Citizen Reader

Nonfiction educates us, whether we want it to or not.

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
by Florence Williams

So I read Florence Williams's really fascinating book Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History almost entirely in the bathroom, and skipped around quite a bit among chapters, but I still enjoyed it. What I MOST enjoyed, however, was that Mr. CR evidently spent some time in the bathroom reading it as well. This is how his experiences with the book progressed:

The first day he came out of the bathroom and said, "Wow, breasts are really interesting."*

The second day he came out of the bathroom and said, "Thinking about what's all floating around in the environment, that's pretty weird."

The third day he came out of the bathroom and said, "I can't read that Breasts book anymore." And I think he really did stop reading it.

So what was the breaking point for Mr. CR? I think it was reading about all the chemicals and toxins in our environment, and how our bodies (womens' breasts, in particular) suck up and synthesize and deal with all those said toxins. But this book was about much more than just that.

I'd probably classify this book as popular science with a good dose of sociology thrown in: Williams discusses the anthropological and cultural history of our breasts, and also talks to a lot of scientists and researchers about their various studies, from the more sociological (male preferences for breast sizes) to the more genetic (including undertaking the chemical analysis of her own breast milk). I think that's the chapter where Mr. CR started to lose it, because you start to find information like this, on why flame retardants show up in everyone's breast milk:

"As one industry website proclaimed, 'Today, polyurethanes can be found in virtually everything we touch--our desks, chairs, cars, clothes, footwear, appliances, beds, the insulation in our walls, roof and molding on our homes.'

There's just one problem: it's highly flammable, earning nicknames like liquid gas and fatal foam. A typical home filled with polyurethane products can literally burst into flames in five minutes once the petrochemical gasses heat up enough. Much household and office foam is treated with flame-retardans designed to delay ignition. The substances, which include bromine, chlorine, and phosphorus versions, came into widespread use after 1975..." (p. 202.)

And that sort of information, coupled with the science of how breast tissue, more so than other body tissues, sucks up environmental ingredients and interacts with them, is what starts to freak a reader out.

Depressing subject matter notwithstanding, I really enjoyed this one.** I like a good science read that isn't completely dumbed down but which is still within my understanding, and Williams has a nice writing style. She reminds me a bit of Mary Roach, but I like her better--Roach seems (to me, anyway) to be becoming increasingly cutesy in her science writing.

So do give this one a try. If nothing else you'll probably be amused by the photos on the front and back covers. Very clever.

*This still makes me giggle. You think it's interesting reading about them, guys? Try walking around with the complex buggers.

*I know The Lesbrarian swears by Stacked, and I mean to read that one too, but I think I enjoyed the heavier emphasis on science topics that this book offered.

Where will the next big epidemic come from?

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
by David Quammen

Would you believe I spent the past week blowing through a book on diseases (primarily caused by viruses) that cross over from animals to humans?*

Well, I did, and it was a fantastic read. The book in question was David Quammen's Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, it's 520 pages long, and yes, it's about disease and human pandemics, and I could not put it down.

This came as somewhat of a surprise, since I've looked at some of Quammen's other science/natural history books, and found them somewhat dull. So either this is just a subject that I find interesting (and I do), or he took his style up a notch in this one, or I didn't give his earlier books a fair trial. All possibilities.

To be specific, Quammen reports on "zoonoses"--diseases that are communicable from animals to humans (thanks, Merriam-Webster's). Here's some introductory information from Quammen:

"Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918-1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity. All of the human influenzas are zoonoses. So are monkeypox, bovine tuberculosis, Lyme disease, West Nile fever, Marburg virus disease, rabies, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, anthrax, Lassa fever..." (p. 21).

So yes, a real upper subject. But Quammen makes it very compelling, tracing the emergence, outbreaks, study and history, and other aspects of a variety of zoonoses, from Hendra to Ebola to influenza to HIV. It's quick-paced, particularly for science writing, and there's a ton of fascinating things to learn here. Did you know, for instance, that HIV might have "spilled over" from animal to human hosts as early as 1908? I didn't.

It's a really fascinating book. I wouldn't read it right before you get on an airplane, or if you live near a lot of bats. Otherwise, do have at.

*Although, check out that freaky cover. Mr. CR is reading it now, and I've had to request that he put it down facedown, because the cover freaks me out.

Holy downer book, Batman.

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco

If you're looking to become suicidally depressed, have I got the book for you.

A few weeks ago I was actually browsing my library's "Serendipity Collection"--a shelf of books that are new, bestselling, or otherwise popular, and for which there are usually long waiting lists, but in that small collection they are available on a first come, first serve basis. I place a lot of holds, and normally have a pile of books to pick up and check out, but nothing great had been coming in for me, so I thought I'd look around. So I ended up checking out Chris Hedges's and Joe Sacco's investigative work Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.

According to Hedges's intro, the pair (Hedges is a journalist; Sacco is a graphic novelist/journalist) "set out two years ago to take a look at the sacrifice zones, those areas in the country that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement. We wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like when the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit."

So yeah. You're starting to see where the suicidal depression comes in, right?

