→ February 27, 2009
→ By

Snark.

I saw the title of David Denby’s new polemic, Snark, and I simply had to have it. Whether it was pro-snark or anti-snark, it didn’t matter. As it turns out, it’s anti-snark, and it’s awful – the whine of a man who, I’m guessing, has been the target of snark and doesn’t like it.

Snark‘s biggest problem is that it’s not clear on its subject: Denby struggles to define snark, and redefines it on the fly as the situation suits him. Denby gives examples of what he considers snark, but he is using “snark” as a catchall term to identify and sequester anything he doesn’t like. It seems to me that snark, to Denby, means any content or commentary that insults its target or adversary; any content or commentary that is maybe kind of unfriendly or might hurt someone’s feelings; any content or commentary that slanders or libels its target; and any content or commentary that criticizes Barack Obama. Insults and calumny are their own categories, and they likely have no defenders; a book that says “slander is bad” is somewhat tautological in nature, as no one is running around saying that it’s good, and slander is bad as much as water is wet and David Denby is confused about snark. Unfriendly content is snark, in Denby’s world, when he decides that it’s snark; he makes a point of excusing several snarky pundits whose snarktacular ways are an essential part of their popular appeal, such as Steven Colbert.

I have no objection to Denby taking the opportunity to praise the best satirists and ironists out there, but his inability to pin down snark – and the ways he takes pains to say that he recognizes the benefit of some forms of what can only be called ridicule – frustrates the entire work. It’s best encapsulated in the schizophrenic chapter on Maureen Dowd, the vitriolic and popular Washington-based writer for the New York Times. I’m no fan of Dowd’s, but Denby’s complaint – in short, that she can be cutting in ways that don’t necessarily inform the reader – is weak, and once again, he seems to be most up in arms when she’s attacking Democratic candidates, particularly Obama.

The book is short and is unbalanced in its approach to dissecting snark or whatever it is that Denby is dissecting. An early “fit” (what Denby calls his chapters – I suppose that’s supposed to be cute, but it came off as pretentious) describes the history of snark, with a long tangent on Juvenal, perhaps the progenitor of snark or at least one of its earliest practitioners. He deserved a mention, not a long digression with samples of his work (which, by the way, sounded a lot more like crude insult than snark). Similarly, the passage on the origin of the word “snark” – from Lewis Carroll’s epic poem “The Hunting of the Snark” – doesn’t have much bearing on the current meaning of the term. I think Denby’s real motivation for spending so much time on the poem is that he likes saying “Boojum.”

I’m not the only one who thought Snark to be a waste of a few hours; it received a strongly negative review from the Times, and I found this point-by-point review of Snark that viewed the book as validation for the snarkers.

Next up: I’m a little backlogged on writeups – I just finished Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and have started Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , ,
→ February 21, 2009
→ By

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber.

In a comment on my October 2007 post listing my 25 favorite nonfiction books, reader Dennis suggested Julian Rubenstein’s Ballad of the Whiskey Robber. Win.

The book tells the true story of a Transylvanian man who escapes Ceaucescu’s regime and ends up in Budapest, where he becomes a pelt smuggler, pen salesman, Zamboni driver, backup hockey goalie, and, in the end, the most successful bank robber in Eastern Europe, all while Hungary is undergoing the painful transition from communist rule to democracy and a market economy. It is a non-fiction novel of the highest order – by all accounts, completely true, and yet built around a character so rich and fascinating that he seems like he had to have come from someone’s imagination.

The “Whiskey Robber,” Attila Ambrus, was so named because he would get hammered on whiskey before each bank job, but was also a meticulous planner and athletic enough that his hockey teammates referred to him as the “Chicky Panther.” He’s the protagonist and hero, but isn’t entirely sympathetic; aside from the whole stealing thing, he’s a spendthrift, a gambling addict, and an alcoholic, and he becomes reckless with his gun in the last few robberies before he’s captured. He’s struggling to overcome a lousy start in life – his mother walked out when he was one, and his father was cold, distant, and would beat Attila when drunk – but also has strong powers of rationalization. He’s clever and charming – many tellers whose employers he had robbed wouldn’t testify against him or testified that he was kind and courteous during the robberies – but, of course, he’s a thief.

Rubenstein balances Attila’s story with that of the Budapest police force, which chased Attila for six years, during almost all of which time they had little idea of who the Whiskey Robber was. Rubenstein depicts the police force as undermanned and underfunded, a popular second-guessing target for politicians in Hungary’s ever-unstable governments, asking for help from above and from the FBI’s office in Budapest but never receiving it. Attila became a particular thorn in the police’s side thanks to Kriminalis, a popular TV show in the mid-1990s that discussed major criminal cases of the day, a sort of Hungary’s Most Wanted but with a more tabloid feel; the show made Attila into a folk hero, as did Hungarian rapper Ganxsta Zolee*, who (without realizing he was already friends with the Whiskey Robber) recorded a popular song that proclaimed “The Whiskey Robber is the king!”

