Deirdre on reading, writing and living

I made it. I know the year's still not quite over and I'm deep into The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver so there may be a few additional titles, but I made it to 50 books and that makes me happy.

There are at least four books that I own and feel guilty about not reading this year. Maybe I'll get to them early enough in 2010 to get them done. So here is my list:

1. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, by Niall Ferguson. 1/1/09
2. Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food, by Jan Chozen Bays, MD, 1/3/09
3. Just After Sunset: Stories, by Stephen King, 1/3/09
4. Bread Body Spirit: Finding the Sacred in Food, Edited by Alice Peck, 1/11/09
5. Foods Jesus Ate and How to Grow Them, by Allan A. Swenson, 1/23/09
6. Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed & Forgery in the Holy Land, by Nina Burleigh, 1/25/09
7. Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland, 1/31/09
8. House of Happy Endings: A Memoir, by Leslie Garis, 2/5/09
9. I Never Thought Addiction Could Happen to Me, by Loree Taylor Jordan, 2/6/09
10. Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America, by William Graebner, 2/6/09
11. The Kiss: A Memoir, by Kathryn Harrison, 2/7/09
12. Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu, by Philip Alcabes, 2/21/09
13. No one belongs here more than you: Stories, by Miranda July, 2/22/09
14. A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana, by Haven Kimmel, 3/1/09
15. An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, and Dominion on the Banks of the Cape Fear River, by Steven M. Wisw, 3/9/09
16. Love Junkie: A Memoir of Love and Sex Addiction, by Rachel Resnick, 3/12/09
17. Dooms Day Book, by Connie Willis, 3/20/09
18. Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher, 3/21/09
19. This Boy's Life, by Tobais Wolff, 3/28/09
20. Normal Eating for Normal Weight: The Path to Freedom from Weight Obsession and Food Cravings, by Sheryl Canter, M.A., 3/29/09
21. Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, by Helene Stapinski, 4/11/09
22. John Henry Days, by Colson Whitehead, 4/30/09
23. Brother I'm Dying, by Edwidge Danticat, 5/3/09
24. Middlemarch, by George Eliot, 5/14/09
25. Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found, by Marie Brenner, 6/7/09
26. Fierce Attachments: A Memoir, by Vivian Gornick, 6/12/09
27. The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton, by Vivian Gornick, 6/15/09
28. Women In Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Communities, by Carol A. Kolmerten, 6/21/09
29. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, 6/26/09
30. The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, by Vivian Gornick, 6/30/09
31. Born in the Wrong Country, by Milton Lee Norris, 7/3/09
32. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin, 7/12/09
33. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham, 7/26/09
34. The Fallen Man, by Tony Hillerman, 8/9/09
35. My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands, by Chelsea Handler, 8/12/09
36. Man Versus Nature: The Field & Stream Guide to How to Stay Alive in the Outdoors, by Howard Earl & Frederic T. Jung, 8/14/09
37. The Locked Room, by by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, 8/20/09
38. Underworld, by Don Dillio, 9/6/09
39. The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler, 9/11/09
40. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, 9/27/09
41. Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, by Kerry Cohen, 10/1/09
42. Killing Castro, by Lawrence Block, 10/26/09
43. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, 11/8/09
44. Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir, by Rosemary L. Bray, 11/17/09
45. Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, by Ahmed Rashid, 11/21/09
46. Silas Marner, by George Eliot, 11/29/09
47. It's All About You: A Daily Comic Strip, by Tony Murphy, 12/2/09
48. Cousin Henry, by Anthony Trollope, 12/3/09
49. Madam Bovery, by Gustave Flaubert, 12/13/09
50. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, by Carolyn Kay Steedman, 12/16/09


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Current Location: NYC
Current Music: Silence

Michael need a hit and he needs it bad. Wait, it's not really a "hit" he needs but a shot, no make it a double shot. Michael is in real trouble. His drug of choice? Caffeine. And when the steaming water hits grounds, it's like elixir dripping down from on high. Coffee is life.

Tony Murphy's new book, a collection of daily comic strips, is good for the voyeur in all of us. What could be more entertaining than watching a neurotic stumble, tip-toe, and crawl through life? Murphy's characters are so real you feel like you could run into them at any cafe in the world. Did I mention that I laughed -- out loud?

