Enjoyable novel about 1720s Whigs, Tories and Jews.

Bess Corey settled in South Dakota in 1909, a good three decades after the years that I'm studying, and in a very different part of the state from great grandfather J.K. Smith (she in the Pierre area, he in Mitchell) On the other hand, like him, she was straight off the Iowa Farm, and looking to make something of herself. In generational terms her consciousness would have been closer to my grandfather's, G.Day Smith's, but again, although of his generation, she was a farmer's daughter. She did share with Day her teaching profession. All in all, this is a completely different settlement process from the one I'm studying, but Bess's story makes for interesting reading and it is interesting to dip into her letters as well.

I read this mostly because I'm researching the South Dakota of my great-grandparents Jacob K. Smith and Emma Kate (Day) Smith, who immigrated to Mitchell, in the Dakota Territories, in about 1880, just four years after Custer's last stand at the Little Bighorn, 472 miles to the west of Mitchell. I'm not very interested in battle history, but I found the details of clothing, relationships, army culture and the incidental representations of 19th century life to be interesting windows on the world of my great-grandparents. They were married October 9, 1876 in Eldora Iowa, just three and a half months after Custer's force was destroyed on June 25, 1876. By 1880 the Dakotas were open to settlement and they were among the first settlers in Mitchell. The book itself tells the battle story in a matter-of-fact and interesting way, but it is easy to forget as one reads it and finds oneself sympathizing with how Custer may have been betrayed by his fellow soldiers that the whole lot of them were on a vicious genocidal mission to destroy and imprison an entire nation. If these genocidal American "Nazis" had succeeded on that June day in 1876 women and children would have had their heads bashed open on the rocks. Instead, just this once, the "Jews" (l'havdil) beat them back. The genocide was postponed, although not for long. The picture is further confused by the fact that there were so many native "scouts" helping to track down other Native Americans and enabling the army to kill them. While their presence highlights the "multi-cultural" nature of the frontier and the army and the social complexity of the frontier space, in the end these army Indians were cooperating in the genocide against other tribes of their broader "people." Then, upon all of that, I must consider the fact that my own ancestors, Jacob and Emma, and their parents and grandparents had each moved into the lands opened by genocide and built their lives there. These genocides were committed for people just like them, and they took full advantage, and yet were able to do so with relatively little personal involvement (although one ancestor, third great-grandfather Joshua Bland did, possibly, participate in the Blackhawk war in 1830.) For three generations Joshua Bland and his spouse, their daughter Mary Ann Bland Smith and her husband Samuel Smith, and their son Jacob K. Smith and his spouse Emma Kate (Day) Smith, advanced into Illinois (1833), into Iowa (1841) and into Dakota (1880) in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing operations. They were not the soldiers(except perhaps Joshua Bland, although in his late 40s he is unlikely to have been a frontline soldier), but the families for whom the soldiers drove the Indians out, and onto the reservations. Some of their memoirs even speak of childhood memories of "wigwams in the trees." The Native Americans were still around in their world but depleted and defeated, ghost people who were no longer much of a threat. Custer's story at Little Bighorn is the story of one bad day in the life of a not terribly competent but competent enough military machine that carved out the liebensroom that made my ancestor's lives possible. Sitting Bull's story at Little Bighorn is the story of one good day in a long and painful defeat. All of that, in turn is the karma that comes down to me through my mother and more broadly to the United States as a whole. It is interesting to think whether such karma is localized in place and localized in persons, or whether somehow all parts of the United States and all people in it now share it equally.

The story of the Bielski brothers surely qualifies as one of the great and little known Holocaust stories. I only learned of it a few days ago when we watched the movie "Defiance" (2008). It is a tale of heroism and survival and the ordinary lives that followed extraordinary deeds. -- The relationship between the movie and the reality as represented in the book, bears comment. The movie seems very true, but not in a literal sense. Situations and actions are combined and imagined by the movie to represent in two hours the complexity of the historical reality described in this book. A few differences do make themselves clear. (1) The Bielski brothers operated largely in the framework of the Soviet partisans - you might miss that in the movie, particularly insofar as it focuses on the early period before alignment with the Soviets became unavoidable. While it is true that the Bielski brothers were first and foremost trying to save Jews and defend Jewish interests, the outward context of their activities had to appear to be Soviet in every respect. Their closest allies had little sympathy for their fight to survive as Jews, and supported them only insofar as they shared an enemy in the Germans. (2) Also, the book makes clear what the movie only hints at, that the brothers themselves were very much authoritarian commanders who brooked no dissent. These were hard men fighting a desperate battle with few resources while surounded by potential betrayers. They were rescuers of innocent life to be sure, but killers too, as warriors must be. The movie portrays the humanity beneath the hard exteriors, and I am willing to believe it does so fairly, but in the book we see the Bielski brothers and their fighting force in a harsher light. I do not doubt that their's was a necessary cruelty and that the survival of so many hundreds of civilians in their forest camps was the result of their methods. (3) The book also allows us to contemplate the mystery of certain rare human beings, such as Konstantin Koslovsky, a selfless Belorussian peasant honored as Righteous Gentile after the war, who offered assistance to the Jewish partisans for years, even as the vast majority of his countrymen helped the Nazis hunt them down. What strange miracle of character enables a man to achieve this kind of nobility when those around him lack it? (4) The final act of the Bielski story, Tuvia's killing of a Jew for insubordination on the very day the Jewish village in the forest was being disbanded, is one of the most powerful moments and it sums up the full pathos, temper and power of Tuvia Bielski, the commander. It does not significantly detract from my sympathy or admiration for the man - to have brought 1200 people through the horrors of four years of forest living and warfare only to be insulted and defied by one of them on the last day surely constitutes justifiable grounds for homicide if any exist. It may not have been right, but we can understand Tuvia Bielski's sin and must weigh it against so much good. (5) There was some controversy in Poland about whether the Bielski brothers participated in a Soviet action against Polish partisans. Whatever the truth of that matter is, the larger truth is that the Polish people, no strangers to suffering between two great powers, were happy in the main to identify Jews for the Nazis and otherwise participate in their slaughter, while the Soviets supported the Jewish partisans against the Nazis. If the Bielski brothers were aligned tactically with the Soviets and may have done bad things even to admirable Polish partisans, it seems a small matter against the abysmal picture of implacable Polish antisemitism and willing participation with the Nazis in the Holocaust. (6) The final chapter, documenting the ordinary lives that follow these extraordinary deeds, the lack of recognition and obscurity that was the lot of the Bielski brothers, is something to contemplate. -- This is a wartime Jewish tale to read and reread.

