In one now-classic study, Colleen Rand, an obesity researcher at the University of Florida, asked 47 formerly fat men and women whether they would rather be obese again or have some other disability. Every one of them said they would rather be deaf of have dyslexia, diabetes, bad acne or heart disease than be obese again. Ninety-one percent said they would rather have a leg amputated. Eighty-nine percent would rather be blind. One said, “When you’re blind, people want to help you. No one wants to help you when you’re fat.”

What Kolata goes on to prove quite convincingly is this fascinating book is that our hatred comes from the idea that fat can be controlled and managed, that obese individuals are just weak, undisciplined, lazy or have some other mental block or trauma that keeps them fat. They’re just not trying hard enough, right? Well, Kolata says, “Wrong.”

The data in study after study were consistent — obese people had no unique psychiatric abnormalities. Some had problems, such as anxiety, depression and mood disorders, but in every instance the psychiatric problems were just a prevalent in people of normal weight.

“Most obese people are no different than non-obese people,” Stunkard says. They are not eating because they are depressed or because they have a pathological relationship with food or to their parents. If all you had was their scores on psychological tests — if you could not actually see the people you were testing — you would not be able to decide who was fat and who was not.

Some scientists suggest an intriguing hypothesis. The origins of people’s recent weight gains may have little to do with willpower, or lack of it, or with today’s social customs to snack and eat on the run of with any other popular belief. Instead, they say, we may be a new, heavier human race and our weight may have been set by events that took place very early in life, maybe prenatally.

Scientists know that animals and people have a range of weights that they can comfortably sustain. Each person’s range is different, but any weight much above or below a person’s range is almost impossible to maintain. Scientists also know from animal studies that weight as an adult can be affected by early nutrition or infections. They even know that the brain circuits that control eating are modeled and remodeled in mice early in life and again in adolescence. Maybe, these researchers say, something happened early in life — better nutrition, vaccines to provide freedom from viral infections that plagued children of previous generations, antibiotics to cure infections like strep throat or pneumonia — that precipitated changes in the brain’s control over weight.

While she delves into some complex scientific material, Kolata manages to keep the book accessible. It’s both fascinating and heartbreaking to follow the journey of some of her interviewees, most of whom are either on or between some diet or another, their entire lives revolving around the number on the scale. It’s wonderful to see someone admit that those with a BMI considered obese are often healthier than their skinny counterparts, that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with some extra weight. And it’s depressing to learn that, at the end of the day, science has proven that diets are ultimately unsuccessful and extreme diets can actually change your body chemistry for the worse.

Maybe the lesson is that we’ve been looking for answers to the obesity epidemic in all the wrong places. At the very least, it does not help to tell people that they are fat, much too fat, and that they just have to eat less and exercise more. After all, as (other dieters in the book) mentioned, even Oprah gained her weight back, she with all her money and her personal chef and her personal trainer, and with the whole world watching.

I’d like to think also that as the population gets fatter, there might be a rethinking of the risks of a few extra pounds. When health data have not supported alarmist cries of a medical disaster in the making, could a society perhaps let up on the beleaguered fat people?

I hope so. They can start by putting aside their preconceived notions and picking up the book.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars – Hardcover book club reading

Determined but uncertain about maintaining her own mental equilibrium, Norah boldly commits herself to three different facilities up and down the socioeconomic ladder, and brings to life an astonishing range of tragic and comic inhabitants of these wards. We are with her as she navigates the byzantine rituals of the urban hospital with its overburdened staff and underattended, near indigent patient population dazed on a buffet of powerful psychotropic drugs; a calm private clinic in the Midwest, populated largely by lonely middle-class substance abusers on court referrals; and, finally, an alternative-therapy private clinic, opposed to medication with a focus on human process.

Revealing as to the human psyche, the state of mental health care in our country, the prevalence of often dangerous pharmaceuticals as well as the author’s personal history and emotional struggles, life inside the loony bin is very well rendered in a can’t-look-away-from-the-car-accident manner. Craziness fascinates us, craziness scares us, and in the end, craziness is something that we “other,” drawing a line between it and us that’s thinner than most people imagine.

But you, reader, are the sane person reading this now, and you are thinking that these people on this page are not you. By no means are they you. They are the other, put away, out of sight — and yes I, too, laugh at this expression newly now — out of mind.

It is a significant expression in this context — out of sight, out of mind. But out of whose mind? Who is out of whose mind? The lunatic is out of his mind and so we put him out of sight — not because being out of sight is necessarily good for someone who is out of his mind, but because when the lunatic is out of sight he is out of our minds. We can forget him, forget his resemblance to us, forget he is a member of the family. Thus he is made into not just “an,” but “the” other.

But as I mentioned, this, by the author’s admission, is not an objective account of anything, but becomes…

… the very persoanl account of a bona fida patient’s search for rescue and, if possible, a touch of lasting self-awareness along the way. The journalist and the patient are both me: one doing a job, or trying to; the other slouching, in her own time, toward bedlam; and each, by turns, pushing the other up and along or dragging her down.