*The video in that link isn’t for the song about the Whiskey Robber, which I couldn’t find, but Zolee’s entire look in that video is just priceless. I’m sure Cypress Hill would be flattered.

The book’s greatest strength is Rubenstein’s apparent thoroughness. To construct this narrative, covering six years of robberies plus Attila’s life before his first bank job (which was actually in a post office), he would have had to talk to an inordinate number of people involved in the saga, from Ambrus himself to his ex-girlfriends to his hockey teammates to the detectives who came and went while Attila kept on robbing. The level of detail gives the story a rich, novelesque feel and that plus its scoundrel hero are probably what has given the book such a strong cult following.

I listened to the audio version of Ballad, which was the subject of a story in the New York Times a a few years ago because it was a DIY project: The publisher of Ballad didn’t want to pay to produce an audiobook, so the author cobbled together a cast of famous fans of the book and some studio time and did it himself. In some ways, it’s a blast: The characters, particularly Attila, develop more personality over the course of the book because they’re voiced individually.

I hate to criticize Rubenstein, since he read the book himself out of necessity rather than choice, but his oral style is not ideal. He reads the book in a drab, descending tone, even during chase scenes or other exciting sequences. He also mispronounces a lot of English words, like victuals (he says it as it’s written), closeted (“cl?-ZEHT-t?d”), and the old Italian currency lire (“leer”), which had me wondering whether he’d mispronounced any of the Hungarian words and names as well. These things bug me. YMMV.

Incidentally, Attila now has a myspace page. He can’t use a computer or receive mail in prison, but he apparently updates this during his allotted phone time by telling whoever’s updating the page what to write. There’s not that much of interest on there other than a video allowing you to see what a Chicky Panther looks like. I do like that he lists I, Claudius as his favorite book; I wondered if the prison library also has the sequel, Claudius the God.

I don’t read enough nonfiction to update that top-25 list often, but if I was to redo it today, I’d slot Ballad second, behind only Barbarians at the Gate.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ December 28, 2008
→ By

The Riddle of the Compass.

Amir Aczel’s The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World isn’t as strong as his first two books, Fermat’s Last Theorem (a very math-heavy book but one that relies on the centuries-long efforts to solve that problem for narrative greed) and God’s Equation (a more accessible work about great “blunder” by Albert Einstein that turned out to be correct). Although the story within Compass is mildly interesting, the book – just 159 pages in paperback, including diagrams and a few blank pages between chapters – is so superficial that we get neither story nor an interesting character. In fact, the predominant character in the book probably never existed.

Aczel argues that the compass was, at the time it was invented, the most important invention since the wheel, and produces a reasonable case for the argument while splitting time between the western “invention” of the compass and the evidence for a much earlier invention in China, where the device was used in medicine and by magicians but seldom if ever used for navigation in a country that rarely took to the sea. He takes a detour into Italian history, including an interesting chapter on Amalfi (now known as a tourist mecca, but briefly a maritime power and a flourishing city-state) that is itself a digression from the early inquiry into the alleged inventor of the compass, Flavio Gioia. It seems likely that Gioia himself never existed, and while it’s amusing to see how a missing comma could lead to the creation of a historical personage, it’s not much of a basis for a book.

Aczel accentutates the problem by himself glossing over details that, even if tangential, would add color to the book. While bemoaning both the west’s dismissive and patronizing treatment of Chinese culture during for most of the last millennium and China’s refusal (under multiple regimes) to reveal many scientific and medical secrets, he mentions the very recent discovery that an herb that Chinese doctors have long used as a treatment for malaria has had promising results in tests in western studies. He never mentions the plant’s name (it’s a type of wormwood known by the Latin name Artemisia annua) and lets the matter drop after the one-paragraph teaser.

Next up: A little Wodehouse for the holidays, with a trip to Blandings Castle in Summer Lightning , available only in the compilation Life at Blandings.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 12, 2008
→ By

Taking on the Trust.

There is no one left: none but all of us … The public is the people. We forget that we all are the people; that while each of us in his group can shove off on the rest of the bill of today, the debt is only postponed. The rest of us are passing it on back to us. We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end the sum total of the debt will be our liberty. – Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company

Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller is Steve Weinberg’s short biography of Tarbell, perhaps the first true investigative journalist in American history and one of the original muckrakers, set off against snippets of the biography of Rockefeller. It’s a good read, but it’s not the story of the battle between these two individuals, who in fact, only met once and had no direct contact even as Tarbell was laying bare the unethical practices of Standard Oil.

