• Draft No. 4 by John McPhee *** (of 4)

    McPhee is one of the preeminent nonfiction craftsmen of the last half century. As a staff writer for The New Yorker his longform essays have culminated in 31 books, four Pulitzer nominations, and a Pulitzer Prize. He has summarized his decades of experience as writer, and writing instructor at Princeton, in Draft No. 4, a book that is richer than chocolate mousse: every word is at once carefully calculated and placed with seeming effortlessness so that it is best digested in small servings.

    McPhee shares universal truths such as the observation that all writers are either insecure about their writing or, falling into a second category, find that having other people read their work makes them feel insecure. You are not a writer, says McPhee, unless you experience bloc and that bloc is best overcome by typing at the top of the page, “Dear Mom, here is what I am working on now…” Assembling a first draft is painful, but second and third drafts are easier. Fourth drafts are a necessity at a bare minimum.

    It is hard to say if non-writers will get as much from this book as those who have agonized over putting together a compelling essay. For readers, rather than writers, I recommend any of his 30 other books.

  • Sourdough: Three variations

    One of the things I love most about sourdough, and breadmaking in general, is how many variations can come from such a small number of ingredients.

    This sourdough pizza crust was made with 100% spelt flour. Spelt is an ancient variety of wheat that has been cultivated for more than 5,000 years. It has a rich, nutty flavor.

    Following the recipe provided in Breadtopia the crust turned out super thin and crisp. The dough was extensible without being too elastic; it was easy to spread out, and yet the thin crust held a lot of toppings.

    I used apples picked from the ground beneath a friend’s overburdened tree, some sourdough, and Maurizio Leo’s recipe for a galette crust to make this seasonal offering.

    It did not last long.

    This sourdough pumpernickel with corn, rye, wheat, molasses, and raisins was so rich and delicious that even toasted and with all kinds of toppings from savory to sweet it lasted quite a while. The bread was so moist and dense that it could only be appreciated one slice at a time.

  • The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith

    On the plus side there are very few writers who can match JK Rowling’s (writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith) ability to capture personality, dialogue, and character. In this, the sixth in the series of crime novels involving private detectives Robin Ellicott and Cormoran Strike, Rowling takes on the viciousness, malignancy, and unbridled misogyny of internet communities that spiral downward into the Dark Web.

    What begins as a quirky YouTube cartoon grows in popularity among an on-line fandom. Only the fandom becomes so opinionated about the direction, and Directors, that the power of the fans overtakes the show itself. The anonymity of the internet allows people to form relationships they might not in real life, but it also permits abusers to mislead, harass, intimidate, and threaten. All of that secrecy and privacy makes for a compelling mystery when one of the directors is murdered. In a cemetery!

    On the downside, as happened in the Harry Potter series, Rowling’s editors were unable to push back. The number of potential suspects is so large that it is likely the only way to keep them all straight is to be staring at Rowling’s diagrams pasted across her walls. Likewise, the number of pages has grown to an overwhelming 1,462. The book should have been tighter.

  • The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride **** (of 4)

    The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a one-room general store owned by Moshe, but run, at a loss, by his warm-hearted, open-minded, club-footed (polio), empathetic, and tough-as-nails wife, Chona. The store on Chicken Hill may be run by a Jewish family, but it is frequented by Pottstown, Pennsylvania’s Blacks, who along with other immigrants are all but banned from downtown by the Christian elite. It is the 1920s and 1930s and according to Chona, who writes letters to the Pottstown newspaper, it is the town doctor under robes leading the annual KKK parade.

    You would be mistaken, however, if you went into this book expecting a grim tale of racial and ethnic belligerence. Instead, McBride introduces us to some of the most respectable, joyful, conniving, conscientious, and well-meaning Blacks and Jews you will ever have the pleasure of observing. Throughout–as the the two communities work together to rescue a 12-year-old Black child who has been “taken” to a criminally negligent insane asylum typical of the era — we readers have the unique pleasure of being in the room where vernacular conversations ricochet off the walls. Jews answer questions with more questions and African Americans tell stories that build upon other stories and then lead to new stories as they navigate within the confines of racial America. James McBride is one of the few, perhaps, the only, writer capable of telling such a tale with this much grace, compassion, and drive.

  • The Art Thief by Michael Finkel **** (of 4)

    The book opens by letting readers know that Stephane Breitwieser is probably the most successful art thief that has ever lived. He has been captured and some of his stolen art recovered. Because we know what has been done and who did it at the very beginning, subtler questions become the subject of the book. The first question of how he accomplished art thefts across Europe on three of every four weekends for years on end. Second is why? Breitwieser never sold anything he stole. He simply stored it in his one room flat and adored it. Art, he said, brought him unfathomable joy. Evidently, so did theft.

    But even subtler questions are on offer as this tight little book moves along. How is the value of art determined? If Breitwieser’s collection was worth upward of $2 billion, according to whom? If a private collector buys a rare masterpiece and hides it from the public in his bedroom is that so different from Breitwieser’s crimes? Most vexing of all is the definition of stolen art. Were Breitwieser’s thefts any more criminal than the British Museum’s acquisition of the Elgin Marbles or rare objects taken from Egypt’s tombs? Are millionaire collectors who fail to complete thorough investigations of an object’s provenance purchased from a dealer who might not have asked all the right questions any less culpable?

