→ September 23, 2013
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Hanns and Rudolf.

I only became aware of Thomas Harding’s new book, Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz, because of Harding’s recent piece in the Washington Post about the Kommandant’s daughter, Brigitte, who still lives in northern Virginia. The book’s publisher reached out to me after I tweeted the link to the article and sent me a review copy, which I tore through this weekend because I couldn’t bear to put the book down.

The subtitle is a little misleading, as this book isn’t so much the story of a chase as it is a pair of contemporary portraits of two German men whose lives headed in opposite directions with the rise of the Third Reich, setting them on courses that end in one hunting down and capturing the other after the war’s conclusion. The chase itself isn’t long, so most of the book is spent getting us up to that point. Harding’s achievement here is making both biographies interesting enough that the reader is compelled to keep turning the pages – and in presenting Rudolf in a neutral fashion even though he’s one of the worst monsters in our species’ history.

That Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the man who oversaw the construction of the concentration camp at Auschwitz and devised the scheme where the pesticide Zyklon-B was used to exterminate Jews and other prisoners in huge numbers, with well over a million killed at the camp. Höss’ eventual devolution into a calm, apathetic architect of history’s most efficient mass producer of death starts from early childhood – including a fanatical father who died young and a lack of any close ties to family members – but also reveals a tremendous amount about the “just following orders” mentality of so many members of the SS, the Nazi Party, and of the German population as a whole. While running Auschwitz, Höss would return home each night to his villa just beyond the camp’s walls, where he lived with his wife and five children in a luxurious house staffed with slaves drawn from the prison.

Hanns, the hero of the story and the author’s great-uncle, is Hanns Alexander, a German Jew born into fortunate circumstances that would largely disappear before he fled to the UK with his family in 1936. Left without a state after the Nazi regime revoked their citizenship, Hanns chose to join the British army, which set up a separate unit for refugees seeking to fight their former countries that allowed them to serve in non-combat roles (because, you know, can’t trust ’em). After the war ended, Hanns became a private hunter of war criminals in his spare time, eventually parlaying that into a formal role that led him to recapture the puppet ruler of Luxembourg, Gustav Simon, and to earn a command to track down Höss himself. Hanns’ own drive to fight against Germany – more than fighting for Britain or the allies – derived from the personal injustice that he underwent when he and his family had to flee from the Nazis, as well as the more general sense of outrage from the massive crimes the German state and its people had committed against the Jews and other so-called enemies of the state.

Höss’ testimony played a pivotal role in the Nuremberg trials because of his willingness to admit his own role in the Holocaust and in the chain of command that made the mass murders possible, which means Hanns himself contributed to the convictions and executions of many of the surviving leaders of the Third Reich. Höss comes across as a weirdly complex character, a loving father and family man who beat down his rare compunctions over gassing hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children because he refused to show weakness to his superiors or to those under his command. Did he do this for fear for his own safety in a regime where guards who showed mercy to prisoners would be beaten or killed? Or was he simply nursing his own desire for success and praise by trying to set an example of fanaticism that others would revere?

The conflict between Höss’ work and family selves, his apparent apathy toward his victims, and his unclear motivation for his actions at Auschwitz make him the far more compelling character than Alexander, whose life is much easier to understand. Hanns watched fellow Germans pull the rug out from under his comfortable life, and his personal fury combined with that from his moral compass to turn him into a rabid Nazi hunter, yet one who declined to discuss his role in capturing these criminals for most of the rest of his life. It’s a simple narrative for a man’s life, one that’s easy to fathom. Turning into a cockroach the way Höss did is a lot harder to understand, and it’s part of why I couldn’t avert my eyes from Hanns and Rudolf until he’d been hanged.

–

I’ve been busy plowing through more titles from the Bloomsbury 100 as well, but nothing that merited a long post here. Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, which draws parallels between the swift decline of a noble Austrian family and that of the Hapsburgs’ reign, heading into the disaster of World War I that led to the breakup of their sprawling, unwieldy empire. It dragged horribly, however, with Dickensian descriptions and an absurd amount of moralizing over peccadilloes that barely merit mention today.

Theodor Fontaine’s Effi Briest, named by Thomas Mann as one of the six most essential novels ever written, was a stronger read, even though the morality play also fails to resonate today. Based on a true story from the late 1800s, Effi Briest tells the title character’s tragic history from her arranged marriage to a man much her senior through her extramarital affair with the lothario Crampas to her divorce and fall from grace. It’s far more believable than the similar Madame Bovary and less prolix than Anna Karenina, two similarly-themed novels, working more along the lines of The Awakening, another novel of adultery where the plight of the woman in a male-dominated, moralistic society takes center stage.

Eugenie Grandet is the second Balzac novel I’ve read, along with Old Goriot, both part of his Human Comedy novel sequence. It’s another tragedy, this one the story of Eugenie’s miserly father and how his parsimony destroys his wife, himself, and, even after his death, his daughter, when even a small count of generosity would have saved them all. I’ve found Balzac’s prose to be his great strength – I enjoy his phrasing and descriptions yet never find them slow or monotonous – but the story in Eugenie Grandet had less of the dark comedy that made Old Goriot a better read.

Next up: Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native.

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→ May 17, 2013
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Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

I’ve got my first projection of the first round of this year’s MLB Rule 4 draft up, and chatted on Thursday.

The banana on your table or in your bag right now is a specific variety called the Cavendish, and is genetically identical to every other Cavendish banana in the world, a peculiar trait among comestibles that means that one of our most essential foodstuffs is at risk of being wiped off the commercial market by a fungal disease it can’t fight. Because most banana plants are parthenocarpic (in lay terms, sterile), producing no seeds, humans cultivate bananas by transplanting part of the plant’s underground stem, known as the corm, which means each new plant is a carbon copy of the last one – and therefore the plants have never developed immunity to common fungal diseases that ravage entire plantations. With no help from evolution, the first widely commercialized banana, the Gros Michel, became nonviable as a cash crop, and the same disease is now threatening Cavendish plantations as well.

Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World discusses how we reached this point, going back through the history of the fruit and discussing its importance to subsistence farmers in Africa as well as its economic importance in Asia and Latin America. Now, with Panama disease, a fungal disease that is resistant to fungicide and causes banana plants to wilt by attacking their roots, marching across the globe, there’s a race on to try to genetically engineer a replacement for the Cavendish, one that suits the market’s demands for a portable, sweet fruit that is also resistant to Panama disease, black Sigatoka, and other fungal maladies that can devastate a plantation.

The rise of the banana as a trade good to become the West’s favorite fruit (mangoes are more popular in the rest of the world) has had tragic consequences, from which Koeppel doesn’t shy. The company you know know as Chiquita has a lengthy history of labor abuses in Latin America, including exposing plantation workers to highly toxic pesticides and fungicides; corrupt land deals with autocratic governments that were often put in place by the United States in part to aid Chiquita; and circumventing land-ownership restrictions in former “banana republics” (not just a clothing store!) to maintain strict cartel-like control over the banana trade. The autocratic governments were responsible for oppression, torture, and even genocide of native populations, often while the U.S. stood idly by, content that our economic interests were protected. Chiquita’s sins, and those of its billionaire owner Carl Lindner – also part-owner of the Reds at the time – were documented in a massive expose’ in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1998, only to have the paper issue an apology and pay the company $10 million for illegally obtaining voice mails. Chiquita never disproved any of the paper’s claims, and only had to threaten a lawsuit for theft and invasion of privacy before the publisher folded his tent.

Banana farming in other parts of the world, such as Malaysia and Brazil, “only” led to substantial deforestation, while the blight now affecting the Cavendish and that nearly drove its predecessor, the Gros Michel, into extinction is threatening subsistence farmers in developing countries who depend on banana plants as a food source. Koeppel uses that latter point to launch into descriptions of those genetic engineering efforts, with brief thoughts on the anti-GM movement and the rather clear conundrum that our choice is to accept GM bananas or likely live with no bananas at all unless they grow in your backyard.

Koeppel does well to largely keep himself out of the narrative, only appearing to introduce certain characters or to describe his experiences tasting other varieties of bananas, most of which aren’t cultivated for export. (He has special praise for the Lacatan banana, found in the Philippines.) It’s compelling on several levels – as a chronicle of corporate greed and corruption, as the story of how a largely tropical fruit became a global commodity, and of course in the unfinished story of whether scientists can use traditional and modern methods together to craft a disease-resistant replacement for the Cavendish. I loved it because I love popular science books and also love to cook, but this book should be required reading for anyone who likes to eat.

Next up: Alessandro Piperno’s second novel, Persecution.

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→ April 23, 2013
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52 Loaves.

I’ve got a new Insider column up on possible demotions/promotions, looking at whether there’s any sense in those moves. I also recorded an extremely fun episode of Behind the Dish today, featuring Michael Schur of Parks & Recreation and FJM fame.

William Alexander’s 52 Loaves: One Man’s Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust is a peculiar mix of memoir, baking how-to, and experiential non-fiction (“I did this weird/crazy thing so I could write a book about it”) that never quite hits on any of those areas until its final passage, where Alexander’s quixotic efforts to bake the perfect loaf of French country bread lands him in the disused bakery at a French monastery, teaching one of the brothers how to bake bread. It’s poorly written and just as poorly organized, yet when Alexander finally steps back and lets an actual story unfold, it makes the aggravation of the first 200-odd pages worthwhile.

Alexander’s quest to replicate a bread he’d tasted some years earlier leads to a resolution to bake a loaf of this style of bread, known as pain de campagne, every weekend for a full year (hence the title). This bread has a few key characteristics – a hard, crispy crust that shatters (in a good way) when you bite into it, and a moist crumb with plenty of air holes, sometimes a little large and irregularly shaped. It’s normally made with a levain, a wild yeast starter that can be years or decades old, and includes a blend of white and whole wheat flours. Alexander starts out from a recipe, struggles with it, and then goes out in search of expert opinions and better tools, even growing his own wheat and attempting to build an earthen oven in his backyard, while consulting people like the esteemed Peter Reinhart, whose books I regularly extol on this blog.

Alexander is fine when he’s describing these educational endeavors, from trips to grain mills and bakeries to phone and email conversations with bakers, but he’s in the book himself far too much, unfortunate as he’s not an interesting character and shares way, way too much information (especially about his sex life with his wife, who I assume has since castrated him for doing so). He’s also just not a good writer at all, verbose when he needs to be terse, and desperately unfunny, as in this description of a brief conversation with his wife:

“It was Julia’s idea,” I said clumsily.
“Julia?”
As Ricky Ricardo used to say, “Lu-ceee, you got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.”
Let’s start with Julia.
I’m referring of course, to the late Julia Child.

That’s about as hackneyed a phrase as you’ll find, followed by three mentions of “Julia” before he tells us which Julia … except that in a book about food, there’s only one Julia anyway, so why play coy?

Eventually, his bread-baking improves to the point where he’s at least churning out solid loaves, albeit not exactly up to his own high standards, so Alexander starts reaching out to monasteries in Europe in search of one that still bakes its own breads in-house. That search leads him to one that has a bakery, including a wood-fired oven, but hasn’t used it in some time; that monastery agrees to let Alexander, an agnostic, come bake in their ovens for a week or so if he agrees to teach one of the brothers how to do it so they can restart the tradition after he leaves. Alexander’s experiences there, building unexpected bonds with his protege and others in the monastery, while himself pondering some big questions (without coming to any real conclusions or experiencing a conversion), is so compelling and so well-written that it felt like it came from the pen of a different writer. The forced jocularity of the first three-fourths of the book disappears when there’s something significant at stake – he has to teach this novice how to bake this one kind of bread in a matter of a few days, using unfamiliar equipment while conforming to the monastery’s rigid schedule of prayer and services. And Alexander’s own reaction to that schedule, even attending some of the services himself and sharing meals with the brothers, gives us a much more mature picture of the man than his puerile jokes about rebuffing his wife’s advances because he needs to feed the starter do.