The book is comprised of four chapters on "destruction": in journalism and graphic novelettes the two tell the stories of people they found on the Native American reservation at Pine Ridge South Dakota (poverty, alcoholism, drug dealing); Camden, N.J. (a former industrial/dock town where immigrants used to find the American dream and now poverty and lawlessness rule, along with racial tensions and violence); a coal-mining region of West Virginia (where mountaintops are being blown off, there are very few coal jobs to work anymore, and everyone has diabetes or other health conditions from breathing in coal dust); and Immokalee, Florida, where illegal immigrants work in modern-day slavery. A fifth and final chapter titled "Days of Revolt" centers on the Occupy protests in New York City.

It's so sad, but I couldn't stop reading it. On the other hand, I don't know if I can recommend it. Really. I know the authors meant the last chapter in particular to be inspiring, but I just can't help feeling that the Occupy protests were not enough to offset the relentless misery in the first four chapters. What I did find inspiring, actually, was one of the graphic novelettes in the Camden, N.J., chapter, featuring a woman named Lolly Davis, who not only worked and took care of her own children, but also raised other people's children, and in one memorable story, during race riots in the city, warned her white neighbors across the way to "put something red in their window" (as a rioter had told Davis to do) so rioters would leave them alone.

I thought the format was done well too--I'll admit I skipped ahead and read most of the graphic novel bits before I read the rest of the text. But that was to be expected--I've never been much of a Chris Hedges fan. I find him a bit histrionic in all his books (I wasn't overfond of his title War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, either). Here's what he has to say towards the end of his narrative:

"The game, however, is up. The clock is ticking toward internal and external collapse. Even our corporate overlords no longer believe the words they utter. They rely instead on the security and surveillance state for control. The rumble of dissent that rises from the Occupy movements terrifies them. It creates a new narrative. It exposes their exploitation and cruelty. And it shatters the absurdity of their belief system." (p. xii.)

Okay, sure. I wish the game really were up, but I suspect it is not, and won't be for a long time, even with continuing Occupy protests. But that's just me. Do read the book sometime, but do me a favor and make sure you're not depressed when you start (although whether you should blow a happy mood with it either, I just don't know).

2012 nonfiction trends: part 3.

To me, it seems that a third trend in 2012 nonfiction titles is a focus on Environmental and Natural History titles.

I have absolutely nothing against Environmental titles; many of them have been written by some of my favorite authors (Rachel Carson and Wendell Berry, I'm looking at you). All the same, I can't say that there is anything in the spreadsheet (under Environmental writing) or on this list that I really, really must read any time soon. Although Richard Fortey's Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants that Time Left Behind does sound kind of interesting.

So there's my ideas about 2012 nonfiction trends: politics, comforting history and historical biography, and environmental titles. If you'd like to see a PDF version of the talk I gave, here it is (or you can click on the Nonfiction Trends 2012 (OWLS) link at the right).

What I want to know is: do you agree with these trends? Have you been noticing any nonfiction trends? (I also think that there's fewer memoirs coming out this year, although I think they'll continue to be popular with readers.) Any trends that you'd LIKE to see?

Even the word "mooncup" makes me shudder.

I honestly don't know why I read the entire book The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, by Mark Boyle.

This entire "living frugal/living without money" genre is one that I never particularly enjoy, but yet I can't stop reading them anyway. I think subconsciously I'm looking for money-saving tips that don't have anything to do with extreme couponing. I already try to spend as little money as possible (I spent the entire summer babying my one pair of shorts along, sometimes hand-washing them, so they didn't develop big holes and I could make them last through the summer), but I do not like couponing.

Unfortunately this book was an extreme version of its kind. Boyle spent a year living in the UK with absolutely no money--living in a trailer, creating his own power/electricity, using a woodstove, biking or hitching anywhere he needed to go, and doing everything he could to get the word out about moneyless living. I guess it wasn't a boring read--I did make it through the whole thing--but I can't say I really enjoyed it. There's a lot of this sort of thing:

"...if I wanted bread, I was going to have to come up with a new solution. And I did. I decided that although I loved bread, it would have to be a treat. Instead, I would sprout the grains. This means sprinkling a layer of rye grains along a couple of stacked, perforated trays and rinsing them with water twice a day until they sprout. This only takes five minutes and so is much less effort, for more nutritional gain, than making bread. Although not quite so pleasing to taste and smell!" (p. 28.)

Oh brother. It's all I can do to get through the day even when I just buy my bread like a sucker.* Experiments like this are just too extreme for me, I'll admit it. But I have to give the guy credit for trying something a little different with his life, and for writing the book about it.

*I also wouldn't be much good as a moneyless woman. Here's what Boyle has to say on certain, ahem, feminine needs: "For coping with periods without money, there is an obvious solution that even I know about: a mooncup. This is a rubber cup, which the user inserts in her vagina to collect the menstrual flow. It's held in place over the cervix by suction." (p. 180.) At the risk of sounding twelve, I've got only two words in response to that idea: icky poo.

Your daily Langewiesche.

I continue to be unsettled in my nonfiction reading, and reading in general. For some reason I am just a bit tired lately--which means I've been reading things like Agatha Christie books. Nothing really to blog about there.

