The title of the book refers  to the fact that humans, like some other primates, rats, pigs, chickens, bears, and a bunch of other species, are "omnivores," meaning that they (we) are generalized feeders that can eat both animal meats as well as plant foods for our nourishment. Other species have a more specialized diet, and can only survive by either eating meat (carnivores) or plant foods (herbivores).  While being an omnivore gives distinct advantages, allowing for a wider assortment of nourishment, the flip side of this increased number of choices is the problem or dilemma of what to eat.  Koala bears know they can eat eucalyptus leaves, and that's it.  Omnivores have to figure out what they can eat, making sure not to eat something poisonous, and also trying to determine the most nutritious animals or plants (or parts of these) so that they don't waste their limited capacity to consume and fill up on ones that aren't as very nourishing. Also, since we've developed culture, language, philosophy, and religion, we also need to deal with the decision of what we should eat.  Should we eat meat, for example, or is that "immoral."  Should we eat by the rules of kosher or halal?  Should we eat organic or conventional?  Should we eat something that authorities tell us will eventually be detrimental to our health despite no immediate or obvious danger?  These questions, although they perhaps only infrequently come up for most of us, are ones where we differ from other species, and Pollan demonstrates throughout the book that these decisions can be at times very difficult ones if one really chooses to contemplate them seriously.

 The first section of the book details industrial agriculture.  Specifically, it describes everything about the biggest single crop that the U.S. produces - corn, or more accurately the species zea mays.  The history of corn is a fascinating one as Pollan tells it.  He describes how in the last fifty or so years it has become part of an absurdist spiral that has bankrupted huge numbers of farmers, made the U.S. one of the most obese countries on the planet, and has usurped the vast majority of our arable land.  Most of this, Pollan writes, is due to government subsidies that compel farmers to grow corn over anything else.  Government regulations also favor corn, industrial methods of farming, and the largest of operations.  These regulations are no doubt affected by the lobbying dollars spent, and campaign contributions given, to government officials on behalf of the manufacturers of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and huge industrial farms. 

Corn has become such a cheap commodity, Pollan tells us, that new ways are constantly being devised to deal with the ever-increasing yields and surpluses that would otherwise rot on the silo floor.  So corn goes into all processed foods for various purposes - bulking, sweetening, preserving, or adding this or that quality.  Sweetening, of course, is one of its main functions, as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) found in soft drinks and desert foods and in many other non-desert foods that one wouldn't expect it to be in.  The escalating consumption of soft drinks with HFCS has been proposed by many as a major causal factor in the U.S. epidemic of obesity and diabetes - especially childhood diabetes.

In addition to corn, Pollan also tracks a steer he purchases that will eventually be slaughtered in a factory farm, or has the industry calls it, a Confined Area Feeding Operation, of CAFO.  The steer gets to have a happy few weeks with his mother, eating a natural diet of grass, after which he is shipped to the CAFO and subsequently made to eat a completely unnatural diet of corn, soy protein, and the fat from fellow slaughtered cows.  Corn is the carbohydrate of choice, of course, because it is so cheap, but also because it fattens the cow very quickly (not unlike how it fattens us), and produces the marbling affect that the USDA uses one of its two main variables in how it rates rate cuts of meat.  Such cows are routinely given antibiotics as part of their regular diet due to the unsanitary conditions of the industrial feed lot as well as their unnatural diet.  They are also pumped full of hormones to speed their growth even more.

Aside from the humanitarian, health, and economic issues involved, there is even one of geopolitics.  This is because industrial farming is based around petroleum, and according to Pollan accounts for 20% of the United States energy expenditure!  Not only does this industrial system involve shipping food products across the vast distances of our country, but the fertilizer itself requires a great deal of petroleum to produce.  While technology like genetically modified organisms and new farming methods have made the yield per acre of corn very high indeed, the efficiency of producing it in terms of resources needed is still low.  According to Pollan, it takes something like 50 calories of energy (mostly from oil) to produce a single food calorie from corn.  Of course, all this government subsidizing, and hence cheapening of corn, means that corn and the animals raised on it have become much cheaper to eat.  But, Pollan argues, there is a tremendous hidden cost, or costs, the two major ones being public health and our increased dependency on foreign oil.

The second part of the book is devoted to "industrial organic."  This might seem like a contradiction in terms and Pollan argues that this may be the case.  He describes the origins of the organic movement in the 60's and 70's and how part of the tenets of the movement was about "sustainability" - the ability for a farm to sustain itself without a significant amount of outside "inputs" - chemical fertilizer, pesticides, etc.)  The first farms of this movement grew haltingly, but eventually took off, mainly in the 1980's, after which their products were in such high demand by national chains like Costco that their demand could not be bet via the original ideals of organic movement.  So a more "industrial" approach was adopted.  Still, neither the animal feed nor the crops grown for human consumption via industrial organic can use chemical fertilizers or pesticides.  Antibiotics can only be used in case of an illness rather than as a preventative, and hormones cannot be used at all.  While this takes care of many of the problems of pure industrial farming, it does not deal with the problem of sustainability that was a major part of the movement's initial focus.

The third part of the book centers around the self-labeled "beyond organic," movement, which aims to reinvent the original movement's ideals, although some of its origins hark back even further to the 1940's, when industrial farming was really starting to get started, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides were starting to be used.  The movement preaches sustainability and imitating nature in the closest way possible within the confines of a managed system.  The practice is exemplified by the colorful farmer Joel Salatin in his 100-acre farm in Swoope, Virginia, about two and a half hours west of me here in the Washington DC suburbs.  Salatin has been a tireless crusader for the rights of small farmers like himself, who are often given the short end of the stick because they do not have the lobbying dollars of the industrial organic sector, let alone the non-organic industrial.  Pollan actually spends a week working at Salatin's farm, "Polyface ," for a week, involved in many of the aspects of farming, even including the slaughtering of chickens.  As Pollan describes it, just about everything at Polyface is sustainable.  The Cows graze on a given pasture and fertilize it with their manure, then they are moved to another pasture and chickens are brought in as a "clean up crew" eating the larva that has been growing in the manure.  The chickens in turn deposit their own waste, and in another day or two the grass has grown back to the point where another group of cows can be brought in to feed.  This cycle where different plants and animals participate in a system that helps all involved without the need for external materials or forces (except the farmer to move the animals) is such a huge savings in terms of fuel, raw materials, etc., that one can really see how incredibly wasteful  the industrial systems are in comparison.

The final part of the book concerns itself with Pollan's efforts to make a meal that he has hunted and gathered himself.  A friend mentors him both in hunting feral pigs as well as finding wild mushrooms.  Much of this portion of the book is devoted to Pollan's own philosophical and moral meanderings about whether he can justify killing an animal and eating it.  Pollan corresponds with Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation , and has debate both with Singer and with himself about whether eating meat is justifiable.  He does end up going on his hunt, and we get to experience the exhilaration that this brings, as well as the disgust when it comes time to dress his kill.  Foraging for mushrooms, does not elicit any moral dilemmas, but does provide some interesting information about an organism completely separate from both that of the animal and plant kingdoms, and one which we apparently know comparatively little about.