If you're stuck for a present for that special someone who squirms at the idea that he or she is actually in a relationship or for your long-suffering Barista order of copy of It's All About You: A Daily Comic Strip right now.



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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Silence

What came first the roasted chicken or the hard-boiled egg? Cooking is so universal and has been in vogue for so long, it's hard to look at with fresh eyes. But in Catching Fire, Wrangham seeks to explain the extensive roll cooking had in human evolution.

Instead of diving right into the history of mankind's development, the book begins by looking at how modern humans do on a raw food diet. There are many people who swear by eating food that is either raw or cooked at very low temperatures. Studies have found that while subjects have eaten the same amount of calories as their cooking counterparts, they loose weight. Part of the explanation is that heating food breaks some of the bonds that hold substances together on a molecular level. Because those bonds are softened or broken by cooking, it is easier for the digestive system to extract the calories.

By looking into modern hunter/gatherer societies, Wrangham sees social benefits to the division of labor, men hunting woman gathering and cooking, that add up to better survival chances for our proto-human ancestors. By cooking food, less energy was needed for digestion, creating smaller guts and spare resources for brain development. Paired women could count on the protection of their food by their hungry partners.

Chimps and great apes chew the raw food that is available to them for almost six hours per day. That much mastication takes time away from hunting. Modern man chews for an average of an hour to an hour and a half per day leaving lots of room for other tasks.

The book makes lot more points and it is a fascinating take on evolution and what separated humans from other animals.
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Current Location: Catskills
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: silence

When the calls came, they were always there for one another. It didn't matter that one lived in the old neighborhood in Haiti and one moved all the way to New York City. They were brothers and when one was in trouble, the other one moved miles and mountains to help.

Danticat's superb memoir about her entire clan, focusing particularly on her father and his brother, puts them in their element for readers to meet. Their lives are built in the shadow of invasions and dictators. Small decisions have huge consequences.

Both men had a hand in raising Danticat and her brother. Scenes in the poor Bel Air neighborhood of Port au Prince (the capital of Haiti) begin when the author is a little girl. She and her parents live in a tiny house and dream of making a good and decent life. Soon squads of paramilitary men called the Tonton Macoutes, enforcers of Papa Doc Duvalier's rule, begin throwing their weight around. Danticat's father, tired of living under their gaze, overstays his tourist visa to the US. When his wife follows him, Danticat and her first brother stay with their uncle. It will be years before the family is able to live together again.

Larger historical events push the people of Bel Air to the breaking point and Danticat's family is threatened, just like everyone else there.

The book is beautifully written and can help readers unfamiliar with Haiti's tumultuous history catch up by focusing on the families trials and traumas. While the situation may be off the front pages, misery and resistance are is still thriving. It's well worth spending some time learning about Haiti and the people who struggle and live and die, both there and right here in the US.

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Current Location: Catskills
Current Mood: busy
Current Music: silence

John Henry was a steel-drivin' man strong enough to break up a mountain so that the trains can come through. He beat a steam-powered hammer in a contest and then dropped dead with his hammer in his hand, or so the legend goes. Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist and Apex Hides the Hurt) creates a strange and familiar world in the three books I've read. In John Henry Days the main character is an African-American journalist who goes from PR event to PR event freelancing and freeloading. He laughs and chats with his fellow "junketeers" at a weekend devoted to celebrating the legend of John Henry at the Big Bend Tunnel in Talcott, West Virginia.

A near death experience shakes his ambition to break the record set by a previous junketeer to go to an organized and paid for PR event every day for six months. So far J. Sutter's been going for three months solid about half way to Bobby Figgis's record.

Hundreds of people converge on John Henry Days and readers get to sit inside many of their heads. The main event is the unveiling of a stamp featuring folk heroes including the steel-drivin' man. Postal employees, town muckety-mucks, the daughter of a researcher who owned the biggest collection of John Henry paraphernalia, PR men, writers, townspeople, and stamp collectors all get their chance.

Whitehead loves language and it slides beautifully onto the pages of his quirky novels. John Henry Days won't help you decide if the man was a myth or a fleshy human, but it will absorb you and leave you with a sense of wonder.

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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: silence

This is the memoir Helene Stapinski was born to write, whether she liked it or not. Set mostly in Jersey City, NJ, Stapinski gets low-down with the too-colorful characters, many from her own large family, who dominate the past, at least the way she tells it. She takes a long view of the city, just across the river from glittering Manhattan, distilling the corruption, dirty politics, petty theft, fallen-off-the-truck swag, and murders that gave the place its tainted reputation.