So it's mainly an update today. I did finish William Langewiesche's The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime, and liked it even more as I went on. The last segment in the book, on the shipbreaking industry in India (literally: they run old ships aground and then people tear them apart, manually, for the scrap steel), is nothing short of fantastic. What I really like about Langewiesche is how he doesn't really insert himself in the story, but you do get a feeling for how fascinated he is by his subjects. I envy that, kind of. Imagine being engrossed in something and being able to investigate and write about it for your job. Imagine being able to write this kind of prose:

"I went down to the ship when I could, past the ground crews who by now had grown used to my presence. At the torn bow, I climbed through the broken bilge into the huge forward cargo hold, now open to the sky. The ship was mine to wander--up precarious ladders to the main deck high above, through passageways and equipment rooms where the peeling paint and rusted steel gave evidence of the years of wandering and hard use, and ultimately of neglect. Nonetheless, I felt a sort of awe, and was never in a hurry to leave...

The workers did not seem to mind my presence, or even to wonder about it. They appeared sometimes like ghosts, moving fast and in file without speaking. They were very dirty. They were very poor. But they lacked the look of death that I had seen on the men in the Bhavnagar rerolling mill. They were purposeful. Toward the stern, where sunlight streamed through rough-cut ventilation holes and struck the oil-blackened walls, the towering engine room had the Gothic beauty of a cathedral--a monument to the forces of a new world." (pp. 238-239.)

Fantastic.

The view from Detroit.

Even though I live in the Midwest, I sometimes think about Detroit, and it seems as foreign (if not more so) to me as do cities across the world in other countries and cultures. This mainly started when I found some pictures online of an abandoned building in Detroit that was once used to store textbooks and other school items and supplies (the Book Depository). It just looked so sad. Ever since I saw those I have been looking at and reading books about Detroit.

I found my latest read* on Detroit while I was poking around online looking for reviews of Paul Clemens's superlative investigative title Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant. Detroit Disassembled is a big, gorgeous book of photography, although the photographs are anything beautiful. They document a city in decay.

What we found so jarring about these photographs (Mr. CR carefully looked at the pictures too) is how, whoever abandoned these buildings, seemed to abandon them midway. Nothing seems cleaned out or closed or locked down with any kind of order: in a former high school, desks are piled around haphazardly and science lab equpment sits out on counters; in the book depository, trees grow out of piles of books left jumbled on the floor to rot; in a library branch, the spinner still holds pulp paperbacks. It looks like stills from a horror movie, you know the type, when everyone in a small town just disappears into thin air, leaving their half-eaten meals on a table.

It's a horrible, gorgeous book. It needs to be looked at in conjunction with reading either Paul Clemens's Punching Out or Made in Detroit: A South of 8-Mile Memoir. I sometimes wonder if the whole city shouldn't be emptied and left to decay, and then maintained and visited as some sort of post-apocalyptic theme park (you know: see Alan Weisman's book The World without Us, about the process of how cities would go back to trees without us around, in action!). I'm not saying everyone who lives there would have to leave; maybe they could just live in some new buildings across town and then work jobs in the theme park. Or maybe that's too morbid. It was just an idea. Look at this book and tell me if you don't start having similar ideas.

*I say "read." Mainly I just looked at the pictures, although I did skim the essays by the photographer and by Philip Levine.

Some old favorite authors with new books.

Last week seemed to be the week for reading new books by nonfiction authors I've previously enjoyed. First up: Catherine Friend.

I first came across Friend when I read her memoir Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn, about she and her girlfriend's experiences starting a working farm. Friend's partner, Melissa, was really the one with the interest in farming, so Catherine often just seemed along for the ride. (To which I can relate: I grew up on a farm but would have to be coerced--strongly coerced, say, by a world financial meltdown or apocalypse of some kind--to return to the farm.) That was a fun memoir. I also enjoyed her follow-up, The Compassionate Carnivore, which was a great book about eating meat while still like animals, and which made a strong argument for simply making better choices about the meat you eat (and paying attention to how and where it is raised). In that respect it was about a million times better than Jonathan Safran Foer's pointless Eating Animals.

So when I saw her new title, Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet, I was excited to read it. This one, like her previous books, offers short chapters and a wealth of funny stories, but I struggled to find the cohesive story arc in this one. This is rare, as I am not normally a nonfiction reader who needs a lot of story.* It's divided into five different parts, with Friend chatting variously about the latest farm adventures (including a fascinating chapter about sheep getting pregnant at the wrong time of year); menopausal difficulties; some struggles in her relationship with Melissa; and an appreciation for the farm, the sheep, and particularly their wool. She shares some interesting tidbits about wool, its history, and its properties, but I must confess she lost me on her knitting chapters. Knitting for me is a lot like gardening: It seems like a good hobby and I feel like I should be interested in it, but at the end of the day, knitting comes in at about #434 on the list of things I want to learn how to do in my life, somewhere below curling my eyebrows but above sewing in general.

It was a fun**, quick read, but if you're looking for something more cohesive I'd start with any of Friend's earlier books.