On the whole, The Omivore's Dilemma is a fascinating book that will make many people rethink their entire relationship with food.  The vast majority of us think little about food other than perhaps the cost, the calorie content, the taste, and occasionally the number of grams of fat or carbohydrate contained in it.  This book provides some great insights into aspects of the food chain that most of us know little about, perhaps enough to prompt those who read it to start thinking and caring how the food on their plate got there enough to ask more questions about that food, be it from a grocery store or a restaurant.  Perhaps some will even start to demand more from the restaurants and food shops they patronize.  And perhaps some will even ask themselves more about what they are willing to sacrifice in an effort to eat what they think will be healthy for them, the country, and the planet.

As much as I enjoyed The Omnivore's Dilemma, I did have a couple of problems with the book, and I'm apparently not alone, given some of the reviews on Amazon.com .  Let me first mention that I listened to this book as an audio book downloaded from Audible.com , so my experience is, I'm sure. slightly different from those reading the book in paper form.  Nonetheless, one of the main complaints about the book I would have to agree with - I think Pollan could have gotten his point across within 3/4 of the pages it actually took, perhaps even less.  The first parts about industrial non-organic,  and industrial organic, are very informational.  In the third part, Pollan puts himself into the story, which in itself is fine and gives us some of his personal insights by letting us experience what he did on the farm, but at a certain point, especially around the issues of killing, Pollan becomes so entangled in his own conflicting emotions and tortured thinking about it, that eventually gets repetitive and you feel like you are reading the diary of a tortured soul.  This continues and perhaps even worsens in the final part of the book, where Pollan debates vegetarianism with himself and with Singer, tries to deal with the guilt over having fun while hunting and killing his pig and his revulsion during the dressing of the animal.  Although these moral musings aren't prevalent in the chapters on hunting for mushrooms, Pollan seems to find other things to wax philosophic about, fluffing the pages out way beyond what they should be, especially at the end of a long book.

Aside from the length issue and some inaccuracies and inconsistencies pointed out by other reviewers on Amazon, my other major issue with Pollan's book is one that might not be an issue for most.  It relates to Pollan's ridicule of restricted carbohydrate diets - Atkins in particular - and disdain for fat in general and saturated fat in particular.  I find it disappointing that Pollan can debunk so much of the standard line about food, even about the "organic" label that marketers would have you believe is the healthiest food there can be, yet he seems to accept all the old dogma about low-carb and saturated fats despite there being tremendous evidence that supports the healthfulness of that way of eating.  Instead he more or less calls Atkins a "quack" and bases this, it seems, on the oft-repeated erroneous claim that Atkins eliminates an "entire food group" - by which he means carbohydrates.  This of course is incorrect, but Pollan, like many, seem to have a bias against diets, and specifically towards Atkins that clouds objectivity and careful research.  This bias seems to infect other ideas of Pollan's.  The most blatant example of this bias (perhaps also combined with some sloppiness that Pollan shows elsewhere when dealing with other technical subjects) is when he claims that the human brain can get glucose only from carbohydrates.  Any first-year biochemist will tell you that this is false, and that protein can easily be converted to glucose as well - Eskimos have survived for hundreds of years on a diet of pure protein and fat (from seal and caribou) for hundreds of years.

Finally, as at least one Amazon reviewer points out, Pollan doesn't really fully deal with the issue of the price of doing things in an organic and sustainable way.  Organic, and "beyond organic" foods are generally much higher in price than their conventional competition.  That's not to say they aren't worth that price for those who can afford them, but Wholefoods, CSA's, and Farmers Markets are often more patronized by those on the upper end of the income scale.  Those who make minimum wage, or even a bit more, would probably have to spend a huge portion of their paycheck in order to buy most of their food as organic.  They simply don't have much choice in the matter.  Pollan suggests that Pollyface's customers didn't seem like the well-healed customers of Wholefoods.  Still, Swoope is a pretty  rural part of Virginia, and so those more well-to-do people just aren't there in large numbers, and those who are probably are not trying to stand out as such. 

Theoretically if the government would stop subsidizing corn and instead used that money to support small sustainable farmers so that their food could be sold less expensively and locally(but without the regulatory requirements that often come with such funding), the food supply might be turned on its head.  This of course, is a pipe dream.  I'd love for it to happen, but how practical is it in a country as large as ours?  Can all the farmland be reconverted into lots of Polyfaces that could serve the entire country?  Even if it could be done, the monumental market forces needed for getting this change to occur just aren't there.  It would take a huge rethinking on the part of most of citizens of this country about the food they eat.  Even if everyone read Pollan's book (which I don't think is a bad idea), there would still be plenty of hold outs who simply don't care about their own health, let alone the health of others, the environment, or the health and well-being of the animals they eat.  I think the best we can hope for, at least for the foreseeable future, is just a level playing field, where small farmers are given the same rights and opportunities as the giant industrial ones and still get to produce their crops and livestock in the way they choose with as little regulation from the government as possible.  This is all that Joel Salatin wants, according to Pollan, and I don't think it's something unreasonable to ask for, even from those who couldn't care less about "organic," "beyond organic," or any other fancy label we might choose to give our food in the future.

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Garlic and Sapphires is Ruth Reichl's fourth and latest book and it describes her six or so years as the restaurant critic for the New York Times in 1990's.  She had previously worked at the LA Times and as she writes, was more interested in reviewing a wider range of cuisines and price ranges.  Up until then, she contends, the reviewers concentrated mainly on the very high-end restaurants like Le Cirque or La Caravel. While this may be the case, I found it a bit odd, since 90% of the places she talks about in the book seem to be expensive to super-expensive.

Reading Garlic and Sapphires wasn't quite like a trip down memory lane, since so many of the restaurants were the very high-priced ones that we never ate at growing up, or they were simply restaurants that were established after I left the city or that I'd never happen to patronize.  The one exception to this was Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.  I went a few times back in the 80's for special occasions, but only for brunch, which I believe was much cheaper than their dinner menu.  Also, as Reichl explains, Windows On the World was renovated and received a new chef and emphasis after the first World Trade Center bombing in the early 90's.  So for all practical purposes I ate at a different restaurant.

Despite the fact that I have little chance of eating in most of the establishments described in the book, it was wonderful, as a foodie, to listen to Reichl describe in poetic detail how various foods would melt in her mouth, revealing layers upon layers of different, sometimes subtle, sometimes very blatant flavors.  Reichl also gives us many of her own recipes (she was a chef and co-owned a restaurant in Berkeley in the 70's), some of which sound great.  The book is also nice for those simply interested in New York City, as Reichl describes a good deal of it - not just the restaurants - in this book.

But this isn't just a book about food or restaurants.  It's also one about human nature.  Reichl describes at the beginning of the book how she's spotted by someone who works for a restaurant on one of her first flights to New York when she is preparing to move.  She's told that every restaurant in New York probably has her picture taped inside the kitchen with a reward for spotting her.  Because of this, she decides she will enlist the help of an old acting-teacher friend of her mother's to create new identities.  She is given wigs and makeup and different clothing to transform herself into everything from a sexy blond divorcee to a meek, impoverished older lady, to even a replica of her own brash and demanding mother.  She uses these disguises to try to understand how others may experience the same meal.  And she discovers that, as we expect, that restaurants (especially the high-end ones) do play favorites and discriminate quite liberally in how they provide service to different people, and even whether they will permit someone to patronize their establishment.

