Nov. 3 2008

October 2008

October 18, 2008

My son read this to me at dinner. This 4 page story would make a fantastic short ghost film. October 17 2008

Remembering what it is like to be a teenage boy. Very witty. October 2008

Hey, I remember that world... sort of... except that I was never really part of it (I thought of myself as modern orthodox, not ultra-orthodox) and memory does fade after two decades. Or does it? Even if I wasn't in it, I was right there next to it, and sometimes even in it, if briefly. Hard for me to believe now. In some cases I actually know more about things the author explains than the author himself does. In some cases I think I know what the orthodox people he describes are thinking better than he does. That's not a criticism, just an expression of how deep I really was in the edges of that world. Eisenberg does a great job of taking the initiated or uninitiated visitor on a tour of ultra-orthodox life as it is really lived. For me it is almost healing... for most it will simply be fascinating. September 15 2008

To my daughter in August and September, 2008

The mirror of the crisis of capitalism, and how crisis is used to advance fascist interests. August 2008

First read to me by Mrs. Murata in 6th grade, I've spent the last few weeks reading this to my daughter at bedtime and she has been entranced. It is always fascinating to reexperience something as an adult and marvel at all of the things one missed or didn't understand the first time through There were many such things as I read the book again but I think that the message about totalitarianism got through to me even in 6th grade. July 30 2008

This history of an obscure Oregon line and the competition to build it (they built two, one on each side of the river) provides a window into both Oregon / Northwest history, and into the flavor and vibe of late 19th and early 20th century railroad magnates, and the bare knuckled politics, violence, bribery and back country dealings that they engendered. Also, we get a sense of just how hard it was to work as a laborer on the railroad - hard and hot. The photos are beautiful too. July 28 2008

A fondly remembered (from 1971, my 6th grade year) tale about being true to yourself and not immitating others. I discovered it in a box, yellowing and falling apart, and read it to my son this evening. Simple fable, great pleasure. July 14 2008

Completed in early June, I began with Leora reading this book to my daughter 6 months ago or more when she was not quite 7 years old. Because I read only every other chapter, on alternate nights, I have no idea what it is really about. But by the time we reached the end, my daughter took over the reading and would read me to sleep for several weeks. So, again, I missed a significant part of the story, and I still have no idea what it is really about. She however thought it was wonderful, and who am I to argue? It was in the last 6 months, while reading this book that she became a reader, capable of reading almost anything. The other major reading project in her life has been to have read to her, by Leora, the better part of the entire Anne of Green Gables series. But frankly, I've lost track of all the books she is consuming. June 22, 2008

Short stories. Cavemen and the title story are particularly good. April 2008

April 2008

A romp through the swell 1920s. It could not possibly be lighter. April 11 2008

March 2008

I was walking by Powells Books when I saw in the window this 25 cent 1938 pamphlet on a subject of longstanding interest to me - the historical social mores of sleep, courtship, night and gender relations. Four dollars later it was mine. April 10 2008

I greatly enjoyed this backwards through time exploration of the history of the Sarejevo Haggadah, and the hands and places it might have passed through. April 8 2008

To my daughter, March 30 2008

March 28 2008

Wow! This wonderful high energy story is one of the best I've read in a while. The protaganist is relentlessly and enjoyably pissed off at the world and everything and everyone that gets in her way. She reminds me of a modern day female Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye), utterly convinced of the idiocy and foolishness of the adults in her world, and determined to claim her own angry deranged vision. Like Caulfield and his sister, her love for a younger cousin keeps her centered and human. I read this in 24 hours, and recommend it very highly. I want to read more from Helnwein. March 23 2008.

Read to me by my daughter, March 22 2008

Read to me by my daughter, March 22 2008

Outloud to my son at bedtime....

Inspiring. March 13 2008

March 6 2008

Little windows on contemporary China - if not perhaps great literature, still illuminating. Late February 2008

Yep, that's Fry of the Fry and Laurie videos. This is massively amusing and gloriously raunchy. Fry manages to be funny about sex in more different verbal positions than I had thought possible. Half of the novel is epistolary. While visiting a fine English estate, and solving a most peculiar myster, he also manages to weave in a good Jewish / Zionist / English historical narrative that is remarkably plausible and completely unexpected. He makes a compelling case for secular view of the world. He seems, as an author, to be having one heck of a rollicking good time, even if, assuming he has any relation to his main protaganist, a poet, he probably sweated blood to write it. Nobody knows how to end a novel, and neither does Fry, but that detail hardly matters. Apparently he also wrote a book called "Liar." I look forward to reading it too. February 29 2008

I was half way through this way cool story of contemporary mysticism and spelling bees before I realized that the title had nothing to do with the apiary profession. My spouse finds me the most wonderful books to read. I had never thought about even the possibility of a relationship between Jewish mystical practices and spelling bees, but Goldberg weaves them together as if they were always meant to be part of the same story. She also does a fantastic job of getting inside the minds of a fifth grade girl, an adolescent boy, a more than a little troubled mother, and an oblvious (aren't we all) but well intentioned father. Half family drama, half mystical exploration and mystery story, this will be one to return to some day. Richard Gere was in a movie based on this book too, and I simply must see it to find out if they did this little novel justice. February 25 2008

Who am I to complain? Ben Schrank wrote a novel, I didn't. But I thought this could have gone in a much creepier and more other worldly direction that it did. I won't tell you what does happen, but the metaphors stay sadly, and merely, metaphorical and the golem never becomes real in the way I expected. Kind of enjoyable... kind of a big let down. I would have written a different novel. Maybe I should some day. February 21 2008

This wonderful tale of an upper middle class Victorian life has taken over my life for the better part of the last two weeks, read piece by piece, 20 minutes at a time as I commuted on the MAX to downtown Portland. Initially, the book seems impossibly dense, going into minute detail about the pre-Victorian lives of Florence Nightingale's ancestors. A fellow commuter on the train, observing me reading it, pronounced that she had tried to read it and found it impossible. I was at that point almost ready to agree with her, but soon enough it gripped me. We learn the minutist details of Florence Nighingale's life from the extensive correspondence she engaged in with friends and family. We are offered a portrait of her sexuality (unclear if the concept even applied), her likely medical diagnosis upon returning from the Crimean war (a rare bacteria found in goat milk, which she probably consumed to avoid the water and alcohol that was available there), and a portrait of how this highly educated woman battled against the extraordinary sexism that was normative in Britain in her era. We find that she had an extraordinary father who chose to educate her as well as any son. We are reminded that a woman of her age and class could go almost nowhere without an escort, and that for much of her childhood and young adult life she, a person who craved solitude, was like any woman of her class, never alone, even in sleep, but always attended and accompanied. I found this as engaging as any novel, and as much a portrait of Victorian England, particularly its upper middle classes and their habbits and manners, as of Florence Nightingale herself. In the end she invents the profession of nursing administration and changes her world's perception of the roles and aspirations that women could have, but the strain of her battles against convention and in wartime create a most peculiar and strained personality. It appears though, that while she twisted under the load, she did not break. The final images we have of her are of a conventional, solicitous (if largely by the written word) and loving auntie to many members of her extended family. February 18 2008

A children's story of evolution, very nicely explained. Read to my daughter again, January 31 2008

Compelling and engrossing narrative of a young teenager co-opted into the government forces in the 1990s in Sierra Leone. Beah's tale reminds me of some Holocaust stories I've read. I must remember to go back and read this one again some day. January 31 2008

I translated to English for my daughter this tale in Hebrew of a father who embarrasses his son. January 28 2008

This is an absolutely gripping can't put it down until you've read the last page memoir of man and his sociopathic narcissistic social climbing money grubbing thieving and murdering mother and brother. I was fascinated and horrified (in a delightful way) on every page of this book. This will remind you of every narcissistic self-aggrandizing person you've every met, but taken to a level that is simply stunning. And it's not just about criminality, but it seems like a metaphor for other bigger things than one duo's psychopathology. It reminds me of the American corporation as well with its ethic that one's own interests are the paramount value and the ballsy in your face never-cop-to-anything style that corporations and sociopaths like Sante Kimes rely on. We watch as Sante Kimes, combines a career of petty shoplifting and car thieving with bank and real estate fraud on a large scale, scores a millionaire husband, manipulates her family member's lives in the most intimate and personal ways, and uses anything and everyone that gets in her path, while still attracting friends and being remembered by the author, her son (Kent Walker), as a warm and fun person who wrapped him in a cocoon of love. The book reads like Kent Walker sat down at a tape recorder and just started talking, while Schone knit it altogether. Normally that would be a recipe for disaster, but Schone and Walker have done a great job. This is a story that can only be told from the first person perspective by the man who lived it. Walker is self-reflective and contrite about his own role in facilitating his mother and brother's criminality and cruelty over the years, and makes what seems like a reasonable and plausible case for his own efforts to avoid being drawn into their dramas and scams. He acknowledges that love and greed stopped him from cutting off relations entirely, although he appears to have made numerous efforts to report his mother's fraud and murder plans to the police over the years, and seems to have been largely ignored. Who do you have to kill before they'll arrest you around here? In the end we are left with the pathetic and yet remarkable image of a tired and essentially insane old woman serving 120 years for murder and related fraud but still plotting her strategy to persuade the world that she was framed. Walker acknowledges in the end that his mother and brother are irredeemable (worse than Charles Manson says one attorney who knew both), and regrets, if only partially, the years when he believed and acted otherwise. This book is so over the top, and so mind blowing, that it must be read to be believed. It is also interesting at this stage of my life to be reading memoirs from people who are about my age (48) or even a little younger, and finding these memoirs set in the very world and at the very same time that I was living my life. So as this drama runs between Las Vegas, Hawaii, San Diego, and Los Angeles in the 1970s through 1990s, I am reminded that I was walking those same streets as these people, and was roughly the same age as the author. You always suspected that there was more going on than you knew, and this memoir tells you one completely idiosyncratic slice of that hidden world that was all around me... and yet the decades and the places are all so familiar. I was there, doing other things... but these folks were there too, and look at the mess of a life they were living. We probably passed each other on the freeway. January 26 2008

