addict and his long-time friend. Splicing action in time, we see how it was that Brian came to be murdered, and how his family and friends reacted.

Whilst it gets a bit melodramatic, the film is powerful drama. Del Toro is magnificently understated, restraining himself from becoming too

3 films

The Darjeeling Limited - mediocre, at best. Waste of time. Three brothers are on a train in India in some sort of quest, that, inexplicably, involves consuming cough syrup and pills, as well as smoking an endless stream of cigarettes. This nonsense exemplifies Hollywood in one of its ceaseless impulses, and it is not a pretty sight. Owen Wilson plays the eldest of the three brothers, wearing head bandages and a domineering streak that is baffling. Adrien Brody is stuck in a time warp, it seems, and wearing oversized glasses he keeps flipping onto his forehead. Jason Schwartzman plays the third brother, who lusts after the waitress/stewardess that serves them lime drinks. The film meanders, and then flops.

Manchurian Candidate - very good. Denzel turns in a stellar performance as a Desert Storm veteran, rather than a Korean War vet, played by Frank Sinatra in the original film version (1960). Meryl Streep plays the bitchy mother to perfection. The film veers on the melodramatic or absurd, but the action and the acting, especially the acting, pull it back, and make it work.

Adaptation - too much Cage. Way too much. Even Streep and Chris Cooper, in the end,, can not overcome that hurdle, good as they are.

Jen

 Management summarized:

Mike Cranshaw has a chance meeting with Sue Claussen when she checks into the roadside motel owned by Mike's parents in Arizona. A bottle of wine 'compliments of management' jump starts a cross-country journey and unique courtship between two different kinds of people who are both ultimately looking for the same thing: a sense of happiness. Mike sees something special in button downed Sue that inspires him to take a chance and hit the road to go after her. However, once he reaches Maryland, he finds that Sue has no place for an aimless dreamer in her carefully ordered life. Obsessed with making a difference in the world, Sue falls back in with her ex-boyfriend Jango, who promises her a chance to head his charity operations. Mike finally finds something worth fighting for and the two embark on an interesting journey to discover that their place in the world just might be together.

Sounds preposterous, and almost becomes so, but, it works okay. Steve Zahn plays the nerd who makes a move on Jennifer Aniston's Sue. I happen to like Aniston's work; here she pulls more substance out of a shallow character than many other actresses would. Woody Harrelson is preposterous in a crappy role he does justice to. Aniston can not make much happen with her role as Olivia in Friends with Money. The movie is silly,hangs on by a thread, but even Joan Cusak can't help Aniston salvage this mediocre film.

One hit wonders of the '50s & '60s.

Farmingdale Library called asking for two songs: Let me go lover! and I'll Always Love You. The second song is in sheet music; the first in this book.

Q 784.5 O

Songs:

Alley cat song -- Angel of the morning -- Apache -- Theme from Baby, the rain must fall -- The birds and the bees -- Bobby's girl -- Book of love -- Chantilly lace -- The deck of cards -- Dominique -- Eve of destruction -- Grazing in the grass -- Guitar boogie shuffle -- Happy, happy birthday baby -- Harper Valley P.T.A. -- I like it like that -- Israelites -- Leader of the laundromat -- Let me go lover! -- Love (can make you happy) -- May the bird of paradise fly up your nose -- More -- More today than yesterday -- Na na hey hey kiss him goodbye -- On top of spaghetti -- Pipeline -- Pretty little angel eyes -- Sea of love -- Silhouettes -- Stay -- Stranger on the shore -- Sukiyaki -- Tie me kangaroo down sport -- Who put the bomp (in the bomp ba bomp ba bomp) -- The worst that could happen.

Hot Time in the Old Town

Kohn, Edward P. (2010). Hot time in the old town: the great heat wave of 1896 and the making of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Basic Books.

Byron Collection/Museum of the City of New York
COOLING OFF At Coney Island in the summer of 1896.

Moscow Express

Smith, Martin Cruz. (2010). Three stations: an Arkady Renko novel. New York : Simon & Schuster.

Reviewed by Olen Steinhauer in NY Times Book review section.

Last chance Harvey

Insipid, at best. Devoid of much anything. Oy.

Buena Vista Social Club

A classic. Quite enjoyable. Bravo, Ry Cooder.

P.S.

