→ March 7, 2013
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 22, 2013
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 16, 2013
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ January 19, 2013
→ By

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.

—

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 9, 2013
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ December 26, 2012
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 30, 2012
→ By

The Orchid Thief.

Susan Orlean’s 1998 book The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession showed up in Allison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much as one of that author’s favorite narrative non-fiction works, so I grabbed a used copy as soon as I came across one. “Narrative” is only loosely applicable to Orlean’s work, which violates one of my main rules on non-fiction works – unless the author is the subject, the author shouldn’t appear in the book much, if at all – but The Orchid Thief mostly succeeds in spite of Orlean’s heavy presence on the pages because her twin subjects, orchids and the wackadoos who collect them obsessively, are so fascinating. The book was adapted, loosely, by Charlie Kaufman for his script for Adaptation., which is more about Kaufman’s difficulty adapting the book for the big screen than it is about the story in the book itself.

The thief of the book’s title is John Laroche, who was arrested in 1994 while working for the Seminole Nation in Florida as a horticulturalist who wanted to build a nursery and lab that could clone rare orchids, creating a sustainable revenue source for the tribe while feeding Laroche’s own mad obsession with the flowers. Laroche hoped to exploit a loophole in federal laws on taking endangered plants from federally-protected lands by employing Seminole tribe members to take these rare orchids from lands technically under the Seminole Nation’s control, a legal inconsistency that opens up into an ethical quandary over adminstration of lands under Native American control, which Orlean unfortunately chooses not to address. Instead, she follows the crazy people in the orchid world, each one more eccentric than the last, while also explaining the botany of orchids and why people from so many walks of life become so obsessed with them.

Laroche has much in common with Bartlett’s own anti-hero, the book thief John Gilkey, between the psychology behind his madness and his ability to rationalize actions that are immoral and often illegal. Laroche isn’t quite the unrepentant thief that Gilkey is, as the latter merely deluded himself into believing that it was right for him to steal rare books because he couldn’t afford them, whereas Laroche had concocted a broader environmentalist rationalization that by exploiting the loophole, he’d force the government to close it, all while making money for the Seminole Nation and himself. Orlean describes Laroche as rakish and charming, even as good-looking, but on the printed page he comes off as erratic, self-centered, and exasperating. I couldn’t imagine being friends with this man, so it’s hard to see him as an object of desire for women – and there’s no evidence beyond Orlean’s own descriptions to indicate that he is one.

The strongest characters in The Orchid Thief aren’t the collectors or dealers, however, but the flowers themselves. Orchids – technically plants in the family Orchidaceae, which includes over 20,000 species and over 100,000 hybrids, according to Wikipedia – are tough to grow, requiring seven years from seed to bloom; bloom only for very short periods, as little as a single day per year; and depend on complicated relationships with other species to propagate, which has led, through natural selection, to unusual colors and shapes in the flowers designed to attract and/or trap birds or insects, allowing for the spread of an orchid’s pollen. Wild orchids also require the presence of specific fungi to provide sufficient carbon for the seeds to germinate properly, a symbiotic relationship that Orlean doesn’t mention in an otherwise lengthy discussion about just how rare orchids are. The orchids that Laroche wanted to steal grow in the forbidding Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in Florida, a low-lying swampy expanse that is very difficult to access or navigate, but that forms the largest known home for the rare dendrophylax lindenii, also known as the ghost orchid, which Orlean becomes mildly obsessed with sighting in the wild while writing the book. (Orlean does provide an entertaining diversion on Florida land scams in the same area, where operators sold useless parcels of swampland to gullible cold-weather inhabitants.)