This is the best book about internet culture that I've ever read. It may also be the only one, but never mind that. Beatrice has done something I've never seen before. She has gone and captured what online culture and the offline world around it felt like in the late 1990s through early 2000s. Her particular angle is the bizzare world of Buffy the Vampire fandom, something that my wife partook in but that I never grasped at all. But her comments on that experience and related internet cultural realities are spot on. Here's one comment I particularly liked, in "The Internet Wants Your Daughters". "You don't expect electricity to take responsibility for your kid's health. Why expect the internet to prevent your kid from getting hurt?" January 22 2007

Fascinating reading for the MAX commute. January 19 2008

January 18 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, January 13 2007

A coming of age (a little late) tale, spanning Korean, African-American and low rent diner cultures. Enjoyable. January 12 2007

This dark comedy was a great pleasure because it was set in my "hometown", the West Los Angeles and Hollywood Hills of my childhood (1970 to 1977) and early/middle adulthood (1987-2002). Selwood's character spins about my familiar streets and locales including Franklin Avenue, the Bronson Caves, the La Brea Tar Pits, Cheremoya Elementary School, and implicitly even Ledgewood Drive and Beachwood Canyon, although I don't recall seeing them mentioned by name. The author, curiously, now also lives in Portland Oregon. Good for him for making dark comedy of Los Angeles, a city that in all my years of living there I found to be only dark and not very funny at all. January 9 2007

Taking a break from biking in the new year, I enjoyed reading this book on the bus and MAX, going to and from work. I enjoyed the real-world historically and technically grounded components of the story (bomb dismantling and Egyptology) more than the flights of poetic imagination. I had previously seen (but barely remember) the movie, and this book brought back a few scattered memories of the movie, but not enough to get in the way of enjoying it. January 8 2007

The fascinating story of the Harrison brothers and their clocks is as much about the culture as the science of 18th century England. December 30 2007

We talk a lot about the difference between religious and scientific explanations of the world around here. I read this to my daughter at bedtime, in response to her recent requests to know how things really work and really got started. Upon reading about the evolution of hands, she immediately devised and demonstrated a Lamarkian theory of how, over the lifetime of an organism, as it practiced standing up straight it got better and better at it. I, in turn, tried to explain natural selection, but didn't get very far. She wants to know more. December 29 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, December 29 2007. I seldom record reading to my son because he reads on his own. But, for example, today he and I went to the library together, looked for books together, picked up some books for his sister, checked out a comic novel about Thor for him, stopped at the cafe next to the library, and so on.

Science fantasy adventure, part of chapter 4, to my daughter at bedtime, December 28 2007

I endorse Wolf's perspective. Having said that, it must be noted that she is (intentionally?) naive about the history of American fascism, which really begins not with W. Bush but with the Eisenhower administration, as the military industrial system began to infillitrate and control the political establishment. And, bad as Bush is, and bad as Reagan was, American fascism has ideological and corporate roots that go back even further than Eisenhower to the begining of the 20th century (think of Ford and, in the 1930s, Lindbergh, for example.) The fascist shift has been slow, but inexorable, for almost 100 years now. This is a book worth reading. December 27, 2007

A favorite story (how many times have we read this over the years!) to my daughter at bedtime, December 25 2007

If you've ever worried about raising a teenage boy, this is a wonderful book to read. I started at 9 am and read straight through to 2 pm on a lazy Monday, December 24 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, December 15 2007

One of my all time favorite children's stories. It somehow makes me cry almost every time I read it. To my daughter. November 25 2007

Very enjoyable, highly recommended, November 21, 2007

Fascinating reading for the MAX, November 20, 2007

Very amusing and brief imagining of the Bush mishpacha as a bunch of haimishe finaglers. Unfortunately, that family is so evil that I'm not sure it isn't a little like humanizing Hitler. But I laughed. November 17 2007

My daughter's choice for a bedtime story, September 25 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, while outside, the bamboo waits to be assembled into a Sukkah. September 24 2007

Read in synagogue on Yom Kippur - you do the math. Spinoza is a very bad Jew! Not that there is anything wrong with that! I haven't finished exploring this, but it is fascinating how his mode of textual analysis still takes the bible very seriously as history. He reads the text as a Jewish or Christian scholar of his day would, as a history of the world that surely approximates reality when it does not deviate from reason. In his attacks on the Jewish religion it is painful to see how he echoes Christian anti-Jewish polemics and no wonder that he was excommunicated from the Jewish community. But then, of course, he turns around and attacks Christianity too, although in my preliminary reading there is not quite the level of personal investment, not to say vituperation, in those attacks. He is, in the end, an equal opportunity opponent of ecclesiasticism, religion, and religious authority. The charge of athieism, on the other hand, is patently absurd. One could hardly imagine a more religious God obsessed philosopher. Is his theo-centrism merely a concession to the intellectual mores of the time, and a failure of the imagination, or an admirable re-imagining of religion and reason? It is hard to say, but Spinoza's God of reason, a God co-extensive with reality, which itself is co-extensive with reason, is a profound vision, and obviously a heretical one from a medieval perspective. I think we must count him as sincere in calling reality and reason God. Such a god of course requires no worship or thanks - it simply is, and in that view to the extent that our own lives are consistent with reason we are one with God. More heresy! My spouse asked me whether Spinoza acknowledged emotions. The answer is that he very much did, and believed that reason dictated that they be held in check and moderated, but not that they need be ignored. That mild emotions were to be preferred to violent or passionate ones seems clear, but whether even mild emotions would be seen as sub-rational and sub-Godly is an open question about which I shall have to read more to answer. September 22 2007

An old favorite, seldom read these days, to my daughter and son, Friday evening, erev Yom Kippur, September 21 2007

Picked this up at the library for my daughter, and she was happy to read the first chapters to me. I also read a chapter to her. September 16 2007

My son and I went for snacks at Fleur de Lis cafe, then swung by the library where we read mostly in silence and in parallel, but sometimes he would stop me to read me a Wattersen cartoon. We laughed together, he at the cartoon and I because of his aliveness and pleasure. September 16 2007

The problem is that terrorism is completely uninteresting. Who doesn't understand that this relatively minor police problem has been used to justify a movement toward fascist police states? Notwithstanding this beating of a dead horse (which may be useful if someone somewhere hasn't gotten the message yet), this book although utterly bleak, is eminently readable. Sure, you will want to kill yourself, or someone, when you are done with it, but unlike the heroine, you will probably lack an appropriate target for your frustration. The difference between a novel and real life is that in real life there is seldom someone you can kill whose death would actually improve things. September 15 2007

In the same broad stream as Michael Pollan's Omnimvore's Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Bill McKibben explores localization in eating and food making, but also ranges much more broadly connecting these issues to Peak Oil, global economic development, community building, global warming and the human future. In some ways McKibben's exploration is both deeper and more far reaching, yet easier to read than either Pollan's or Kingslover's enjoyable books. In any case, this is highly recommended. Rosh HaShannah, September 13 2007

Too painful, unable to finish, September 2007

Purchased for a flight, I started it but was unable to finish. I have some reality obsession that interferes with my ability to enjoy counter-factual history. I spend too much time trying to detect the difference between truth and fiction. I am unable to lose myself in the delight of uncertainty. Plus, I found this really dull. September 2007

Preparatory to heading to a Hochstein family gathering in New Jersey tomorrow with many cousins and great uncles and great aunts, I was discussing our family history with my daughter. My daughter read the letter explaining my genealogy project to the family, and then asked me to read from this family history written by my Great Uncle Phillip Hochstein, my grandfather Sam's youngest brother, in 1985. August 31 2007

Home early on this Friday before a Labor Day weekend, I read two chapters to my daughter and then she read many more to me and kept on reading to herself after I wandered off. August 31 2007