  • Properties of Thirst by Marianne Wiggins *** (of 4)

    An ambitious book that centers the Owen’s Valley in California, the valley’s desertification following rerouting all of the valley’s water to Los Angeles, and the placement of the Japanese internment camp, Manzanar, in the midst of the dusty, isolated desert. A lone holdout rancher, Rocky Rhodes, refuses to cooperate with the water boys from LA. He is joined by his twin sister, Casswell, his wife (who is already dead by the time the book opens), and his two children: Sunny and Stryker. (Get it: Rocky Roads, Sunny Roads?). The Rhodes’s come from old waspy money back east.

    Schiff, a nebish of a Jew, with a big conscience, from Chicago is charged with building a camp — really a ghetto — for 10,000 American citizens forced to abandon their jobs and homes with nothing more than what they are wearing and could carry in their hands. Sunny and Schiff have eyes for one another, Sunny is an indomitable chef in the middle of nowhere, Nature (with a capital N) in the desert and in the nearby Sierras is a character in its own right, and Japanese prisoners of war stagger through the indignities of living behind barbed wire.

    Wiggins is a master story teller and a wizard with words, but may have taken on too many themes to do sufficient justice to all of them in one book.

  • The Breads of Morocco

    This is a longform article about the geography, history, culture, and value of bread in Morocco. It can be found at The Perfect Loaf.

    The coincidence of the article’s release and the devastating earthquake is horrible. If you feel moved to make a contribution, I strongly encourage you to visit The High Atlas Foundation. I have worked with HAF for many years and can vouch for their commitment to sustainable development, women’s empowerment, and reforestation. No one knows the communities hardest hit better than HAF does.

  • Deep South by Paul Theroux **** (of 4)

    This is Paul Theroux’s only travel book wherein the act of traveling is intentionally easy. Unlike his other books – taking the railroad across Siberia, traveling from Cairo to Cape Town by public transport – in this one, he heads from his home in New England to the Black Belt of the southern U.S. in his personal car. He returns several times, responding to the siren, “Y’all come back, now.”

    The driving is easy but the landscape is just as poor, but less tended to by national and international aid organizations, as anyplace he has seen in Africa, and Theroux has spent years in rural Africa. What emerges from a book written in the early 2000-teens is that Black people in the southern United States continue to face economic segregation that is so severe as to leave families living in tar paper shacks, on degraded farmland, facing an inability to get loans or federal assistance more than a century after Reconstruction.

    Making the book even more unique is Theroux’s discourse on other travel writers and especially to famous southern writers, most notably William Faulkner. It’s like taking a roadtrip with a particularly informative English professor, albeit a driver who keeps asking how it is possible that former President Clinton’s multi-billion dollar foundation (and others like it) can provide aid to villages in Africa, but won’t pay attention to desperate hollers in his Arkansas backyard or impoverished cotton farmers with leaking roofs in Mississippi.

  • Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule *** (of 4)

    The author, Ty Seidule, is a professor of history at West Point. That gives him real cache when he says the southern states lost the Civil War but won the battle for the narrative that followed. The South, he argues, maintains a perception that the war was over “states rights,” that the north won only because of overwhelming financial resources and personnel (the north also used unfair tactics, they claim), and that the really brave and heroic military commanders were southerners, most notably, Robert E. Lee.

    Seidule was raised in the south and growing up wanted nothing more than to become an upstanding southern Christian gentleman in the mold of Lee. Gentelmanliness was another myth of the Lost Cause, that southern life before the Civil War was best depicted in Gone With the Wind: iced tea sipped quaintly on the wide porches of antebellum plantations by women in wide skirts attended by chivalrous men.

    As Seidule makes clear in his introduction, the more research he has done, the more shocked he is by the effectiveness of southern propaganda. Plantations are nothing more than enslaved labor work camps. The Civil War followed a free and fair election that displeased the south so much, they started an insurrection and fought a bloody war against the United States Army. From that perspective, no southerner deserves a statue or recognition of any kind, and yet as he digs into the records, he sees that enslaved girls and women were subjected to sexual violence at will by southern gentlemen, and for decades, onto today, black men and women face an unfair electoral and judicial system of terrifying efficiency.

    His point is made early enough in the book that reading the whole thing may not be necessary. Worse still, at the very opening, he admits that southerners wedded to Lost Cause mythology have rarely if ever been persuaded to change their perceptions when presented with facts.

  • Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne **** (of 4)

    In 1939, Raymond Chandler wroteThe Big Sleep featuring, Private Investigator Philip Marlowe. Marlowe was the original world weary, cynical PI: hard drinking, self-mocking, and a womanizer. He wore a fedora and could only have existed on a black and white screen played by Humphrey Bogart. In Only to Sleep, it is now 1988 and Marlowe is called out of retirement to traipse across Mexico for an insurance company that thinks one of its clients has just duped them out of a couple of million dollars.

    Marlowe takes the job because he’s bored and wants one more run at his old job. Only his knees and arthritis are bothering him and he’s old enough that the appeal of femmes fatales is more instinctual than physical. Osborne’s Marlowe is a deep philosopher with insights about human nature, decadal changes in Mexico, loneliness, landscape, and growing old. He is also funny and difficult and Osborne’s joy at turning out this novel is infectious. The audiobook is excellent.