Laura Linney in a role I have never before seen: sexual. In this 2004 film, she plays the admission officer at the School of Fine Arts at Columbia University, a 39-year-old divorced woman who leads an unfulfilled life and remains friends with her ex-husband.

After processing the current year's admission applications, she finds a letter on the floor of her office as she is about to leave for the day, and is stunned to see its return address: F. Scott Feinstadt, the exact name of her high school sweetheart, who died twenty years back in a car accident. She phones the applicant and makes an appointment to see him the following Monday.

From the quick interview, to which she wore a dress with a very low neckline and revealing lots of chest, she invites him to her apartment and they have sex.

F. Scott is played rather irreverently, and quite well, by Topher Grace. Made me think of Mark Ruffalo.

The script was rather weak, and their two performances lifted the film beyond where that script woul dhave otherwise taken it. A review in Rotten Tomatoes has it about right: P.S. is at its best when it follows the tics and foibles of human behavior; Linney and Grace both give vivid, lively performances. But every time reincarnation rears its head, the movie flounders, particularly in clumsy scenes with Louise's predatory best friend (Marcia Gay Harden, Mystic River), who stole Louise's boy so long ago. Fortunately (or strangely), that element is almost a tacked-on subplot; center stage is the romance between Linney and Grace, which glows sweetly. Also featuring Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspects, Miller's Crossing) and a woefully underused Paul Rudd (The Shape of Things, Clueless). --Bret Fetzer

Soccer explains world

Foer, Franklin. (2004). How soccer explains the world: an unlikely theory of globalization. New York: HarperCollins.

Fascinating, enjoyable book.

“Thanks to the immigration of Africans and Asians, Jews have been replaced as the primary objects of European hate.” p.71

Operation Mincemeat

Checking for Operation Mincemeat : Macintyre, Ben, and came across this:  Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat by Smyth, Denis.

Curiously, I read the original and saw the movie based on it after coming across a mention of it in one of David Ignatius's books.

Radical

In a nation that abhors the word liberal, what a refreshing look at an old-style activist.

When Barack Obama came to prominence as a presidential candidate, his Chicago background—in particular, his efforts as a "community organizer"—reignited an interest in Saul Alinsky (1909-72), the hard-charging activist whose 1971 book, "Rules for Radicals," was said to have had a formative influence on Mr. Obama's thinking. Some critics worry that Alinsky's ideas guide Mr. Obama even today, in the White House. About such matters Nicholas von Hoffman cares little. But about Alinsky himself Mr. von Hoffman cares a great deal. He knew Alinsky, worked with him for 10 years in Chicago community groups and now offers a portrait of him in "Radical."

Von Hoffman, Nicholas. (2010). Radical: a portrait of Saul Alinsky. New York : Nation Books.

Alinsky's activism began when he left his studies and joined in labor-union agitation on Chicago's South and West sides. Before long he was organizing community groups in rent strikes and store boycotts, arranging safe passage for blacks on their way to jobs in bigoted neighborhoods, and conducting negotiations among feuding ethnic groups. He could be daring with his tactics, but he drew the line at jail: "Saul had an absolute prohibition," says Mr. von Hoffman. "He would explain that a staff person cannot operate behind bars." In this respect Alinsky's methods differed from those of his contemporaries in the civil-rights movement.

Emphasis added, for these are important points. Nincompoops on the right, even on the left, dismiss radicals far too easy with cartoonish looks and superficial characterizations.

The prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Bravo Dame Maggie. Do not believe that I had seen the film before, and I am glad to have seen it now.


1968. 1969. A tour de force performance which deservedly won an Oscar and launched a career. A surprise is that Pamela Franklin, who also turned in a stirring performance, did not have a successful career; her wikibio has it that she became typecast in horror films.

Laura Linney

Portrait of this great actress in the Sunday NY Times

K*ke like me

Seemed interesting; wasn't.

Weather man

Piece of crap. Doesn't work. A waste of time. Michael Caine is miscast. Nicolas Cage is two-dimensional, and can not rescue a role fated to fail from failing.

Shantaram

A young, and very pretty, patron wanted this book for her summer English class. Looks interesting.