To my daughter on a Friday afternoon before Labor Day, August 31 2007

There is much to love in this book, and I recommend it highly. Goldstein takes the familiar ideas, people and texts of the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages and uses them to shine a new light on the social and historical context of Baruch/Benedictus Spinoza and the question of why the inventor of modern philosophy was so completely ostracized by the refugee Jewish community of Amsterdam at the age of 23. For me, the fascination is particularly deep, because, excepting the work of Spinoza, these are the texts and world views I studied in my twenties, in the 1980s, and this is the history that I absorbed so deeply at that time, and this was the community, in some historically recognizable and contiguous sense, in which I lived as a young man. -- Goldstein betrays Spinoza by revealing him as a Jew, and as a man who lived and thought in reaction to very specific social and historical realities. She reveals what we today easily recognize as "humanity", or perhaps we might say "the person within." He may have rejected the Jewish community, as it tossed him away too, but he is far more interesting to me when I understand how his philosophy is a reaction to Jewish thought and historical experience. Goldstein explores where Spinoza fits in the range of Jewish, Christian and secular thinking. In attempting to recover the biographical and historical Spinoza, Goldstein denies him his effort to rise above history, place and specificity, but we can hardly complain for that is her method. She is in the end a novelist, artist, philosopher and historian at once, (and perhaps a modern and a post-modern too) and not a Spinozan. -- But Goldstein's betrayal of Spinoza goes even further than revealing him as a man simultaneously banned from and yet situated in a Jewish world. There are several more betrayals it seems, all of them much appreciated by this reader. The first is her resort to fiction to fill in the gaps and bring us a true Spinoza. Surely Spinoza would not have approved. A second betrayal comes in her search for truth through the empirical methods of history - as an empiricist her methods are far from the purely deductive methods that Spinoza endorsed in the search for God or truth. I'm unsure of the extent that her historical empiricism counts as a betrayal, or might on the other hand in its application of surmise and deduction of necessary realities and entailed truths, be a kind of expression of his method. -- Finally, we might say that there is an element of betrayal in the post-modernity of Goldstein's telling of her own subjective experience of coming to understand Spinoza, first as a child in a Jewish school, and then later as an academic philosopher, and finally as the writer of an historically informed fiction. In her gathering of her own and other's subjective reports of Spinoza, without an attempt to create a single truth about the man, and in her mixing of empirical history and fiction, Goldstein has constructed what might legitimately be called a post-modern history of the first modern philosopher. It is interesting to think of how Spinoza might have felt about that truth. Although the post-modern is not possible without the emergence of the modern before it, post-modernity does seem a kind of betrayal to Spinozan thinking. -- Another issue that I kept coming back to is the relationship between Buddhist thought, to which I feel an affinity, and Spinozan thought about which I plan to learn more. Buddhist stoicism, acceptance of what is, seems closely related to it on one level, but Buddhist acceptance seems to go deeper, insofar as it is not clear that Spinozan principles allow or require indifference to irrationality. My take on Buddhism is that it involves a practice of acceptance and distancing even from that which is completely opposed to reason, even from one's own emotions and feelings. There are of course different Buddhisms, and in light of Goldstein's book, perhaps there is more than one Spinoza as well. So I look forward to thinking more about the relationship between Spinozan and Buddhist thought, in their various manifestations. -- The most revelatory insight for me, as someone situated culturally in both American and Jewish cultures, is Goldstein's explanation of the line that runs from the Spanish Inquisition and the horrific mass torture and killing of Jews by the Catholic Church, to the American Constitution as conceived by Thomas Jefferson. To understand Jeffersonian Constitutional ideals as they represent the ideas of Locke, which stem in part from how Locke interpreted Spinoza, whose ideas are significantly rooted in Spinoza's community's reaction to the Catholic torture and slaughter of his parent's generation of Jews in Portugal is to glimpse a connection between the Jewish experience and the American experience that I had not been aware of. -- Finally, to keep this review as post-modern as my own life, this book also gave me insight into an important chapter in my personal history. The book itself was a gift from my mother, who has never fully grasped what I was doing living in Israel and wearing a kippa on my head all those years ago, but who deserves credit for trying. For the record, in those years I was exploring the spiritual dimensions not of the pre-modernity that Spinoza was thinking his way out of, or the modernity that he was instrumental in inventing, but of a new thing called post-modernity. Post-modernity, it is true, has a great deal more to do with the pre-modernity of kabbalah and talmudic study than the rationalism of modernity (think for example of Derrida as a modern day kabbalist of sorts), but post-modernity could not exist without our culture having passed through the purifying and alienating kiln of modernity, forever distancing us from the pre-modern illusions that Spinoza so disdained. -- As a post-modern 20 year old, in about 1980 I was able to take the triumph of modernity over pre-modernity for granted, and free to push on into post-modernity, even as many around me were still waging the battle of modernity against pre-modernity, including those in my parent's generation. My post-modern explorations landed me in Israel, a land of pre-modern religiosity, in which secular Zionist modernity and other modernities are still struggling simply to assert themselves. In that context my life and my ideas made no sense at all, because the pre-modern texts were the most advanced and amazing things around, but the people who lived and read them were approaching them as pre-moderns, while I was a post-modern. We agreed only that the texts mattered, but not at all on how and why they mattered. I myself was not fully conscious of the extent to which my studies of traditional Jewish texts were a post-modern process, under-taken for thoroughly post-modern reasons. However, understanding that in retrospect brings me much closer to understanding the absurdity of my involvement with religious culture. -- Today, many two or three decades later at the age of 48, I am not only a post-modern man, but largely perhaps my post-post-modern human being. All of this is now clear to me. I could even explain it to the people who thought I was going pre-modern in the 1980's... but I don't care that much anymore and neither do they. Instead, these days I raise children, pursue my artistic interests and design software. -- I remember enjoying Goldstein's novel "The Mind Body Problem" many years ago too. This is really a great historical and philosophical investigation. Betraying Spinoza is full of happy memories, historical illuminations and philosophical insights. Read and enjoy. -- August 27 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, August 27 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, August 23 2007

Received at her birthday party from a friend, I read the Tolstoy adaptation to my daughter at the end of the day. August 20 2007

To my daugher on the front porch, Saturday, August 11 2007

Read to me by my daughter on the front porch in the Saturday morning sun, August 11 2007

Chapter 1, to my daughter at bedtime, August 9 2007

Leora cooked me savory crepes for dinner, and my son got very mad at me for eating the last crepe (by accident! I swear!). I think we worked it out in the end. I opened a present from my mother and my daughter gave me a card, told me many lovely and fascinating stories from her day at day camp, and then I read this to my daughter at bedtime, August 7 2007

My daughter declared this "very sweet" and "one of my favorites" when I read it to her this evening at bedtime. August 5 2007

To my delightful daughter at bedtime, August 3 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, July 30 2007

Read once again today, to my daughter at bedtime. Outside we could hear her Savta talking to a friend. I turned the light out and we curled up together and she was asleep in minutes. July 27 2005.

Walker tells her story of growing up as the child of a black mother (author Alice Walker) and a white and Jewish father (Mel Leventhal), and the process of developing an identity that included both, and moved beyond them. Naturally, the story resonated with me and I found it quite fascinating. July 27 2007

Hitchens is a skilled polemicist who makes a convincing case that, if religion is defined as fundamentalism, only "secularism" makes sense. I'm always suspicious of binary intellectual frameworks that offer straw men and burn them. Fundamentalism has always been stupid, and I've always opposed it. Binary either/or reasoning about life's deepest questions has always been just about as stupid, and in the end Hitchen's seems little more intelligent than the idiots he opposes. He's right about much he says, but only because he sets the bar so low. July 26 2007

The story of Tacky's encounter with Rocky the Elephant to my daughter after dinner, July 23 2007

To my daughter on a Sunday morning, July 22 2007

To my daughter, along with several others, July 21 2007

An old favorite, to my daughter at bedtime, July 15 2007

To my daughter on a Saturday afternoon. July 14 2007

After you've read and enjoyed Michael Pollan's Omnimvore's Dilemma, this is really the next book to read. Kingsolver descrbes her year of feeding herself and her family entirely from their Appalachian farm, supplemented by food from other local and regional sources. I've been thinking a lot about farming and gardening lately, so I found this to be a fascinating exercise, very real world, and not the least bit preachy. It seems that everyone is writing and thinking about being a locavore these days, for all sorts of reasons, from peak oil to earth sustainability to the sensuous pleasures of good food. Enjoying Kingsolver's prose greatly, I stayed up much too late, so that I could finish the book and learn about the hatching of turkey chicks. It was completely worth it. July 9, 2007

This is the book that I would have liked to write, and I blogged about the need for a good history of the night last year. I'm so glad to have found and read this one. At Day's Close is a wonderful exploration of what night was like over five centuries of pre-modern (mostly) European and American history, including a well researched and very explanatory section on bundling, bundling boards, and nighttime courtship customs. As Ekrich demystifies the matter, bundling included parental supervision (with parents in the same room or nearby), internalized female norms against premarital sex, and perhaps an acceptance that as a relationship advanced, c'est la vie, pregnancy happens and isn't the end of the world because marriage is in the offing. Ekrich offers many fascinating quotations on the subject from primary and secondary sources. Other sections include the dangers and fears of night life, the myths and stories of the night, and many other fascinating ruminations. Highly recommended. July 7, 2007.