This is non fiction that flies by, that you can’t put down, that you don’t want to be interupted from. It’s a book that anyone with experience personally or tangentially with mental issues or anyone with a healthy curiousity about mental health won’t regret picking up.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

I also, in the interest of full disclosure, like our current president, voted for him and eat arugula, so of course my enjoyment of this book stems partially from those preferences. But the other part of me that enjoyed this read comes from the way Obama describes himself intellectualizing as I do, dissecting himself and his place in the world in a way that both made sense and entertained me.

Half black and half white, growing up among the white part of his family, he has no one to teach him how to be black. No one can tell him how to exist in both worlds, or if that’s even possible. And so this book is the story of his journey to become comfortable in his skin and find his place — his unique, personal place — in society at large.

From his college days:

The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture has individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselvs in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us of the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every day of the lives — although that’s what we tell ourselves — but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.

Don’t you know who I am? I’m an individual!

No, he’s not a Pulitzer Prize-winning genius writer, but he does know how to tell a straight-forward, descriptive and interesting story. (As a writer, I know that’s quite a feat itself. I’ve met and helped many who couldn’t.) But I wasn’t really in this book for its literary value. I wanted to know Obama’s story in detail. I wanted to know how he came to be the man he is, if he’s for real. And because I admire him, I wanted to know how he came to be the person he is today. Without being dry or boring, this book certainly quenched my thirst.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – Vacation book-club reading

Not that it was bad by any means. It was amusing and witty, typical of Sedaris, but let’s just say that it was a little forced, as if a publisher with a  five-book deal wanted No. 5 already and was breathing down his neck. As if all the stories of his childhood and every interesting anecdote of his life had been thought, re-thought and mined for publication long ago. What we’re left with is the day-to-day journal of a very funny man, just not the same funny man as he’s been in the past.

Can’t blame him. After all, he’s had more than 40 years to gather those best-ever stories. Now he’s an adult, and he’s not about to take guitar lessons/become a performance artist/come out of the closet/stop smoking by taking a $20,000 dollar, three-month trip to Japan ever again, now is he?

If you’re a Sedaris fan, it’s still worth picking up, like checking in with an old and beloved friend. But if you’re not a Sedaris fan, start earlier with “Me Talk Pretty” or “Naked.” Then you’ll fall in love, breeze through his whole series and wind up back here, where you’ll be mildly disappointed without losing faith in the author all together.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – Book club vacation reading

Fhew. Now that I got that uncomfortable subject out of way, let’s breeze right on to the sex, shall we? This book, which was amalgamated from a blog written in 2003 and 2004, is exactly as advertised: It’s the daily journal of a London-based, high-class “working girl,” a legal profession in the UK. And it’s sallatious and fun and silly and sad and witty, all of what you’d expect. And just as you’d expect, there’s a good dash of kinkiness thrown in just for kicks — HIGH kicks with those legs. Very “Sex in the City” in its tone, it never jumps over the line into downright crudeness, but remains a light and entertaining read.

Not much more than that, though. After all, it was a blog. There’s no character arc or plot development. There’s really no point. It simply ends, and that is that, which is rather disappointing. I’m told — by the boldface advertisement on the cover — that Showtime is making a series out of the concept, and I’m thinking that’s a much better venue for this material than literature.

Still, sometimes you need an easy, breezy and naughty story. At least I do now and then, so in that context it’s worth the 290 pages.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

It won a National Book Award, and I respect that. But I hope the world will still respect me in the morning when I label this one…

Rating: 0 – Unfinished business

“In 1921, the National Census had published. The figures were devastating … In England and Wales there were 19,803,022 females and only 18,082,220 males — a difference of a million and three-quarters. This was far worse than predicted. Already, since the end of the war, newspapers had been running scare headlines about ‘Our Surplus Girls’. By February 1920 the Manchester Evening News was running a report on Dr Murray Leslie’s alarming analysis of post-war demographics, in ‘Husband Hunting — Tragedy of England’s Million Surplus Women’. The Daily Mail caught the story, with ‘A Million Women Too Many — 1920 Husband Hunt’. But with the publication of the 1921 Census the figure doubled overnight, and the Mail’s proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, felt able to publicly refer to ‘Britain’s problem of two million superfluous women’. The phrase — with all its insinuating baggage — refused to go away.”

Much awaited, the book didn’t disappoint in the least with Nicholson’s mostly anecdotal tales of these “bach girls” (pronounced batch, as in bachelorette), surplus women, spinsters and old maids. Yes, there were a lot of negative titles for these unfortunate ladies, who not only had to experience their brothers, fiances and neighbors being killed in foreign lands, but also had to find a way to go through life without a mate — and often have society blame THEM for not following the traditional route of marriage and babies. There simply weren’t enough men to go around, so what was a girl to do? According to Nicholson, lots!