God

Reading about John McWhorter, having seen his op-ed piece in the Times, I cam across the name of Robert Wright

Bloggingheads.tv (sometimes abbreviated "bhtv") is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers. The site was started by the journalist Robert Wright (The Evolution of God, Nonzero, The Moral Animal) and the blogger and journalist Mickey Kaus on November 1, 2005. (Kaus has since dropped out of operational duties of the site as he didn't want his frequent linking to be seen as a conflict of interest.) Most of the earlier discussions posted to the site involved one or both of those individuals, but since has grown to include a total of more than 250 other individual contributors, mostly journalists, scientists, authors, well known political bloggers, and other notable individuals.

Hogs, purpose, break

Mediocre 2007 film, predictable, stereotypical, two-dimensional characters, with a few laughs, and a thud of an ending. What a way to make a living.

Purpose (2002): badly dated; good idea, badly executed and quite mediocre. Mia Farrow as a hard-edged financial manager totally unbelievable, uncvonvincing and badly cast. Did somebody owe her a favor?

Lucky Break (2002). Seemed a good idea; couldn't understand what language they were speaking, turned it off.

Marilyn Hotchkiss

Marilyn Hotchkiss' ballroom dancing & charm school

Took it our because of Marisa Tomei, a way to get films lacking anything specific.

Cute. Works. Fun. 3 stars, just makes 3, out of 5.

John Goodman makes a strong contribution, playing a strange role, moving the narrative along. Why Robert Carlyle was cast as the leading man is a mystery. Goodman's charcater propels him; without that support, he might have sank.

Why this world?

I f irst became aware of Lispector in reading Gregory Rabassa's If this be treason : translation and its discontents : a memoir. Seeing this book, I thought it'd be interesting. Sort of, as it turned out, but not enough to excite me and get me to read it. Perhaps another time.

Books on Alcohol

These books on booze deserve a toast, says Daniel Okrent


1. The Alcoholic Republic. (1979). W.J. Rorabaugh. Oxford.

This excavation of the most drink-sodden era in U.S. history (1790-1840) is as damning as it is enlightening. At a time of easy access (there were 14,000 American distilleries by 1810), rough frontier mores and poor water quality, liquor seeped into every corner of national life, writes W.J. Rorabaugh. Americans "drank at home and abroad, alone and together, at work and at play, in fun and in earnest. They drank from the crack of dawn to the crack of dawn." If you wish to understand the temperance movement's nobler impulses—that is, those that were untouched by the xenophobia and political cynicism that later drove the campaign— you might start here.

2. Domesticating Drink. (1998). Catherine Gilbert Murdock. Johns Hopkins.

Despite her subtitle, "Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940," Catherine Gilbert Murdock's primary subjects are female and her perspective decidedly feminist. But by focusing on women and drink—territory previously unexplored by scholars of her ability—she is able to tease out some of the puzzling and persistent anomalies and contradictions in American attitudes toward booze: women soldiers of the temperance movement co-existing with matrons who chugged Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound (20.6% alcohol!) to alleviate their "female complaints"; the instant acceptance of women into the speakeasy, after they had been barred for decades from the saloon; and the absolutely decisive role of women in bringing about Prohibition's repeal, just they had been critical to its creation.

3. Noble Experiments.  "Judge Jr."  John Day, 1930

This pocket-size oddity—chiefly a compendium of novel cocktail recipes— tells you how impotent Prohibition had become during its waning years, at least in the big cities and other places where the wish to obey the law ran a distant second to the wish to imbibe. Published three years before the arrival of Repeal, "Noble Experiments" (the title was taken from Herbert Hoover's characterization of Prohibition) wasn't about the appreciation of fine liquors and wines. A typical concoction (gin, brandy, apricot brandy, lime juice) was known as "The Bridge Table," the pseudonymous author tells us, "because 8after a few of these your legs will fold up." Among those who contributed recipes were journalist Heywood Broun, actor Roland Young and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld; among those who declined was the usually ombibulous H.L. Mencken, who in a rare moment of moderation said he'd rather make the argument for wine and beer.

4. The Speakeasies of 1932. (1932). Al Hirschfeld and Gordon Kahn. Dutton.

More than a decade before he began to insinuate his daughter's name, Nina, into his grand caricatures of entertainment figures and other celebrities, the 29-year-old Al Hirschfeld devoted a good chunk of a year to prowling some of the 32,000 speakeasies tucked into every corner of New York. ("This may be the best damned researched book ever," he wrote in a preface to the 2003 edition, when he was 99.) Ranging from Bowery dives to the "all marble and gold" Bath Club on West 53rd Street, where the entertainment was chamber music, Hirschfeld produced a portrait of speakeasy life infinitely more reliable than the distorted renderings concocted for film and television.