We listened to most of this book on CD in the rental car from San Jose to Cambria, and again on the return to San Jose after visiting my parents there. It was absorbing for all members of the family, and together with the help of good snacks and a few rounds of "20 Questions" and "I spy with my little eye" we made the journey with few arguments and general good spirits. June 29 2007 and July 1, 2007

I've been thoroughly enjoying this review of modern obituaries and their writers. Fascinating. June 24 2007

Dean makes a persuasive case for the sociopathic nature of leading Republicans. The problem is of course that when you lack a conscience, lacking a conscience doesn't bother you much. June 23 2007

My daughter read to me, and I read to her, from this Shakespearian tale. June 23 2007

Beautiful pencil drawings and a story about a young boy, to my daughter at bedtime, June 17 2007

Now reading... a little at a time in the evenings. (Well that was back in June. It is now July and it looks like this one will go unread. In theory it is interesting, but I never seem to pick it up.) August, 2007

My daughter started reading this to me, and told me she really liked it. I said "I don't like this so much because Jews don't eat bacon." She said "Abba! It could be turkey bacon or any kind of bacon!" Oh! I see! Read by my daughter to me at bedtime, June 4 2007

To my daughter after dinner, on the couch, while our pet rats Fufu and Qumquat clambered over us (and listened to the story), while my son also listened and read Leslie Baker, Paris Cat to himself. June 4 2007

While watching/not watching my daughter's school play (I didn't miss her part in it!), I snuck into the school library and read the first two chapters of The Gulag Archipelago. I remember how this book grabbed me by the throat, many decades ago in high school, and awakened me to the horror of totalitarianism, and the reality of Stalin's reign of terror. It still makes for absolutely engaging and gripping reading. I have heard that Solzhenitsyn turned out to be a kind of Christian totalitarian himself, but that doesn't compromise the ferocity and moral certainty of his indictment of Stalin and the Soviet Union. I've heard that his history isn't really right either (but doesn't he call this "an experiment in literary investigation"?) Perhaps that is true, but this is still a powerful book. It influenced me strongly, many years ago, and probably had something to do with my decision to take on the subject of genocide in my doctoral dissertation. At my daughter's school play, Friday evening, June 1 2007

Chapter 5 to my daughter at bedtime, May 31 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, March 26 2007

This portrait of Monique and her life in a small village in West Africa is truly fascinating. Kris Holloway spent two years there in 1989-1991 in the Peace Corps and writes of her friendship with Monique and the texture of life in a village of mud huts and agriculture and poverty at another end of the world. Monique's later visit to the U.S. and comments about what she experienced here provide a fascinating coda to the story. The whole enterprise particularly fascinated me because of the role that memory of a place visited in one's youth plays out across a lifetime into middle age. I wonder if Holloway worked entirely from memory, or from diary entries as well? The pictures of Monique and her village and family are great additions, but the real portrait comes in her letters and Holloway's descriptions. This is not a title toward which I would naturally gravitate, but having read it I'm really glad that I did. Highly recommended. March 25 2007

Such a girly book, and so engrossing for my daughter! A few pages from the first chapter to my daughter at bedtime, May 22 2007

This is a book with only good things to say about American soldiers and their civilizing mission around the world. The glimpse inside the reality of military life, particularly of the Special Forces, is interesting, even fascinating. Read this book and you will see and understand a military world that you might not even be aware exists. Yet where this book fails is in its author's refusal to discuss or consider the question of imperialism itself. Is this what we Americans must be? An empire, entrenched around the world? I don't buy it. Failure to examine the question of imperialism isn't just forgetfulness, but an endorsement of a manifest evil. It's all very well that U.S. soldiers are highly competent and sometimes even noble. Glad to learn about their good deeds and clever thoughts. That doesn't begin to address the question of global order and what it does to the world and to people in the U.S. to be acting as the world's policeman and imperial master. It may be true that this book could only have been written by an author willing to refrain from asking such questions, just as an empire can only be maintained by soldiers who decline to think about such issues, but that's just the point isn't it? The path to knowledge implicates the knower in what is studied, and makes it difficult to think unapproved thoughts. But courageous authors, and authors who are willing to sacrifice future reporting and travels, must eventually begin to think about what they have learned and draw larger conclusions. Robert Kaplan, whether for practical or heartfelt reasons, remains in the trenches, describing and explaining the life of a soldier, but offering no perspective on why so much treasure and life is given to soldiering, or whether it should be this way. The result is a book that is both illuminating and yet, for its failure to ask deeper questions, sad, limited and deeply flawed. May 19 2007

A timely gift from Emily, as we prepare to paint our house in brilliant stand-out colors and possibly annoy the neighbors. Read to my son and daughter before bed, May 19 2007

Read to me by my daughter, Saturday afternoon, May 19 2007

To my daughter, in the afternoon, May 19 2007

To my daughter, in the afternoon, May 19 2007

This is a perfectly awful book, a didactic pedantic moralizing ra-ra statement of conventional values of determination, striving, loyalty, determination, and I don't know what nonesense, and it is particularly notable because my dear daughter, age 6, loves it. It was given to her by my mother. I can't stand it. It is the very opposite of the kind of book I like to bring into our lives. Perhaps it is for precisely that reason that she chooses to have it read to her and chose this evening to read much of it to me. Of course I'm so dopey proud of her reading that I played right along at bedtime, and was subject to one more wide-eyed recitation of these wooden values. May she soon move on to better things. Bedtime, May 12 2007

A brief reading to my daughter at bedtime, May 6 2007

My daughter read to me about manatees, dugongs and other animals (her class is studying the Great Barrier Reef), and then I read a little to her also. May 6 2007

Chapters 34 and 35 to my daughter (while my son listened with half an ear), May 5 2007

I'd never read this before. It is beautifully written, and the words roll of my tongue with ease. Stylistically impressive. Chapter 33, to my daughter at bedtime. April 30 2007

This was a fascinating tale of George Washington in retreat and defeat, in the year 1776. I read it straight through in about 24 hours this weekend. As a story I found McCullough's early treatise on John Adams to be much richer but it is a great pleasure to have vaguely remembered events and names from American history, absorbed once long ago as a schoolchild, come alive in consciousness for the first time as an adult. Who remembers the Battle of Boston or the Battle of New York, and what happened in Trenton, New Jersey?! It is a gripping tale, and mostly one of defeat and disaster for the Americans. The slave-owning status-conscious Washington struggled to understand and lead New England farmers who elected their own officers, and came and went as they saw fit and as their harvests and farms might require. And through it all, I thought of my great(1) great(2) great(3) great(4) grandfather, Giles Day, (1748-1795), one of those New England volunteers, a revolutionary war soldier who at age 19 engaged as Corporal in Captain John Morgan's Co., Col. Ruggles Woodbridge's Regiment on August 24 1777, served for one month 22 days, and "with 20 others is reported to have deserted Oct. 27 1777." He went on to father some eleven children, took the freeman's oath in Marlborough in Jan. 1781, died at age 47 in 1795 and is buried at Marborough Cemetery, Marlboro, Vermont. His tombstone is said to read "Death is a debt to Nature due, Which I have paid and so must you." I'd like to meet that man and drink some hard cider with him and ask him about that summer of 1777. I'd love to know why a 19 year old man joined the Continental Army in August of 1777, and why he might have thought better of it less than two months later. Since McCullough's tale ends in the winter of 1776 I shall have read further, and push forward from the January winter of 1777 (just after Washington's crossing of the Delaware river and the army's victory at Trenton) into the summer and fall of that year when grampa Giles Day joined and quickly deserted. The record would appear to indicate that Mr. Giles Day was the very picture of a Sunshine Soldier and Summer Patriot for whom Thomas Paine had such scorn. On the other hand, since I may, in some small way, owe my life to his decision to save his life and leave the army, I'd be the last one to criticize. I for one am more than ready to forgive, and take no pleasure at all in forgetting. April 29 2007

Spring comes and a man's thoughts turn to gardening. Leora and I planted some vegetables and flowers today in our front yard, on a fine spring day. April 29 2007

Chapter 2 and 3, to my daughter at bedtime, Thursday April 26 2007

Checked out for my son, I found myself reading most of this nicely illustrated history of spears, swords, guns and armor. The assassin's pistol, such as killed President McKinley in 1901, was particularly interesting. April 22 2007.