Along with exploring how waiters and other diners react to her in her various disguises, she also has revelations about herself.  She admits to being able to assume particular personas very easily.  It's almost as if she is channeling different aspects of her personality, some of which may be well hidden and seldom seen.  Through this she has some self-discoveries and eventually decides to leave her post at the Times.

We also get to read about various political maneuverings within the Times, stories about her husband and son, and about coworkers and friends who accompany her to restaurants.  There are also memorable parts where she is both fooling the restaurant, but also fooling her guests, who are unaware of whom she really is.

In general, I found it a very enjoyable read.  There were times where I thought she might be exaggerating some things for effect, or even making some stuff up (they just seemed too "perfect" or "predictable" in a kind of theatrical way), but for the most part these were few and far between.

I actually listened to an unabridged audio version of this book via Audible.com which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods).  Bernadette Dunne does a good job of narrating the book and I don't recall any pronunciation errors in all the descriptions of food, restaurants, or place names in New York.  Although I will admit I didn't care for her rendition of Reichl's young son.  Reichl also narrates an abridged version of the book if you'd like to hear the author read her own book, New York accent and all.  The book is available in print as well, of course.

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My background is web development, but I chose this book for a few reasons.  One is that it got some good reviews on Amazon.com, and no really bad ones.  Secondly, I bought it knowing that I would be taking a week-long training course in ASP.Net 2.0 in a few weeks.  I wanted a book that was easy enough that I would have a good chance of completing it in a couple of weeks, and I also didn't care if I got the most in-depth understanding of the subject.  As long as I got some familiarity with it, that would be good enough as a foundation should the class go at a faster pace than my brain can process information! 

Generally, what I have found is that there are three or four basic types of computer book.  You have books geared towards absolute beginners which walk you through every little step, every mouse click, over and over again ad nauseum.  Then you have books geared towards programmers, which are written in such a way that if you don't have a formal knowledge of this subject, you will probably eventually get a lost.  Of course for those without any programming experience or knowledge, these books will quickly go over one's head.  Most of these books are about a particular facet of a programming language or environment, but some are exhaustive studies of everything, almost to the point that they are reference books themselves.  Finally, there are reference books, which sometimes double as instructional texts as I intimated, and sometimes are simply streight-forward information about the various features and functions of a given language or system.

Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours, of course, fits into the first category - that of one geared towards beginners.  I often wish there were books that kind of bridged the gaps between beginners and more experienced programmers, and occasionally there are, but they are few and far between.  What I have in mind is something that walks you through some fundamentals at least initially, but soon stops repeating the same steps, challenging you to remember them yourself, and also getting into some of the more advanced aspects a little.  Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours doesn't do this.  That being said, it's still a good book for what it's for.  You just need to understand it's target reader so that if you have experience programming, you can just skip the repetitive parts, or parts that you already know (control structures, conditional statements, html markup, etc.).

Like many in the field of web development (at least those of us who've been at it for close to 10 years or more), I came to it without formal study.  When I started, there were no books on html, let alone classes on it.  Through the years I taught myself how to program in more sophisticated ways using Perl, then Cold Fusion, JavaScript, and ASP.  But while I understand how to use all these tools to create dynamic websites, I'm not sure if I have the same "programmer mentality" that I see in others who mastered C++ or Java in college, high school, or even earlier!   In my opinion there's a kind of middle-tier market out there of those of us who came to programming in adulthood, too late to substantially effect how our brains work.  We can understand programming, but are not "native speakers."  We can program, but books written "for programmers" can still start to sound like Greek if we don't concentrate hard and perhaps reread some sentences a few times!

In any case, Scott Mitchell's book is a good start for anyone like myself, or those who are just starting out in the field and want to gain some familiarity with what .Net is about.  It will take you through many of the things you will do as a developer in creating dynamic sites - including connecting with back-end databases, form validation, file uploads, site navigation, and more.  You will not get much understanding about the Visual Basic or C# languages used to manipulate business logic or to do more advanced stuff with data binding, etc.  But for me at least this was a good primer before going on to read more advanced books and reference guides about ASP.Net 2.0.  I think it created a great "bridge" between my familiarity with plain old ASP and what I know is going to be a much more powerful and deep environment to program websites in. 

The other nice thing about this book is that it comes with Microsoft's "Express" edition of their Visual Web Developer 2005.  This is basically a paired down version of the Visual Studio software that is used by professionals not only to build ASP.Net websites, but also to develop stand-alone Windows applications.  However, this will let you develop any ASP.Net website and test it locally on your machine - it comes with a version of Microsoft's SQL Server Database, and a web server.  You can easily take the files you develop on it and upload them to a hosted server on the internet or a corporate intranet server behind a firewall, etc.  You can download this software for free from Microsoft, but it's nice having the CD that you can use to do a quick install and avoid having to go find it and download it from MS's site, especially if you don't have a fast Internet connection.

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Sarah Vowel has written several books, and this latest one repeats some of the same themes of American history that her previous book, A Partly Cloudy Patriot, started. Vowel is a self-proclaimed "history geek" and also presidential-assassination-obsessed. A lot of what she wrote about in the past was about personal experiences, and that is what she talked about on the radio as well. In this book, too, there is a lot of this. It's not just an historical text, but also partially an autobiographical journey with Vowel to various places of historical significance where she interacts with the tour guides and other tourists, and also the friends that she drags grudgingly to almost every one.

I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). If you've ever heard Vowel speak, you know she has a very distinct voice. You may have even heard her without knowing - she played Violet (the daughter) in the animated movie The Incredibles. It's high and nasaly, which you would never think would be something you'd want to listen to for 7 hours, and yet at least some of us find this voice strangely hypnotic. I've heard her speak a couple of times in DC, once as part of a live This American Life, and a second time as just herself. The second time, she was late. She doesn't drive, and so was taking the train up from her home in New York City. The train lost power. The woman handling the show was talking to her on her cell phone while she was rushing from the train station in a cab and actually put the phone up to the microphone. Sarah managed to keep us laughing and still did a great job once she got there in person. It's a testament to her appeal that 99% of the audience stayed over an hour after she was supposed to be there for her to arrive. The book is available in print as well, of course.

Vowel's dry humor runs throughout Assasination Vacation, catching on oh so many ironic twists of history, so many outlandish actions or quotes that they seem downright hilarious sometimes. She also repeatedly pokes fun at herself for her peculiar geekiness about historical minutiae, her morbid fascinations, and her various allergies and phobias. The book contains not only her own voice, but also that of a number of others - actors, writers, comedians - who ad a little spice to the mix. They recite quotes from the principal characters - presidents and assassins alike. Included are Steven King, John Stewart, Conan O'Brian, and Brad Bird (whom I think was my favorite as Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau).