52 Loaves includes recipes at the end, including his method of developing and growing a levain (starter) as well as the unique recipe he developed for the monastery, adapting to the ingredients available there. (There are some differences between our flours and those you can buy in Europe, another informative section that showed Alexander can educate his readers when he wants to do so.) I have used a starter, and kept one going for about two years in Boston, but don’t bake enough bread to justify the work involved in keeping one, since the Arizona summers are so hot that we don’t want to run the oven at those temperatures for long periods of time. When the urge to bake bread strikes, I use a biga, a sort of overnight starter that begins with ¼ tsp of commercial, active yeast, allowing it to develop overnight in the fridge to get some of the flavor you’d get with a wild yeast starter – an inferior substitute, but not one most people (myself included) are that likely to notice.

Next up: In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart, presumably not the third baseman.

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→ March 22, 2013
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

I’ve got a fantasy-themed post up today, answering questions from ESPN.com’s fantasy editors about divisive players for fantasy owners in 2013.

I hadn’t heard of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down until I encountered a reference to it in Alison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, in which she mentions it as one of her four favorite narrative non-fiction titles. I wasn’t sure how compelling the story of a Hmong girl with severe epilepsy who got caught in the cultural divide between her family and the American doctors who treated her would be as a 300-page novel, but Spirit is so thoroughly researched and so perfectly balanced that it turned out to be as engrossing as any non-fiction book I have ever read.

Lia Lee is the Hmong girl at the center of the book, born with a terrible case of epilepsy that caused massive grand mal seizures, one of which led to irreversible brain damage when she was four that left her in a vegetative state for the remainder of her life. (She died in September of 2012, shortly after the book was reissued for its 15th anniversary.) The conflict at the heart of the book swirls around Lia in the time between her birth and that neurological catastrophe; in those four-odd years, the doctors tried an increasingly aggressive course of treatment that Lia’s parents didn’t fully understand and with which they didn’t entirely comply, while also pursuing traditional Hmong treatments (what many of us would consider “woo”) along with or sometimes in place of what the doctors prescribed. This clash of cultures, exacerbated by a then-unbridgeable language gap and socioeconomic factors, led one doctor to accuse Lia’s parents of child abuse for their passive refusal to administer the prescribed medications, after which she was taken from them and placed in foster care for about a year. Not long after she was returned to the custody of her parents – with full support from the foster family that took her in – she suffered the massive seizure that effectively ended her life, although she remained in that vegetative state for fifteen years beyond it.

The phrase in the book’s title is the translation of the three-word Hmong phrase that refers to the disease we know as epilepsy, as the Hmong don’t have an exact word for it. In Hmong culture, many diseases and disorders we know to have clear physical causes are treated as ailments of the soul; Lia’s parents believed that the seizures were the result of one of her sisters slamming a door, which scared Lia’s soul out of her body, after which they had to try to coax it back in using methods like animal sacrifice. Fadiman’s greatest trick in this book is providing total balance between the two sides of the debate – it would be far too easy to paint the Lees, and the Hmong in general, as animist twits believing in superstitious nonsense that modern science should have killed off a few centuries ago. Fadiman never questions the scientific reality of epilepsy, but gives credence to the Lees’ beliefs as they affected their own perspective on Lia’s illness, treatment, and the final catastrophe, while also extrapolating from that to discuss the Hmong experience with the United States in general, from their time in the CIA’s secret army in Laos to their resettlement here starting in the late 1970s. The only real villain here is our government, which was happy to sacrifice thousands of Hmong men but did little to take care of this oppressed minority after the communist Pathet Lao overthrow the country’s monarchy and began a genocidal campaign that wiped out up to a quarter of the country’s Hmong population. (Laos remains one of the world’s only communist states, and, not coincidentally, is also extremely poor.) These detours into the history of the Hmong and their experience as immigrants to the U.S. add some needed context to the story; the Hmong left behind not just their homeland but their entire way of life, which revolved around self-sufficience through agriculture and the broad support networks of extended families (called “clans”), and then were resettled into unfriendly environments ranging from Minneapolis to Merced, California, where Lia’s parents lived. Fadiman touches briefly on a deep sense of betrayal among the older generation of Hmong, who felt that they were promised things by the U.S. for their aid during the war(s) against the communists and received very little of what was pledged.

Fadiman began writing the book as a magazine article that was never published, starting her research in the late 1980s almost a decade before the book’s initial release in 1997. In addition to reviewing 400,000 pages of medical records, she went back and spoke to as many of the principals involved in Lia’s care as she could, including the main doctors who treated her, the social worker who was most heavily involved with the Lees, and the Lees themselves, becoming so involved that Lia’s mother, Foua, began to refer to Fadiman as one of her “daughters.” (Including Lia, Foua had nine surviving biological children, most of whom went on to attend college in the United States and to find jobs and incomes that evaded their parents’ generation after the migration.) The book came out at a time when the idea of holistic medicine was still viewed as a concept from the fringes, never taught in schools and barely practiced in hospitals (according to Fadiman’s accounts). Since then, it has become more popular in academia and in practice, with The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down a part of the process of teaching doctors to view the patient as a whole rather than strictly the disease or disorder. Yet I think the book’s core lesson goes beyond medicine; while many of you will read the book as I did, with an inherent bias towards the doctors who employed sound science while banging their heads against the wall of parents who refused to follow the regiment of pills that might have saved their daughter’s brain, Fadiman does a tremendous job of showing us how and why the Lees distrusted and feared American doctors and Western medicine, a gap that the doctors should, in hindsight, have worked harder to close.