*This is why it annoys me when nonfiction read for recreation is referred to as "narrative nonfiction"--just because something isn't a how-to, doesn't necessarily make it "narrative." But people need labels. I understand.

**It starts with a zap, literally, as Friend describes a young couple's tour of her farm and their reaction to the electric fence: "...the man looks down at the smooth wire running from post to post. 'Is this electric?' I nod. There's a yellow sign hanging from the top wire about thirty feet away. The sign says, 'Warning: Electric Fence...' He can't take his eyes off the fence. 'Would it hurt?' The guy's wife rolls her eyes. 'Honey, don't touch the fence.'" Of course he touches the fence. As a wife who probably (too frequently) rolls her eyes, I got a charge out of that one. Pun intended.

The sound of a happier person reading.

For whatever reasons I have been more tranquil this week. I think it is because I have either a) decided not to think about world events (the fact that states are working to cut worker rights and salaries when we're fighting two pointless and expensive wars--or maybe three--who the fuck knows what the Pentagon is planning for Libya) and culture (books are dead and everybody clearly loves gadgets more than I do, if they can stomach the thought of buying Kindles and iPads and smart phones, oh my), or b) I have just been finding good nonfiction that is helping me keep my mind off all of the above. It might also be because the weather's a bit warmer. Hard telling what goes into the daily soup that is one's state of mind.

One of the books helping to keep me tranquil was Elisabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. When I read the review of it at MadREADS, I was intrigued, so I checked it out, although I am not normally one for nature books of any kind. (I make an exception for Rachel Carson. I love her.) The story of this tiny little book is simple: Bailey has been suffering from a neurological malady for many years, and once, when she is completely debilitated and bedridden by her disease, a friend visits her and brings along a snail she found on a walk, thinking simply that Bailey might like it. They fill a pot with violets and dirt and set the snail in it, and soon Bailey is watching the snail navigate its slow and steady way around her home.

Bailey does not share many details about her illness, but it of course colors every page: "Each morning there was a moment, before I had fully awakened, when my mind still groped its clumsy way back to consciousness, my body not yet remembered, reality not yet acknowledged. That moment was always full of pure, sweet, uncontrollable hope. I did not ask for this hope to come; I did not even want it, for it trailed disappointment in its wake. Yet there it was, hovering within me--hope that my illness had vanished with the night and my health had returned magically with daybreak." (p. 21.)

I find her writing both simple and very beautiful, and she brings that sensibility to her descriptions of her snail, as well as to the information she shares about snails that she learns from wide and historical reading. As she moves the snail from her violet pot to a terrarrium and eventually back out into the wild, you get the sense she just felt privileged to interact so closely with another little life. It's not really a happy book, but it's a very hopeful little one. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Citizen Reader's Holiday Gift Guide: Wendell Berry

If you're looking for a great all-around author who might work for any readers for whom you are seeking gifts, you really don't have to look any farther than Wendell Berry.

The guy's a super-talent. Not only is he a thoughtful human being, but he writes in a variety of formats, and he writes well in all of them.* And, he publishes often enough that even people who are only interested in new books have lots of options. Some of my top picks:

Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food: A wonderful collection of essays about food, agriculture, and sustainability. This would make a good gift for anyone interested in those subjects, any of the more environmentally aware people on your holiday list, or anyone who simply enjoys good essay writing. Foodie readers might also get a kick out of this one.

What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth: Another great recent essay collection focusing on matters of economy and agriculture. This one would work for the sustainability crowd, but might also be of interest to any people you know who enjoy business or economics books.

Jayber Crow: Berry's finest novel, in my opinion. A classic. It would work for anyone you know who likes character- and setting-driven fiction, and doesn't mind a bittersweet twinge to their storytelling.

Given: New Poems: A poetry collection that might be good even for people who aren't crazy about poetry. Berry's poetry is just like his prose; clear but evocative, and timeless. Everything you want poetry to be.

*It's a bit disgusting, really, that one man got all this talent.

The finest Berry collection to date.

I'm very unhappy that I have to take Wendell Berry's essay collection What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth back to the library; it's overdue. I may have to break down and buy it--not only is it a fantastic collection of essays, it will now forever be connected in my memory with a time I've found somewhat trying but also memorable. By which I mean, I read most of this book after 3 a.m. baby feedings, when CRjr actually agreed to go back to sleep and I stayed up for a few additional moments, just to enjoy the quiet, the sense of being untethered that being up in the middle of the night gives you, and a granola bar.

The collection consists of five essays written recently, in 2009 (or 2006, in one case), and ten essays written up to several decades ago (1985, etc.). All have to do, ostensibly, with the economy, but they all have that special Wendell spin: looking at the economy in terms of not only money, but in terms of lifestyles and choices, as well as land and community stewardship.