Stapinski could be an historian, and I hope she dives back into Jersey City for her inspiration. The book caught a pre-gentrification era that could be applied to many neighborhoods in the metropolitan area, now scrubbed clean of their origins.

She ran far to get away from her roots (all the way to the Alaskan wilderness for a year), but when she finally stopped moving and told this story she let her "inner Jersey" shine.

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: Silence

Smart Book by a Smart Author

Ms. Canter has my number in so many ways. Her book, based on years of experience, her vibrant on-line community, food programs, and research has many important revelations for anyone with eating issues.

The method in the book encourages people to learn how to listen to their bodies, change the destructive thinking that many of us indulge in, and find some sanity in the insane world of eating, food, and desire in the United States. Canter says that her program isn't a quick fix and, while I'm not an active member of her community, I know that a healthy relationship with what goes into my body took a long while to develop. If she said she could solve an intractable problem like this quickly, it would reason to doubt.

Normal Eating for Normal Weight: The Path to Freedom from Weight Obsession and Food Cravings can become one of the healthful tools that people with eating issues and other addictive behaviors can use to improve their lives.

It's available on www.NormalEating.com

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: refreshed
Current Music: silence

Book #17: Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher
This is Ms. Fisher's one woman show on paper. Carrie Fisher, daughter of movie icon Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, is best known for her role in Star Wars. The other part she played (with zest) was that of an addict. All issues are brushed by, with little or no deep exploration, as if to linger might bring us all down. I wish Ms. Fisher had spent more time and used her writing talent to transform the show into something that can live on the page without the shortcuts that a come naturally to a live performance like gestures, facial expressions, and infectious laughter.


Book #18: Dooms Day Book, by Connie Willis
A fellow member of the 50bookchallenge recommended this one to me after I read Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland. Both involve the Asian/European plague known as the Black Death. Both have similar time frames. Dooms Day Book brings a very modern sensibility to the crisis. I don't want to give anything much away, but time travel is involved. This book won the Hugo and Nebula awards and it was well worth the time.



Book #19: This Boy's Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff
I loved this memoir. Mr. Wolff brings us back to 1950's Seattle where his impulsive and loving mother settles after a divorce. She finds a seemingly-stable man, Dwight, and they marry. The book is mostly how Dwight and Mr. Wolff lock horns and jibe each other. It's a classic coming-of-age story that seems as honest as they come. The author's experiences are as fresh and recognizable today as they were in the '50's.

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: sore
Current Music: silence

Fantasies to the left of me, heartbreak to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you. Addiction comes in many guises, some are easier to spot than others. Is emailing someone three times a day a problem? How about ten times a day? What about 64 times over a two day period? Is it wrong to go back to a guy and beg him not to breakup with you? What if he told you that it's over just days after you have a miscarriage?

For Rachel Resnick, the extreme thrill of a new relationship, the inevitable conflict, and the devastating breakup all triggered feelings she first experienced in childhood. The waves of emotion mimicking archetypal moments like The Day Daddy Walked Out or The Nights Mommy Slept With Strange Men.

A child of emotional and physical neglect turned into an adult who looked for love and affirmation in the arms of extremely good-looking, abusive, control freaks. The problem was that she got what she was seeking, a replay of the past.

Resnick's book exposes her compelling train-wreck of a life in vivid, lurid colors. And I wish I didn't identify so much with her, but I do.

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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: silence

Zippy was born small with large eyes. She didn't talk until she was good and ready at age three and she zipped everywhere, around her small house and tiny Mooreland, Indiana (population 300).

Kimmel's recollections are amusing, but I'm not as in love with this book as everyone else seemed to be. It's a pre-coming-of-age story and I guess I like my memoirs to be a little juicier.

However, her tales are well written and could be inspiration for anyone who thought that her childhood was too normal to merit a book.

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: sore
Current Music: Beethoven

No, this book is not about the Bush administration or any other political formation. Yes, I needed some escape from reality and I got it with Maitland's worthy novel.