Surplus women studied at the best universities (where they could complete courses, but not receive degrees). They could get office jobs as clerks and secretaries (where they were paid a pittance compared to men doing the same jobs). They could fall into the guilt trap of taking care of aging, ailing relatives. They could set up house with a sister or a friend and become uncomfortably fond of their pets. They could go lesbian. They could go to the colonies in search of single men. They could live financially and emotionally meager existences. Some did, of course.

However, Singled Out chooses not to focus on what these women missed out on or the negative aspects of their spinsterhood. Instead, we learn about women who became stockbrokers, archaeologists, publishers, authors, diplomats. We meet women who took lovers, traveled the world, adopted children, devoted themselves to politics or public service. In fact, these single women transformed society in one short generation. Unable to ignore such a big population, the patriarchy was forced to relax. Women not only had careers and options and freedom, they were eventually accepted for having them. They got the vote. They got respect. They achieved things that it might have taken women a century to accomplish and changed Britain’s conception of women, setting the stage for the women’s rights movement/feminism of the next generation. According to Nicholson, many came to see being a wife and mother as the real cage, a boring existence they were glad to escape. (And some wives shared their opinion!)

And all because their future husbands were killed before they could ever meet.

Bittersweet and often touching, the stories of these women were fascinating reading, sad yet empowering. Singled Out (like Sin in the Second City or Dorothy Parker’s biography — Gee, am I a bit of a feminist, you think?) is the kind of non-fiction I can read all day, without the pressure of a classroom or a syllabus to MAKE me do it.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

This calm, measured and thoughtful book, however, is anything but incendiary in my opinion. Granted, my opinion is firmly in the pro-choice camp, so perhaps it’s easy for me to say that. But Susan Wickland’s story could make a more convincing case for safe, legal abortion than doubtful readers out there may expect. After suffering a horrific abortion as a young woman and then becoming a mother, Wickland became a doctor later in life, specializing in women’s health issues. She had to fight for the right to learn the abortion procedure, thinking that it was a necessary thing to know when you dealt with women who, you know, get pregnant and might want to, gee, have a perfectly legal procedure done to stop that pregnancy from progressing.

She had little idea what she was getting into. Because of the high personal risk of the job, very few doctors are willing to step into the shoes of “abortion provider.” They’re stalked, libeled, threatened — as are their families. From 1977 until 2005, these doctors have seen seven murders, 17 attempted murders, 52 bombings, 100 acid attacks, 3 kidnappings and 480 cases of stalking. Needless to say, few have the courage to provide the services anyway and more women than you would ever guess are thankful for them every year. And Wickland? Well, she even had the courage to provide services to the very women protesting outside her door, who would then use privacy protections to be out on the front lines the next day, harassing other women in the same situation.

“Smile: Your mom chose life!” read several billboards around my city, the very conservative town of Colorado Springs. These ads make me very angry, because they assume that every pregnancy is potentially unwanted, that women make arbitrary decisions about such important things. (Should I dye my hair red? Should I have this baby? How insulting to our intelligence. No wonder some think they have the right to make choices FOR us flippant women.) The experiences Wickland describe have nothing to do with women using the procedure as birth control or making offhand choices. These are real women making hard choices, women who would have no where else to turn except dangerous, back-alley, illegal providers. These are the victims of rape, abuse and incest. They are women who don’t want to bring their child into the wrong situation. They are women who know they aren’t ready. Women who don’t need to share their motivations with anyone, really, just as they need not make if or what form of birth control they use, what career choices they make, who they love public. It’s a hard choice no doubt, but one they have the right to make.
Wickland writes: “Abortion is about life: quality of life for infants, children, and adults. Everywhere and in every sense of the word. Life, not death.”

If you don’t believe this, or don’t believe that the above could be true for ANYone in ANY situation, read the book. Perhaps it will change your mind.

Chicago — the second largest American city at the turn of the 20^th century — full of marvels like horseless carriages, trolleys, skyscrapers and modern medicine. But also overflowing with immigrants, shysters, con men, crooked politicians, bribed policemen and, of course, prostitutes. By the tally of the 1911 Vice Commission, there were no less than 1,020 brothels in Chicago and 5,000 full-time prostitutes, and the Levee (the red-light district) raked in more than $16 million per year, which would amount to $328 million in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars.

Enter Minna and Ada Everleigh and the Everleigh resort. (Yes, yes, the ever-lay club. The pun is intended.) These two madams set out to elevate the profession, which they see as a necessary service to male society, a sex that they not-so-secretly disdain. Their harlots are fed gourmet meals, dressed opulently, cared for by a respectable physician, taught to recite Balzac and made never to drug, rob or otherwise con their clients. The Prince of Prussia drank champagne out of the slipper of a Butterfly, as the Everleigh’s harlots were known, and any visitor to Chicago (who had the money, of course) wanted to see the inside of the sisters’ carpeted, gold-plated, perfumed bordello.

But this was 20^th century America and the moral reform movement was already at hand, the same movement that would pass the Mann Act to prevent white slavery and make alcohol illegal for more than a decade. And so the free spirits of the Levee district and their bacchanalian attitudes clash with the street preachers, the stern lady do-gooders and the fiery spirit of moral uplift. I think we all know who wins.