While I enjoyed listening to the book, and believe I picked up some knowledge from it, I'm afraid that as with most books about history, I will soon forget many details (if I haven't already). Even with the fairly narrow subject matter, there are still lots of facts involved with each assassination, not to mention a bunch of background information about the lives of each president and their various family members, friends, colleagues, and of course their assassins and co-conspirators.  Also included is information on the wars, scandals, and other events that took place before or during the time of a given president. Of course Vowel makes a lot of this stuff more memorable by adding her own humor and passion for the subject, which makes it more memorable, but I still think many of the details will slip away despite this. Then again, this isn't a history text, but more a kind of biographical/autobiographical journey through a few singular parts of history, as well as a journey in the present day to some of the odd memorials and museums for both the presidents and the assassins - ranging from the high reaches of the Adirondack mountains to Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas, a small tropical island 70 miles west of Key West, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Caribbean.

That being said, while I certainly enjoyed Assassination Vacation, I personally preferred  A Partly Cloudy Patriot. Either book is a great listen from my viewpoint, and this latest one kind of follows from the last.  I also think that this book might grow on you and slowly infect you with at least a little of that same geeky obsession for these assassinations that Vowel has herself. Then again, while I'm a geek, I'm not much of a history geek, and so I'm not sure I'll have the dedication (or time) to devote to something as relatively arcane as 19th Century U.S. presidential assassinations!

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I would say a majority of the book is about language and specifically about euphemisms, which Carlin finds repugnant, because they "water down" the language and make a lot of things "meaningless" by couching them in kinder sounding words or phrases that don't impart truth or real meaning. There's a lot of truth to this, but Carlin does belabor the point, and after a while I was starting to say, "Ok, I get the point already!"

He also has a lot of these little "skits" where he will make up a conversation among a couple of people. Some of these are funny, some aren't. A lot are graphic, gross, "dirty" or in various ways the opposite of "political correctness." As I said, he definitely is out to try to offend just about anyone.

There's also some insightful stuff about politics, the irony of various political issues, how politicians are constantly trying to deceive us, and a lot of times doing so by use of language.

Of course there's a lot about various things, not all language-related, that simply piss Carlin off. Some of these are just silly and obviously not to be taken seriously, some are things that most of us would probably find annoying, or at least will once Carlin enlightens us as to why they are so dumb.

I've mainly seen Carlin in some older stand-up routines, a couple of movies, and one other book, Napalm and Silly Puddy, so I don't know if I'm familiar enough with his stuff to comment on how this book compares to earlier work. It was an interesting listen, one with some laugh-out-lound moments, no doubt, but also some interesting thoughts, and a lot of expounding on random stuff that made it a bit repetitive. I wonder if for books like this, a very strategic audio abridgement might actually make it a much more solid listen?

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Most of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is about Sedaris's odd family.  Stories about them are accounted both from his childhood and adulthood. Sedaris is gay, and often makes fun of his clichéd feminine proclivities growing up.  Even so, this oddness seems to pale in comparison to the personalities of some of his (heterosexual) brothers and sisters.  Possibly it's because we are all used to these clichés by now from TV and movies, but even so, the Sedaris clan all seem to be exceedingly odd.  One can scratch ones head and wonder a bit about this, but then most families have their oddities, and sometimes that accounts for most of the family!  Of course Sedaris makes even the most bizarre and repugnant characteristics cutely funny ones.

A few of the stories Sedaris relates are about his current life with his partner in France, and while I loved his stories in "Me Talk Pretty Some Day" about his trying to learn the French language, and just trying to make sense of French culture, in this book, I preferred the family stories to these. The main exception to this was his relating how he uncovered the Dutch version of Santa Clause and how bizarre he seemed compared to the U.S.
version. This particular story, as well as one or two others, was taken from recordings in front of a live audience, as opposed to the rest of the book, which is your normal, studio-produced audio book.

In the end, if you love Sidaris, you'll probably love this book, and if you hate him, you'll hate this book. If you're unfamiliar with him, here is a selection of audio featuring him on Nation Public Radio.

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It was largely an entertaining read. It covers Conroy's history as a basketball athlete from
the first time he handles a ball (at 10 or so) to his last game as a player for his college, The Citadel. While it's primarily about basketball, including lots of play-by-play reporting using sports lingo which isn't always explained but still understandable, there's
also a lot of about Conroy's life that  has nothing to do with basketball per se - his incredibly cruel father, his discovery of literature and finding his own voice as a writer, his ordeals as a Plebe at The Citadel, and much more. I like the way Conroy mixes in some poetic flourishes into hid descriptions book - kind of like dabs of florescent color on an otherwise straightforward, albeit very interesting picture.

I listened to this book via my subscription to the online audio book service, Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods).  The book is available in print as well, of course. The narration is skillfully handled by Chuck Montgomery, who is also an actor and composer in addition to narrating many audio books.

I only have two minor quibbles with My Losing Season.  The first is that about halfway through the book, I realized that Conroy loves superlatives. Everything is "the best" or "the most" of his life. Most of this has to do with a particular game standing out in some way or another, or a particular performance by himself or another player. Someone I mentioned to, said something to the effect of, "well of course he loves superlatives, honey, he's Southern!"  This was said by a Southerner, of course.

The second qualm is that the ending takes a little while to come. Conroy doesn't just end on his last game at the Citadel, but goes on to talk about players and coaches in subsequent years. The book was written in 2002 and his last game was in 1967, so there's a lot of ground to cover. He talks about the history of his relationship to The Citadel, about his changed relationship with this father over the years, etc. Don't get me wrong, I was certainly interested in finding out about all of these things, but there's gotta be over an hour, maybe two of this "afterword" stuff. I suppose when you're reading a book, you can see clearly something marked "afterword" and you understand that it's seperate from the book itself. But listening to it, either it wasn't marked as such, or I missed it.

These two complaints are pretty minor and I'd definitely recommend it to most people. I know almost nothing about basketball and never watch it, but it does give you a great deal of appreciation for the game and even a desire to learn more about it - although the book is more about how the game was played in college in the 1960's rather than how it's played today, either in college or in the pros.

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For those who enjoy non-fiction, Mountains Beyond Mountains is a fascinating look at a Doctor who's devoted his life to curing disease in one of the poorest countries on the planet - Haiti. Dr. Paul Farmer and his organization, Partners In Health, have been involved for 15 years or more not only in Haiti but in treating multi-drug-resistant TB in Peru and Russia, as well.

The author, Tracy Kidder, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Soul of A New Machine, covers Farmers life growing up, going to college, and his initial experiences in Haiti.  He also covers the perspective of some of the other principles of Partners in Health, including the director, Ophelia Dahl, and others.  The different personalities of these people as compared with Farmer (who it seems is a unique individual), makes for some interesting interpersonal reporting, so it isn't just a story about a saintly doctor who came to a poor country and made everyone well.

I didn't really know much about this book when I started listening to it, since it was one of my wife's selections. I just started listening and thought if it was interesting, I would continue. I did. The narrator, Paul Michael, does an excellent job as usual - he narrated The Da Vinci Code, and as with that one he has lots of fun with the various accents from different nationalities in the book.

