[from the stabenow.com vaults, 3/29/2010]
I went to Philadelphia a few years ago and saw Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and City Tavern where Paul Revere came galloping up with news of the British blockade of Boston. When I got home again, the first book I reached for was James Thomas Flexner’s Washington: The Indispensable Man.
Any good biography is not only a portrait of the subject, it is a doorway that opens into a place and a time, and Flexner’s book is rich with this kind of detail.
“The “Wild West” was then on the Atlantic seacoast,” he writes of Virginia in 1675, the year the first Washington came to America.
There, that gives you a little perspective on the time.How about this: “In 1768, Washington went to church on fifteen days, mostly when away from home, and hunted foxes on forty-nine…He attended three balls, two plays, and one horse race…He visited a lioness and a tiger, and gave nine shillings to a showman who brought up an elk up the long driveway to Mount Vernon.” I feel like I know the father of our country a little better now, don’t you?
Flexner has an able pen, and at times an enjoyably acid one, too, as in this portrait of General Charles Lee: “He was tall and emaciated, dirty of clothes and body, voluble, foulmouthed, seemingly brilliant, best characterized by his Indian name, “Boiling Water.” He felt that he was making perhaps too great a sacrifice in agreeing to be commanded by the amateur Washington.”
“As always,” Flexner writes, after Yorktown, “when the British were in trouble, patriots came flocking [to Washington’s army]…”
Of French Minister Edmond Charles Genet, he writes “Jefferson now tried to tone the Frenchman down, but it was like arguing with a tornado.”
Jefferson, Munro, Adams, Franklin, all the usual suspects are of course present in this narrative. But it is Flexner’s contention that only Washington could have led the Continental Army to victory, and only Washington who could have led the nation during those first shaky years of the first government ever of laws and not of men. He’ll make a believer out of you.
# Permanent link to “Jefferson now tried to tone the Frenchman down, but it was like arguing with a tornado.”
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 7/12/10, and in honor of the publication of the last Sookie Stackhouse novel tomorrow, Dead Ever After.]
An awful lot of books with vampires in them out there nowadays, I agree, but before you roll your eyes and groan let me steer you to some really good ones.
Sookie Stackhouse's clairvoyance made her an outcast long before she started dating Bill the vampire. Sookie tends bar in present-day Bon Temps, Louisiana, where due to the invention of synthetic blood by the Japanese the vampires have decided to come out of their underworld closet, and that's just the beginning. Over so far ten books in the series, Sookie is introduced to vampires, werewolves, werepanthers, weretigers, witches, fairies, maenads, and she takes them all in her stride. Beautiful, spunky, brave, Sookie is the calm eye of the supernatural hurricane swirling around her, and standing at her shoulder as she leans into this paranormal wind makes this world seem all the more real. Yes, this is the series that HBO's True Blood is based on, but read Charlaine Harris's books, too, because they're a lot of fun.
Harry Dresden is a wizard living in present-day Chicago, where he advertises his services under "W" in the Yellow Pages. He's got a good heart, a smart mouth, and a skull for a sidekick, and he goes up against some of the Biggest Bads ever to scare the socks off you. Among these are the vampires, organized into the Black Court, the White Court and the Red Court. The twelfth book in Jim Butcher's series, Changes, features a finale smackdown with the Red Court that will have you on the edge of your seat, and the best hook I've seen set in the denouement of a work of popular fiction in a long, long time.
A new entry into the vampire oeuvre is Blood Oath, the first book in a planned series by Christopher Farnsworth about a 163-year old vampire who under a voluntary voodoo spell (work with me here) has been working as a secret agent for the presidents of the United States since Andrew Johnson, and who sublimates his lust for blood by going to AA meetings, whenever he can fit one in between fouling dastardly assassination plots by zombie Frankenstein soldiers. His sidekick and our way into this world is the ambitious and cynical Zach Burrows, a young White House staffer caught in flagrante delicto with the president's daughter, which explains his current assignment. A promising start for a buddy series.
# Permanent link to Sookie is the calm eye of this supernatural hurricane.
And let's not forget the book that started it all, Bram Stoker's Dracula. I read it a long time ago but I remember wondering even then how Stoker in 1897 got away with all that unspoken but nevertheless smoldering sexuality that underlays every line of the text. And Renfield still gives me the creeps.
The Reversal by Michael Connelly
It usually was the best moment of a case. The drive downtown with a suspect handcuffed in the backseat. There was nothing better. Sure there was the eventual payoff of a conviction down the line. Being in the courtroom when the verdict is read--watching the reality shock and then deaden the eyes of the convicted. But the drive in was always better, more immediate and personal. It was always the moment Bosch savored. The chase was over and the case was about to morph from the relentless momentum of the investigation to the measured pace of the prosecution.
This is why we read Connelly, this kind of observation that gives us the sense that we're a part of the murder investigation Harry Bosch is currently on. Of course, you'll notice the word "usually" in the first sentence, which all by itself tells us that all the rules are about to be broken.