Even if the reader knows that the brothel doors will one day be closed, Abbott is a masterful story teller. Never dry or dusty, she brings the lives of these ladies off of the page with sensory details, real dialog pulled from first-hand accounts and a burlesque sense of humor that it’s difficult not to share.

“Imagine yourself,” Bell (a Chicago-based preacher and reformer) wrote, “In this awful district with Satan and all his cohorts let loose, seemingly. The cursing of men and the screeching of dope-filled and half drunken women; the banging of electrical pianos; the honking of autos; the throngs of young men going like mad into these houses of horror, where the air is reeking with the fumes of dope and tobacco and millions of germs; where women are in their scanty attire with painted faces and colored and false hair, with their honeyed words and foolish prattling, calling and alluring men into their fearful clutches and then to awful sin and death perhaps!”

Ah yes, just imagine. How sordidly and wretchedly fun to read and imagine.

File this under “business,” not biography. The later I like and the former I’d rather us as a coaster than subject my fragile, creative head to its numbing influence.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars – Mediocre

In other words, portions of the book are pure fan-to-fan fiction. If you don’t share the same heartfelt passions for particular gods of indie rock, you won’t truly get what the man is laying down, dig? And given indie fans’ (all music fans?) tendency to bash the well-loved indie bands of others as “too trendy” or “knock-offs” to make their own favorites seem more cool, he alienates a few readers, too. (I mean what’s with the animosity, or perhaps just indifference towards Modest Mouse, Johnny boy? Huh?!)

But I’ll give the man props for this: He made me REALLY listen to the music of The Shins. Outside of the ubiquitous Garden State Soundtrack, that is. While Seller’s prose didn’t disappoint me (let’s get that straight), it didn’t wow me either, but lyrics like this from The Shins (Sleeping Lessons, Wincing the Night Away) do:

Eviscerate your fragile frame
And spill it out on the ragged floor
A thousand different versions of yourself

And if the old guard still offend
They got nothing left on which you depend
So enlist every ounce
Of your bright blood
And off with their heads
Jump from The hook

You’re not obliged to swallow anything you despise
See, those unrepenting buzzards want your life

And they got no right
As sure as you have eyes
They got no right

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – Vacation book club selection

Update: I can’t upload the song here, as per The Boyfriend’s little reminder of legality (party pooper!). Check out the link in the comment below for the YouTube video of Sleeping Lessons.

It’s a great biography that gave me a lot of insight about the country of Jordan and their unique role and perspective in the region, and it also fleshed out and humanized the role of women in politics in the Middle East. While I wouldn’t say Queen Noor (Noor meaning light in Arabic) is a hero of mine or any such thing, I would say her life story is a valuable addition to my view of the world and the people who inhabit it. Oh, and she’s really purdy, too, especially for a woman that’s my mother’s age.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

While she goes into detail about how to make bread for a hundred and her school schedule, even that her brothers hoard John Deere tractor catalogs like other boys do dirty magazines (my words, not hers), she doesn’t really go into the things I want to know. Such as do they talk about the birds and the bees? Is enjoying sex a crime because the act in purely for reproduction? Are there illegal drug rings skulking around the barns in the dead of night? You see, that’s why I couldn’t be a Hutterite, that dirty little mind of mine.

So while I enjoyed the book, I wanted more. I wanted the truth that didn’t have to be read by her mother before it went to press. Also, the narrative style was a bit choppy given that the book is simply a compendium of her previous columns, not a cohesive work. I guess all that bread baking keeps a girl too busy to re-write from scratch. Still, a really fun read. I think I finished the whole book over the course of an airplane trip with a layover.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

“What fresh hell is this?” Such was the typical, pessimistic attitude of Parker when the doorbell rang or something new happened to interrupt the old. She was known to like you to your face, and rip you to shreds when you back was turned. She had but a few friends, but those loyal, and an on-again-off-again success monetarily. As in the newspapers, gossip columns and magazines of the day — she was one of the first writers, and a continuing one, in The New Yorker magazine — she is still remembered for her biting one-liners. A sampling:

• When told that President Coolidge was dead, she asked, “Well, how can you tell?”
• A friend of Dorothy’s was described as never being able to hurt a fly. She replied, “Not if it was buttoned up.”
• At one of her first literary jobs at Vogue, Dorothy wrote captions for fashion pictures. One, which almost ran before it was caught, read, “From these foundations of the autumn wardrobe, one may learn that brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

But her personal life was turbulent, and included abortion, two divorces, buckets — if not barrels, if not ships — of alcohol, Communism and other then-disdained political choices, and chronic financial neediness thanks to a drive towards charity and the need to spend every penny in her hand, when she had it.