Fadiman writes at an extremely high level, never talking down to the reader and avoiding inserting herself too much into the story. I did notice a few odd word choices – referring to one person as having an “exiguous crewcut,” or the frequent use of “hegira” to describe the Hmong’s exodus from Laos, an accurate word that I’d never seen before – but otherwise the book was extremely readable and moved as quickly as any novel, especially in the intense, often heartbreaking depictions of Lia’s neurological crises. Even when you know the eventual outcome is tragic, Fadiman manages to infuse the situations with tension through precision, painful passages of details that put me in the room with Lia, her doctors, and her bewildered parents. In some ways, it’s a terrible story, but one that needed a wide telling like this to help us all expand our cross-cultural understanding.

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→ March 7, 2013
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The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry.

I have a new post up on Ryu Hyun-Jin and Yasiel Puig and did a Klawchat as well.

One more negative book review before I move on to one I’m really enjoying, this time on Kathleen Flinn’s flimsy cooking-school memoir The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School, in which the author tells the story of her time at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, which coincided with her engagement and marriage to the love of her life. Unfortunately, the book just isn’t very well written (in terms of prose) and the telling is so superficial that we’re not getting enough of the food nor are we getting enough of the personal anecdotes that could make a book like this a fun read even if it’s light on the cooking.

Flinn’s reason for going to cooking school is easily the best aspect of the book: Laid off from a dot-com job with Microsoft’s sidewalk.com unit (it’s never named, but if you’re familiar with the industry it’s obvious who she worked for), Flinn decided to chase a long-denied dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious culinary arts programs, one she was encouraged to pursue years earlier by none other than Julia Child. Flinn’s then-boyfriend Mike encourages her to do it, even leaving his own career on hold for a year-plus to move to Paris with her and have what I imagine was the adventure of a lifetime.

However, that sense of adventure just never comes through on Sharper‘s pages. There’s a rote sense to Flinn’s days in school – go in, cook, screw some stuff up, take the food home – that we don’t get any of the color of the school itself as we did in Michael Ruhlman’s seminal The Making of a Chef, yet we also get only the slightest feel of life as an expat in Paris, or of the terrific romance between Kathleen and Mike. Side characters are painted in two dimensions, and sometimes one, like their overbearing, freeloading houseguests from Seattle, a lesbian couple who seem to be on the verge of a breakup with every interaction. I closed the book with no clear picture of who anyone was except for Kathleen herself, and even she came through in a faded image, driven by hackneyed life advice more than an abiding passion for food. (I’m sure she has that passion, but it never comes through on the pages.) Flinn’s habit of ending sections and chapters with awful cliches – “Sometimes, the places life takes us can be so unexpected” or “I wonder if graduating higher in the class rankings is worth the price she may ultimately pay” – is grating and indicative of a broader writing style that reads like it was written by someone who hasn’t read enough great writers, who believes that this is how you craft a story.

If this subject interests you, I can’t recommend Ruhlman’s book highly enough, as it balances the food and the educational experience very well against the fascinating personalities with whom he went through the school. I just found Flinn’s book paled in comparison and was much harder to push through given the weakness of the prose.

Next up: I’m just 50 pages into Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter and it’s amazing, extremely well-written and, thus far, a compelling story.

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→ February 22, 2013
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How We Decide, Lady Almina, and Bitters.

Time to catch up on a few recent non-fiction reads…

* Jonah Lehrer ended up back in the news recently, again for the wrong reasons, this time because a journalism foundation paid him their standard $20,000 honorarium to come speak at their conference about how he went from one of the brightest stars in science writing to fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan (and, it turns out, in many of his articles forWired) for his third book, Imagine, which was a great read but has been removed from publication. (I don’t understand why it couldn’t be fact-checked more thoroughly, rewritten, and re-released.) I still like the guy’s writing even if I have to read his work with a more skeptical eye, and I think How We Decide, his second book, was an even more valuable read than Imagine for its insight into how the two sides of our brain, the rational and the emotional, interact in our internal decision-making processes.

Lehrer’s premise here is that recent advances in neurology and related fields have allowed us to better understand what goes on inside our brains when we are forced to make different kinds of decisions, and whether those processes are ideal or counterproductive. He cites numerous psychological studies and, as in Imagine, makes heavy use of the results of fMRI scans of the brains of people as they’re confronted with choices or decisions to see what parts of the brain are activated by which stimuli or questions. He gives shocking examples like the pilot who saved a plane from a terrible crash by making a fast yet totally rational decision to try something that had never been tried before by a pilot and wasn’t even taught in flight school, or like John Wayne Gacy and other psychopaths whose emotional response systems are broken, usually due to childhood abuse or neglect. (Lest you think Lehrer shows sympathy for the devil in that section, his descriptions of broken brains, thoughout the book, are quite dispassionate.) Lehrer’s conceit is that between looking at people who can only use one of those two decision-making processes and looking at what kinds of images, numbers, or thoughts light up certain parts of our brains, we can better understand how we make decisions and thus better understand how to improve that decision-making – such as when it’s good to let your rational brain take over and when it’s better to let your emotional side help simplify things for you. It is a real shame that Lehrer’s name is mud right now among much of his potential audience, because his main gift as a writer was in making complicated matters of science, especially neurology, available and accessible to the lay reader. His crimes were serious, but I’d rather see him writing under much stricter controls than he had before than to have him out of the game entirely.