A present from her Aunt Jenny, read to me by my daughter on a Saturday morning, April 21, 2007

To my daughter on a Saturday morning, April 21 2007

To my daughter on a Saturday morning, April 21 2007

To my daughter on a Saturday morning, April 21 2007

Read three times today, once at our favorite local bakery cafe to my daughter, once more on the couch in the afternoon to my daughter, and once by my daughter to me, to my great delight. April 14 2007

A favorite of mine and our children, to my daughter at bedtime, April 12 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, April 9 2007

This is a fascinating exploration of a life interupted and bent at age 13, in 1959, by a move from Poland to Vancouver B.C. I can relate to the experience of trying to create a new self or a new life in a foreign languge. Hoffman captures the sense of dislocation, the perpetual remove, that the exile experiences. I relate to this one very personally. April 7, 2007

I really can't bear this book, but my daughter loves it. Chapter 1 to my daughter at bedtime, April 6, 2007

I organized a second Seder this year, unusual for us if I recall correctly, and this evening we used the Haggadah translation based on a traditional text that I created and printed back in 1996 before our children were born. I don't think we've used it for many many years. The translation held up quite well, although I might translate a few things differently today. Enough time has gone by that when I read my footnoted comments on the Haggadah text I sometimes find what I had to say to be fairly interesting. I'm so impressed with how my son reads now, and he was a very willing participant this evening. This was my daughter's first Pesach as a reader, and she did a wonderful job also. Passover 5767, April 3 2006

On the first night of Passover we used a children's Haggadah that we've used for a number of years recently. It is an adequate text, but only just. I'd rather not use it again. I'm bascially uninterested in modern adaptations of ancient texts that try to resolve uncomfortable ideas in modern terms. I like the integrity of old texts, even if their meanings are uncomfortable. Better to wrestle with something old and authentic and uncomfortable and to say out loud "I don't like this" than to be happy and ignorant and comfortable because all has been modernized and updated. Our children read beautifully, and this was my daughter's first seder ever as a reader and her first crack at at least one of the four questions. Passover 5767 April 2 2006

To my daughter at bedtime, April 1 2007

Read to me by my daughter while I brushed and braided her hair before bed, March 26 2007

To my daughter, March 22 2007

To my daughter, while my son listened and read Peanuts cartoons, March 22 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, March 21 2007

Read to me by my daughter (with just a very little bit of help) before she fell asleep next to her new pet rats, March 10 2007

Monday evening after work and before dinner, to my daughter, March 5 2007

This is fascinating and great social, natural and geographic history. For its review of the history of Norse Greenland, Polynesia, New Mexico, Mayan civilization and others this is definitely worth reading. The problem with Diamond's analysis lies in his conventional liberal faith in our ability to make wise choices. Such faith seems almost quaint compared to the extent of the actual planetary environmental challenge. Diamond's examples of societies that chose badly in the past, and collapsed utterly, are indeed persuasive. But his examples of societies that created sustainability seem flawed and exceptional. Furthermore, the challenge of wise collective choice on climate issues on a planetary level seems far beyond the problem of wise collective choice on a small Polynesian island or in 16th century Japan. I find it very hard to take the author's cheery optimism, written from his affluent tenured position at UCLA, with homes in LA and Montana, very seriously. The incentives for behaving badly (abusing the global commons) are massive, deeply embedded, and experienced by every person who needs to get to the next town, grow some food or cook a meal, and by every industry compelled to make a profit for its shareholders. Read this book and experience, perhaps, as I did, the disconnect between the magnitude of the problems Diamond describes and the capacity of humanity to make collective decisions about the global commons. Ponder whether the capacity of "societies" to make choices has any relevance for the capacity of "humanity", composed of its many societies, to make decisions about the global commons. Wonder, with me, why Diamond fails to grasp the difference between organizing individual islands and nations and industries to make wise environmental choices and the much deeper challenge of organizing an entire planet to make much harder decisions. Consider whether Diamond's optimism is not sadly misplaced, and perhaps even delusional, fervently believed by the author because the alternatives, a slow inexorable drift toward ecological and economic collapse are, although more realistic and probable, too painful to be acknowledged. Highly recommended. March 4 2007

With my daughter on a Saturday afternoon at the library, March 3 2007

With my daughter on a Saturday afternoon at the library, March 3 2007

To my daughter at bedtime, as she fell asleep in my office, February 13 2007

Just enough material to make a very nice story. To my daughter before bed, February 12 2007

"And silver the coins and silver the moon / Silver the waves on the top of the sea / When the pirate ship comes sailing in / That gallant Vanity." I really like this little story poem and the illustrations by David Shannon. My son declared that it was too scary, but it really isn't. Something else was going on, after a long day and a birthday bowling party. So he read Garfield comics, while I read this to my daughter before bed, February 11 2007

Read by Leora to our children in the evening on the couch, while I listened, February 11 2007

This is a very readable and very interesting portrait by Kayla Williams of her life as a woman in a man's army, and of the ordinary soldier's experience of the Iraq war in 2003. Williams certainly understands that the war she fought was founded on lies, but like many soldiers, as she writes her memoir in 2005 the army still feels "normal" and civilian life strange. February 10 2007

To my daughter, Saturday afternoon, February 10 2007

To my daughter, Saturday afternoon, February 10 2007

To my daughter, Saturday afternoon, February 10 2007

"I'll ask the questions," said Bella, "and you listen to the answers, Gertie." To my daughter, Sunday afternoon, February 4 2007

To my daughter, Sunday afternoon, February 4 2007

Totally fascinating. Vincent plays a man, and tries to understand how the other side experiences life. I just love her boldness, and the fact that she had the courage to go into deep sexual/gender cover to answer her own questions about life and gender. Yes, there are many deceptions involved, for which she is appropriately contrite, but sacrifices, she clearly feels, must be made to obtain high quality intelligence and create great art. I have to applaud her. Highly recommended. February 2007

A chapter to my daughter, Saturday afternoon, February 3 2007

As we prepare to introduce a dog to our family I went back and reread this book by Daniel Pinkwater who just might be one of the funniest authors I know. Are we crazy to contemplate dog ownership? Yes. Sometimes perhaps we are compelled to do things that reason and common sense tell us are foolish, will complicate our lives to no end, and bring no clear benefit. Yet, I grew up with dogs. I like dogs. My son wants a dog. So I guess we are going to do it. We went to the humane society today and didn't see any animal that was remotely appropriate. But we'll keep looking. As for books, Uncle Boris in the Yukon is a great one to read if you're thinking about getting a dog, and secretly want to persuade yourself that it's a great idea, even though you know it's insane. January 28 2007

To my children, on the couch on Saturday morning, January 28 2007

I continued reading from the Sad Cafe collection. The Wunderkind didn't work for me very well. More satisfying were The Jockey and Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland. When I read Madame Zilensky I felt I suddenly grasped on some level what Carson McCullers is up to. She is painting with absences. She creates stories with great big unexplained gaps and invites us to fill in the possibilities. Her art seems precisely this: creating enough room for our imaginations and enough pointers to lead us down paths that she willfully does not illuminate. The frustration I feel in reading her is that I lack the cultural familiarity that would enable my imaginings to function as an adequate counterpoint to the narrative itself. I simply don't understand the world of which she writes, and thus am perhaps an inadequate partner and co-writer for her art. Nonetheless I did enjoy Madame Zilensky in particular. January 18 and 19, 2007

This novella, the first work I've read by McCullers, is rich in southern atmosphere and sense of place, but I don't think I really get it. I understand that the ambiguity and uncertainty about people's histories and motivations is supposed to be part of the charm, and the author excels in holding a discordant harmony which we readers wait endlessly to hear resolved. The resolution never comes and we're left with a handful of questions and vague dissatisfactions. But I did enjoy it in an odd way, and now I would like to read McCullers' The Heart is Lonely Hunter, just because I've always loved the title. January 17 2007

A bedtime story to my daughter, January 16 2007

This is a fascinating and amusing confessional autobiography. Winkler lays it all out for us... well, not everything presumably, but more than I think I'd ever confess to in my limited online biography. But then, maybe the true confessions are the ones you write and publish in your seventh decade and not in your fifth. For anyone who has traveled through the different communities and ways of "Jewishing" or obsessed and danced around the pursuit of sex, or struggled with his or her relationship to a community, this has much to offer and may offer some cringe-worthy moments of self-recognition. I wonder whether this story would make as much sense to someone immersed in similar struggles but from a non-Jewish perspective? You look at this book, and this life, and you think (that is, I think) "this man could easily be condemned, and could easily condemn himself, as an irresponsible lout, but he reaches the end of his life and writes a book in which he finds that he is a hero of honesty, a man who, whatever his faults, has been true to himself and he chooses to congratulate himself for his honesty and his accomplishment." And who am I to argue? This too is true. And while he understands those who criticize them, he also says in effect, to hell with them and their conventional perspectives. Because those voices come from Orthodoxy they are almost parodies of conventional wisdom, and that much easier to portray and ignore. Like Philip Roth who writes in Everyman about the need to divorce in order to live, Winkler says the alternative of staying conventionally married in a strictly religious community to the mother of his three daughters was a living death, and not a viable option. This, says Winkler, has been my life, I call it a dance with the evil inclination, and I'm happy now. Are you? January 15 2007

For bedtime reading my son asked that I read these Calvin and Hobbes cartoons to myself while he read a Peanuts book. So we sat together and did that for awhile. January 16 2007

A children's history to my son, apropos of his class history project and MLK day, at his insistence. My daughter declared it boring and I'd have to agree that this particular book was. January 16 2007

Read to me by my daughter while I brushed her hair before bed, after the four of us spent two nights at Timberline Lodge , January 9 2007

Read by my daughter to me, January 6 2007

Read by my daughter to me, January 6 2007

Read by my daughter to me, January 6 2007

First 2 chapters to my daughter. Heavy stuff, with first chapters hitting us with the death of the father of a motherless girl, but she likes it and it gives us a lot to talk about. January 6 2007

A very complete review of the issues. December 30 2006

To my daughter, December 30 2006

I love Daniel Pinkwater's stories and the Irving and Muktuk books in particular....

"We must find out who really took the muffins. We must remove this smirch from our names."