Tarbell’s magnum opus was the book quoted up top, an 800-page tome first published in installments in McClure’s magazine, which at the time was an intellectual rag that combined serious (if muckraking) journalism with pieces of short fiction. Tarbell’s father had been involved in the western Pennsylvania oil boom, but also saw his fortunes derailed by the monopolistic practices of Rockefeller’s firm. Weinberg presents the thesis that Tarbell’s drive to expose Rockefeller’s dirty pool, although her earlier work indicates a passion for reformist journalism, with Standard Oil as a likely target of any dogged reporter of the time. What set Tarbell apart was her willingness to work to unearth new sources, including first-person accounts that had not previously come to light, but also documents and letters that other journalists had not bothered to find. She made great use of court documents and filings from the small towns where Standard Oil set up shop, often via shell companies, and identified people who’d had contact with Rockefeller or his minions during Standard Oil’s rise to domination.

Unfortunately, we don’t get much on the direct impact of Tarbell’s book, which only merits a chapter and a half towards the end of Taking on the Trust. Standard Oil was broken up via court ruling a few years afterward, but how direct is the link between Tarbell’s work and that legal decision? And how did Tarbell’s groundbreaking efforts affect the world of journalism afterwards? I imagine that later investigative reporters would have given her at least some credit either for directly inspiring them or for opening doors through which they could walk, but Taking comes to a fairly abrupt end once the narrative reaches the breakup.

I may post something over the weekend, but I’ll be on vacation from Sunday to Saturday and probably won’t post anything next week. I’ll keep an eye on the comments, as always.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 11, 2008
→ By

Organic, Inc.

Samuel Fromartz’ Organic, Inc. might be the most balanced nonfiction book on a contemporary subject I’ve ever read. Even though Fromartz is clearly a pro-organic partisan, he focuses the work on the food and the various personalities that helped turn organic food from tasteless hippie health food into the panoply of choices the organic-minded consumer has today.

Organic, Inc. is part history and part description of what “organic” really means, both today and what it meant in earlier eras. The history is interesting enough, as Fromartz discusses how natural farming methods were slowly and then quickly overtaken by more industrial production methods, from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to the loss of critical agricultural techniques like crop rotation, and then shifts gears to focus on the various organic-food advocates who, for health or culinary reasons, pushed back against the agro-industrial complex. While many of the characters Fromartz presents were – to my eyes, at least – certifiable kooks, some, like chef Alice Waters, who is responsible for introducing Americans to “spring mix” or mesclun salad, were just passionate about one specific aspect of organic food (in Waters’ case, taste) and matched it to a niche in the market that would allow them to sustain and even grow their food-related businesses.

Fromartz also provides two chapters that delve more into the way Big Bad Corporate America has gotten its grubby mitts on organic food. One chapter talks about soy milk, going into the history of White Wave, the company behind Silk that has since sold out to Dean Foods, which has introduced non-organic products under the Silk name. (I checked at Whole Foods yesterday; even chocolate Silk can’t call itself organic because the cocoa used in the drink isn’t organic.) The last chapter goes into the pitched battles, some still ongoing, between the hardcore organic community and the growth-oriented side seeking to ease labeling rules and guidelines for organic agriculture and husbandry. Fromartz builds the first six chapters to leave this conflict as somewhat inevitable, and manages to keep his own views out of the fray, although it would be hard to read that chapter and side with the “growth” crowd when you see what they would like to make acceptable under the label “organic.”

Fromartz’ prose was the one obstacle that was tough to surmount, however. His word choices are often awkward and occasionally wrong, referring to one veterinarian as “widely regarded” without saying how he was regarded or what he was regarded as. I also caught a handful of grammatical errors or funky word orders that made the subjects of sentences unclear. I also would have preferred to see inline citations; the book has a thick Notes section, with notes by page number, but the lack of inline citations creates a game where you guess that there might be a citation for what you just read and check the Notes section to see if there’s one there. Given the frequency with which he uses the “Some people say” device, inline citations are a must.

If you care about food, or the environment, Organic, Inc. is a solid and informative read. I know I’ll be looking for organic strawberries wherever possible, and will probably shift what little conventional dairy buying I do to organic as well, all the result of the information Fromartz gave in the book, rather than any rhetorical or polemical arguments I’ve read.

Next up: A return to the TIME 100 with Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant.

Filed Under: Food, Nonfiction Tagged With: , ,
→ April 3, 2008
→ By

The 13th Element + the return of KlawChat.

Phosphorus is highly toxic and flammable, forms compounds that explode on contact with oxygen, is the key ingredient in detergents and nerve gases, and is absolutely essential to life. It’s good fodder for what amounts to a biography of a chemical element, and John Emsley’s The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus is an excellent read.