They are, of course, sensational, which makes it all the sadder that the people who need to understand his principles the most will never read them. I didn't even bother to bookmark great passages (primarily because that would have involved heaving my ass off the couch, and I've done enough heaving around of my body and another little body the past few weeks), but also because there's a great passage on nearly every page. Here, I'll just open the book at random and I'm sure I'll find one:

"But the 'free market' idea introduces into government a sanction of an inequality that is not implicit in any idea of democratic liberty: namely that the 'free market' is freest to those who have the most money, and is not free at all to those with little or no money. Wal-Mart, for example, as a large corporation 'freely' competing against local, privately owned businesses, has virtually all the freedom, and its small competitors virtually none." (p. 182.)

Okay, I cheated a bit. That's from the essay "The Total Economy," the entire text of which is as brisk as that paragraph. Buy this one. Hand it out to people you know. Give it as a gift. Or, if nothing else, get it from the library and read it at 3 a.m., and be comforted that Wendell Berry is out there still saying the things he's saying.

A useful little cleaning book.

I'm still reading various chapters in Leslie Carroll's fun Notorious Royal Marriages, so not much new to report today.

However, I did want to mention a neat little book I looked at over the weekend, titled Household Cleaning Self-Sufficiency, by Rachelle Strauss. Now, I hate cleaning, but I don't mind reading about it, primarily because I am a very inefficient cleaner, and I have always had this idea that if I just figured out HOW to clean, it would go a lot better. Because I always leave cleaning too long, I have also always relied on typical and harshly chemical cleaning products, which is a habit I'd like to break.

So I've looked at a lot of "green cleaning" books, and photocopied some recipes for cleaning solutions out of them (like mixes using borax or vinegar to address bathroom mildew spots), but I've never really found one that I thought it would be useful to own. But Strauss's book is the exception. It offers very logically laid out chapters, and succinctly lists what chemicals are in regular cleaning products that you should avoid (and why), what natural ingredients you can buy and use, and then a few chapters of specific ways you can clean various areas in your house. It's only 125 pages long, so it's not overwhelming, and it's pragmatic more than it is "earth mother." (Some of these books are so intimidating it's ridiculous; with recipes saying things like "slaughter your own hog. Then drip its tallow through charcoals to make lye, which you can then use as soap..."*) And, it's only $12.95. If you're looking for one household manual to pick up, or maybe even a useful gift for a change to give at a bridal shower or wedding, consider this one.

*I'm making this example up. Please do not try and make your own lye.

Community reading.

I have been thinking a lot about community since reading the book I spoke about yesterday, Peter Lovenheim's In the Neighborhood.*

I liked the book, but I think there were some other books I liked better, or at least made me think about community and neighborhoods in slightly different ways (other than feeling guilty that I don't know many--any--of my neighbors). They were:

Peter Kilborn's Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class. Not a perfect book, but it should make you realize what we're up against in our culture, trying to form communities. Kilborn points out that a large portion of the population simply has to move where their jobs are, and they want to live in innocuous, safe, homogeneous suburbs when they get there.

Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. A classic work, if a little dry, about changing participation in civil and public activities in America. I'd actually like to re-read this one; lately I've been wondering where we're going to go, soon, just to be among other people, as I believe video stores, music stores, and book stores are all on their way out.

Sudhir Venkatesh's Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Again, a bit sociological, a bit academic, but really interesting, and a good look at how people everywhere are still bartering and doing what they can to get by utilizing the resources nearest them.

I know there's more but I'm blanking on them right now. Anyone else have any suggestions? Either way, and regardless of where your community is, I hope you have a great weekend.

*Many thanks to Katharine, by the way, for suggesting this one.

In the neighborhood.

I honestly didn't know what to think about Peter Lovenheim's new nonfiction book In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time. On the one hand, I thought it was a pretty neat little work of investigative and personal journalism (and I love that it came in at 238 pages, making it easily readable over a couple of nights); but on the other hand, I am too conflicted in my own feelings about neighbors, and what constitutes a community,* to wholeheartedly enjoy anything on the subject.

The impetus for Lovenheim's story came from an incident in his neighborhood in 2000, when a couple who lived just a few houses away from him died in a murder-suicide (the husband killed his wife and then himself). He was shocked to find how little he himself had known about them and their lives, and it got him thinking:

"What would it take, I wondered, to penetrate the barriers between us? I thought about childhood sleepovers and the insight I used to get from waking up inside a friend's home. More recently, my family and I had done summer house exchanges with families in Europe--they stayed in our house while we stayed in theirs. After living in these strangers' homes--waking in their beds, fixing meals in their kitchens, and walking in their neighborhoods--we had a strong sense of what their lives were about, something that would have been impossible to achieve just through conversation...But would my neighbors let me sleep over and write about their lives from inside their houses?" (pp. xvii-xviii.)

In fact, a bunch of his neighbors DID let him sleep over, and his descriptions of those experiences are the most interesting chapters in the book. I really did kind of enjoy it. Lovenheim's a skillful enough narrator, and the stories move right along--he gets to know an elderly neighbor, as well as a number of families, and another woman who is struggling with cancer. Along the way they do all become somewhat more involved in each other's lives--Lovenheim facilitates his older neighbor's desire to help individuals (rather than volunteering) by matching him up with the woman with cancer who needs help driving to some appointments, and he does become friends with many more people on his block.