Set in the England in 1348, a year when it rained every day from Midsummer's Day to Christmas, a plague (or three) stalks a band of misfits as they try to move north to outrun the pestilence. They are a horribly scarred peddler of religious relics, a surly and overly righteous magician, two musicians recently "let go" from their cushy positions, a pregnant woman and her fresco-painting "husband," an expert in herbs and midwifery with secret beliefs, a storyteller with a story, and a white-haired child who tosses runes to predict the future.

There are no straight lines in the story, and getting to the truth of what set each to the hard life of wandering the road is compelling. Their stories unfold between the tales they weave at the campfire, the tricks they use to earn money, and their confessions in the face of almost certain death from disease and the hardships that bedevil them every day.

The book did exactly what I needed it to do, turn my mind from my today, with the thousands of challenges that are in front of me (and everybody else), and focus me on people who have it much worse. It's not only that misery loves company, being able to say, well at least that isn't happening to me, makes it all feel a little better.

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: gloomy
Current Music: silence

What's a museum curator to do? If items aren't found by archaeologists in a sanctioned dig, but are so deliciously historic that they turn whole religions on their heads, can the items be bought and displayed? To whom do these items belong? The country where they were found or the person or group who dug them up?

Collectors don't have the same restraint. Some, like the ones mentioned in Burleigh's absorbing new book, go by feel, buying the objects of their obsession. In the process they spend vast amounts of money, encourage illegal digging, and get duped by forgers.

These questions have been dogging internationally-known museums recently. Some, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have had to return looted items, like the Euphronios krater, to the country or origin. Others, like the J. Paul Getty Museum, have seen their staff (Marion True, former antiquities curator) on trial for years.

If museums and scholars ignored antiquities that appear on the market without provenance (known and documented origin) then the Dead Sea Scrolls might never have been studied.

But there is another wrinkle that haunts both the world's cultural institutions and collectors and that's the subject of Burleigh's book. Sometimes, it seems, the most tantalizing items are fake, made by skilled craftspeople to garner huge excitement and fabulous prices. Two of the items focused on in the book had international news feeds buzzing and garnered devotees in Christian and Jewish communities.

The James Ossuary, a burial box complete with bones, was inscribed to imply that the occupant was the brother of Jesus Christ. If real, it would have been material proof of the existence of Jesus.

And the Jehoash Tablet, carved and seasoned to seem as if it came from the disputed area in Jerusalem called the Temple Mount that sits under the famous Islamic shrine the Dome of the Rock, was inscribed with 16 lines of ancient Phoenician script that seemed to be part of Solomon's original temple which would go far to prove the truth of sections of the Bible that are important to Israel's claims to Jerusalem. (Recently the Al-Aqsa Intifada or the Second Intifada began on September 28, 2000 because of Ariel Sharon's arrival with troops at the Islamic site.)

Burleigh takes readers on an thrilling ride through apartments crammed with antiquities, into the workshops of scholars who are called upon to write opinions on the veracity of items brought to them, and into the international antiquities market, both legal and illegal. She had amazing access to police investigations, collectors, dealers, and academics.

Unholy Business is well worth reading for those who follow historical and biblical antiquities as well as those who like a fascinating mystery filled with characters who could have stepped out of the pages of a novel.

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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Beethoven's Piano Sonata no. 32

An uneven collection of short stories that left me pleased and a little confused. There are several class A tales in the book like "A Very Tight Space," "N," "The Things They Left Behind" and "Rest Stop."

Part of what was so fascinating about the book is the introduction and end notes by King. It seems that Mr. King found himself craving the old groove he used to have when he was banging out short stories for men's magazines. It seems he edited a book The Best American Short Stories of 2007 and got excited about the form again.

The weaker stories were like Twilight Zone episodes, diverting but not brilliant. I'm not certain that some of them would have been published in the same magazines that published King's work way back when (if they even still exist). I feel he still does his best with the novel. I loved Lisey's Story even when it took me into the supernatural, where I didn't think I wanted to go.

I know for certain that this isn't my last King investment, but I've certainly had enough for the moment.

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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: envious
Current Music: Silence

Money's money, right? Wrong. My sister told me that "Life is like a sh*t sandwich, the more bread you have the less sh*t you eat." (True unless you're Sunny Von Bulow.)

Niall Ferguson focuses his history of the world on its finances. He succeeds in explaining the origins, evolution, and present state of currency, bonds, stocks, insurance, property, and financial wizardry. There's plenty I still don't know, but looking at the world through the prism of money usually explains a lot. And while Karl Marx didn't get rich from doing it, he too thought it was a pretty darned important way to interpret events.