One of my favorite of her magazine poems, many of which she came to think of as vapid and silly in her later life, spoke of marital problems:

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying —
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

It’s a long read (414 pages in my copy), but worth it if you have an urge to find out more about this “Wit.” (I’d like to know, how do you get the title of “Wit” anyway? Is it possible in the 21st century?) However, the story of her life is darker and deeper than her cutting words. The biographer did a great job, but her poetry and short fiction depict her personality, too, in a much more dynamic way… a more true way, from a certain point of view. Besides, it kind of depressing to know that her ashes are still lying unclaimed in some attorney’s office in New York.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

However, rather than taking the young boys in and shielding them from further involvement in war, these soldiers offer the boys a choice — fight as soldiers by the troop’s side or leave the town into the hands of surrounding rebels, who will likely take them for governmental collaborators. Each boy receives a small dose of training, a large gun and a daily supply of drugs and violence: marijuana, cocaine and a substance they call “brown brown,” a mixture of gunpowder and drugs, plus war movies such as Rambo played on a gasoline-generator-run projector every night.

With plain, simply and un-fussy language, Ishmael tells his whole story. And he doesn’t need any frilly text — his story is so compelling and unbelievable that the reader hangs on every plain and simple word. The book is a journey through the hell of war, about how twisted ideals, adults and circumstances can wrench away childhood, an article that is impossible to regain once lost. This book is about how a human in extraordinary circumstances survived, and how such a person forgives themselves afterwards for how they enacted that survival.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

Wolfe speaks in this book about Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and one of the founders of the psychedelic movement, and Kesey’s group of friends and fellow travelers who name themselves The Merry Pranksters. They’re the first to travel the country on a magical mystery tour (yes, before the Beatles) and one of the first to try to make acid and the ensuing mental expansion related to the drug a cultural and philosophical movement.

Tune in, drop out. Tune into the wholeness, the interconnected nature of the universe and drop out of square (meaning live to day to day with your head down) society. So long Mom, Dad, John and Jane Doe. Hello the true world, which is more than your parents with their antiquated notions of what is right and wrong, what the future should be, with their stuck-in-a-rut daily lives. In this book, you begin to see the “hippie” notion of expanding yourself rather than fitting into a conformist mold, or seeing the world in a new way, a spiritual journey of discovery rather than an oft-traveled path of marriage, career and death.

The Pranksters spread the message of LSD through parties known as Acid Tests, which in the media, are often thought of as multi-media experiences (think light shows, trippy music and such) that replicate the acid experience without the actual drug. But yeah right, the LSD was there! On the other hand, Wolfe brilliantly recreates the acid mindset, varying his prose and descriptions, making the reader feel as if they truly have the trip without the drugs.

It’s a great history of the sex, drugs and rock and roll of the time period told from the naive point of view of the time period, the perspective that they were doing something that had never been done, feeling emotions that had never been acted upon. And though the world has changed since the time the book was written, that idealism and spirituality shines through. It’s a fun jaunt back in social history, and it’s even more fun now that we are older, wiser and knowledgeable about the effects of the “hippie” movement.

While I didn’t imbibe the LSD, I feel I have learned a small bit of truth about history, about how it felt to be present in a certain time and place in American history. And, most importantly, I have been entertained.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

No really. Listen: I recently read a soft-core lesbian romance, some military big wig got in hot water for calling homosexual acts immoral and I recently attended a function where the Colorado Gay and Lesbian Fund was a main sponsor and was honored. There were more instances of homosexuality being hyperactive on my radar, too, that I can’t think of right now.

Anyway, so imagine my sense of coincidence and confluence when I opened this book, which got onto my list thanks to a review in Time magazine. It is the tale of a young girl, a lesbian, coming to grips with herself and her strange, dysfunctional family who happen to run a small-town funeral home. (I know, it’s all very Six Feet Under.) The funeral home = the FUN home. It was just all too ironic given the strange theme of gay-ness permeating my atmosphere recently. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Really.)
There was also something incredibly unique about this book, however: the fact that it is not only words but illustrations. In fact, it reads like a comic book from pane to pane with detailed black and white ink illustrations. I love something that blows my expectations out of the water like that and the technique was a breath of fresh air, as were the drawings, which were neither the overly masculinized comic stereotype (think large breasts, bulging pecs and muzzle flashes) or all sappy and girly comic stereotype (think puppies and Disney cartoons). They were realistic, even lewd or awkward when necessary, and the comic style made the book read incredibly fast.

Allison Bechdel tells a very interesting story using this method, the story of her life in fact. And despite my introduction, homosexuality is not its only theme or value. There’s also the power of family and of genetics, the struggle of the individual to choose and strive toward their own future, the universal themes of literature in everyday life and the struggle to make sense of the past, a struggle that is not as neat and tidy as the frames of a comic book. If your interested in Bechdel, you can check out her work via the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – A book club selection for vacation reading

Seriously, yum. Well, so her recipes aren’t anything that I am hopping up and down with anticipation to try. They’re rather simple and 1950s Betty Crocker / add-a-can-of-cream-of-something-soup-and-you’re-all-set meals (see The Gallery of Regrettable Food). There are a few I’ll try, including the cheese ball. And while the book is incredibly funny, her wit isn’t as honed or sophisticated as her brother’s. Quite intentionally, I think. That’s just who she is: blunt, raunchy, retro, slightly morbid/grotesque and obsessed with her rabbit, Dusty, who has the run of her apartment.