By the end of The Orchid Thief, the Seminole nation has fired Laroche and hired a less ambitious, more practical horticulturalist to run their nursery, while Laroche swears off orchids forever, leaving Orlean scrambling a little for a resolution to her book that doesn’t read like Acheron Hades just went into the original and erased the final dozen pages. The final chapter, which covers her trip into the Fakahatchee with a park ranger to try to spot a ghost orchid, would stand alone very well as a magazine feature, but its tenuous connection to the remainder of the book is a major reason why I wouldn’t call this a narrative work. It’s more of a broad study of interconnected stories around a single, compelling subject, one that touches on themes from morality to biology to beauty and madness, with a nonlinear and thus non-narrative structure that works because Orlean’s language is strong and clean.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ October 26, 2012
→ By

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much.

Allison Hoover Bartlett’s non-fiction book The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession (on sale for $6 on amazon) tells the story of a man who stole dozens of rare books from dealers (whose security protocols were often quite lax) because, well, he wanted them. Or he felt entitled to them, because the fact that he couldn’t afford them was just unfair. He’s a con artist, but not a very sharp one, just a persistent one with an pathological self-delusion when questions of right and wrong interfere with what he wants. He’s fascinating, enough that Bartlett’s portrayal is compelling reading despite only going about half as deep as it could have on the subject.

John Gilkey is the book thief of the title, a man who preys on the trust in the cloistered world of rare book collectors and dealers, most of whom still trade in these commodities for love of the books (but not necessarily to read them), and none of whom seem aware of the possibility that someone might rip them off. The problem is exacerbated by a lack of communication among dealers, allowing Gilkey, who isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier but manages to keep himself out of jail for longer than you’d expect, to stretch out his spree by avoiding hitting stores multiple times and eventually spreading out across the country, even pulling a scam or two via mail.

Yet the peculiar part about Gilkey’s crime wave is that he never sells the books. He collects the books just to collect them; he doesn’t even read them. He focuses on the Modern Library list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century, a list I’ve haphazardly been reading my way through (despite its sketchy tabulation), because, it seems, these books have been identified for him as Important or Prestigious. His knowledge is superficial and his moral compass is either damaged or nonexistent – he talks of “getting” books, not stealing them, and feels no remorse for the dealers he’s robbed. He can’t afford the books, so the logical option is to take them, because why should rich people have these things while he does without? His ability to rationalize his actions reminded me of pedophiles or serial killers who, even after they’re caught and convicted, remain unrepentant and even try to convince others of the rightness or fairness of their crimes. Fortunately Gilkey was completely nonviolent, although I wonder what would have happened had any bookseller confronted him while he tried to steal a book.

The story of how he was finally stopped is almost as interesting, a credit to the efforts of a single book dealer, Ken Sanders, a lapsed Mormon who is also a collector (and perhaps hoarder) of rare books, purchasing them for his store in part so he can be their temporary custodian. Sanders was the director of security for the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America for several years and took Gilkey’s thefts personally, helping coordinate reports on the crimes and disseminate information to try to protect other dealers from falling for the same scam. Those efforts led to Gilkey’s arrest, but law enforcement’s interest in thefts of rare books, even valuable ones, isn’t that high, and the sentences for such crimes are often light if the criminals are prosecuted at all, meaning Gilkey serves his time, re-offends, and is arrested again, but the thefts continue. Many of the books he stole in his original spree have been recovered but others remain at large.

That last point is where Bartlett herself becomes enmeshed in the story herself, as she may have seen some of those books herself when interviewing Gilkey’s mother and sister, eventually seeing a group of books Gilkey asked his mother to store for him. The statutes of limitations on many of those thefts have long expired, but their recovery is also relevant for the books’ historical value, giving Bartlett an ethical dilemma she never fully resolves. Bartlett shies away from examining the books, but doing so could have given her some titles to give to Sanders for circulation, possibly returning some to their former owners, regardless of criminal charges.