* My wife bought me Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey because we’re both fans of the British soap opera (although I thought season 3 was a big letdown from a writing standpoint), and I was pleasantly surprised by how well-written the book was and how much real-life drama the family that held the house, called Highclere Castle, during the time period of the show actually underwent. Written by the current Countess of Carnarvon (that is, the wife of the current Earl of Highclere, three generations removed from the Earl of the time of the show), the book focuses on Lady Almina, the illegitimate daughter of Alfred Rothschild, who grew up privileged because of her parentage and managed to land the young heir to the earldom of Highclere, after which she put her energy, force of personality, and organizing skills to work in rebuilding the family’s status and the Castle itself, eventually shifting her attention to wounded soldiers when she volunteered to turn the estate into one of the most luxurious wartime hospitals for wounded British soldiers during the Great War.

Almina’s efforts at a time when women’s rights were pretty limited led to her overshadowing her husband in the book, and, one presumes, for most of their marriage, but that table turned in 1922 when the Egyptian explorer Howard Carter, whose expeditions had long been financed by the Earl, discovered the intact tomb of King Tut, making Carter and Lord Carnarvon instant celebrities, touching off a media storm just as the Egyptian public was becoming restive under unwelcome British colonial rule. (You can see the earliest seeds of today’s political strife in the Maghreb and Middle East in the Countess’ brief descriptions of Egyptian protests.) The Countess manages to make this seem like an almost inevitable climax or conclusion to the family’s efforts and struggles during the war, in which many of the household staff gave their lives while their son served but survived. The lead-up to the war, the Castle’s conversion into a hospital, and the episode in Egypt moved a little slowly, since we’re largely getting background material, some of it feeling like the intro to a Regency romance, but once Almina gets cracking, she’s a fun and interesting character to follow, buoyed by the Countess’ clear, evocative prose.

* Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All isn’t a book to read so much as a book to own, one to keep with the cookbooks or in the liquor cabinet rather than in your library. The book contains about fifty pages of text describing the history of bitters, its definitions and types (the book focuses on the highly concentrated flavoring bitters, not potable bitters or digestifs like Campari or Fernet Branca), listing the major artisan bitters makers, most of which have begun production in the last ten years, and explaining how to make your own bitters, with numerous recipes. The back of the book lists recipes for common and obscure drinks that rely on various flavors of bitters as well as some recipes for dishes that use bitters as an ingredient. I particularly enjoyed the two-page essay on the 2010 Angostura bitters shortage, with the explanation of how it began and ended, but not before much hoarding had taken place, especially by better bartenders in New York City.

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→ February 16, 2013
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The Machine.

I broke two of my reading guidelines when tackling Joe Posnanski’s The Machine, his 20010 book about the remarkable 1975 Cincinnati Reds, focusing on their larger-than-life personalities as much as he does on the way they steamrolled through the National League. The first rule is that I almost never read baseball books. Baseball is work; reading is pleasure. When work invades pleasure, it becomes work. So I keep them separate as much as possible. The second rule is that I try not to read books written by people I know, especially if I count them as friends (as I do Joe), because then if I don’t like the book, I am faced with the difficult task of keeping my mouth shut, which, as many of you surely realize, is not something at which I am particularly skilled.

The good news is that I liked The Machine quite a bit – not as much as I loved The Soul of Baseball, which isn’t really a baseball book anyway, just a book about some people who played the game, but that’s an absurdly high standard. I won’t pretend to give The Machine an objective review, so I’ll focus on why I would recommend it.

I turned two during the 1975 season and have no memories of the Big Red Machine other than my parents telling me about those teams (including their dismantling of the Yankees in the 1976 World Series) when I was first becoming a baseball fan about five or six years later. Posnanski does a good job of keeping readers in the flow of the season, which started slowly for the Reds but turned into a romp that didn’t end until they faced the Red Sox in October, while also weaving in short but telling anecdotes about the team’s central personalities – primarily Rose, Anderson, Morgan, and Bench, and if you need their first names, well, you’re probably not the target audience here anyway.

Posnanski does a good job of humanizing Rose and Morgan, both of whom needed it for obvious yet totally unrelated reasons, while somewhat demythologizing Johnny Bench, who was one of baseball’s last true Hollywood stars, although he’s now better remembered for Krylon commercials and his gigantic hands. (Truckasaurus.) Rose doesn’t come off as sympathetic, just as pathologically driven; you won’t forgive his transgressions, but you can at least somewhat understand how he reached that bottom. Morgan, meanwhile, comes off as the cerebral player we all thought he was, given his stat lines, but that he did his best as an announcer to convince us that he wasn’t. (Disclaimer: I’ve never met Joe Morgan, and have no idea what he’s like as a person or as a student of the game.) Anderson, Tony Perez, Davey Concepcion, and Ken Griffey (Sr.) don’t get quite the same treatment, although I found the quiet rage of Griffey, still evident in contemporary quotes within the book, more reminiscent of Barry Bonds than of Ken Griffey, Jr., who had more of a reputation in baseball circles as an idler and a bit of a diva.

The Machine kicks into high gear at the end of the book when the nobody-respects-us Red Sox reach the Series and finally give the Reds the test they didn’t have all season. Those games were dramatic and come off as such on the pages, especially the epic Game 6, which Posnanski evokes through quotes and stories, including Rose’s boundless enthusiasm for what he correctly identified at the time as one of the greatest games in baseball history.

Posnanski mentions the team’s ethnic makeup and players’ obliviousness to it a few times during the book, but I wonder if that was truly a coming of age for MLB players post-Civil Rights Movement or just a function of winning breeding good chemistry. Was it unusual at the time to have a lineup – and the book is mostly about the lineup – that was so racially balanced? Did contemporary news sources see it as a big deal? In 1960, it would have been, and in 1980 it would scarcely have been noticed. I don’t know where 1975 fell on that continuum.

Posnanski’s writing has always spoken to me and, as you’d expect, the book absolutely flies – I knocked it off on a weekend trip to LA earlier this month. The friend who gave me this as a gift made a damn good call.

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→ January 19, 2013
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King Leopold’s Ghost.