I've never been one to watch the commercials for charities showing all the malnourished kids.  I find them incredibly depressing, and the underlying issue to be one of such huge proportions that it's all but insurmountable.  While this book was similarly depressing in some ways, it was also very hopeful. It detailed many of the improvements going on in world health, concentrating on those pushed ahead by Farmer's group.  I found myself routing them on like a sports team, even though I haven't been a real sports fan since I was a kid and following the New York Yankees in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

As for Farmer, his life sometimes does seem at times to be that of a saint. On the one hand you admire everything he does, but on the other hand you sometimes wonder if he's actually human.  While he's someone you would might want to emulate, his selflessness, courage, and dedication are so superlative as to be almost unatainable, at least by most of us.

It's probably a great listen for when you might be feeling a bit sorry for yourself, and realize that there are so many people who are living in such wretched conditions that you should be grateful to live in a country where all your creature comforts are taken care of - even if you happen to be within the poorest 10% of us. On the other hand, it also could induce a lot of guilt for not wanting to devote your life, or at least a fair chunk of your time and money, towards helping those who are so less fortunate for the simple reason that they were born in a horribly poor and mismanaged country...

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However, I have been up to some other things besides parenting, specifically as it relates to what I am listening to these days vis-à-vis digital audio.  First a quick bit of history:

I got involved with audio books and what might be called a forerunner of podcasting (at least in terms of subscribing to feeds of magazine, newspaper and radio shows) about 6.5 years ago when I subscribed to Audible.com. I've listened to a lot of books and other programming, but after I got involved with my now wife back in late 2001, the listening slowed somewhat.

Then in late 2004, I started listening to what was then the very new phenomenon of podcasts. Because there were so many, they completely pushed out my audio book listening.  Sure, I could have alternated. But as kind of a news junky, it's hard to start reading history books when there's lots of current event non-fiction or news articles, etc. I also have this tendency to want to complete lists of listening, and the method that seems easiest is to do the shortest things first, thus getting through a large number of list items right away. Unfortunately with podcasts, they just keep piling up! You can subscribe to just a couple, but I was subscribed to 20-30, and even though these were on average a small fraction of the length of an unabridged audio book (and also that I was speeding these up by 50% or so), I was still barely keeping my head above water. All this time my audio books sat dormant, and continued to pile up. I was also spending a considerable amount of time just doing the processing that would speed these podcasts up, organize them in the proper folders, downloading them and transferring them to my iPod, etc.

Back last December I finally axed my Audible account because I simply wasn't listening to books at that point, and didn't want yet another growing pile of content that I was ignoring. Several months later, though, I took advantage of an offer to become a member again for $10/year with a free audio book offer.  There was a book that had just come out, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dillema, that had just come out and was available unabridged at Audible.  I thought I'd spend $10 on it, or half the price I would have had to normally, and gain back some of the priveleges of membership - such as the ability to take advantage of sales, to gift audio books, etc.

In August, I burned out on my podcast habit, and felt like the only thing to bring back a bit of calm was to quit cold turkey and go back to my kindler and gentler days of mainly just listening to audio books.  It's odd, since I now have over 100 audio books that I haven't read, most of them unabridged, that I wouldn't feel the same compulsion to finish them as soon as possible.  But I guess the difference is that these are not podcasts of news events that I feel compelled to be familiar with or else be "out of touch."  Many are novels, but there are plenty of non-fiction titles as well.

I think the seed for this move was generated when I bought my Treo 700P back in May.  I was surprised to see that it had come with a $100 off coupon for some types of Audible memberships.  I was resisting the temptation because at the time I was still totally committed, nay addicted, to podcasts, and so feared digging myself an even deeper hole! I wanted to have some chance of actually finishing what was on my plate! But by the time I had burned out on podcasts, I think I had given up on the thought I'd ever be able to keep up.

The $100 off an Audible.com makes each book "credit" cost about $5.42 (most books are 1 credit), at least if purchasing Audible's Annual Platinum plan. This price is great when you compare it with what you would normally pay at a bookstore or online, save for maybe a used version of some book on eBay.  Then when I was actually trying to sign up when I looked a little more closely at the offer. There's some fine print at the bottom which says "Offer valid for new Audible customers only." Doh! The only way around this is to actually create a new account with Audible and apply the coupon to that new account.  Yes you can do this.  Theoretically you can have as many accounts with Audible that you want.  I don't think Audible cares, as I know many who have multiple accounts.  The one problem with this scenario is that if you want to have all your audio books on your iPod (or other compatible player), you can't.  Well, unless you have only one, or at most two accounts.  You can't activate more than two accounts on a given player.  I suppose you could buy two or more iPods and then rack up accounts in order to take advantage of these discounts, but the added price of the player would kind of defeat the purpose.  In any case, my problem was that my wife had an account as well, which had a number of books I hadn't read and really wanted to.  So I managed to dedicate most of my free time towards reading some of those books, and a few others I ended up skipping after I determined that I wasn't enjoying them enough after the first hour or two to devote another 10+ hours.

So I signed up for the new account that gave me 24 credits.  What do I do with those credits?  So far, the only ones I've used were for a podcast!  Well, that's what Audible calls them anyway.  They are basically the same type of subscriptions that Audible gives you the choice of downloading in the old more manual way or via a feed address.  Unfortunately, as I've found, when you set it up in iTunes as a podcast via the feed they give you, it downloads a file that cannot be sped up as all other Audible content can be on the iPod.  Yes, I still speed things up!  Although I do this via the iPod's built in ability that will only speed a file up by 20% or so, not the 50% I was doing in a much more belabored process with my podcasts earlier.  I signed up for a subscription to The New Yorker magazine.  Then I discovered a couple of free audible shows, one of which only comes out every month or two called Ear to the Ground, the other which comes out twice a week, called This is Audible.  Both of these contain excerpts of audio books, interviews with authors, publishers, and others who talk about the books.  Then just a week or two ago I discovered that my new account came with a complimentary subscription to the New York Times!  So now I have around 27 hours of subscription/podcast content via my Audible account!  I can't escape the podcasts!

In an effort to try to organize things better, I went through my very long wish list on my old account to look for stuff that I could get rid of. I hadn't done this in a while and I had lots of old stuff, and as it turned out a good amount of abridged stuff which Audible
never did offer an unabridged version of. I made the rule that I wasn't going to have anything abridged on the list, nor books that were more than 100 or so years old, since that would put them in the public domain and I could possibly get versions for free via Libravox or the Guttenberg Project. I used to add books to my wish list because they seemed interesting, and that's fine, but after 2 or 3 or more years if they had no reviews and a rating of 3.5 or less, I didn't have the confidence that these were books worth  listening to. I was able to get my list down from a whopping 308 to a much more manageable 60 or so. Of course, I've also been adding new ones to this list due to hearing some of the books on This is Audible or Ear to the Gound which really interested me.  But I've also paired things a bit by actually buying a few titles via special sales that Audible has had in the last month or so - they seem to be having sales pretty regularly now, maybe gearing up for even bigger ones towards the holidays in an effort to make some big sales numbers by the end of the year?

The point of this is that I've been listening to a lot of stuff, and have even managed to post a bunch of short reviews on an Audible Yahoo Group, but I thought I'd start posting them here as well, since I'm not posting much else these days!  So watch for a bunch of these reviews as I have time to find them, spruce them up slightly and post them here.