Emsley focuses on four areas of phosphorus’ story: Its early history and manufacture, its valuable commercial uses, its less benevolent uses in explosives and chemical weapons, and its environmental reputation (not entirely deserved). The narrative is a bit clunky, and Emsley tends to veer off into list mode, rattling off a number of famous murder/poisoning cases involving phosphorus in one of the book’s later chapters, and one chapter seldom connects to the next. But most of the book is highly readable, with some of the more technical content siphoned off into sidebars, and it was news to me that phosphorus’s rap for causing eutrophication wasn’t entirely fair, and the history of phosphorus’ use in chemical weapons, including nerve gas, is sadly relevant today.

—

I’ve got a 1 pm chat today on ESPN.com, and you can also hear a few minutes with me on today’s Baseball Today podcast.

Filed Under: Chat, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ October 22, 2007
→ By

Top 25 non-fiction books.

Since this is probably going to be my lone post of the week, I figured it should be a long one. I started out planning to offer a list of the ten best nonfiction books I’ve read, and then found I’d written down thirty titles. I trimmed a few and settled on twenty-five. I’ve omitted self-help/instruction books (like books on cooking) and stuck to more serious topics, although some are lightly treated.

25. Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand. Heard the movie was terrible, which is a shame because the book was great. It’s a classic underdog story – horse thought to be too small, jockey blind in one eye, trainer with unorthodox methods, and so on – with Seabiscuit’s rise punctuated by several high moments and an almost too-good-to-be-true shot at redemption when he gets one last chance to win the race that has always eluded him.

24. The Catholic Church: A Short History, by Hans Küng. I’ll admit that this book may have a narrow appeal, but I think it’s a solid read even for those with no direct interest in the Catholic Church. Küng is the Church’s greatest internal critic, a Catholic priest and theologian who underwent an excommunication proceeding for his teachings. He rejects or questions several doctrines of the mundane Church, pointing out that such concepts as papal infallibility and the celibacy requirement for clergy are man-made, not divinely granted. The Catholic Church serves as a summary of many of his major works to date within the context of a Catholic’s history of the Church itself, dating back to its early days as a small-c catholic church hewing much more closely to the teachings of Christ than the bloated and often corrupt bureaucracy we see today.

23. The Prize Game, by Donald Petrie. A bit short and a bit slow, The Prize Game still has a fascinating and improbable story at its core: Piracy was once a government-sanctioned business with clear rules of engagement. Captured ships were known as “prizes” and there were strict guidelines for how captured cargo and sailors were to be treated. This style of privateering was all but ended after 1815, although the book does go briefly into privateering during the U.S. Civil War. If you’ve read any Patrick O’Brian books or perhaps played the Sid Meier game Pirates!, this book’s right up your alley.

22. The Invention of Clouds, by Richard Hamblyn. Reviewed briefly here. Hamblyn tells an interesting story about the amateur meteorologist who came up with the system of nomenclature and descriptions for clouds that is still more or less in use today. The only hitch here is that there wasn’t a lot of drama in the book – not that Hamblyn should have made any up – so the book just sort of flows along without the tension that tends to drive successful history of science books forward. There are some interesting asides, and it’s amazing to think that there was a time when science presentations to the public resulted in packed houses.

21. Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain. Hilarious and cutting and explosive in its revelations of kitchen culture, Kitchen Confidential will make you think twice when deciding where to eat when eating out. And I would hope that it would teach all of you to head in the other direction when you see a sign that says “Discount Sushi.”

20. Catch Me If You Can, by Frank Abagnale. The movie sucked, but the book was great, and it’ll make you wonder why the movie’s producers felt the need to alter anything given how outrageous Abagnale’s life of deception was. He pioneered a new type of check-kiting and is one of the greatest social engineers the world has ever seen – all because he wanted to impress the ladies. And if his tale is to be believed, impress them he did.

19. The Power of Babel, by John McWhorter. Reviewed in depth here, Power offers us a history of human languages with a good dose of McWhorter’s own opinions, including his view that language is a dynamic, living entity that can only be constrained through fiat. He also takes the view that all “languages” are merely dialects, and explains why some languages still have nasty features like noun declensions and the subjunctive mood while others have lost them over time.

18. The Island of Lost Maps, by Miles Harvey. The Island of Lost Maps tells the story of one of the boldest and for a time most successful thieves of whom you’ve never heard, a milquetoast man – appropriately named Bland – who cut antique maps out of rare books in university libraries and sell them to collectors. Bland made about a half-million dollars in the early 1990s before he was caught. Harvey weaves Bland’s story in with a few other narratives, including a description of the map-collecting industry, the history of this sort of maps, and his own obsession with the story and with learning about the map world. That last thread is the one major negative of Island, as I’m firmly in the camp that says that a nonfiction book’s author doesn’t belong in the book unless he’s the subject as well.