A quick baseball note: Earl Weaver passed away last night at the age of 82. Weaver hadn’t been active in the game in over two decades, but his work as the Orioles’ manager made him a legend not just for his colorful language but for his thinking about in-game strategy, which presaged a lot of what is now called “Moneyball” thinking in an era before computers, spreadsheets, and mothers’ basements. His book Weaver on Strategy is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to learn about a more rational approach to managing; the book discusses the use of statistics, the uselessness of the bunt, the benefits of platooning, and more such topics strictly through logical arguments rather than with heavy math.

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Adam Hochschild’s 1998 non-fiction work King Leopold’s Ghost tells the unsavory story of the rape of the Congo by the monarch of the book’s title, a megalomaniacal autocrat who manipulated and schemed his way into one-man rule of a giant and resource-rich plot of land in the heart of a continent he never visited. The book itself focuses on the time from Leopold’s first attempts to gain a colony for himself to the eventual handoff of the territory to the Belgian state, but the effects of his misrule and the marginally better rule of the Belgians continue to plague what is in effect a fake-country today.

Leopold was obsessed with finding a colony to rule, partly out of ego, partly out of fear that tiny Belgium would be left at an economic disadvantage (as their equally small neighbors the Netherlands established colonies across Asia), and partly out of greed. His impact on the land he ended up ruling was awful, but he was a master diplomat in his era, buying influence, wheedling concessions, and financing large expeditions, some led by Lord Stanley, up the Congo River to explore and claim territory for himself. That territory was first titled, Soviet-style, as “The Free State of Congo,” even though it was about as free as a man in concrete shoes, and later became the Belgian Congo and then Zaire, the title by which I’ll probably always think of it. (It was so easy to remember the geography of that part of Africa, as the world’s only three countries that start with Z were located there, adjacent north to south in alphabetical order: Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe.) Leopold established a brutal system of colonial rule that relied very heavy on forced labor – outright slavery as well as punitive labor systems that created virtual slavery through enormous production quotas, hostage-taking, and cutting off hands – and made the territory the world’s main producer of natural rubber at a time when demand for the resource was growing due to the invention of motor vehicles.

The extent of slavery and its inherent violence ended up a cause celebre around the world, even though similar systems existed on smaller scales in French and English territories in Africa, with the movement to end the oppression of the Congo’s native tribes led by an English journalist-activist named E.D. Morel and two black Americans who visited the Congo, the historian George Washington Williams and the preacher William Sheppard, and saw the the brutality up close. After setting the scene by detailing Leopold’s takeover of the Congo, Hochschild spends the heart of his book explaining the rise and modest successes of one of the world’s first truly international protest movements, aimed at embarrassing Leopold into instituting reforms. Leopold fought back, often playing quite dirty in the process, but did eventually sell the colony at an exorbitant cost to Belgium, which didn’t do a whole lot better as colonial rulers.

The biggest problem with the country known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, something Hochschild doesn’t spend enough time exploring, is that it remains a fabrication of the Belgian king who created it: The territories aren’t based on tribes, languages, or even historical entities, but on the treaties Leopold signed to craft his territory. Much as the Versailled-created nation of Yugoslavia (originally and comically known as “The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes,” as if they were all citrus fruits you could stash in the same crisper) collapsed once autocracy there failed, the DR Congo has been torn apart by civil wars, coups, famines, and genocides since the Belgians left – not that it was any better while they were in charge – and the United States helped assassinate the country’s first ruler, the democratically-elected Patrice Lumumba. Wikipedia – which is never wrong – says that there are an estimated 242 different languages spoken within the DR Congo’s borders, now, including four “national” languages, all of the Bantu family, the distribution of which gives you some idea of how fraudulent the country’s borders seem today. Yet breaking the country apart poses enormous problems of resource management, with the eastern province of Kivu providing over 10% of the world’s supply of the ore coltan, the central provice of Kasai-Oriental providing 10% of the world’s diamonds by weight, and the southern province of Katanga has the world’s second-largest reserve of copper and might have a third of the world’s supply of cobalt. (All data also from Wikipedia.) The country has just one direct outlet to the sea, at the Congo River delta into the south Atlantic Ocean, so dismembering the country would create economic discrepancies across the new nations while just one of these subcountries would control the only international trade route that didn’t involve crossing a border. It is no wonder that the country has been racked by conflicts for a half-century, with the only respite coming during the reign of the dictator-thief Mobute Sese Seko. (No, not this guy.)

Hochschild does a fair job of sourcing his material, although the lack of inline citations is a slight negative, and he points out several times that most of what we know of Leopold’s rule actually comes from white/European sources, since the conquered African tribes either didn’t have effective writing systems or just didn’t have the way to put that writing in a form that would survive. Slaves or forced laborers seldom had avenues to describe their experiences unless they escaped from servitude. Hochschild paints a bleak picture to begin with, but it’s likely that the brutality was more widespread than he states and the death toll, estimated at around 10 million, could easily be higher. It’s a shocking and largely forgotten story of white exploitation of Africa, but given the constant instability in the region – including further genocides and the use of rape as a weapon of terror – it’s important that we understand our own contributions to the area’s problems. In a week where Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’o each garnered about a hundred times the ink of the conflict in Mali, however, I suppose that’s wishful thinking.

Next up: I am making extremely slow progress through Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow; through 200 pages, I can say that the book makes almost no sense to me.

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→ January 9, 2013
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Catching up on recent reads.

For a variety of reasons, I fell behind on book reviews in December, so I’m cheating a little with an omnibus post on everything I read between Thanksgiving and New Year’s that I haven’t written up yet, aside from the usual Wodehouse/Christie/Stout stuff I generally don’t cover here. I had pretty mixed feelings on all of these works except the one non-fiction title, which is probably part of why I procrastinated on the reviews – it’s easier to write something quickly when you know which way you’re leaning from the start, but these books had enough positives and negatives to keep me from coming down on either side.