Aside from the unsatisfactory resolution to Bartlett’s ethical quandary, she also didn’t get deep enough into Gilkey’s pre-thieving history to explain why he is the way he is. This seems like a mental illness, but Gilkey’s hints about thieves within his family, stealing from each other as a fact of life, go unexamined and unresearched. Gilkey seemed forthcoming with Bartlett, almost eager to tell his story, yet we don’t really get much beyond understanding that he’s not a profiteer and he’s not playing with a full deck. Once he’s caught, he’s not clever enough to change tactics, so the hunt for him (which, while short, is thrilling to read) can’t sustain the second part of the book. We do get some glimpses of Gilkey’s past, and his weird personality, but could have used more, so the book as it stands feels a little light even though it’s very interesting and an easy read.

Bartlett mentions along the way that she’s a fan of narrative nonfiction, mentioning four titles that rank among her favorites:

* In Cold Blood, which I read last year but somehow never reviewed. It was interesting, well written, but the crime at heart is tough to read about, and Capote’s platonic relationship with the truth detracts from the power of his narrative. It’s a better read for its historical value and literary importance than for the story within.
* The Professor and the Madman, which I read about ten years ago and loved, although its narrative is looser than most, without much of a conclusion.
* The Orchid Thief, which I haven’t read but purchased last week.
* The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which I also haven’t read and would love to hear about if any of you have.

Next up: Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ July 26, 2012
→ By

The Making of a Chef.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is up. I am planning to go to tonight’s Mets/D-backs game and hope to file something off it tomorrow.

The Culinary Institute of America has become the most prestigious cooking school in the country, expanding from a small, all-male class when it opened 66 years ago in New Haven, to a large campus in Hyde Park, New York, featuring four restaurants and a rolling calendar where a new set of students matriculates every three weeks. For the CIA’s 50th anniversary in 1996, writer Michael Ruhlman went through the curriculum as a student, albeit at an accelerated rate and without the required restaurant externship, and wrote a book about this first-hand experience. The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America became a best-seller and established Ruhlman as one of the top food writers in the business, succeeding both because of its lively, energetic prose and because Ruhlman absorbed so much food knowledge while working his way through his classes.

Ruhlman refers to himself as an “undercover” student, although the faculty are aware of his presence and role, and he cooks right alongside the students, finding himself judged and graded as they are – and often defending himself when he’s not happy with the results. These classes range from basic knife skills to butchering to sauces to pastry, concluding with a 15-week run through the four on-campus restaurants run by the CIA, which range from family dining to formal and assign each student to a different station each day, forcing them to draw on all of their prior education.

Ruhlman’s great trick in this book is finding and conveying drama in what otherwise might seem the most mundane of tasks: The preparation of food. From early classes where the object is to beat the clock and achieve a good enough result for a demanding professor to later work in the restaurants, where students’ work is served to paying customers (and, occasionally, the school’s president or a visiting celebrity chef), Ruhlman manages to evoke a sense of urgency in the reader, turning dry material into compelling prose. He achieves this primarily through dialogue, letting his fellow students (and, often, himself) communicate their rising stress levels, rather than trying to explain it directly in a way that would likely sound trite to anyone who’s never spent time in a restaurant kitchen. There’s a recurring theme in the book about the need for chefs to push themselves harder and faster than they thought possible, something hard to imagine if you’re in a job that doesn’t have the same kind of time pressures.

He also uses the open question of what type of roux (a cooked combination of flour and fat, used as the base for many major sauces, as well as for gumbo) one should use to make the poorly-named “brown sauce,” which also relies on veal stock, aromatics, and tomatoes (usually as a paste) for flavor and then itself becomes a foundation for countless other sauces. There are two answers to the question, blond or brown, but the way in which each instructor answers the question reveals much about his/her philosophy of food and, perhaps more importantly to this book, philosophy of teaching about food. The lengthy discussion of the making of consomme follows a similar path – it is not sufficient to know what consomme is or how to make it; one must understand why making it so clear that the instructor can read the writing on a dime at the bottom of a gallon of this clarified meat stock matters.