Still, I stand by my “yum” because it’s a rare book on hospitality you can read from cover to cover, especially when you are not even planning a party. The best helpful hints?

• Fill your medicine cabinet with marbles before you have guests over so you can sound out the nosy partygoers.
• Pre-crack all of your liquor bottles. No one wants to be the first to dive in.
• In case of a drunk staying the night, make the guest bed with a rubber sheet.
• Sell unwanted items for 25 cents to all takers, clearing out your junk and giving guests a fun souvenir.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

Sure, I was desperate, but I was also immensely satisfied by this collection of clinical tales by Dr. Sacks, a professor of neurology and author of several other books, including Awakenings (which, yes, is also a good movie with Robin Williams). In this book, Sacks attempts to explain — at least in part — the unremarked-upon right side of the brain, which is often thought of as the more primitive side. Yet, “it is the right hemisphere which controls the crucial powers of recognizing reality which every living creature must have in order to survive.” Disorders of the right are incredibly difficult for the average person to imagine. After all, how would it be to live with:

• The ability to hear perfectly, but not understand words
• The ability to understand words, but not tone/inflection/meaning
• The ability to see, but not process those images into faces/pictures (Hence the title story)
• The ability to feel direct stimulation, but not make your own muscles move

In addition to describing what he knows about these patients’ fascinating worlds, Sacks also delves into both mental “deficits” and “excesses,” savantism, mental handicaps, seizure-stimulated reminiscence and more, all the while linking these stories to the common theme of the human experience. What is “functioning”? What is identity? Can we more flexibly define the first? Can we divine if and how various patients, with various challenges and odd inner worlds, hold onto the second?

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

As with quite a few authors of books I enjoy, Buford makes me green with jealousy–In a good way, I promise. He is a writer and former fiction editor of The New Yorker whose life changed when he did a profile on Mario Batali, the Italian-American chef made famous by the Food Network. (Red hair, baggy patterned pants, kitchen clogs, Iron Chef – You know who I’m talking about.) Always a foodie, Bill decided to go undercover to witness the life of a kitchen first hand at Mario’s famous restuarant Babbo’s, where he is so drawn into the culture of food, the chaos of the kitchen, the satisfaction of working with his hands, etc. that he quits the illustrious day job to persue his newfound addiction, to continue his education in the true nature of food.

Hey Ma! Wanna know what I (via Buford) learned?

1. That Mario Batali is quite a party animal (drinking a case of wine in an evening, admiting to partaking in the cocaine explosion of the 1980s, cussing like sailor and making racy comments to women the moment the camera is turned).
2. That you should never order pasta after 10 p.m. (Noodle water is starchy thanks to the pasta, and makes an excellent, flavorful thickener for sauces… and therefore the water doesn’t get changed. Ever. Well, until the next day, after it has acquired a purple hue. Purple?)
3. That random people often stick their fingers in your food before it arrives at your table, and that you should probably thank them for caring so much.
4. That eggs in pasta dough and tomatoes in Italian sauce are historical landmarks in the history of… everything, and that they can be tracked down and footnoted if you care enough. Buford does care enough. Be careful. He’ll make you care, too.
5. That you can buy a whole pig without the USDA getting involved if you buy it while it’s alive.
6. That everyone should drop everything and learn a dying art, reclaim the disappearing past. (And if not that, at least eat those dying arts.)
7. That French food is just ripped-off Italian food, brought over the Alps by that loose-lipped Catherine de Medicis.

And after this journey of a thousand miles, Buford taught me – or at least reiterated my own thoughts on the matter – that:

“For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, having cooked with the seasons and had a farmer’s knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved traditions of preparing food down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don’t have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and it’s true, those who do have it tend to be professionals–like chefs. But I didn’t want the knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human.”

And no, I don’t think that’s a spoiler. I think it’s good incentive to go pick up a copy.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars – A hardcover book club selection

]]> http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/194/feed 0 http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/193 http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/193#comments Fri, 02 Feb 2007 02:56:39 +0000 Kate http://www.katejonuska.com/2007/02/01/my-life-in-france-julia-child-with-alex-prudhomme/ There’s a lot I didn’t know about Julia Child. Sure, we all know her for her boulebaise and buerre blanc sauce; we all know her tall, squarish shape and the familiar (and oft-imitated), sliding cadence of her voice. But this book fleshes out her six-foot frame with the flesh of a real woman–her history, her love of her husband and the unexpected way she found her true calling in her 40s.

Speaking only school girl French and lacking the knowlege of what something as simple as a shallot was (a small type of onion, for those not in the know), Julia arrived in France with Paul, her husband of two years (she was 37 and he 47 when they married). Paul worked for the USIS managing government exhibits that would facilitate artisitc and cultural communication between the French and the Americans during the post-WWII Truman Plan era. Their first meal off the boat was truly one to remember, one that opened Julia’s eyes wide and set her about mastering this strange and beautiful, surprising art of French cooking. Though it is amazing for me to think of, her husband Paul–a foodie by nature–once thought there was no hope for his wife in the kitchen, and he was surprised and pleased as she began to improve thanks to her studies at the Cordon Bleu cooking school and the help of their gourmand friends.