* The longest book I read in that span, and the one most deserving of a longer writeup, is Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, part of the TIME 100 and #81 on the Modern Library 100. Tabbed “the great American novel” by Martin Amis, praised by authors from Amis to his father Kingsley to Salman Rushdie to Christopher Hitchens, Augie March is an ambitious, expansive story of its title character’s growth from an impoverished Chicago childhood through one money-chasing scheme after another, including various brushes with the law and materialistic women. It starts slowly, hits a promising note for several hundred pages, and then ends with a gigantic whimper that ruined an otherwise enjoyable serious yet comical read for me.

Augie’s odyssey of self-discovery while he’s trying to make a buck – or a pile of bucks – draws him into various webs of fascinating side characters, a panoply identified by Hitchens as Dickensian, but one I think comes from the broader tradition of picaresque novels (to which Dickens contributed in The Pickwick Papers) and that continues through postmodern works like Ulysses and The Recognitions and later writers like Dawn Powell, Haruki Murakami, and Richard Russo. Augie March even has the peripatetic thread that defines the picaresque novel, even though Augie’s adventures, like his brief but disastrous time in the Navy, rarely encompass the high ambitions of classic picaresque characters.

Augie himself straddles the line between hero and antihero – he’s the protagonist and quite likeable despite his highly fungible morality, in part because he’s got the rags-to-riches vibe about him and in part because he entertains us through one peculiar situation after another – creating a curious ambiguity about Bellow’s point. If this is to be the great American novel, what exactly is Bellow telling us about the American experience? Is the key to the American Dream a refusal to commit oneself to anything – an education, a career, a marriage? Or is he saying the American Dream is an illusion that we can pursue but never catch? I think Bellow was posing the questions without attempting to provide any answers, which works from a thematic perspective but left the conclusion of the plot so open that I felt like I was reading an unfinished work, like The Good Soldier Svejk or Dead Souls.

* I wanted to like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, since I think Lolita is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, and while I didn’t enjoy Pale Fire I do recognize how clever it is and that I might not fully appreciate its humor. But Pnin, the story of a fish-out-of-water Russian professor at a fictional university in upstate New York, suffers from Pale Fire‘s problem even more deeply: The target of its parodic efforts is too obscure for the average reader to appreciate. Where Pale Fire satirized technical and literary analysis of poetry, Pnin takes aim at the ivory towers of academic life at private universities, which is probably hilarious if you’re a professor or a grad student but largely went right by me as someone who sleepwalked through college by doing the minimum amount of work required for most of my classes.

* Abbe Provost’s 1731 novel Manon Lescaut seemed to be stalking me over the last two months, so I had to read it – it appears on Daniel Burt’s revised version of the The Novel 100, then was the subject of allusions in at least two other books I read that time, including Augie March and I think Nicole Krauss’ History of Love as well. Manon Lescaut follows the Chevalier des Grieux as he ruins himself over his obsession with the title character, a young, beautiful, and entirely materialistic woman who throws the Chevalier overboard every time he runs out of money. The two engage in multiple schemes to defraud wealthier men who fall in love (or lust, really) with Manon at first sight, and eventually end up sent to the French colony at New Orleans, where the pattern repeats itself with a less fortunate conclusion. Its controversial status at the time would be lost on any reader today over the age of 12, but its depiction of sexual obsession mixed with several early examples of suspense writing (before either genre really existed in its own right) made it a quick and intense read. Plus now I get the references.

* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is another short novel of obsession, also appearing on the Novel 100, this one telling the tale of a man who is so in love with a woman who is betrothed to someone else that he eventually takes his own life. Told through the letters Werther writes to his friend, I found the deterioration of Werther’s mind as his depression deepens to be far more interesting than the pseudo-romantic aspect of a man so in love with another woman that he’d rather die than live without her. He just needed a good therapist. It was by far the shortest novel I had left on the Novel 100 and brought my total read on that list to 80, so it was worth the two hours or less I spent on it.

* Zadie Smith’s On Beauty reimagines E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (which I read and didn’t care for that much) in a serious comic novel around a conflict of race rather than class, set in a New England college town in the early 2000s. Smith also sends up the conflict between conservative and liberal academic ideologies (or theologies, more accurately) in one of the subplots that, much like that of Pnin, ended up missing the mark for me, although I could at least recognize glimpses of my alma mater in some of the satire. The novel’s greatest strength is the way Smith defines so many individual characters, especially those of the Belsey family, headed by a white father and an African-American mother and whose children are searching for racial, religious, and cultural identities while their parents try to recover from their father’s inability to keep it in his pants. I couldn’t help but compare On Beauty, which has some brilliant dialogue along with the deep characterizations and is often quite funny, to Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, which produced very mixed feelings in me when I first read it and didn’t fully appreciate (as I think I do now) how Smith was trying to stretch the boundaries of realistic fiction to tell a broad and expansive story. On Beauty, paying homage to a classic work of British literature, feels restrained by the confines of its inspiration when Smith’s imagination is a huge part of why her writing is so appealing, leaving it a good novel, a funny yet smart one that reads quickly, but a slightly unsatisfying one because I know she can do more than this.

* Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World tells the history of that somewhat mundane, unrespected fish, which had a substantial impact on the growth of civilization in Europe and in North America, and which was one of humanity’s first warnings (duly ignored) that we could exhaust a seemingly endless natural resource. Kurlansky’s book Salt turned a similar trick, taking a topic that seemed inherently uninteresting and finding interesting facts and anecdotes to allow him to make the story readable. Cod actually has a stronger narrative thread because Kurlansky can trace the fish’s rise in popularity and commercial value as well as its role in international relations, climaxing in the sudden collapse of cod stocks and the uncertain ending around the fish’s future as a species and a food source. We’re really good at overfishing, because technology has allowed us to catch more fish (as well as species we didn’t intend to catch) which has in turn made fish too cheap to consume. Kurlansky didn’t focus enough on this issue for my tastes, although Cod was published in 1997 when overfishing was seen as more of a fringe environmentalist concern, before celebrity chefs embraced sustainability and began preaching it to the masses.