Ferguson is no Marxist. He believes that it is the lack of credit that leads to intractable poverty, such as racist blue-lining African-American neighborhoods so that they never had local banks to get mortgages from or paid higher rates for loans than whites. Nor does he spend much time on the evil and oppression that has been carried out in the pursuit of super-profits.

But what he does do is unravel the mysterious nature of capital. The book is brand new and the melt-down of 2008 was just getting started when it went to press. However, Ferguson gives us a paradigm to understand the magnitude and the origins of the depression that the world is in.

After reading the book it's hard not to thing of all of banking, stocks, and finance industry as a giant Ponzi scheme that is finally coming due.

Still, I just keep thinking about that sh*t sandwich that's coming our way.

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Current Mood: nerdy

Here's my 50.

Non Fiction:

Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, by John Gray, 1/7/08
Fireweed: A Political Autobiography, by Gerda Lerner, 1/21/08
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan, 2/1/08
The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections, and Events that Shaped Modern North Carolina, by Rob Christensen, 2/10/08
After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, by John Darwin, 2/17/08
Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, 2/20/08
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, by James Risen, 2/26/08
Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt, by Nina Burleigh, 3/4/08
Freedom's Unsteady March: America's Role in Building Arab Democracy, by Tamara Cofman Wittes, 3/15/08
Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe, by James J. Sheehan, 3/23/08
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, 3/31/08
A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry, by Nathan Hodge & Sharon Weinberger, 4/20/08
Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, 4/24/08
In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India, by Edward Luce, 5/3/08
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, by Gary Marcus, 5/10/08
Them: A Memoir of Parents, by Francine du Plessix Gray, 6/5/08
It's a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life, by Keith Stewart, 6/9/08
Fountain of Marvelous, by Valerie Fausone, 6/13/08
Once a Marine: An Iraq Tank Commander's Inspirational Memoir of Combat, Courage, and Recovery, by Nick Popaditch with Mike Steere, 7/2/08
The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, by Charles Petzold, 7/10/08
The Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard, 7/16/08
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, 7/26/08
How to Fish, by Chris Yates, 7/29/08
Wounded Warriors: Those for Whom the War Never Ends, Mike Sager, 8/18/08
Mexican Enough: My Live Between the Borderlines, by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, 8/31/08
When You are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris, 9/24/08
The Way of The World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, by Ron Suskind, 10/02/08
Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, by Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar, 10/11/08
The Liars' Club: A Memoir, by Mary Karr, 10/22/08
Higher Realism: A New Foreign Policy for the United States, by Seyom Brown, 10/27/08
The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, by Sven Birkerts, 11/2/08
Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Pierre Bayard, 11/05/08
Church of Lies, by Flora Jessop and Paul T. Brown, 11/12/08
Lost in the Sacred: Why the Muslim World Stood Still, by Dan Diner, 11/20/08
She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, by Jennifer Finney Boylan, 12/1/08
The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, by Helen Benedict, 12/9/08
Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir, by Lillian Faderman, 12/30/08

Fiction:

The Fire Engine That Disappeared, by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, 1/12/08
Emma, by Jane Austen, 4/13/08, [mentioned in blog]
Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome, by Robert Harris, 6/11/08, [mentioned in blog]
Murder at The Savoy, by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, 6/18/08
Personal Days, by Ed Park, 7/15/08
Keeping Watch, by Laurie R. King, 8/5/08
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer, 9/4/08
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, by Mark Twain, 10/25/08
Nothing is Ever Lost, by Argyris Calbaris, 11/24/08
Lisey's Story, by Stephen King, 11/28/08
The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot, 12/4/08
Exposure, by Kathryn Harrison, 12/12/08

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Current Mood: pleased

No, I don't mean my age. Yesterday I finished Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir by Cal State Professor Lillian Faderman. It was the 50th book I've read this year. (Full list to follow.)

When she says naked, it's no metaphor. Faderman put herself through school by posing for girlie magazines. Her story is compelling, touching and liberating. It was fantastic to watch the illegitimate daughter of a poor Jewish immigrant grow up to be a trailblazer in the Women's and Lesbian movements.