This book doesn’t cover Julia’s whole life. It only encompasses the time she spent abroad, and it includes many pictures her artistic husband snapped and snippets of the many letters they sent home to family and friends. Therefore, her television career is only covered where it overlapped with her travels, which makes the book refreshingly humble and human. Written with the help of her great-nephew, Alex, Julia’s personality still manages to shine through with her stereotypical insertions (i.e. Hooray!, Yuck, or Hmmm). The writing style may be simple and straight-forward–nothing to get all excited about–but the simple, straight-forward story the words tell keep you involved from cover to cover.

If you are a foodie of any calliber, this book is a meal that is worthy of Julia’s unquestionable culinary seal of approval. Devour it as you would an excellent canard a l’orange and, as she was so famous for saying, Bon Appetit!

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars – a hardcover book club selection

]]> http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/193/feed 0 http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/169 http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/169#comments Thu, 28 Dec 2006 23:24:03 +0000 Kate http://www.katejonuska.com/2006/12/28/the-gallery-of-regrettable-food-james-lileks/ Once upon a time, James Lilecks moved to Fargo, North Dakota. Upon that time, his mother was greeted by the neighborhood “Welcome Wagon” with, among other things, a cookbook sponsored by the North Dakota Durum Wheat Commision called Specialties of the House. She glanced at it, shuddered and promptly shoved it into some lightless corner. Once upon more current times, Lileks, now a writer at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, stumbled upon said book, became sick to his stomach at the sight of the “specialties it contained,” and began a personal collection of regrettable vintage cookbooks. Eventually, he created a whole new world–including Lileks.com and this fabulous little book I got for Christmas.

No, you don’t need a passport to travel in this world. You just need a snarky sense of humor, a haughty (but light-hearted) contempt for advertising culture, a love of all things campy or retro (the colors turquoise and olive green, boomerangs as a decorative shapes, etc.) and, most importantly, a strong stomach. The food in this world, I admit, is rather bad. Do you know what an aspic is? Ha! You do now!



Something about those poor vegetables suspended in transparent gelatin, space explorers frozen in zero grav, is so very space age. Well, what was once considered space age. Learn new vocabulary words and much more with Lileks as your witty host. Find out what dish he calls, “pressed shank braised with smoker’s phlegm” or “Ring O’ Rectum Flan.” Dicover the power of ketchup and 7Up, the A1 guide to better sex, why smart people eat toast, and how to entertain guests at the late hour of–GASP!–10:00 p.m. Make fun! Make fun and have fun until your heart’s content or the book is finished–which happens way too soon. (Luckily there are loads more hours entertainment on www.Lileks.com.)
Says Lileks:

“We seem to think we’re the first people to roll our eyes at the commercial culture; we’re not. Even then, no one believed something just because the corporate cookbook said so. But these books don’t presume our disbelief–and that’s what makes them seem so honest and simple. The quality of the lie is purer; the nature of the fib is cheerful and straightforward. Did my mom believe any of these things would make her life perfect? Of course not. I think she kept these books for another reason. Some people smoked, some took pills, some ran to keep off the weight. Mom just looked at the pictures. The recipes kept her slim and lovely for one reason: she never made them.”

Perhaps it’s just bad photography. Maybe it is the attempts of industry to seep into the kitchens and recipe boxes of a new generation of post-War housefraus. Perhaps the use of new, modern food products and techniques was more important than the human palate. Who knows? But whatever the cause of all this disaster, I’m sure glad I am looking at a book rather than a steaming hot plate of some of this glop my mother or other innocent female (always female, you know) household chef tried to force down my gullet. Ummmm, I’m not really hungry. I had a big lunch, you see. And I sure am thankful for my darling Jen who gifted me this little gem of fun and fabulousness, inscribing it as follows:

You have so many pretty, tasty, dignified, and sane cooking mags and tomes, I think it’s time you had something like this. Regrettable? Yes. Awesomely hilarious? Also yes. Maybe someday you’ll invite me over for a heapin helpin of “Harlequin Spinach” or some kind of horrible aspic. Until then, enjoy!

Oh, I have. As for the aspic, well, do they still sell clear gelatin to send modern veggie slices into null grav? I shall have to scour the local grocer and you will be the first one to get an invitation when I do.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

]]> http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/169/feed 0 http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/147 http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/147#comments Tue, 14 Nov 2006 04:26:56 +0000 Kate http://www.katejonuska.com/2006/11/13/dress-your-family-in-corderoy-and-denim-david-sedaris/ Witty gay man tells stories: A great cocktail party or a great book by David Sedaris, whose talent is for taking the ordinary or the embarassing and turning the tables, painting over the black white and gray with a rainbow of colors. Though he hates the rainbow flag being associated with “alternate lifestyles” (read: alternate sexualities) and swears he wasn’t asked to vote on that one.