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Related Entries:

• Garlic and Sapphires
• Ditching your iPod for a Treo 700P
• Speeding Up Podcasts and Audio Books
• Back from the dead & NPR Podcasts
• Audio Books and Audible.com

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I only recently discovered Wil Wheaton’s blog, and although I haven’t read every entry since, I have read a good number.  He’s a good writer, but I’m not always in the mood for his sometimes very sentimental stuff about his family.  Nevertheless, I was very interested in reading more about his time growing up on the set of Star Trek The Next Generation and Stand By Me, and so was happy to receive Dancing Barefoot, which is a collection of short pieces that got axed from Wheaton’s full-sized book, Just A Geek.

A large bulk of the book revolves around Star Trek.  There is a recounting of when Wheaton meets one of his idols, William Shatner, for the first time, when Shatner was directing Star Trek V on a set next to where they were filming The Next Generation, which Wheaton was in.  Shatner was apparently a real asshole to Wheaton, who was then just 15, and henceforth is known in what Wheaton writes as William Fucking Shatner, or WFS.  Another story is about a Star Trek convention in which Wheaton participated in September, 2001 in Las Vegas to celebrate Star Trek’s 35th anniversary.  It was a fascinating look at the Con experience from one of the actual performers, as opposed to a fan or objective observer.  Wheaton pulls no punches, neither towards himself nor towards some of the more disturbing fans.  One thing that Wheaton is good at is giving you his very personal perspective on things. 

I am often amazed that even now after 15 years of getting beaten up by some of his fan base, he still hasn’t hardened into a pompous jerk or a recluse.  Instead, he seems just as if not more sensitive as he recounts he was growing up.  He wears his heart on his sleeve, so to speak, and is still hurt by those who display insensitivity.  He still manages to be self-conscious about his identity as Wesley Crusher, despite proving himself over and over to be much more than that poorly written character.  Of course he talks about this in his blog, but it’s something that he seems to have to continually remind himself and his readers.

I for one never despised his character the way some did.  I felt the first two years of The Next Generation, in comparison to the rest of the series, were just not all that well written in general.  I loved them all the same when I first saw them, but compared to later seasons they just seemed “cheesy,” kind of along the lines of the olds series, but just updated with better special effects.  I was much more annoyed with Marina Sirtis’s character Troy, who seemed to only be there to have a large set of breasts on the bridge and whose comments about a foe’s emotional state seemed ridiculously obvious to anyone with a brain.  But apparently some of the nuttier Star Trek fans who can’t separate reality from fantasy, took their hatred for the character Wheaton played and projected it onto the actor himself.  This is ridiculous to begin with, but the fact they took out their anger on a 15-year-old kid is despicable, and apparently those wounds still haven’t healed for Wheaton and we get the sense they never will heal fully.  In that respect I do have one thing in common with Wheaton, since I was teased and ostracized relentlessly as a kid for being short, chubby, and socially awkward.

One of the stories in Dancing Barefoot is about Wheaton going to his recently deceased aunt’s house for the last time, a house he went to on countless occasions.  It’s a very heartfelt story about how this wonderful woman was going to be missed terribly.  This was reminiscent for me in a couple of ways.  Firstly, my wife’s aunt died just before we started dating, and she was a woman who was central to her entire family.  Her home was where people would gather.  Her death took a horrible toll on my wife and others who loved her dearly.  Her house sat vacant for at least a year until it was finally bought by one of her nephews and is in the process of being renovated.  The day after receiving Dancing Barefoot (and having finished the entire 115 pages of it), it so happened that we were going up to visit my own uncle and aunt in Orangeburg, NY.  They had just sold their house that they had owned for somewhere around forty years and are moving into a condo in a retirement community.  They wanted us to come and see the house for one last time and since we were more than happy to honor the suggestion.  This is a house that I spent countless Passovers and Thanksgivings at, hanging out with my aunt Evelyn, uncle Nat, and various cousins, 2nd cousins and extended family.  I remember one occasion where my uncle gave me a driving lesson around the neighborhood, and of course all the food.  The ritual passover meal was not complete until my uncle had spilled wine on my grandfather, which we always suspected was a diversionary tactic that would help him hide the matzoh.  The bus rides home from the house clutching my stomach in agony from all the excess food I’d eaten because it was so delicious I couldn’t stop when I was just full.  I took some final pictures of the house and my uncle and aunt, so I thought I’d share them here:

Dancing Barefoot is a quick and interesting read, and gives one a flavor of Wheaton’s writing that one can get loads of off his blog – and for free!  Still, I will most assuredly pick up Just a Geek real soon.

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Mike Daisy, who wrote this book which describes his experiences after college first in the temping world and then in the world of a .com company (actually the .com company, Amazon.com) describes himself as a slacker, a dilettante, and a geek, but not a particularly “high-level” geek.  I could describe myself in the same terms, but not quite as flamboyantly.  In high school I was an introverted science-oriented student, but lacked the savant capabilities one often sees portrayed in the movies where the resident geed can get in front of his computer, start typing really fast, squint, strains as if a bit constipated, and then shout “I’m in!” as he’s just hacked into a national defense supercomputer.   I did, however, participate in things that either amazed or confused my family since at that time the Internet was something only a small group of academicians knew much of anything about.  This was, after all, back in the early 1980’s. 

Daisy is a few years younger than me, and while I somehow lucked into my first job as a programming assistant in a student travel/exchange company, it appears he roamed his way around Europe in true bohemian style, at least for a bit before coming back and continuing a pseudo-bohemian existence in Seattle, where it seems it is very easy to be bohemian, or at least it was in the 1990’s.  Instead of going on to grad school as I did, Daisy just temped for a while and eventually lucked into a job with Amazon.com in 1998 when they were just starting to fly.

What ensues is a tale of an Amazon.com insider, or at least an Amazon.com Customer Support insider.  Being a telemarketer in high school for a summer and after college being a technical support drone for a software company, I know first hand that one can become cynical very quickly.  Daisy describes how this became, at least for him, an opportunity to ship scandalous books to clergy or others who were nasty to him, or to alternately refund or send free stuff to people who were nice.  In order to decrease his long call resolution average, he would simply hang up on customers within a few seconds of picking up their call.

As with other blindingly successful .coms of this era, Amazon.com was (and still is) headed by a charismatic leader, Jeff Bezos, whom all the Amazon.com employees seemingly looked up to as a “geek Mesiah.”  Daisy intersperses his prose with emails that he wrote (but never sent) to Bezos.  These emails are so intimate because they were never meant to be sent, more of an exercise in soul searching and Daisy trying to understand his very conflicting feelings toward Bezos and Amazon.com.  On the one hand, Daisy was overtaken with the “coolness” of the ideas that Amazon.com pitched and it’s divine Jeff.  On the other hand, Daisy is slowly having his soul sucked out of his body by answering the same questions, request, or complaints every day all day long.  He finally is able to maneuver out of phone support to a more coveted “Business Development” department by making up a study he has concocted, but this just serves to show him how random and meaningless things are.