5. Martini, Straight Up. (1998). Lowell Edmunds Johns Hopkins.

In the midst of his distinguished career as a classicist, Lowell Edmunds paused to focus his critical talents on a cultural artifact packed with just as much meaning as a Minoan terracotta or an Ionic capital. Originally published in 1981 as "The Silver Bullet: The Martini in American Civilization," Edmunds's book finds seven meanings in the martini (among them: "The Martini Is Optimistic, Not Pessimistic," "The Martini Is the Drink of Adults, Not of Children") and four ambiguities ("The Martini Is Sensitive—The Martini Is Tough"). He's not quite the cocktail snob that I am—he is willing to consider that a martini can be made from vodka—but one suspects that Edmunds does prefer his bullets straight up and very dry.

— Mr. Okrent is the author of "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition." He writes a monthly book-review column for Fortune.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8

Four seasons in Rome

Four seasons in Rome: on twins, insomnia, and the biggest funeral in the history of the world. (2007). Anthony Doerr. New York: Scribner.

How I wanted to like this book; o, how I wanted. I first came across it many moons ago, and took it out of Peninsula Library. Started to read it, I felt disturbed by the style used, but persevered.And persevered. But I could not like it. And, as Mrs. Delahunty might have said, one can not help not liking a book. And I don't like this one. So I'm stopping at page 96. I have others book to read, others I'm reading (Duke Ellington's America, by Harvey G. Cohen; Napoleon Bonaparte: a life, by Alan Schom (struggling to end it); Flotsametrics and the floating world, Curtis Ebbesmeyer; which lead me to The mysterious history of Columbus : an exploration of the man, the myth, the legacy, by John Noble Wilford), and want to read (In search of Nella Larsen : a biography of the color line, by George Hutchinson; and, perhaps, Why this world : a biography of Clarice Lispector, byBenjamin Moser.).

Dancing with Cuba

Picked up, looks interesting; another time.

The man who invented Fidel

DePalma, Anthony. (2006). The man who invented Fidel: Cuba, Castro, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York times.New York: Public Affairs.

Excellent work. Enjoyed reading immensely. DePalma debunks myths on both sides of the equation, analyzes Matthews's career and role, and does not spare the Times in his judgment. This is a book that should be widely known and read, but it is far too serious and challenging to be such. Alas, the world subsists on bad books and myths.

One person mentioned prominently was a journalist resident in Cuba before Matthews arrived, Ruby Hart Phillips. She had contacts everywhere, the Batista government included, and did little foot work to research her stories. Needless to say, she disliked and resented Matthews and his work. She went by the name of R. Hart Phillips to fight sexism.

She wrote two books on Cuba: Cuba, island of paradox (1959) and The Cuban dilemma.(1963).

Samples of DePalma's words:

"Matthews was a scholar with a deadline, an intellectual with printer's ink on his hands and a soldier's tolerance for danger in his heart." p.19

"In a time of misconceptions and lies, the truth itself became malleable. Both the accusers and the accused were willing to believe that image mattered more than reality. Policy was being misshaped by perception, while perceptions were distorted by emotions. Both government and journalism were under tremendous pressures at this critical moment, and both would be forced to change in significant ways in their relationship to one another." p.229

If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium

If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium

A patron called looking for soundtrack to film (which includes Donovan).

Gjon Mili : photographs & recollections

He directed the short "Swinging the Blues" that opens with shot of Prez's porkpie hat. Interesting book.

Messiah?

Heilman, Samuel C. (2010). The Rebbe: the life and afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Dressed in a white straw hat, tan chinos and a blue shirt, Samuel Heilman, the co-author of a new book about Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, stood at the rebbe’s grave site among scores of pilgrims — a vanguard of the thousands expected to visit on Tuesday, in the Jewish calendar the 16th anniversary of his death — who arrived at a Queens cemetery a few days early to commune with their beloved leader.

“It is very holy,” Mr. Heilman said outside the open-air mausoleum, or ohel, that contains the graves of the rebbe and his father-in-law and predecessor, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn. Hasidim believe that the spirit of a great sage remains after death, and many Lubavitchers think the rebbe is not only a sage, but also the messiah.