Although Making of a Chef is a book about cooking, it’s not a cookbook – there are no recipes, nothing more specific than a general description of some fundamentals like brown sauce. The story is full of unusual characters, instructors and students, but none becomes a central figure and some of the students blink in and out of the story as they leave campus for their externships at high-end restaurants – a requirement for graduation at the CIA. It’s a book about an idea, that cooking, only recently seen as a highly respectable profession in the United States, can be codified and taught to the inexpert so that they can enter the world of haute cuisine and develop their own culinary concepts. It also details Ruhlman’s own intellectual evolution from someone who enjoys food to someone who understands it, appreciates it, and, fortunately for us, can write about it in an informative and eloquent way. For a book that would seem, on its face, to lack a compelling hook, it was very hard for me to put down.

I own four other books by Ruhlman, none better or more heavily used than Ruhlman’s Twenty, an absolutely essential cookbook that I reviewed in November. It goes through twenty ingredients or techniques that are key for any home cook, with numerous foolproof recipes that often include step-by-step instructions and photographs to help the less experienced reader.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 5, 2012
→ By

Priceless.

Recent ESPN stuff:
* Notes on Trevor Bauer, Andrew Cashner, and Pat Corbin from Tuesday night
* notes on six top July 2nd signings
* Today’s Klawchat transcript
* Today’s Baseball Today podcast
* And my guest appearance on today’s Fantasy Focus Baseball podcast.

I apologize for how little I’ve been posting here; the draft, followed by a 16-day east coast trip with family, put a serious dent in my blogging time. I’ve still been reading as usual, with the best book I read in June a bit out of my normal interests – Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, Robert Wittman’s memoir of his time at the FBI, where he founded the bureau’s Art Crime Team.

Wittman wisely spends most of the book talking about major cases he helped solve for the FBI, including recoveries of objects as diverse as Goya’s The Swing, North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights, and a flag used by an African-American army unit during the Civil War. He bookends all of those stories with the attempt to recover several paintings, including a Vermeer and a Rembrandt, stolen from the Isabella Gardner Stuart Museum in Boston in 1990, an attempt that (mild spoiler) was unsuccessful, something Wittman blames largely on bureacracy, infighting, and one particularly obstinate and territorial bureau chief within the FBI. He also includes a little of his own backstory, explaining how he ended up the bureau’s art crime expert, how he learned enough about art and artifacts to go undercover as a crooked art dealer/broker, and how his life was nearly ruined by a car accident that resulted in the death of one of his colleagues.

I’d be stretching to call this a collection of spy stories, but there’s a surprising amount of intrigue involved in stories that you know (other than the final one) are going to more or less work out OK, and are usually very successful. Wittman and co-author John Shiffman, a former investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, manage to work in enough of the personalities of the various thieves and shady dealers with whom Wittman had to negotiate – and was usually also trying to set up, with a SWAT team hanging out in the hotel lobby or in the room next door – to keep the vignettes from feeling paint-by-numbers: Wittman gets the tip, negotiates the deal, and then the bad guys get arrested. The details on how he managed to operate for so long in fairly small underworld circles without being compromised until right before he was due to retire also made for interesting reading, enough so that I wish they’d spent more time discussing backstopping or how he’d cover his tracks after a bust.

My only other criticism is that it’s way too short – even as someone who doesn’t know art, I was interested in the histories of the pieces he was trying to recover, and would gladly have read another dozen such stories between that and the unintentional comedy of the crooks who had the stolen goods. (Really, stealing a Vermeer … I get that the piece is valuable, but you can’t exactly put the thing on eBay and get 90 cents on the dollar here. Whatever happened to knocking over a nice jewelry store?) I also thought the back half of the Gardner Stuart story treated the FBI’s internal squabbling a little superficially – it reminded me of the way The Wire often used the FBI to throw an obstacle in the main police characters’ paths – even though in both cases the Bureau probably was a legitimate part of the problem. The idea that the most significant unsolved art theft in U.S. history remains unsolved in large part because one doofus in the Bureau’s Boston office wanted to cut the FBI’s main art crime expert out of the loop should make your blood boil, but at the same time, the allegation could use more substance.

Next up: Anita Loos’ two comic novellas, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes & But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,