I wouldn't say this book is a favorite, but it definitely was interesting (I felt the same way about the author's earlier title, Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf, which I read a million years ago and enjoyed but didn't love--and which I didn't realize was done by the same author until I read his bio on this book). Check it out if you're interested in the continuing cultural debate about communities, neighborhoods, and social preferences.

*And when I say conflicted, I mean I want nothing to do, personally, with any of my actual neighbors. Ask Mr. CR: when taking walks, I have been known to cross the street to avoid talking to any of my neighbors who might actually be out in their front yards. I know the names of the people in the houses on either side of me, but other than that I only know other neighbors by nicknames like "the bossy old lady in the house behind us." I know this is not right, but I can't seem to help it. I try to be a good citizen otherwise; I volunteer time for other causes, I take care to keep my house and lawn neat, and I have called the cops before when noticing suspicious behavior at other houses on my street. But that doesn't change the fact that we once went to a movie specifically because we knew our nearest neighbor was throwing a party designed to help all the neighbors meet each other, just so we wouldn't have to go. Part of this is because I have made the choice, along with other members of my family, to stick near them and in my hometown, so I feel like THEY are my community. If you have moved away from or don't get along with your family, I can see how the need for neighbors might be a very real one indeed.

What was the point of this farming experiment, exactly?

I did not enjoy Manny Howard's My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard Into a Farm.

I did end up reading most of it, although I could tell from the start it wasn't really going to be my type of "back to the land" narrative. Although, to be honest, I can't think of one of these types of books that I've really, really loved, other than perhaps Doug Fine's Farewell, My Subaru, which was at least kind of charming, or Michael Ableman's On Good Land, which was more of a "staying on the land" story. I did not like Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, either. I think I tend to find these books either obnoxious or smug, neither of which are tones I enjoy in most of my nonfiction (unless, of course, the obnoxious is coming from Anthony Bourdain, who has a new book coming out!).

This book grew out of a New York Magazine article that Howard wrote in 2007, in which the magazine challenged him to live the locavore lifestyle by growing enough vegetables and livestock in his 800-square-foot Brooklyn backyard to keep him in food for a month. Perhaps the book just needed tighter editing; Howard seems to bounce, without any sort of plan, from one scheme to the next: growing plants from seed in his basement, growing vegetables through hydroponics, breeding rabbits for food, and eventually getting a few chickens and ducks as well. I was also annoyed that, throughout, he seemed to have endless money and resources for these projects; I couldn't tell if that was because his wife had a great job in the city, or if the magazine was footing all of his expenses. Consider his exploits in the hydroponics store, when he realizes the salespeople probably think he is a narc looking for information about home marijuana growers:

"Have the boys here made me for a narc? Me? Maybe...I may not be a narc or a drug-enforcement agent, but ever since I walked into the store I have been doing what my profession trained me to do, ask as many dumb questions as you can think of...But I neglected to identify myself as a reporter--because I am not, I am a farmer--so I have inadvertently communicated only a deep desire to burn vast amounts of money on a project I know nothing about. I have spent the last half hour asking after only the most obvious covert growing rigs--ones designed to fit inside closets. I can be one of only two things, the dumbest cannabis grow king ever to step through this front door, or a cop." (p. 85.)

I have two problems with that paragraph. First: dude, you are no farmer, even if you do keep trying to quote Wendell Berry. (Anytime you grow something for just the one season, I can call you at most a gardener.) And secondly, I have no patience for people who get to burn vast amounts of money on any project, because I have never had vast amounts of money, and frankly, hearing about other people burn through such amounts makes me both jealous and annoyed. It's the way the entire book progresses; he goes from one project to the next, and eventually does get some garden produce, but at the end of the season a tornado (first tornado in Brooklyn in a hundred years, which was unfortunate) wrecks most of his backyard and most of his animals die off. By the next season he's back to putting sod over his backyard, and that's the end of that. Leaving me with only the one feeling: What was the point of all that?

Meh. If you're looking for a better book on living off the land, do try Doug Fine's Farewell, My Subaru. Likewise, if you're interested in a more humorous memoir of a man bumbling through the first years of his marriage and home improvement, try Lawrence LaRose's vastly superior Gutted: Down to the Studs In My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life.

A book so good it actually put me off chicken.

Once again, it doesn't really sound right to say that I "enjoyed the hell out of" Gabriel Thompson's new book Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs [Most] Americans Won't Do, but that's really the only way to say it. The book is horrifying and depressing and stupendous.

Whether you call this type of work immersion journalism or "stunt lit," the style is becoming familiar: a journalist or a memoirist decides they are going to do something over the course of a set time period, and then write about it. One of the best known examples of this genre is Barbara Ehrenreich's now-classic title Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America, in which she tried to live on the wages she could make as a waitress, cleaning person, and Wal-Mart employee. This book is very similar to Ehrenreich's, but for some reason it resonated with me more.

Thompson set out, not to live on the wages he could make, but simply to experience the types of jobs in this country that are often filled by immigrants and undocumented workers. He decided to spend two months each working in the agricultural field, a chicken processing plant, and the kitchens of New York City's restaurants. Each job is described over roughly a third of the book.