Michael Falco for The New York Times

Lubavitchers at the Queens grave site of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

Triangle in the Sky

The Flatiron: the New York landmark and the incomparable city that arose with it. Alice Sparberg Alexiou. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010.

Yalta: the price of peace. (2010). Plokhy, Serhii 
New York: Viking .


Various links include an event at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a segment on BookTV,

No Reservations, No Prisoners

Bourdain, Anthony. (2010). Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. Ecco: New York


The black leather jacket and earring are gone. On the cover of Anthony Bourdain's "Medium Raw," he is dressed in dark suit and tie, the tie a little loose around the neck, as if he is not quite at ease in it. Seated at a beaten-up wooden table strewn with carving implements, the former chef is testing the sharpness of a kitchen knife against his middle finger. Who, you wonder, will he stick the knife in this time?

The leather jacket and earring have been replaced by placed products; he flashes a Chase Platinum, no, Saphire, card. Everyone grows up eventually, I suppose. Bourdain has become trite.

"Medium Raw" mixes personal memoir with travelogues and ruminations on such matters as the degradation of the American hamburger, the dumbing down of the Food Network, the tedium of multicourse tasting menus and the rise of food gurus such as David Chang ("the most important chef in America today"), whose 12-seat restaurant Momofuku Ko on New York's Lower East Side requires you to log onto its website at precisely the right moment six days in advance to book a place.

Nothing is that important.


The author is still a bit of a kid himself, or at least a brat, like the one who shoots off his mouth in class, daring to say out loud what others may secretly have been thinking. He hates vegetarians, raw-food enthusiasts and celebrity chefs' product endorsements.

Is that a form of self-loathing? Or does he consider his own endorsement subtle enough to be refined and excused? Plu-eez.

The news last year about a deadly strain of E.coli in hamburgers sends Mr. Bourdain, an unabashed carnivore, into a paroxysm. The meat was sold by the food giant Cargill, "the largest private company in America. A hundred and sixteen billion dollars in revenue a year," he rails, yet the company tried to "save a few cents on their low-end burgers" by using meat scraps that had been treated with ammonia to kill bacteria. The words "meat" and "treated with ammonia," he says, should never appear in the same sentence "unless you're talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.

A very valid and accurate point. Vintage Bourdain. As is this:

Mr. Bourdain is a vivid, bawdy and often foul-mouthed writer. He thrills in the attack, but he is also an enthusiast who writes well about things he holds dear. His detailed reporting on the backroom lives of restaurant employees is terrific. One of the most moving parts of the book is a chapter on a Dominican, Justo Thomas, who has spent the past six years in a tiny room below the kitchen of Le Bernardin in New York, cleaning 700 pounds of fish a day and cutting it into perfectly uniform portions. Breaking rules of the trade, Mr. Bourdain takes him to lunch in the dining room, where Mr. Thomas for the first time gets to taste the fish he has prepared.

No one else does that.

"At the end of the day, would a good and useful criterion for evaluating a meal be 'Was it fun?' "

The end of the day? Ach, rescue me from clichés!


As a chef, Mr. Bourdain has never been on a par with his heroes, and he readily admits to possessing only "middling" kitchen skills. But he loves to cook and feels strongly that everyone should learn at least the basics. "I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able—if called upon to do so—to make a proper omelet in the morning."

Lady Q

Went looking for Paul Quinichette,by googling Lady Q, and wound up with this book as the first result: Lady Q : the rise and fall of a Latin queen / Reymundo Sanchez and Sonia Rodriguez.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö

A Peninsula Library patron told me he was looking for books on CD by these Swedish authors, back some weeks ago. He was in today, and thanked me profusely for enlightening him on accessing the OPAC online. Nice to get such feedback.

Hunted : a true story of survival

Came across this book whilst weeding 796.5 books (Athletic & outdoor sports & games). Looks interesting.

What becomes: stories

Well reviewed in Kirkus; that should be enough to spark the curiousity. Reviewed in NYT Sunday 23 May.

Language

A patron called to reserve these two books:
    Hitch-22 : A Political Memoir : Hitchens, Christopher
    Globish : how the English language became the world's language McCrum, Robert.

420.9 M
English language -- History.
English language -- Globalization

 B Hitchens