Twenty-four years before, Jason Jessup was convicted of kidnapping and murdering a little girl. New DNA techniques have caused the courts to throw that conviction out and to bring him to trial again. Because of suspicions of conflict of interest in the Los Angeles DA's office, the DA names defense attorney Mickey Haller as special prosecutor. Mickey picks his ex-wife Maggie McPherson (aka Maggie McFierce, love that nickname) as his co-chair and his half-brother Harry Bosche as lead investigator. The fact that the three of them share two daughters adds a serious degree of personal urgency to the investigation and make it a seriously family affair.
Good plotting, good characters, a villain who should never be taken at face value, and courtroom scenes like this one
"I want jury selection completed by the end of the day Friday. If you slow me down, then I will slow you down. I will hold the panel and every lawyer in here until Friday night if I have to. I want opening statements first thing Monday. Any objection to that?"
Both sides seemed properly cowed by the judge.
make The Reversal a fun read.
# Permanent link to “Both sides seemed properly cowed by the judge.”
Third in the saga of teleport David, his wife Milly, and now their daughter Cent. Steven Gould is the direct descendant of Robert A. Heinlein and Joe Haldeman--he writes so sensibly and practically of impossible things that he makes you believe, well, the impossible. He's really given serious, extended thought in these novels (Jumper, Reflex) to just what it would be like to be able to teleport, and to just how attractive that would make you to the powers that be. If you live in daily fear of being kidnapped by forces determined to exploit your ability, what do you do with your life? How do you stay out of their reach? Do you decide to try to do good in the world anyway, at the risk of losing your freedom and self-determination? How do you raise a child in this world to be aware and responsible? (FYI, Milly and David do a pretty good job.)
I read Impulse in one sitting. Watching Cent, a very atypical rebellious teenager, learning to cope with her world's privileges and its dangers and even to extend its boundaries is riveting stuff. Cent is a marvelous addition to this world and is now my favorite character in it. I hope we get to go there again.
# Permanent link to What would life be like if you could teleport?
Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch -- Over 120 Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods by Jennifer Reese
A few caveats before we get started, Reese writes in the introduction. First, although, like most people, I think about money, I've always been able to clothe my children and pay the mortgage and if I couldn't whether I bought or made creme fraiche--or bread, to use a less absurd example--would make no difference. It is frivolous and deluded to think it would. I just wanted to address and answer some middle-class home economics questions that nagged my Michael Pollan-reading, price-checking, overthinking self. This is not a book about how to scrape by on a budget and it is not a book about how to go off the grid.
Well, thank god for that. I, too, read The Omnivore's Dilemma and when I finished it I said out loud, "Well, what the hell can I eat then?"
Here instead is an examination of the art of the possible in the kitchen, with recipes graded by three scales: Make it or buy it?, Hassle, and Cost comparison. She starts with peanut butter (Make it or buy it?: Make it.) and goes on to truffles (Hassle: Actucally, yes. These are a hassle.) to mozzarella (Cost comparison: If you have a good source for the proper milk (like a couple of goats) this is a bargain...).
Smart and funny, and worth reading for the chapter on raising chickens alone. I'm going to try her bread recipe.
# Permanent link to The Art of the Possible in the Kitchen
For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund
Part dystopian future, part teenage love story, part philosophical debate on whether a man's reach should or should not exceed his grasp and what either might mean to the larger community of mankind (but don't let that scare you), told through a clever replotting of Jane Austen's Persuasion.
Well into a post-apocalyptic future Earth history, Luddite Elliot refuses to run away with Post Kai, choosing to sacrifice her own happiness to ensure the survival of the Reduced workers on her family estate. Four years later Kai returns triumphant, rich and successful beyond their wildest youthful dreams. Elliot still loves him, he appears to hate her, and his intelligent, able Post companions only emphasize the differences between his life and hers, spent everlastingly cleaning up after her spoiled sister, her cruel father and her wicked cousin.
Horror and Jane don't pass the smell test for me, but science fiction and Jane sure did. I especially enjoyed that Anne -- sorry, Elliot -- got to have a job and to do it well.
Note: My book club is going to be reading and discussing this book together with Austen's Persuasion later this year.
# Permanent link to Part dystopian future, part teenage love story, all Jane Austen
...that any book you truly love is in need of a properly annotated edition.
# Permanent link to It is a truth universally acknowledged…
Go here to read the full story.
# Permanent link to Pack Horse Librarians
Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
Reading a book like this makes you ashamed of every time you ever whined about anything.
Fifteen-year old Lina, her mother, and her little brother Jonas, along with hundreds of thousands of other Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians and Finns, are yanked out of their homes in Lithuania by Stalin's NKVD in 1941. They are thrown on trains that take them out of Europe and into Asia, where they are forced to work as slave labor, first in a Siberian beet field and then in a Siberian fishing village on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. After the few things they managed to take with them are sold they steal beets from the fields and eat scraps out of the guards' garbage. When they are moved to Trofimovsk under the even more sadistic Captain Ivanov, even those options are gone.