Along the way, she meets people from the least privileged layer of society, sex workers and addicts, is harassed by anti-gay cops, fends off the lascivious hands of certain men, struggles and strips her way through college, falls in and out of love, and comes to be a greatly respected academic.

A fast and enjoyable read.
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Current Mood: content

I feel like I haven't been as able to assess the books that I've read for the 50 Book Challenge. One of the reasons is that by contract I can't write anything about the books I review for ForeWord Magazine. So here is a list of book reviews that have been published.

The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections, and Events that Shaped Modern North Carolina, by Rob Christensen Review.

Freedom's Unsteady March: America's Role in Building Arab Democracy, by Tamara Cofman Wittes Review.

A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry, by Nathan Hodge & Sharon Weinberger Review.

Once a Marine: An Iraq Tank Commander's Inspirational Memoir of Combat, Courage, and Recovery, by Nick Popaditch with Mike Steere Review.

Wounded Warriors: Those for Whom the War Never Ends, Mike Sager Review.

There are other reviews that still haven't been published yet. I'll post them when I'm able.


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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: awake
Current Music: silence

When she finally buried her shovel in Mexican soil she had no idea how rich the ground might be. No longer satisfied with simply being considered a Latina on applications, Griest, who learned Russian to travel in the former Soviet Union and Chinese to live in China, decided it was finally time to learn Spanish by traveling Mexico.

In her best and most heartfelt book yet, Griest documents both her amazing process of embracing the wild, dangerous, loving, and enthralling calliope that is Mexico and its volatile political and social atmosphere. Along her way, Griest meets farmers and activists, gay men and macho wrestlers, revolutionaries and victims of violence. Each encounter changes both writer and reader.

All the while the main question is hovers in the sky: What does it mean to be Mexican? Can a woman from Texas with roots in rural Mexico and the Kansas prairie find her reflection in brown eyes or blue eyes?

Read the book. Griest's journey resonates with all of us who struggle to define ourselves in a complicated world.

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Current Location: Catskil Mountains
Current Mood: cold
Current Music: silence

Wouldn't you like to know the outcome of your actions before you decide what to do? Looking into the future, you could see if biting that apple was a good idea or something completely different and unexpected.

However, there's no way through it but to do it.

Well mathematicians and computer programmers have the same problem. British mathematician, Alan Turing, proved that there is no way a computer can be designed with the correct set of instructions (program) so as to be able to determine if any other program will work properly. The program in question must be run -- come what may.

By proving that to be true, he also proved that there was no set of instructions or number of actions that could analyze a mathematical formula and see if it's going to work (or be decidable) except doing the math.

It sounds simple, and my husband Charles Petzold almost makes it seem simple in his new book The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper of Computability and the Turing Machine.

You like that sly disclosure? Here is another one. I haven't ever read a mathematical paper. I haven't thought much about math since I took my last class in it in 1977. Although I did receive a Math/Science Regent's Diploma from Clinton Central School in 1978, I did so without taking either subject my senior year.

Did I understand Charles' book? Yes. I read it carefully and I think I got the first eleven chapters. Please don't quiz me, but I seemed to follow the basic idea. I tried to ask him few questions as I read. I will admit that I've been listening to him talk about the book for the last nine years though. I will admit to being overwhelmed in the chapters on mathematical logic. They were words and numbers on a page.

However, if anyone out there is a computer programmer or a math whiz, take a look at the book. Alan Turing's paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," was historic for many reasons. He solved one of Hilbert's famous problems. He imagined a machine that could do what all computers do these days. And he showed the limitations of computers and software before they existed.

Charles is a great guide in this endeavor. Impress your professors, read it this summer and dazzle them this fall.

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Current Location: Catskills
Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: silence

In an era where every new television drama is overflowing with cops and doctors or worse, contestants exploiting one another to get rich or get famous, Fountain of Marvelous is an oasis.

Fausone is just like us, another working-class person coping with all of the insanity that comes her way. Trust me, there is plenty of insanity to go around. Be it the Oscar Mayer Wiener-mobile (who wouldn't want a chance to drive that thing) or how to prepare yourself for having a dog (pre-trash your living space so the dog won't have to) or having to deal with (ugh) germs at the local Target, Fausone has an opinion about everything.

The every-day is something best dealt with by a sardonic wit and a big feces detector, two things very much in evidence in this humorous tome.

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Current Location: Catskills
Current Mood: silly
Current Music: silence