17. God’s Equation, by Amir Aczel. Aczel’s first book was Fermat’s Last Theorem, a history of that famous equation and the math that led up to the ultimate solution by Andrew Wiles. The book started with a riveting description of Wiles’ first presentation of his solution – I’m serious, you’ll be caught up in it too – but the rest of the book was dry and very mathy, with only the occasional bit of real-life drama (like the suicide of one of the Japanese mathematicians whose work was invaluable to Wiles) to keep it moving. For his second book, however, Aczel chose a broader topic and crafted a much stronger narrative, describing how Albert Einstein’s greatest “mistake,” that of the cosmological constant (a sort of high-physics fudge factor) turned out, in the end, to be correct.

16. The Lighthouse Stevensons, by Bella Bathurst. The family of Robert Louis Stevenson is known for something very non-literary: constructing a series of lighthouses around the dangerous coastlines of the British Isles. Not only were these projects dangerous and very difficult, they also disenfranchised the various communities of wreckers who thrived on the proceeds of shipwrecks off their shores, often killing survivors to ensure their hauls. (Bathurst, also a journalist and the author of one novel, started to lose her hearing a few years ago after a head trauma suffered in a car crash, and wrote a column on how the loss is not entirely without compensations.)

15. The Tummy Trilogy/Feeding a Yen, both by Calvin Trillin. A series of four books that are more collections of stories of the quest for good eats across America and eventually the world. The Tummy Trilogy’s stories are more folksy, while Feeding a Yen seemed more focused on the food, although the disappearance of Trillin’s wife Alice midway through that tome is a sad reminder of her early death in 2001.

14. All the President’s Men , by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Still riveting thirty-plus years later, the book is more about the reporters’ gradual uncovering of the Watergate scandal than it is about the scandal itself. Loses a bit of its romance now that we know who “Deep Throat” was.

13. Brunelleschi’s Dome, by Ross King. The story of the construction of the cupola on the duomo of Florence, Brunelleschi’s Dome focuses on the technological advances that Brunelleschi had to drive to be able to construct such a large dome without internal supports or risk of collapse. The story offers a surprising intensity because of the deadlines, the pressure from the Church, and various other external factors that make the project’s completion seem uncertain, although I can assure you from firsthand experience that it all worked out in the end. If you enjoyed this one, you might like the similar but fluffier Tilt, by Nicholas Shrady, about that crooked tower an hour down the A11 in Pisa.

12. Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, by Giles Milton. I picked this one up in the remainders room of a local independent bookstore for no other reason than the inclusion of my favorite spice in the book’s title. It turns out that it’s a riveting and thorough history of the Indonesian spice trade, which has not a little to do with the fact that we in the United States are speaking English today and not Dutch. Black pepper, mace (the aril covering the nutmeg seed itself), and cinnamon all make appearances, but nutmeg was the spice that drove the markets and led to fierce battles and even torture over the control of the Spice Islands, particularly the tiny nutmeg-producing island of Run.

11. Millionaire, by Janet Gleeson. I may be biased on this one, as the subject of Millionaire is the inventor of paper money, a manor-born English ne’er-do-well named John Law. Law’s financial genius (just sounds right, doesn’t it?) led to the development of modern currency systems and credit markets, but also created one of the biggest speculative booms and crashes in history, and led to the need for a new word to describe those who had amassed so much wealth: “millionaire.”

10. The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto. The story of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, the early history of Manhattan (starting with the arrival of the Europeans, that is), and the enduring influence of the Dutch culture, language, and society on New York, both city and state, and the United States in general. Shorto had access to a recently-unearthed trove of over 12,000 pages of documents from the Dutch colonial government, and the result is a fascinating story with two heroes, the idealistic Adriaen van der Donck and the better-known but half-villian Peter Stuyvesant, some serious villains in the English, the Swedes’ short-lived foray into colonization, and early experiments in things like democracy, tolerance, and free trade.

9. Living to Tell the Tale, by Gabriel García Marquéz. I’m not big on memoirs, but this book has a lot of the feel of a Marquez novel, and if you’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude, then Living to Tell the Tale will give you a lot of insight into where the amazing stories from that novel originated. He’s lived a fascinating life, and his role as a journalist in the midst of revolutions and strife provides some incredible and often darkly comic stories.

8. Lords of the Realm, by John Helyar. Still the best book about Major League Baseball I’ve ever read, although it’s somewhat out of date. Helyar looks at MLB as a business and delves into a lot of the self-dealing and corruption that have shaped the monolithic monopoly we see today. And indeed, the self-dealing hasn’t stopped since the book’s publication.

7. Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The book responsible for the -onomics nomenclature scourge does do wonders to lift the image of the dismal science, showing how we can use data to learn things about human behavior and how we respond to changes in our economic world. Freakonomics includes a highly-controversial study of the connection between the legalization of abortion and the drop in crime in the 1990s, but also includes an interesting chapter on the life cycles of baby names, a chapter on why realtors – excuse me, Realtors® – are running a bit of a scam, and an ever more relevant chapter on cheating.

6. The Professor and the Madman/The Meaning of Everything, both by Simon Winchester. These two books, not strictly original/sequel but still inextricably linked, revolve around the production of the Oxford English Dictionary, a 70-year project that outlived all of its original heads and contributors. Professor is the better-known and more successful of the two books, telling the story of the asylum-bound murderer who proved to be one of the most prolific contributors of example sentences to the OED project, but I found it lacked the sort of narrative greed that propels Meaning, which tells the story of the OED’s history from genesis through publication, forward. I don’t see why you’d read one and not jump to read the other, though, since each offers a built-in teaser for its partner book.

5. Liar’s Poker, by Michael Lewis. I’ve got some serious issues with Moneyball, where Lewis put the narrative ahead of strict adherence to the facts, fabricating the anecdote that includes a mention of me towards the end of the book (and declining to correct it between the hardcover and paperback editions when I pointed out that it wasn’t true). As a result, I look at Liar’s Poker with a slightly jaundiced eye, because I’m not sure if the same accuracy problems infect Lewis’ other books. But I can’t deny that Lewis is a master of prose and storycraft, and Liar’s Poker is a cracking good read, with hilarious stories and comical characters and the intensity you’d expect to see in scenes set in a bond-trading room in the wild boom leading up to the 1987 crash.

4. Longitude, by Dava Sobel. I’ve always seen Longitude as the book that started the whole history-of-science book craze, by taking an esoteric story around a forgotten hero and crafting it as a novel, complete with villains, setbacks, and a linear plot that leads to a big climax. And as it turns out with so many of the best books in the genre, the invention at the heart of Longitude made the world as we know it possible: Transoceanic voyages were not safe until the invention of the chronometer, a device that allowed a ship in the middle of the ocean to determine its longitudinal location and thus its distance from Europe or the Americas. Longitude remains one of the kings in this field because the trials and tribulations faced by its hero, clockmaker John Harrison, were so severe.

3. Mauve, by Simon Garfield. The remarkable story of a teenaged chemist named William Perkin who in effect invented a color while trying to create a synthetic form of the anti-malarial compound quinine. Perkin’s mistake left him with a strong dye he called mauveine and an industrial process that would allow for easy, large-scale production. Perkin became a global celebrity, and his visit to the United States in 1906 was front-page news in the New York Times. He’s all but forgotten today outside of an award named after him that is given to a leading scientist in the field of applied chemistry.

2. Charlie Wilson’s War, by George Crile. Reviewed at length here, and soon to be a major feature film adapted by Aaron Sorkin and starring Tom Hanks. The book revolves around two amazing characters and their successful launching of the largest covert military operation in history, the U.S. funding and arming of the Afghan mujahideen, whose guerrilla warfare against Russian invaders was a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

1. Barbarians at the Gate, by Brian Burrough and John Helyar. Still, for my money, the most novelesque non-fiction book I’ve ever read. Helyar and Burrough couldn’t have created better characters if they tried. The superficial story here is the takeover battle for RJR Nabisco, but the real story is how some very wealthy and intelligent men managed to act like teenaged boys when winning became more important than maximizing profits. The leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, until 2007 the largest LBO in history, ended up costing the victors in the battle nearly 50% more per share than the original offer due to the bidding war between multiple suitors, with the primary players being a management-led group that includes Shearson-Lehman, the buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and rival buyout firm Forstman Little. One entertaining subplot is RJR’s then-failing effort to introduce a smokeless cigarette without admitting that cigarette smoke itself was a health hazard. Good luck with that.

Filed Under: Languages, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ September 8, 2007
→ By

Salt.

Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History is something of a must-read for culinary buffs, whether your interest in food is in cooking it or merely in the eating thereof. Kurlansky does a solid job of explaining how the history of civilization, both in the West and several countries in Asia, has been directed and altered by the search for and use of salt.

The word “salt” actually refers to more than just sodium chloride, although that is the salt that plays the largest role in the book. A salt is one of two products of the reaction between an acid and a base – the other being water – and several other salts make appearances in Salt. Ancient Egyptians recognized that there were real differences between various salts, even if they didn’t understand the chemical compositions; natron, a naturally-occurring compound containing sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and sodium chloride, was used in mummification as well as in curing foods. Different types of culinary salts often served as measures of status, and the drive for whiter and whiter salt up until the last twenty years serves as a stark contrast to today’s marketing of pricier gourmet salts like French grey salt, black salt, and alaea red salt.