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→ December 26, 2012
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The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat and Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

I have a piece up today for Insiders on the Joel Hanrahan trade. There is no Klawchat this week due to the holidays.

If I asked you who invented penicillin, you’d probably give the standard answer of Alexander Fleming, and maybe recall a story of him accidentally getting some bread mold in a Petri dish and noticing its antibacterial qualities. Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist, ended up sharing a Nobel Prize for this discovery and received accolades for decades beyond his death, even though, as Eric Lax details in the surprisingly gripping The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle, Fleming wasn’t actually the first to identify that the Penicillium notatum mold could kill several dangerous species of bacteria, nor was he at all involved in the massive effort to translate this laboratory accident into a usable weapon for human medicine.

Lax’s work is brief (263 pages) and very easy to read, but his research into the subject of the discovery and development of the now-ubiquitous drug is thorough and relied heavily on first-person accounts from the era, including journal notes, correspondence, and interviews with surviving members of the team at Oxford that undertook years of experiments to figure out how to scale mold production and also understand its functioning. Fleming did share the Nobel with the Australian Howard Florey and the German-born Ernst Chain, but the latter two, working at the Dunn School of Pathology under the privations of wartime England, managed to demonstrate that P. notatum was safe to use in humans and effective against bacteria, including Streptococcus and Staphylococcus, that at that time had no known chemotherapeutic antagonists. (That is, if you got a staph infection from a scratch from a rose thorn, there wasn’t much hope for your recovery.) Fleming wasn’t even the first to notice that P. notatum had antibacterial properties – the Belgian bacteriologist Andre Gratia apparently observed it three years earlier, but, like Fleming, didn’t follow through.

Lax attempts to shine light on those who deserve it, not just Florey and Chain but others, including Norman Heatley, without whose knowhow the drug might never have been produced in quantity. Lax goes back to the myth of Fleming’s discovery of the mold’s effects – Fleming did indeed discover it, but the legend of how he did so, which he himself propagated once Florey’s team made the drug viable, is likely false, according to Lax’s research. The focus then shifts to the Dunn School and the difficulties Florey had in assembling a team, finding funding for their work, and in producing enough of the stuff to keep the testing going – even salvaging penicillin from the urine of patients fortunate enough to receive it, as more than half of what a patient was given was eventually excreted via the kidneys. Lax’s access to contemporary documents and later in-person accounts allows him to flesh out the personalities of these central actors, as well as providing details on some of the early successes and failures of the drug as the scientists figured out how best to use it, including the now-common practice of administering an antibiotic for a week or more past the disappearance of symptoms. I’ll also leave the very amusing detail of how pencillin extraction moved from P. notatum to the more potent P. chrysogenum to those of you who choose to read the book.

Where Lax could have gone further was in explaining the science behind penicillin’s action, which he mentions just briefly near the end of the book. Penicillin is a beta-lactam antibiotic that inhibits cell wall development in bacteria, especially Gram-positive ones – meaning that when one cell tries to divide, its cell wall will rupture rather than expanding and closing around each resulting cell, so no new cell is formed and the original cell becomes a wall-less and very fragile spheroplast. Resistance to penicillin also only earns scant mention, again at the very end of the book, with some polite hand-waving about the subject and positive words about penicillin’s continued effectiveness against Streptococcus, but no mention of the rise of Staphylococcus bacteria that have evolved resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics in general. This is a history of science book that leans more toward history yet is a little light on the science for my tastes, but that may increase its accessibility to less science-inclined readers and absolutely made it an easier book to tackle.

If you like your popular science books a little heavier on the science, I also just read Jonah Lehrer’s first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist ($5.98 through that link), which draws parallels between various famous practicioners of the fine arts (and one very famous chef) and later discoveries, mostly by neurologists, that showed that the artists’ insights into human psychology and behavior were biologically justified. Lehrer’s star was nearly extinguished when the first chapter of his 2012 book Imagine – a book I enjoyed tremendously – was found to contain fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan, after which the publisher pulled the book from publication entirely rather than edit and re-release it. (It’s still a great book if you want to learn more about how to be more creative, especially in the workplace.) Proust Was a Neuroscientist is more like a collection of nonfiction stories that share a basic narrative structure: Lehrer introduces a famous writer, musician, or artist, describes his/her oeuvre and a particular advance or insight for which s/he is known, then explains the science behind that insight, discovered decades after the artist’s work.

My favorite chapter was, of course, the one on chef and culinary writer Auguste Escoffier, one of the fathers of modern French cuisine and the man who first wrote down a specific method – not just a recipe, but a concept – for making brown veal stock, now the foundation for an entire family of sauces without which French cuisine as we know it would not exist. Escoffier’s great contribution, according to Lehrer, was his understanding of what we now know as umami, the so-called “fifth taste” – the intensity of flavor produced by glutamate, which is recognized by the tongue and is found in rich foods from Parmiggiano-Reggiano to anchovies to soy sauce to cured meats to mushrooms. (It’s also found in powdered form as monosodium glutamate.) The chemical basis behind Escoffier’s insight was first discovered after he had already risen to prominence in European food circles and wasn’t fully demonstrated until long after his death. Lehrer uses these eight examples to plead for greater interaction between the science and art worlds, arguing that each can learn from the other if they speak a common, “third” language. That message is largely lost on me as someone who works in neither sphere, but some of the anecdotes, including the ones on Paul Cézanne and Igor Stravinsky, were fascinating reads because they involved areas of the fine arts in which I have little to no background, even as a casual fan. I don’t take a jaundiced view of Lehrer’s earlier work just because of the debacle around Imagine, so just as I still recommend that book with the caveats around its veracity, I recommend Proust Was a Neuroscientist as well even if its underlying message isn’t as powerful.

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