"Our names are smirched?" Irving asks.

"Badly smirched," Muktuck says. "People think we are bad bears. They think we are not to be trusted."

"We are bad bears," Irving says. "We are not to be trusted."

To my children, December 30 2006

After a short family hike down to the Willamette in Mary S. Young State Park, to my children, December 30 2006

A friend described this book, which I read earlier this year, as "bleak." I really hadn't noticed. The term surprised me because Roth's Everyman had made me feel good. I was motivated to go back and read it a second time over the last few days, because I had enjoyed it so much and because I wanted to understand why there is such pleasure in such a (now that it has been pointed out to me) bleak book. I have come to the conclusion that this is Jewish white boy intellectual blues. We intellectuals may not be able to clap in time or sing worth a damn, but Philip Roth knows how to sing our blues, and when you sing the blues you can feel good, again, for a little while. At least I do.

Roth writes about the decline and fall of a male body. Roth writes that life isn't a battle, it's a massacre. Roth writes about living when living is all there is and about how when the living is done there is nothingness. Roth summarizes one male life and yet somehow manages to write about every man's male life. He takes us from the begriming to the end, across the terrain of memory, desire, terror and loneliness. And when we reach the end he invites us to circle back again from beyond the grave, and to look down on our own funeral. Roth's nameless advertising executive knows that death is final, but Roth also hovers above the grave, the author replacing or serving as God and as the locus of consciousness following death. Clearly there is no God, says Roth, but just as clearly there is an author. There is an ineluctable sense that this amounts to something related to God.

The difference between those who believe there is no God and those who believe there is a God has always puzzled me, since the disbelievers seem much closer to the reality of God ("there is no God" and "all ideas about God are false ideas") than the believers who proclaim God's simple existence and desire to be praised. Everything interesting about God has to do with God's negation, absence and negativity. The more strongly God's irrelevance is proclaimed the more religiously relevant and God focused a book seems to me.

Needless to say, I consider this to be a great book. It was a pleasure to read once again. December 28 2006

There's a right someone for every dog. I read the last 3 chapters of this favorite from my childhood to my daughter at bedtime, December 25 2006

To my children after watching 3rd Rock, Sunday, December 24 2006

To my children before lunch on Sunday, December 24 2006

To my daughter, December 24 2006

My very favorite Pooh story, to my children while sitting on the couch, Sunday, December 24 2006

Having spent a number of years researching my own family history I read this book with great sympathy and interest. Mendelsohn constructs his story around the search for a particular family, his grandfather's brother's family and seeks to understand their fate in the town of Bolechow in the Ukraine during the late 1930s and early 1940s, in the midst of the Holocaust. I was unable to take much interest in the interspersed biblical exegesis -- I guess I no longer have much interest in the bible or perhaps Mendelsohn's readings simply aren't very compelling. But the story of the author's attempt to find, record and tell his family's true story is quite gripping.

In my case, when I consider my own family history I find not convergence on a single semi-distant historical moment of compelling interest such as the Holocaust in Bolechow, but instead divergence, a vast plain of averageness flowing down, with some notable exceptions, to me. For my part, I find my ancestors no less interesting for their ordinariness. Tracing the tributaries backwards upstream we find that each generation leads to more stories and more lives, and yet the facts become fewer and fewer, until each line is lost in the mists of history, some ending as recently as the mid-19th century (the Jewish stories that take me to Timkovichi and Radoshkovitz Belarus), others flowing back to as early as the late 16th century (the Protestant American and German stories.)

I cannot feel as Mendelsohn does that the story I have to write from the data available to me is fundamentally a Holocaust story, even though I do have distant relatives who were slaughtered by the Nazis in the shtetl of Radoshkovitz, and others more distant lost elsewhere. Many or all of the seven sisters of my great-grandmother Rashe Gitte (nee Isaacson) Hochstein were killed in that town by German Nazis in 1942. I would like to understand more about the specifics of the killing in Radoshkovitz (Belarus), and I have devoted considerable effort to trying to untangle the reality of that little place. Now with survivors very old, and my family having left Radoshkovitz 30 years before the events of 1942, beginning circa 1903, the past is all but gone, its connection to me fairly tenuous. Furthermore, the total story of my ancestors must include the fact that some were American Puritans and settler farmers moving west across America through the 18th and 19th centuries, and some were German business men and their wives, arriving in America in the 1840s, and only some (half) were Jews of Eastern Europe. Whatever the truth revealed in genealogy, the truth of these non-Jewish ancestors is as much mine as the truth of my shtetl dwelling and Bronx New York migrating Jewish ancestors, either the ones who left Belarus before the Shoah at the turn of the century, or those more distant Jewish ancestors who remained behind and perished. When I write my version of Mendelsohn's story it is going to have to focus not on the search for the truth of the Holocaust, but on the truth of the search for my own identity as a multicultural American and the role that autobiography and genealogy play (or don't play) in constructing identity.

Second night of Hanukah, December 16 2006

First chapters, to my daughter, while my son read Peanuts cartoons, half listening to us, evening of December 9, 2006

To my daughter, December 9, 2006

To my daughter, evening of December 9 2006

A favorite from my childhood, I read a chapter to my daughter before sleep tonight. November 27 2006

Published the year I was born with painfully sweet and treacly illustrations and the most conventional of values and daily life settings, yet none of that matters too much. My daughter read this entire book to me this morning, with just a little help. This may be the first time I've seen her read a book from end to end. Joy! November 26, 2006

A chapter to my daughter on a Sunday morning. I find this almost unreadably dull but she loves it. November 26, 2006

November 25 2006

Interesting agricultural, social and meterological history of Europe, read on the plane back from Cambria to Portland after visiting my parents there, November 25 2006

To my daughter at bedtime, November 16 2006

My daughter likes this because it reminds her of her Saba (grandfather). November 11 2006

This was a favorite of my son's several years ago. We haven't read it in a long time, and it was new to my daughter this evening. At betime to both of my children. November 10, 2006

November 9 2006

Very enjoyable. To my daughter at bedtime, November 2, 2006

Why do radical right wingers vote against their economic interests? This is a wonderful analysis of contemporary American politics, informative, honest and enlightening. November 1, 2006

Cute but slightly inspid. My daughter's choice, before dinner, November 1, 2006

First four chapters, to my daughter, after work, before dinner, October 23 2006

To my daughter at bedtime, October 23 2006

To my daughter, at bedtime, October 20 2006

With my son, who has recently discovered this character and, for better or worse is devouring the Watterson books, at bedtime, parallel silent reading, October 18 2006

To my daughter, October 17 2006

To my daughter, October 15, 2006

At bedtime, to my daughter, October 4 2006

Motzei Yom Kippur, following a weekend at the Oregon coast, to my daughter at bedtime. October 2 2006

My son is reading this, and I read it while I was getting dressed this morning. The illustrations of small town New England life are just spectacular. September 27 2006

"Spring around the corner", to my daughter at bedtime September 25 2006

An old favorite around here, to my daughter, September 24 2006

A new one from the library, to my daughter, September 24 2006

This small "existentialist" interpretation of Rabbi Nachman of Braslav was probably the single most influential religious essay of my young adulthood. It summarized the essential dilemmas of faith and reason as I experienced them then, in my early twenties, from inside traditional Jewish practice and made an argument for how different modes of thought, religious, secular and otherwise might co-exist in one life. This year, for Rosh HaShanna, some 25 years later, I re-read this old friend at the New Year's services of congregation P'nai Or and at home. How does it hold up? Quite beautifully. One mustn't mistake Arthur Green's Rabbi Nachman for Nachman's self understanding, or for Nachman as understood by his community. This is a modern interpretation, rooted in contemporary scholarly exegesis of source materials. But the essay on "Faith, Doubt and Reason" is still a powerful exploration of the theology of absence, the finding of God in the complete absence of God from the experienced universe. This one essay raises more interesting religious questions in its brief pages than any other philosophical or religious treatise I've ever read. The larger biography of Nachman is interesting in itself (inspiring spiritual explorer or tormented messianic nutcase? yes!), but if you do nothing else with this book, turn to the "Faith Doubt and Reason" at the end of the book and give it a read. It's worth the effort. Second day of Rosh HaShannah, 5767, September 24 2006

To my daughter at bedtime. September 23, 2006

My daughter's choice. Bedtime, September 21, 2006

My daughter's choice. Bedtime, September 16, 2006

I watched with delight as my daughter figured out the words and read this to me, September 16, 2006

My daughter's choice, afternoon of September 15, 2006

My daughter's choice, afternoon of September 15 2006

My daughter's choice, afternoon of September 15 2006

To my daughter at bedtime, September 12, 2006

This is a memorable and difficult book. Norm suggested it to me while we were standing around in Evon's kitchen, throwing book titles about struggling up from the bottom at each other. I really enjoyed it. At times it was so difficult to read that I had to put it down, but I just kept reminding myself that in the end he grows up to become memoirist Tobias Wolff, author of "In Pharoh's Army" and a living human being, and was thus able to finish it. September 11, 2006

Given to us for my son by Linda, this book is still a favorite, but now of my daughter. At bedtime, August 31, 2006