I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much as Me Talk Pretty One Day (read that review here). The stories in this book were more “a day in the life” tales, whereas the other colelction (his first, I believe) were more the stories he had been accumulating over a lifetime, refining and analyzing to comic perfection. The cast of characters, which includes Sedaris’ unique family and his long-time boyfriend, is still both funny and human, light and yet often moving.

Case in point. One story regards his visit to his sister’s, where she vents the family-wide annoyance with Sedaris’ work and how it puts them on display for the world to see–at their most vulnerable, naked to their core personalities.

“We stopped for gas on the way home and were parking in front of her house when she turned to relate what I’ve come to think of as the quintessential Lisa story. ‘One time,’ she said, ‘one time I was out driving?’ The incident began with a quick trip to the grocery store and ended, unexpectantly, with a wounded animal stuffed into a pillowcase and held to the tailpipe of her car. Like most of my sister’s stories, it provoked a startling mental picture, capturing a moment in time when one’s actions seem both unimaginably cruel and completely natural. Details were carefully chosen and the pace built gradually, punctuated by a series of well-timed pauses. ‘And then… and then…’ She reached the inevitable conclusion and just as I started to laugh, she put her head against the steering wheel and fell apart. It wasn’t the gentle flow of tears you might release when recalling an isolated action or event, but the violent explosion that comes when you realize that all such events are connected, forming an endless chain of guilt and suffering.

I instinctively reached for the notebook I keep in my pocket and she grabbed my hand to stop me. ‘If you ever,’ she said, “ever repeat that story, I will never talk to you again.’

In the movie version of our lives, I would have turned to offer her comfort, reminding her, convincing her that the action she’d described had been kind and just. Because it was. She’s incapable of acting otherwise.

In the real version of out lives, my immediate goal was to simply to change her mind. ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘The story’s really funny, and, I mean, it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it.’

Your life, your privacy, your occasional sorow — it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it. Is this the brother I always was, or the brother I have become?”

Telling a story–telling a true story–can be a powerful thing, which is naturally why we love them so much, especially when someone like Sedaris is the story-teller. Those tales are real, real people, real circumstances… of someone who is not us, who we don’t feel bad about laughing at. In Sedaris’ case, though, he often makes sure we are laughing with him, with his family and friends. We laugh because we see ourselves there. And that is no mean feat.

Read this book. Read this book if, especially if, you don’t usually read books. It may just give you the bug.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

]]> http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/147/feed 0 http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/56 http://www.katejonuska.com/archives/56#comments Thu, 26 Oct 2006 19:02:00 +0000 Kate http://www.katejonuska.com/2006/10/26/the-burn-journals-brent-runyon/ So I received a reading list in the mail from a writer’s organization I used to be involved with at ASU, one that was too expensive for me to continue to be involved with, sadly. Sigh. They were putting together an online book club of sorts and, though I didn’t really feel like paying any money to be a part of such a group, I have no problem using their free list for my own purposes when I can’t seem to think of what I want to read next. This book was the October 2006 selection.

I guess I should have heeded the red flag in my head when I picked up the reserved book from my library and noticed a bright, green “Teen” label on the spine. Teen? I thought. Really? But I dismissed the thought because, after all, the recommendation had come from a reputable, college organization who wouldn’t have me reading childish bullshit. And there are quite a few good novels that cross the border between adult and chidlren’s lit. In my opinion, this did not turn out to be one of them.

The Burn Journals is the autobiographical tale of Brett Runyon, who set himself on fire when he was 15 in an attempt to commit suicide. He then survives a lengthy recovery and a change of heart about the purpose of his own life. While Brett is all grown up now, he still writes in the stilted and simplistic style of an adolescent boy, where he dismisses most emotional concerns in order to remember what then-popular program was on television. I think that Runyon is trying to explain why he would do such a thing with this book–I was wondering that too. Aside from some generic remarks about being “sad,” I am still wondering. There are emotional currents beneath the surface, currents I wanted to explore but that the narrator supresses (out of vulnerability? embarassment?).

It was like a real, teenage boy was stitting there telling me this story, brushing off my questions, trying to be cool about it all. And I wanted to wring his neck and have him tell me what was really going on, even if he didn’t quite know himself, even if the thoughts were incomplete and conclusionless. The book does serve a purpose within the genre so neatly stamped upon its spine: Every teen needs to know that they are not alone in having these nameless, unknowable, apocalyptic feelings and that, yes, they do pass. Things do get better, if not easier, with age because you have more control over yourself and your environment.

Runyon is doing the right thing reaching out to that group, especially the boys, who are under-represented in literature. But I have no idea why ASU would want me to read such a book or why they thought it would be worth discussing and critiquing as a group. I think the conversation would have only one basic thought and direction, something along the lines of:

“That was sad. I wish he hadn’t done that to himself. But now, he can help other kids not set themselves on fire, plus he graduated college. Good for him.”

To summarize, fire and depression bad. Helping others and sharing feelings good. Any questions?

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars = paperweight 

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