Stalin was engaged in ethnic cleansing of the most sweeping kind. Hitler wasn't the only monster loose in Europe during World War II.
Lina says
I hated them, the NKVD and the Soviets. I planted a seed of hatred in my heart. I swore it would grow to be a massive tree whose roots would strangle them all.
In the afterword, Sepetys writes
...most Baltic people harbor no grudge, resentment or ill will. They are grateful to the Soviets who showed compassion.
Yeah, big whoop for Dr. Samodurov, and guard Nikolai Kretzsky, who was in fact half Finnish himself, two kind men out of all the NKVD brute bastards who abused and beat and starved and murdered them long past the ending of the war.
Some wars are about bombing, Sepetys writes. For the people of the Baltics, this war was about believing. In 1991, after fifty years of brutal occupation, the three Baltic Countries regained their independence, peacefully and with dignity. They chose hope over hate and showed the world that even through the darkest night, there is light...These three tiny nations have taught us that love is the most powerful army. Whether love of friend, love of country, love of God, or even love of enemy--love reveals to us the truly miraculous nature of the human spirit."
Pretty to think so, and there is, amazingly, laughter and love herein, but the only thing that really kept Lina (and me) going was the aforementioned tree of hatred.
This isn't an easy read but I tore through it in an evening anyway. It's a chapter of human history I knew very little of, and it reminded me yet again that fiction is a marginally easier way into stories like these, whose virtue is to bear witness, lest we forget. But when I do read these books, like The Poisonwood Bible (the Congo) and Birds Without Wings (Turkey), I wonder just how far The Hunger Games is from us all.
Click here to read all my Goodreads reviews.
# Permanent link to To bear witness, lest we forget.
My Life in France by Julia Child
I spent the summer of 1987 in Paris, studying beginning French at the Sorbonne and staying at the Cité Universitaire, in a program geared toward older students. Some of them wanted to take a cooking class, and the Sorbonne organized it for them. They needed one more student to make it go, and I was browbeaten into filling the empty space.
Understand, I was raised on the five Alaskan staples of Spam, Bisquik, Velveeta, pilot bread and Carnation Instant Milk. If we didn't get our moose that year we didn't eat meat, except on my birthday, when I got pork chops no matter what. We got all the salmon and king crab we could eat for free. The salmon was mostly fried. The crab was mostly boiled. The first fresh milk I ever drank was in college. The first real cheese, same. Remember those Kraft Cracker Barrel packages of four logs of four different kinds? Until then I thought I hated cheese.
So at the time I went to this cooking school, my most complicated prepared meal was a hamburger. Claudine, our chef, went around the class, asking where we were from, and when I said Alaska her eyes lit up. "Alaska," she said, "sauvage..." and made up a roux for wild game on the spot just for me.
I've been playing catchup in the kitchen ever since. I can't believe it's taken me this long to discover Julia Child.
This book is the story of her life in France, from the first oyster in Rouen to the last pot roast at La Pitchoune in Provence. It's a love story, of her marriage with Paul Child, who is about the most intelligent, charming man I've ever met between the covers of a book. It's a voyage of discovery into French cuisine, into the science of cooking, into collaborating on and writing a cookbook, or any book for that matter. And it's a mesmerizing walk through Paris looking over Julia's shoulder. The first year she says
By now I knew that French food was it for me. I couldn't get over how absolutely delicious it was. Yet my friends, both French and American, considered me some kind of a nut: cooking was far from being a middle-class hobby, and they did not understand how I could possibly enjoy doing all the shopping and cooking and serving by myself. Well, I did! And Paul encouraged me to ignore them and pursue my passion.
(You'll remember what I said about Paul being intelligent and charming.)
The how-to portion of this book is fascinating. French ingredients are different from American ingredients and the French learn cooking by watching, not reading recipes, so Julia would take the recipes of her French collaborators and translate them and the ingredients and the measurements of the ingredients into something an American cook could, first, buy the ingredients for in America, and second, understand and recreate. And then she'd test them and test them and test them and test them again, and she and Paul would eat them and eat them and eat them and eat them again until it was foolproof enough to unleash upon American cooks. "No one is born a great cook," she says, "one learns by doing."
In between they'd drive around France and eat in great restaurants. In a more perfect world I would have been their child.
She concludes with a remembrance of that first, marvelous meal in Rouen
...the sole meuniere I ate at La Couronne on my first day in France, in November 1948. It was an epiphany.
In all the years since that succulent meal, I have yet to lose the feelings of wonder and excitement that it inspired in me. I can still almost taste it. And thinking back on it now reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite -- toujours bon appetit!"
I gotta say, I got a little teary at the end of this book. And I just ordered my first ever copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Both volumes.
Click here to read all my Goodreads reviews.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80ZrUI7RNfI?list=PL26EE48981A093CA0&hl=en_US&w=640&h=360]
# Permanent link to Bon appetit!