To my daughter at bedtime, August 30, 2006

To my children, in the evening after work, August 30 2006

Rarely do I encounter a children's book that really annoys me, but this one did. It seems to incorporate certain ideas about behavioral cognitive psychology, and to advocate changing sad "thoughts" to happy "thoughts" by will power and cognitive strategy. I find this kind of psychology, and this kind of didacticism in a children's book, to be deeply wrong headed. As far as I'm concerned sadness is all about feelings, and this book misses them completely. My daughter however liked the book, having received it as an early birthday present. To my daughter, August 13 2006

Very worthwhile. August 13 2006

My little girl now reads. It's been happening slowly, but in the last month suddenly she's there, figuring out new and familiar words before I can say them. It's amazing! This book is one of our favorites. To my daughter before sleep, August 9 2006

Very enjoyable. Notably 1997, but it doesn't really matter. Read in part by flashlight while camping with my family and Roberta's family in Champoeg Oregon, August 4, 2006

I'd skimmed but not read Maus, but this was my first graphic novel, and I enjoyed it. July 29, 2006

Fabulous. I miss Mary Jane. Not very often, but just a little, sometimes. Pollan's tendency to anthropmorphize nature's "desires" is intellectually suspect, but who cares? He understands our desires very well, and this book is fun and persuasive and informative, all in a mystical slightly stoned sort of way. July 27 2006

More fun to read about Franklin than to read him directly, but enjoyable to skim. July 24 2006.

Excellent. By the time I reached my mid-twenties I understood that there was no honor or glory in the work of soldiering, but did I grasp that at age 18? Probably not. At a slightly younger age I probably could have fallen victim to all the illusions that led Wolff to become a soldier. Seventeen to 20 year-old men are terribly vulnerable to the mythological attractions of being a warrior, a master of violence, and armies are designed like nets to scoop them up, suck them in, and use those vulnerabilities (which masquerade as strengths) to serve their own interests. You can just feel the symbiosis of, on the one hand, masculine developmental need and, on the other hand, the desires of leaders to deploy violence in service of the state. How would you ever break that link? Or must young men always make themselves available to the community or state for organized violence? July 19 2006

My son turned to me in a serious manner and said "Abba, you should read this story... it's Jewish." So I did. July 16, 2006

To my daughter at bedtime, July 15, 2006

To my daughter again. She's growing up having never heard the three little pigs, but only the Wolf's version instead. How odd. July 15, 2006

One of my favorites, to my daughter, July 15, 2006

To my daughter at bedtime, July 13 2006

To my son and daughter, evening of July 13 2006

To my daughter, in bed before sleep. Then I sang "All the pretty little horses." Then she was almost asleep. But when I tried to sing "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore" after that... she said "shhhh!" So I stopped And then she was asleep. July 11, 2006

"And silver the coins and silver the moon / Silver the waves on the top of the sea / When the pirate ship comes sailing in / That gallant Vanity." To my daughter before teeth brushing, July 11 2006

The printer of Philadelphia was certainly the coolest of the old revolutionary guys. I started this on the flight back from LA after my brother's wedding. June 8, 2006

To my children, twice, Saturday June 7 2006

To my daughter at bedtime, June 7, 2006

"The villagers' eyes grew wide. Soup from stones? That would be something." Oh, "It's all in the knowing how...." To my daughter at bedtime. July 4, 2006

The Omnivore's Dilemma can be simply stated. What shall we eat when the design of our bodies suits us to eat almost anything? Unlike the Koala bear, the cow, or the lion, whose evolutionary experience confines them to a limited number of foods (or even a single species of food) we are free, and freedom has costs, creates anxieties and poses dilemmas… the Omnivore's Dilemma. Journalist Michael Pollan's book is not so much about food or eating as it is an empirical and personal work of philosophy through the lens of our relationship to food. It is a profound exploration of what it means to be a human being situated in an ecosystem that produces the energy that makes life possible. This was a great one. I reviewed it on my blog. June 30, 2006

A fairly conventional local political history, which leaves you feeling that most of the dirty dealing, violence and viciousnesss has been left out (ie., the fun stuff), this nonetheless gives you some interesting general background for Portland city history and political personalities. Perused with sleepy interest in late June 2006

A nicely illustrated history of mining towns in Eastern Oregon from 1861 to the early 20th century. The big missing piece is the history of women and children, who although not great in number, were certainly present. What was their life like? The author, born in 1895, was the grandson of immigrants who came in the 1860s and grew up in Eastern Oregon in an era in which the time of which he writes was recent history. Perused, June 24 2006

Again, June 24 2006

The first two chapters to my son, before bed. June 22 2006

To my son and daughter before bed, June 21 2006

To my son and daughter before bed, June 21, 2006

To my daughter before bed, June 13 2006

To my daughter, AGAIN, before bed, June 13 2006

My son reads himself to sleep now of course, so I read this to my daughter before bed, June 12, 2006

What does this Depression era allegory about digging your own happy grave REALLY mean? To my son and daughter, before bed, June 11 2006

To my daughter, before bed, June 11 2006

This was worth reading and yet frustrating. The literary references escape me, or fail to resonate with me. The cultural references to Didion's (shall we call it "upper-class"?) Hollywood and New York literary elite life (the kind of folks who sent their daughter to LA's Harvard-Westlake girls school), her life of Malibu homes and the Beverly Wilshire hotel, seem .... icky. I grew up in Los Angeles. I know those neighborhoods and people. I have certain class based feelings about them and their world. Sometimes the wealthy and the elite, no matter how nice they may be as human beings, no matter how self reflective and thoughtful (and she is all those things) are just unpleasant to be around. Their unexamined privilege is painful to be close to, no matter what else they may be writing about or exploring. And yet I dutifully read through to the end because she tells an interesting tale, a forensic psychological examination of death and the first steps that occur in its aftermath. June 7, 2007

To my daughter, June 6, 2006

To my daughter, June 2, 2006

Murder explained by evolutionary psychology. In a word, it's all because of sex. Ah but isn't everything? I don't have a quarrel with the basic argument, although this particular book tends toward over explanation, and seems to assume a reader who is unfamliar with basic evolutionary psychology ideas. In spite of that minor annoyance, its mixture of FBI case files and interviews with theory creates something that goes a little beyond the usual just-so stories of evolutionary psychology, and makes for a good read. May 27 2006

What an heroic dog! To my daughter before bed, Saturday evening, May 27 2006

We've been reading this book for years. I'm not at all sorry his duck is so crazy! To my daughter, Saturday morning, May 27, 2006

We've read this book dozens of times over the years. As I read it this evening to my daughter I thought to myself that this may be one of the last times. She's starting to read, and soon she'll want much more sophisticated books. I've always been bothered by the Mercer Mayer books because their humor always seems geared to the adult reading the book and not to the child. Friday evening, just before Shabbat, May 26, 200

Some day Mateo Burtch is going to be a famous author and I'm going to get to say that I read his first novel before he had even found a publisher. I'll wait patiently in line at his book signing. When I get to the front I'll confront him. "You don't remember me Mr. Burtch, do you?!" A look of blank terror will cross his face as he searches desperately to remember what homicidal maniac he might have offended, but numbed by 6 straight hours of book signing he will be able to recall nothing. I will reach slowly into my briefcase and pull out a .... I don't know what happens next. But this book is a lot of fun, and at the same time goes very deep. May 12, 2006

This beautifully illustrated volume makes living in an ecologically well balanced little village seem easy. I find myself leafing through the color photographs of community meetings and simple but practical structures and wondering why I don't live in a cob house, in a forest, drinking rainwater and consuming minimal electricity, surrounded by a wholesome community of fellow-minded villagers. It all seems so disconnected from the real world of urban living and job holding and mortgage holding and lawn mowing. In the end the real question is not what kind of building you live in, or where you get your energy from, but who will you share your life with? That social question is harder to answer than even the problem of how to build an ecologically sustainable infrastructure or a beautiful house. I enjoy this fantasy, nevertheless, and who knows where it may lead me? May 2006

When you are ready to confront what it means to grow old, this is a great and powerful book. Read in an airport and on an airplane to San Franciso, May 10, 2006

A short book containing about what you need to know about U.S. Grant, his greatness and his flaws. Explains the politics of Reconstruction, Grant's role in attempting to protect the gains of the war, and its ultimate failure. May 2006

In the last few nights I read "In which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle" and "In which Piglet meets a Heffalump" to my daughter while my son pretended to read his own book. I think he was listening too. He has proclaimed on several occasions that he loves to read, and this really seems to be the case. April 29 2006

This book is truly eye opening. It's as if we discover in the Americas an entire alternative history of humankind where previously we had imagined only ahistorical indigenous peoples living unchanging lives in a timeless enviornment. This book should be required reading as an introduction to the history of the Americas, and to controversies in interpreting the past. I found Mann's final speculative Coda concerning the American Indian roots of colonial and contemporary American notions of social equality to be particularly fascinating and intuitively persuasive. I'm looking forward to reading more about that theme. April 2006

I think I just learned more about United States history from this one book than any other I have ever read. For me, there was a great gap in understanding between the Revolution and the Civil War. How was the old Southwest settled? What was going on in Florida and Georgia? What was the real story behind the Trail of Tears? What was the Battle of New Orleans? How did pistol dueling work, socially, and as a practical matter? What was "Jacksonian Democracy" really about? These and other vaguely understood issues are now clear to me in a new way. Above all we see that Jackson was a democrat and represented the will of the people, but the will of the people was for the disposession and killing of Native Americans, for conquest and war, and for the tolerance of slavery. We can all put those uncomfortable facts in our pipes and meditate on their significance.