Salt also drove a number of scientific and technological advances. The curing and preserving process is obviously a major part of the book, since it determined the economic prowess of several European nations and is a major reason the Basques were able to survive as an independent people despite the fact that they have always been ruled by others. But some of the discoveries and advances are more surprising: Natural gas was discovered by the Chinese, who noticed that some salt miners would mysteriously lay down and die in certain spots underground, and that the same substance causing the deaths also appeared to be causing the sudden, massive explosions that plagued those mines. They eventually identified it as a fuel and figured out how to harness it, something which every home and professional cook should appreciate.

Kurlansky largely lets the tale of salt tell itself, although it might be a stretch to call it a tale, since there isn’t a single narrative thread as you might see in a biography. The book is more a collection of anecdotes and mini-histories in chronological order, with the bulk of the book spent on ancient uses of salt and on Europe’s mercantilist period. For a quick read, it’s packed with information, although I thought he gave somewhat short shrift to the aforementioned rise of artisan salts, instead focusing on the rise of Big Salt and the consolidation of the world salt industry. One note to fellow sticklers: Kurlansky’s grasp of grammar and vocabulary leaves a little something to be desired, and even his editors didn’t catch every stray comma or word error (e.g., using “parley” for “parlay”), but the mistakes weren’t frequent enough to get under my skin. Okay, maybe a little bit.

Filed Under: Cooking, Nonfiction Tagged With: ,
→ August 11, 2007
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Charlie Wilson’s War.

What makes George Crile’s book Charlie Wilson’s War so compelling is the two characters at its center: the Congressman of the book’s title, a war-hawk Democrat from Texas nicknamed “Good Time Charlie” for his off-field antics; and Gust Avrakotos, the no-nonsense, blue-collar CIA agent who was first Wilson’s doppelganger in the CIA and later his partner in crime.

The story itself is fascinating for its windows into the bizarre worlds of Washington politics and CIA bureaucracy, and how Wilson and Avrakotos manipulated the former and avoided the latter enough to wage the biggest covert war in history. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the mujahideen – poorly-armed Muslim men who fought the Soviets as part of a jihad, or an Islamic holy war – became a pet cause of Wilson, who believed both that the Afghans were noble warriors whose dedication should be rewarded with support, and that this was a good way to stick it to the Russians. (Wilson repeatedly says he wants to turn Afghanistan into the Soviets’ Vietnam, but given its role in hastening the collapse of the U.S.S.R., it would be more accurate to call it the Soviets’ Waterloo, or, if you enjoy morbid irony, their Leningrad.) Avrakotos came to the Afghan cause somewhat by circumstance, as he was an outlaw within the CIA whose future had been dimmed by internal politics and his suggestion that one of the top men in the CIA go f— himself, but he quickly became a true believer in the value of this conflict within the broader battle with the Soviets. The two men, with plenty of help, independently and then together engineered a large effort to arm and train the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, originally with the goal of just inflicting heavy casualties and expensive damage, then later with the goal of driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan entirely. The tale spins through global arms manufacturing, back-room deals (including the willingness of the Israelis to manufacture and sell arms to the CIA for use by Muslims in Afghanistan), the internal politics of Pakistan, and eventually, the Iran-contra scandal, which nearly killed the Afghan program by association.

But it’s the characters who drive the book. Wilson is almost a caricature of a politician, a man who makes Diamond Joe Quimby look dull and two-dimensional by comparison. In his political mode, Wilson plays the country boy, speaking with an exaggerated southern drawl and, despite his Democratic affiliation, voicing a lot of conservative views. (One notable exception is on abortion. Wilson’s sister Sharon was chairwoman of the board of Planned Parenthood, and despite the fact that his constituents overwhelmingly opposed abortion, Charlie Wilson voted according to his sister’s wishes.) Wilson was a classic political horse-trader, but a shrewd one who gathered his favors over a period of years before calling them in. He backed up John Murtha – still in Congress, I might add – when Murtha was caught up in the Abscam scandal, telling one of the undercover operatives that while he wouldn’t take the bribe just then, he’d be open to it down the road. When Wilson needed Murtha’s support for the Afghan program years down the road, he got it.

But in his personal life, Wilson was a mess. He nearly drank himself to death, got sober, and started drinking again a year and a half later. He was caught with two showgirls in a Vegas hot tub, with cocaine in the room (earning himself another nickname, “Cocaine Charlie”). He had a succession of girlfriends and insisted on bringing one along on each of his junkets to Pakistan and to the Middle East. And he nearly killed a man in a hit-and-run accident that by all rights should have ended his political career – although Ted Kennedy’s continued support from the ignorati of Masschusetts makes it clear that voters will even overlook manslaughter if they want to.