In fact, the whole book is really Daisy’s search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe.  From his college days where he attained the superfluous degree in Aesthetics, to his wanderings in Europe and Seattle, he, along with many of us from his generation, were convinced that some monumental event in the future (something similar to the incredible events we watched happening in the late 80’s and early 90’s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) would somehow wipe the playing board in some way that would make whatever we were doing at the moment irrelevant.  So what was the point in working hard, saving money, and generally being miserable?

Amazon.com, as Daisy portrays it, and really the whole internet, became something to “believe in” for all those non-believers.  It was the revolution and the revelation rolled into one.  But when it became obvious that while the rules were turned on their heads, this was not necessarily better than the old rules.  They were just less comprehensible and more based on random fate.  This, the final reckoning that all .com’s went through when the investors all of sudden realized that they had actually needed to turn profits, and his own conscience, finally broke Daisy down to a point where something had to give.

Daisy actually performs pieces of this book (I can’t imagine him performing the whole things as it would be over 7 hours), as well as other monologues at various venues.  He currently seems to be in NYC.  He also maintains his own blog.  Daisy did amateur theater before Amazon.com and so the monologues are I suppose an extension of that.  If you can, I would highly recommend getting this book in Audio format.  I listened to it via Audible.com where it is narrated by Daisy.  Daisy has an incredibly expressive voice that can have you laughing your head off at one moment and then make you depressed the next. His writing is, for someone of his own generation, anyway, brilliant.  He goes off on pop-culture-induced rants, parodies coworkers, customers, and supervisors, and generally makes the book enormously enjoyable to listen to.  Daisy looks a bit like Andy Richter, and his humor is not too far from Richter’s, perhaps just infused with a bit more literary and historical references that he feels obligated to throw in as compensation for his otherwise seemingly impractical college degree.

Even if you missed out on the whole “internet revolution” and find much of the book to be unfamiliar ground, I would still recommend it on the basis of it being a fascinating look at an interesting subculture or subcultures during the heady days when people were deluding themselves completely about how all the rules had changed and they no longer really had to pay any heed to common sense anymore.  Plus it is a somewhat moving story about a guy who is struggling with the nihilism of today’s culture and somehow trying to stay sane, even if he seems completely insane half of the time.

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I first stumbled onto NPR in college.  When I was growing up, I simply never heard it in our house.  It would have fit in, since my mom is a news junky, but we were too fixated on TV and I don’t think there was a 24-hour NPR station in NYC in the 70’s and 80’s, although I could be wrong.  In high school I was listening to K-Rock in NYC, which played classic rock.  Then towards the end of high school, or perhaps the beginning of college, I started listening to a shortwave radio I had bought.  It was a whole new world.  Shortwave broadcasts are generally government run stations from around the world without commercials and with very in-depth coverage in addition to a wide array of different programming.  I was particularly interested in listening to Radio Moscow at the time as I had started to study Russian and was very interested in the country and it’s struggles in trying to open itself after 70 years of tyranny.  As it turned out, I actually transferred into the school of communications at Boston University in my Sophomore year, this after realizing that Astronomy was 90% math and 10% physics or thereabouts, and that I had a foundation in neither.  My thought was that I would study journalism and potentially become a foreign correspondent, hopefully in Russia.  I eventually learned that one normally didn’t have one’s choice in where one went on assignment, and moreover the journalism classes I took did not leave me particularly enthralled.  However, the school of communications at BU also housed an NPR studio, WBUR, and at the time I recall the Car Talk guys broadcasted from this building, although I never actually saw them.  Being such a fan of NPR now, I wish I had taken more advantage of being at this school and gotten more involved in radio.

Naked in Baghdad is a book written by a veteran foreign correspondent from NPR, Anne Garrels.  In it she recounts her time in Baghdad both leading up to, during, and after the U.S.-led invasion of last year.  If you listen to NPR, Garrels’ voice is immediately recognizable.  She rattles off insightful details in a way that rivets you, and you can tell she is intimately in tune with her surroundings.  She tells her story matter-of-factly, and although she laces it with personal experiences that exposes her vulnerabilities and not-so-pretty side, she keeps her reporter’s steady tone, as if she is reporting on someone else’s story and not necessarily her own.

The story Garrels tells is a fascinating one.  She first came to Baghdad months before the invasion and witnessed a regime trying to hold onto it’s grip while also trying to avoid war with the least amount of concessions.  What I found most insightful was her reports on Iraqis and their opinions about America and the Iraqi regime.  Much of this, especially before the war really got under way, was something Garrels has to interpret from indirect statements.  Once the war has started and especially after the U.S. has successfully taken Baghdad, she gets to voice much more open opinion from the Iraqi people and it is a contradictory and diverse opinion.  Iraqis, she reports, are grateful that Americans have ended Sadam’s hated regime, but also feel humiliated that a foreign power had to do this for them.  They are a proud people in other words.  They were also fearful not so much about the war itself as they had faith in the accuracy of the U.S.’s bombs, but about what might ensue after the actual invasion had concluded, and here it seems they have not been proven totally incorrect.  There is still, one year later, a great deal of uncertainty about what will happen in Iraq.  Will the disparate groups, many of which carry great animosity for one another based on sides taken during all the power plays over the last 30 years, ever be able to live together peacefully?  No one knows.

I listened to an unabridged version of this book via Audible.com, and recommend this as the most natural way to ingest the book, since it is written by a radio correspondent.  Interspersed between different sections of the book are “Brenda Bulletins” which are letters that Garrels’ husband Vint Lawrence wrote to an email list of Garrels’ friends to update them on her travails.  So we hear Garrels’ own reporting, then we here Vint’s, which reworks it, by both putting it in the third person, but ironically making it more personal in some ways.  I had mixed feelings about this device.  In some ways, it might actually help in that it gives two different voices to the story, making it more heterogeneous and thus more interesting.  On the other hand, there’s a lot of information that is simply repeated, and some of Vint’s letters are so stylized, especially after Garrels’ directness, it sometimes seems a bit flakey or pretentious.  This may also have to do with Vint’s voice, which sometimes seems a bit affected compared to Garrels.  Vint’s letters do seem to get more poignant and less playful and punny towards the end, thankfully, but then again perhaps I was just getting more used to them by that point.  Of course this is only my opinion and I’m sure that others might actually have the view that these letters add to the overall experience.  In any case, the book, especially the audio version of it is an extremely interesting, exciting, and poignant portrayal of what it was like for one reporter who actually stayed in Baghdad from before the war started to after the U.S. had secured the city, one of only a handful of journalists who did so.

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Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson has generally had very favorable reviews from readers and critics alike and I would not disagree with them, although I don’t presume to be expert enough in historical matters of early America to comment on its accuracy.  But it does seem like a fairly detailed account of Franklin’s life from the time he was 16 till his death at the age of 84.

Isaacson describes a man whose characteristics are not only likeable by most of us, but so familiar that one could easily imagine this man in today’s world.  That’s not to say that Franklin would not be considered extraordinary even by today’s standards.  His skill in diplomacy, rational thought, science, statesmanship, management, and many other areas would characterize him as a dynamic and multifaceted person by most.  Among the items that impressed me greatly were the following:

Although Franklin initially looked down on blacks or rather black slaves as thieves, he very quickly changed his opinion upon seeing a classroom where black children were learning and started aided these schools monetarily.  His opinion became that slavery itself made the individual (whoever they were) into less of a person, and became one of the most strident early abolitionists.  Unlike those who wrote theoretically about slavery being an evil but who still maintained their own (Jefferson is one quick example), Franklin put his money where his mouth was.