Just as Jackson's life drew to a close my great-great grandfather Carl H. Schmidt arrived on the scene and joined the American army in its march on Santa Fe in the Mexican War of 1846-1847. He was a new immigrant from Germany seeking citizenship and helping to write the last chapter in Jackson's life. April 16, 2006

The pleasure that this book offers are many. Like any good memoir, the reader is left with a feeling of identity with and relationship to the memoirist. For me that feeling is multiplied because for five years of my young life (early 1980s) I wandered the same streets of Jersusalem that Oz recollects from the 1940s when he was a child there. Oz reflections on his parent's and grandparent's pasts, their years of poverty and disappointment in the pre-state and early Israeli period, their troubled marriage and his mother's suicide, are powerful to read. I was also touched because the world he describes is one that was inhabited by my father-in-law Shmuel Troper, just 10 years before Oz was a child there. They attended the same school and walked the same streets. I know the landscape of Jerusalem and Israeli politics well, and reading this book is like running my hands over the bones.

I much prefer Oz' nonfiction works, by the way. His "Here and There in the Land of Israel" was a seminal book in my own understanding of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the way forward. Fantasies about the "Whole Land of Israel" were no longer possible after that book, and I joined the reality based left. Early April 2006

Painfully good. March 30 2006

Just plain painful. You spend a life chasing the violent sickos and you end up with a lot of stories about violent sickos running around your head. Easy to understand why a life of chasing psychotic murders would drive a man to the seminary. Makes me glad I got out of the genocide studies business early. March 27 2006

To my children, every other chapter, over many evenings, and completed out of order on the Max, March 9, 2006

"An authentic history of Hannibal written in 1905 by Thomas H. Bacon, a local lawyer and gifted writer who lived in Hannibal from 1847 to 1908 and who wrote from personal observation many of the events and developments within the city during his colorful lifetime." Those were the years in which my ancestors walked those streets. March 2006

Lots of good background material for picturing the lives of my ancestors in the 1840s through the 1910s in and around Hannibal. Explores the place of flour milling (my great grandfather Dolph's industry) and the Hannibal and St. Joseph railroad (both Dolph Schmidt's and Carl Herman Schmidt's employer at one time), as well as a brief sketch of my great great grandmother Dr. Margaret Ruckdeschell Schmidt. March 2006

You'll never guess who the murderer is. Light reading for the daily commute. March 6, 2006

I'm enjoying this imagining of our world transformed into a feudal Mad Max reality by the sudden disappearance of working electrical devices and gunpowder. The fact that it is set in Oregon and the Willamette valley adds to the pleasure. As famine, plague and violence descend across the world the close proximity of rain irrigated agriculture to major urban centers means that the Willamette Valley emerges as a new center of civillization, while the social disintegration in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other major urban centers is too horrible to even contemplate. Without modern communication or transportation we can only join with the protaganists in imagining the famine and mass death that is occuring in those now far distant locales, so utterly incapable of feeding their massive populations with pre-modern technologies and local resources. While it is easy to be annoyed by the absence of an explanation for exactly why electrical systems and gun powder cease to work (the characters in the novel are as puzzled as the reader... EMP? Bad Magic? Aliens? Nobody knows), the resulting world is interesting to contemplate. Those with skills in the areas of sword fighting, archery, blacksmithery and horsemanship become extremely valuable. But will Wiccans, Renaissance Faire Enthusiasts, Back Country Guides, Horse Wranglers, Medieval Re-enactors and Professors of Medieval History (vicious enough, but are they street smart?) really have survival advantages? The key to survival is found to be as much social/organizational as technological, and the author argues that ideas about justice and social organization (very modern ideas that do survive the Change) still matter. I found it fascinating, and you have to admit that the Portland Central Library would make a fine palace for the Lord Protector of Portland. February 26, 2006.

I don't know how this prepublication advance copy came into our house but I enjoyed Flanagan's meditations on housewifery. February 9, 2006

I've been interested in the jury system, random selection and other means of reducing the venality of legislators serving in legislatures, from city councils to state governments to the national level. The problem as I diagnose it is that the process of seeking election is a positive selector for the most manipulative dissembling ambitious greedy people in a community. Without those nasty characteristics it is exceedingly unlikely that a man or woman will reach the US Congress or any elected office. What is to be done? I concluded that, on average, the average man or woman on the street would probably be capable of doing a better job and be less prone to corruption than any person selected by our current sick election and fund raising system. I was delighted therefore to discover an entire political science treatise devoted to exploring the different forms, rationales and implications of lotteries and random selection for legislatures and leaders. Barbara Goodwin's book does an admirable job of exploring the terrain, and provides ample footnotes to both political science and fictional accounts of "sortition" systems (lottery based allocation of political office or public goods.) Yes, I know there are a hundred reasonable objections, but I'd put it to you that if you truly believe in "representative" government, then representative sampling is your surest bet to achieve it. Give it some thought and consider the advantages. Consider the confidence that jurys enjoy in finding issues of fact. Consider that Athenian democracy was based on just such a random selection. Consider also the possibility of combining random selection of legislatures with the conventional election from within those legislatures of a smaller leadership group with a higher level of political skills. I'd wager than in ANY group of 500 "randomly selected Americans" you'll find 10 or 20 who are capable of real leadership. There are many variants that are imaginable, and that directly address the corruption that is now rampant in American public life. The first step to bringing the lottery back to political respectability is to use sortition at the grass roots level, and I'm looking at how I can make that happen. February 4, 2006

This is one of the few books that I've actually heard (and greatly enjoyed) on tape. The reason I know this book aurally is that my children have been playing the tapes over and over again. It's a wonderful story. I enjoyed reading the author's remembrance of his wife Deborah Howe today. February 4, 2006

I'm still in shock from my discovery of this author. The only things that I can compare to these tales are a few stories I've read by Italo Calvino, such as his Invisible Cities, one of my all time favorite books. I checked this book out because of an obscure reference to a story by Borges about a society in which all outcomes, positions and fates were determined by lottery. I'd been interested in random sampling as a means to select representatives and leaders. But what I found in this book is an author whose imagination and story telling astound and entrance me, and range far beyond simple political allegories. Stories like "The Library of Babel", "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "The Lottery in Babylon" are simply wonderful as poetic acts of imagination and story telling. I'm still reading. February 2, 2006

Are real estate and sex just two sides of the same obsessive passionate coin? Jane Smiley entertains us with this possibility. But why do I find it more interesting to think about author Jane Smiley writing about being a sexual man than to think about her writing about being a real estate agent, when she is of course neither of these? Nonetheless I couldn't stop considering that question, couldn't stop watching a woman write about sex from the perspective of a man, and she is obviously playing with that in several passages. So for me, Jane Smiley was a lurking (distinctly female) character in her own novel. That's partly because I've read at least one of her other books (Thousand Acres), and so I've come to know her voice, and I've seen a picture of her, and she has become a human person more real than any character that she writes. I don't mind that. After a while we read authors not books. This was enjoyable, and I stayed up too late one night to get right to the end, a conclusion that becomes utterly predictable by the time you get there. That doesn't matter either. The pleasure is all in the drive out to look the place over, in the inspection, in the exploration. The final act, the closing, call it what you will, is just what happens when everything else is done and it's time to go to sleep. January 29, 2006

I find the methodologies and reasoning of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology to be generally reasonable efforts to apply evolutionary understandings to human behavior and social order. However this book really falls short and fails to satisfy in some basic way. Perhaps it is the authors' failure to take apart the very constructs of "sex" and "violence" themselves, and that fact that they choose instead to insert themselves on one side of the sterile argument about whether rape "is" one or the other. Where one wonders is the possibility that rape is sexualized violence and violent sexuality? Why do these two categories remain unchallenged and distinct? If the "social science" (ie "feminist") discourse that opposes sex and violence and insists that rape "is" violence is flawed, is the conclusion therefore that rape "is" sex? What deeper understanding does that purchase? None that I can see. A better book on the evolutionary basis of sexual behaviors would have taken a more balanced look at the full range of behaviors involved in potentially reproductive sex acts, including a consideration of why rape is so rare in comparison to consensual sex. Nonetheless, this is a book worth reading. January 22, 2006.

Fascinating book, but I can't escape the feeling that Krakauer is unfair to fundamentalism, and not just to Mormonism. Does Islam deserve to be understood through the lens of suicide bombers? Does Mormonism deserve to be understood through its fanatics? Does Jim Jones deserve to be judged only by the fact that he urged all his followers to commit mass suicide? Oh. Wait. Well, what I mean is, isn't fundamentalism like strong liquor? There are those who can hold it, and those it drives to criminal behavior. Sure there should be limits. Don't sell your fundamentalism on Sundays, drink it in small doses, don