Let me tell you this right now: his first job, picking lettuce in Yuma, Arizona? One day of it would kill me.* Thompson joined workers who worked longer than eight-hour days, continually bending and cutting lettuce, all for $8.37 an hour. And his second job, at a chicken processing plant in Alabama, only got worse. Ehrenreich did a good job of describing the toll these types of jobs take on the human body, too, but for some reason, when Thompson was describing the pain and chronic conditions he was developing, I could actually feel how terrible he felt. The very fact that there was a vending machine of painkillers next to the pop and snacks machines at the chicken should indicate what workers are going through. 

This has been my favorite "eye-opening" book since John Bowe's Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy. And I promise you, I've read many, many books about the horrors of chicken processing plants, but before now, I've gone the way of most Americans and tried not to think about where most of my food is coming from when I shop in the grocery store (although I also try to shop at markets and find alternative sources for my meat). But now? It'll probably wear off again, but even the thought of buying chicken breasts in the store makes me ill. What makes this book so different? Because of paragraphs like this (in Thompson's conclusion):

"At the moment, many of the issues being raised are centered on the consumer: Is the food safe for my children? How far did it travel to get to my grocery store? We should expand these concerns, demanding that the foods are produced in a way that is not only safe for consumers and environmentally sustainable, but also safe and sustainable for workers. This, in turn, demands that we rethink our notions of the benefits of cheap food, because much of the pressure driving down wages comes from companies in competition with each other for contracts with national chain...An order of twenty hot wings for less than $10 might seem like a great deal, but the hidden costs are borne by workers in places like Russellville." (p. 291.)

That says it pretty plainly, doesn't it? Check this book out.** If it doesn't make you a. more thankful for whatever job you might have (and I know about hating jobs, believe you me, and I sympathize), and b. slightly more interested in food issues and immigration reform, I'll eat my made-in-China shirt.

*And I grew up on a farm, so I am not unfamiliar with long days and hard physical work.

**It's a great book for another reason: Thompson's stories of worker solidarity are weirdly and totally inspirational.

But I don't want to make an apron.

When I first looked at Erin Bried's book How to Sew a Button: And Other Nifty Things Your Grandmother Knew, I thought, huh, maybe I should buy this book and actually learn something.

But, as with all my good intentions, I got over it. I enjoyed the book, and there are a lot of useful things in it, but the majority of the tips and how-tos cover skills and tasks I'm simply never going to do. Every now and then I would just pick it up to flip through it a little bit, and it always opened to the chapter on "how to make an apron." This was unfortunate, as I have a perfectly good apron that I stole from Country Kitchen the summer I worked there (if you could have seen my tips from all the old couple customers, you'd know I EARNED that apron), and I'm not about to dink around trying to sew a new one. But I digress.

Other chapters include very handy outlines for the following: how to roast a whole chicken (this I should actually learn); how to compost; how to install a clothesline (this I really do want to learn); how to kill mildew; how to shine your shoes; how to unclog a drain; and many, many, more. Actually, the more closely I look at it, the more I think it is kind of a neat little book. Sadly, though, most of the directions are not hand-holding enough for me. The clothesline instructions, for example, are basically: "Dig two holes in the ground about 1 foot wide and at least 1 foot deep in your desired location. Prepare your cement according to the instructions on the bag. Spray one hole with water, fill it halfway with cement, plumb your pole, and then top of with cement..." (p. 70.)

Uh, yeah. It's nice to make it sound that easy, but it seems like plumbing the pole should involve more steps than me eyeballing it in a half-ass kinda way (which is, really, how I end up doing everything). Or maybe I'm just making everything harder than it needs to be.

Anyway, my issues notwithstanding, it's still an interesting concept for a book and I give Bried kudos for throwing it together, and for encouraging self-sufficiency.

Really, Michael Pollan?

I am thoroughly disgusted with Michael Pollan's new book Food Rules: An Eater's Manual.

This did not come as a complete surprise, as I have never been a huge Michael Pollan fan. I know many people who enjoyed The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I don't think it was a bad book, but (here's a surprise) it was too long for me. And In Defense of Food was one of those books that seemed redundant to me--if you were the kind of person to read In Defense of Food, I figured it was probably likely you were the type of person who least NEEDED to read In Defense of Food. (It is wrong to stereotype. But I figured most readers of that book were probably fairly well-off people, who get a charge out of going to farmers' markets and "getting to know their farmers," and who had the time and money to worry about the origins of their food.) But still, it wasn't a terrible book, and to each their own, although, for my money, I prefer books about agriculture and society by Wendell Berry, or cookbooks by Mark Bittman.

But Food Rules is nothing but a 140-page distillation of In Defense of Food (which the author himself summed up in only seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mainly plants.") with a few other folksy bits thrown in. Divided into three parts (what should I eat?, what kind of food should I eat?, and how should I eat?), each "chapter" consists of a rule (in large type) and a short explanation, such as "Eat only foods that will eventually rot," followed by information like "the more processed a food is, the longer the shelf life, and the less nutritious it typically is." What's really annoying is when the rules start to resemble each other, particularly early on; on page 9 you find "avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry," and on page 17, you have "avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce." Hmm.