Given that history, it’s all the more amazing that Wilson is a clear second fiddle among the characters to Avrakotos. A Greek-American born in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, Avrakotos speaks his mind regardless of the consequences, both to Crile and to everyone he encountered during his nearly thirty years at the CIA. Avrakotos was on assignment in the CIA’s Greek detachment when the Greek army overthrew the country’s left-leaning government, and as a result he became one of the most powerful men in Greece during the early years of the junta’s rule. Avrakotos later survived a near-firing and the above-mentioned telling-off to land in the CIA’s Near East group just at the time that the Afghan rebellion was getting under way. Avrakotos hated the communists as much as Wilson did, partly borne of his upbringing in an area of Pennsylvania heavily populated with people from all over Eastern Europe who could only agree on one thing: that they hated the Soviets. Although it’s never spelled out, it was clear to me that Avrakotos also got a significant charge out of the Afghan operation itself, such as its cloak-and-dagger aspects and the way he was subverting the higher-ups who wanted him out of the CIA.

To Crile’s tremendous credit, he avoids offering judgments on what these men were doing, and in particular avoids the facile explanation we’ve heard since 9/11 that the United States somehow created al-Qaeda or otherwise facilitated the attacks through its Afghan operations in the 1980s. The Soviet Union was headed for an economic collapse at the start of the 1980s, and the CIA’s involvement in Afghanistan hastened that collapse and produced a relatively good outcome when the communists in Russia gave up power voluntarily; since the Soviets were the clear enemy of the United States at the time, a strategy to undermine them made sense. And Crile also makes it clear that one possible reason for the anti-U.S. sentiment of the Islamic militants we supported in Afghanistan is that the CIA was so careful about disguising our involvement that the mujahideen had no idea where these arms came from. The relationship between the covert war and the eventual rises of the Taliban and al-Qaeda is far more complicated than the “it’s the CIA’s fault” side would have it, and Crile refrains from offering his opinion, letting the story tell itself, only delving into the aftermath in Afghanistan in an illuminating epilogue where even Wilson himself offers his thoughts on the matter.

I listened to the unabridged audio versionof Charlie Wilson’s War, clocking in at just over twenty hours. The narrator, Christopher Lane, does an excellent job of bringing the various characters to life with just slight variations in his voice, and apart from the occasional stumble over a foreign phrase (I can’t even reproduce his mispronunciation of “pièce de resistance”), his reading was clean and sharp.

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→ July 14, 2007
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Bill Buford’s Heat.

Bill Buford’s book Heat is three stories in one. It’s the story of the author’s apprenticeship under celebrity chef Mario Batali and the learning process that goes on during that work experience. It’s also a mini-biography of Batali, the gregarious, slightly hedonistic TV chef and the man behind a half-dozen or so major restaurants, including his flagship, Babbo. And it’s an intermittent history of Italian cooking, albeit not a very complete one, with more of a focus on answering certain questions and tracing the lineage of certain dishes.

The book is largely fascinating, especially if you enjoy cooking or if you have interest in how restaurant kitchens really work. Buford’s follies as a kitchen slave – he uses a more vulgar term for it – are largely predictable, but the reactions of the people around him are always entertaining, and he has a talent for capturing the personalities of the various nut jobs populating the kitchen at Babbo.

The book slows down noticeably when the focus becomes almost entirely on Buford’s own personal quest to master Italian cooking, specifically his long trips to Italy to work under the most famous butcher in the world, Dario Cecchini, a man who “banishes vegetarians from his shop and tells them to go to hell.” Dario’s exploits and commentary are hilarious, and there are some solid passages that almost wax philosophical about meat, but after the frenetic back-and-forth approach of the first two-thirds of the book (bouncing from Babbo to Italy and back), the pace really slows down in Dario’s shop. But this book ends up rivaling Kitchen Confidential for its look inside a real restaurant kitchen, even beating it in some ways because of its emphasis on the least-salaried workers (including an empathetic look at the “Latins” in the kitchen, including one former Babbo worker who died).

I listened to Heat as an unabridged audiobook, which appears to be available only on Audible.com. The reader, Michael Kramer, does a hell of a Mario Batali impression, one probably forged from an all-night session of watching Batali’s TV programs. It’s exaggerated, but that’s necessary to distinguish between the voices in any audiobook. But Kramer’s big problem is a complete unfamiliarity with the pronunciation of Italian words. He stresses the wrong syllable all the time, as if he was reading Spanish words, and at one point pronounces the word “che?” (“what?”) as “chay,” rather than “kay,” completely changing its meaning. With all the Italian words Buford uses – too many, really, since they’re not necessary to tell the story – Kramer’s butchering of the language becomes a huge distraction.

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