Franklin never belonged to a specific faith, but especially late in life would sometimes evoke god as the creator of things in trying to promote humility.  His view of the divine however, was pragmatic and rational, and he took the opinion that it was useless to bother his mind with questions about the details of scripture – even such a major one as to whether Jesus was divine – when there was no way to prove this.  Instead he boiled all religions into the common denominator of “do good to others.”

His scientific thoughts and experiments were of course very impressive, and all of this was amazing for a man who was self-taught, of humble beginnings.  He was indeed, the first Heratio Alger story, and assuredly Alger used the example of Franklin to model his stories.

Since Franklin’s death, his image has increased and decreased in status as those who were his antithesis gained stature and influence.  David Brook’s Bobos in Paradise explains this long struggle between Franklin’s rational, practical Bourgeois, and the romantic Bohemian characterized by Keats and so many others.  Admittedly Franklin does seem to embody the bourgeois stereotypes almost to an extreme, and yet I come away from this book with nothing but admiration.  Perhaps because I’m not overtly passionate about most issues myself.  Some people prefer a polite and rational argument to passionate entreaties, screaming, or other dramatics.  Not everyone has to embody both rationalism and passion, and few can pull that off, so why not have prime examples of the most effective in both of these?

I actually listened to this as an audio book download from Audible.com.  It was an abridged version, but even so was over 7 hours.  I’m sure the book or unabridged version would go into a great deal more detail but it’s hard to know how helpful that added detail is, especially as an introduction to a topic that one has little knowledge of to begin with..

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Salt

Kurlansky is incredibly thorough in his accounting of the story of Salt.  However, at points the level of detail gets a bit too deep for me.  Like other nonfiction books that treat a subject with lots of history, sometimes the relentless listing of people and places, and events get overwhelming. Salt also seems to jump around relentlessly both geographically and chronologically. I still found it very
interesting, just a bit bewildering at points!  One thing that Kurlansky recounts which I think could have been left out is his recounting of recipes that somehow involve salt as an ingredient.  These recipes go back thousands of years and they are sometimes fascinating, but they are all quoted from their original sources and thus use somewhat archaic language and ingredients that most would be unfamiliar with today.  A few of these might have been good to spice things up, but Kurlansky probably includes a couple dozen or so of these!

All in all, it was a decent read, but one that I fear many may put down after a while or at least have to skim through.  I actually listened to this book on Audible.com.  The narration, by Scott Brick, was affective and kept my attention throughout most of the reading despite some of the problems with the subject matter as expressed above.

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Recently when I was on Audible.com’s site, looking through new books, I noticed “A Short History of Nearly Everything” in non-abridged format!  I was ecstatic.  The length was a full 19 hours.  Back in July when I saw Bill Bryson had a new book out and it was available for download on Audible, I jumped at it, despite the fact that it was an abridged version.  At over 6 hours, it was still a decent length. Now with a non-abridged version available, I felt compelled to snatch it up.  Silly me I assumed that Bryson narrated this unabridged version; after all, he's narrated all of his other books available on Audible. The narrator, Richard Matthews is British, but doesn't have nearly the pacing and intonation that make Bryson such a pleasure to listen to. Nevertheless, you can still hear Bryson's voice sometimes through the words if you try. At over 19 hours, there's of course a lot more detail – mainly a bit fuller explanations and technical details of the science, which can be helpful if there are areas that are hard to grasp without examples, etc.

I would have to say that “History” is one of those books where I find the abridged version slightly better than the unabridged.  One could probably say this about many poorly written books that drone on and on and could be actually improved by an abridgement.  But this isn’t the reason that I prefer the abridged version, of course, it’s the narration!  Matthews narration is by no means bad, but it is the difference between good narration and wonderful.  It’s hard to explain, but Bryson’s voice, pacing, intonation, etc. is just so distinct and of course his actual voice reflects that which actually wrote the words down to begin with.  Somehow I felt like I learned and remembered more from the abridged version than from the unabridged.   Part of this may have to do with the content and that the unabridged version simply fills in some of the details that the abridged version leaves out but still purveys in a general sense that can be understood. 

I have also come to the conclusion that in some cases for non-fiction books, less is actually more.  When a certain historical event is covered, that’s one thing, but a broad accounting of events throughout history begins to get overwhelming after a while and even with the best of authors can start to feel like a mere log of events and persons.  I’m sure the more one is already familiar with the events and people the less this is the case.  I have read a lot of science history, so much of this was familiar, but Bryson’s book is tour de force of science, including almost all sciences you can imagine.  Kind of a Cosmos of the 21st Century.  A nice thing about the unabridged version that I didn’t notice in the abridged (although perhaps I just overlooked it) was that Bryson quotes a lot of other science writers, which gives one recommendations for further reading in most areas of science. 

For those who like reading about science or even who just like Bryson, I would still recommend the unabridged version, but I think it should be read in addition to the abridged version, not instead.

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The first I actually heard the name Philip K. Dick, it was from a radio host on WBAI, Jim Freund, a true Dick fanatic.  He was a member of a local bulletin board system in New York City called Magpie, created by Steve Manes.  A bunch of us were invited over to WBAI to watch him do his show, The Hour of the Wolf, which was unfortunately 5am to 7am.  But this was back in the 80’s and I was still young and all-nighters were not a rare occurance for me back then.  A few years later Jim Freund actually got us tickets for a theatrical performance of Dick’s Close My Eyes The Policeman Said put on by a theater group from NYU.

I call myself a PKD (Philip K. Dick) fan, but I’m ashamed to say that I really have not read considerable amounts of his prose.  The novels I’ve read are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip, and Radio Free Albemuth.  Up until reading this collection of short stories, I’d never read any of his short fiction.

For those unfamiliar with Dick, his stories are generally dark and paranoid, and reality is shaky.  Dick deals with issues of sanity, alternate realities, drug-distorted realities, religious-distorted realities, and the different perspectives of reality between artificial life (or artificial intelligence as it’s known to us today) and natural life.  Dick himself had a somewhat tenuous grasp on reality during some of his life and eventually drank himself to death.  Nonetheless, his copious works carry his name forward and this book is an example of how it has influenced film makers.

As a science fiction author I find he was often off the mark when it comes to some of the finer details in his portrayal of future worlds.  It’s a common complaint that when imagining the future, authors often underestimate the changes in the farther future (say of 50 or more years), but overestimate the changes in the nearer future  (say under 25 years).  In addition, the vast majority of what Dick wrote was before the age of the personal computer, and since few authors envisioned such an enormously influential device on society, a great deal of what came before the mid 1970's seems very dated.  Nonetheless, Dick does get a few ideas eerily right.  Reality may not be as dark and devastated as the ones he painted, but some of the fears he had play themselves out in the more questionable actions that government has taken since his death.  Whether or not his books accurately predict our future is not of the utmost relevence, however.&nb