I have looked the book over and can't discern if any of the money from its publication is going to a charity or something, which would be the only excuse. Otherwise I am going to assume that Pollan was simply looking for a way to squeeze a few more bucks out of his fans. What really hurts me is the fact that all libraries probably had to purchase multiple copies of this little money-grab (as there is usually high demand for Pollan titles of any kind), and for each $11 copy they had to buy, they couldn't buy a different book that had something new or different or better to say. Bah!

What else is there to say about Wendell Berry?

Last week I promised more thoughts on Wendell Berry's essay and story collection Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, but I don't know that I have much more (that is coherent) to say about it.

The book is divided into three sections: Farming, Farmers, and Food. I completely loved the essays on farming, although, as with any writing that is thought-provoking, they were also somewhat disturbing. How do we turn around our frightening dependence on cheaply produced food that is bad for us, bad for the animals being raised in industrial settings, and bad for the earth? How do we start to say no to big agribusiness, and support farmers who say no to big agribusiness? How do we really affect a change without moving to the country and raising a few goats ourselves (which I really don't want to do).

The second section, on Farmers, is also very interesting, but contains essays in which Berry examines more of the nitty-gritty surrounding specific farmers who he considers masters of their craft, and how they actually do what they do. Some of these essays were a bit too detailed for me, but I did enjoy the one titled "Charlie Fisher," in which he describes the work and business of a man who responsibly cuts timber and works as a logger.

The third section, "Food," was another small wonder to behold. Here most of the pieces are not essays, but are instead snippets from Berry's stories and novels in which food and meals play a part. I loved these stories and they renewed my desire to read more of Berry's fiction (particularly his short stories). They also made me very hungry, in the best possible way. Consider:

"The Proudfoot family gahterings were famous. As feasts, as collections and concentrations of good things, they were unequaled. Especially in summer there was nothing like them, for then there would be old ham and fried chicken and gravy, and two or three kinds of fish, and hot biscuits and three kinds of cornbread, and potatoes and beans and roasting ears and carrots and beets and onions, and corn pudding and corn creamed and fried, and cabbage boiled and scalloped, and tomatoes stewed and sliced, and fresh cucumbers soaked in vinegar, and three or four kinds of pickles, and if it was late enough in the summer there would be watermelons and muskmelons, and there would be pies and cakes and cobblers and dumplings, and milk and coffee by the gallon." (p. 188.)

Oh, man, I just had breakfast, and now I'm starving again. Give this collection a try if you're already a Wendell fan; if you're new to him, concentrate primarily on the essays in the first section.

Wendell Berry.

All week I hve been reading Wendell Berry's essay collection titled Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food. It's not a long book, only about 230 pages or so, but reading Wendell Berry always takes me some time. Or rather, I should say, I need to take my time when reading Wendell Berry, because there's only so much of his writing that I can take at a time. That is because reading him is always inspirational, humbling, and scary. And that's a lot to take in while reading.

Berry is inspirational because I find what he says makes sense. In this collection, divided into three sections (Farming, Farmers, and Food), the emphasis of the chosen essays (ranging in publication dates from the early 1970s to 2006) is on why industrial agriculture is damaging our land and economy, and how small and sustainable farming practices should not only be practiced by farmers, but supported by consumers. There is nothing I can argue with in that. He is humbling because, as a small farmer himself, I think he does make the effort to practice what he preaches, and he is humbling because is writing is so clear and so beautiful.* But, as powerful and enjoyable as those first two feelings are, the end result of reading Wendell Berry is that I most often feel scared. Scared that our economy has taken us too far down the road of destroyed soil, food laden with chemicals and produced in animal factories, and oil dependence to ever go back. And, if I'm honest, scared because I DON'T WANT TO GO BACK TO THE FARM and I can't quite figure out how to live in accordance with his principles otherwise.

I think I will chat more on this one tomorrow, as I continue to read. But for today I'll leave you with the main scary thought I had, and a beautiful piece of Wendell's own writing. My scary thought was this: forget producing food in a small way; most of us, in our reliance on Costco and Wal-Mart, have given up on consuming in a small way. How do we even begin to reverse that? And now for the words of the man himself:

"But a culture disintegrates when its economy disconnects from its government, morality, and religion. If we are dismembered in our economic life, how can we be members in our communal and spiritual life? We assume that we can have an exploitive, ruthlessly competitive, profit-for-profit's-sake economy, and yet remain a decent and democractic nation, as we still apparently wish to think ourselves. This simply means that our highest principles and standards have no practical force or influence and are reduced merely to talk...

As a nation, then, we are not very religious and not very democratic, and that is why we have been destroying the family farm for the last forty years--along with other small local economic enterprises of all kinds. We have been willing for millions of people to be condemned to failure and dispossession by the workings of an economy utterly indifferent to any claims they may have had either as children of God or as citizens of a democracy." (pp. 38-39.)

Think on that for a minute or a year or so.

*I have often wondered how long it takes Berry to write one of his typical essays. They are sparkling little jewels of clarity and conciseness.