We read one woman's memories of life on an Iowa farm as a child, focusing closely on chores, routines of daily life, discipline, habits, relationships between adults and children, play, animal husbandry, vegetable gardening - the real minutiae of farm life, both in a practical and in an emotive sense. Kalish's story bears a certain relationship to my own Iowa farmer ancestors (who lived just 78 miles from Garrison in the Eldora area), but my Smith and Bland ancestors do not appear to have been as religious as Kalish's Methodist folks. Certainly Samuel Smith Jr. (my gggf) was not religious, although his wife Mary Ann Bland Smith (my gggm) seems to have been a church goer. Then also, unlike Kalish's family, the outlines we have of the Smith history involve moving off the farm and away from farming already in the Civil War era and into rural small town governance and shop keeping, while Kalish's family was still farming in the 1920s and 1930s. In the years that Kalish grew up on those farms near Garrison Iowa, my own mother was growing up as the daughter of a college educated newspaper editor who had escaped Eldora to the big city of Kansas City. So Kalish's story is not our story but her story does provide a kind of refracted image of our story as it may have been in the 1850s, when the Smith's first came to Hardin County Iowa, or as it might have been had we stayed down on the farm. The Iowa rural values and attitudes portrayed here were probably shared with my Smith and Bland ancestors, as would have been the technologies and tasks of daily living. While I didn't read every recipe and detail in this book, I read most of it and the overall picture of life is fascinating. After I was done I called up Garrison Iowa using Google Earth and peered down on the little place today, trying to imagine it in 1850 and in 1930. With Kalish's help I could see it all.

It's been a long time since I gave the 15th century this much attention. Belozerskaya tells the story of Cyriacus, the man who, arguably, invented archaeology. On the way we get to journey through the Ottoman and Christian Mediterranean, witness the effort to reunite the Eastern and Roman Churches, and touch upon the economics and social mores of Renaissance scholarship. This is essentially a story of historiography, and specifically a story of historical historiography. There isn't much more interesting than that in my book.

This is the second Deerfield history I've read and enjoyed recently. The focus here is on the historical New England culture from the time of Pocomtuck's first settlement through its evolution into Deerfield and on into the middle eighteenth century. The business of establishing, populating and standing on its feet an entire town is carefully documented, as are the changing patterns of ownership and residence that defined the place. In Melvoin's study we get a real glimpse of who these town folk were, what they owned, how they understood their community and their relationship to it, and just how many lashings a fornicator might receive. Deerfield, home to several of my ancestors including Godfrey Nims, Thankful Nims Munn and Benjamin Munn, reveals itself as one of the poorest and most exposed towns in New England, but also a place of relative equality and civic participation. It was the sort of place a reprobate, in trouble with the law in his youth, such as great (x7) grandfather Godfrey Nims might move to and reach by the end of his life an apparent respectability. In the process of reading my vague understandings about Puritan life were greatly enriched and deepened. The author concludes by describing the world of early 1700s Deefield as an intermediate point in the evolution from English and Puritan culture to a new American culture. Unlike Captors and Captives (below) which was truly a cross cultural and international analysis, this book is focussed primarily on the reality of the English settlers. Like Captors and Captives it was eye opening and for me truly gripping.

"The redeemed captive returning to Zion : or, a faithful history of remarkable occurences in the captivity and deliverance of Mr. John Williams, minister of the gospel in Deerfield, who in the desolation which befel that plantation by an incursion of the French and Indians, was by them carried away, with his family and his neighborhood, into Canada" For further explanation see Captors and Captives, below.

I checked this out and read it because of its title. The title of this book is magnetic. I am powerless to escape the attractive force of this book's title. It is a title that sounds as if I heard it reviewed somewhere and that it received fantastic reviews (even though I don't think I did or it did.) It is a title that actually induces hallucinations of good reviews that may or may not ever have been written. This title sounds like a book that just ought to be read. And how's the reading? Well, it's a quick read, two sittings, and goes down easy. It's about a man, child of a disastrous mother and dysfunctional parental marriage, busy replicating it all in his own dysfunctional marriage with his own disastrous wife, vaguely aware that he too may be flawed, but not articulating to himself or the reader very well what those flaws may be. So it's just like life. I completely missed the "A Memoir" claim, and assumed I was reading a fiction. I'm not sure that matters one way or the other. I only woke up to the fact that this was not fiction when the characters resolve their difficulty with therapy, separate and couples, rather than violent divorce or murder. Oh. I get it. This is a story of someone's actual experience. But children, BMW lust, difficult mothers, marital challenges, dog ownership... it all felt real to me. I guess I find it hard to believe that anyone could be quite this dysfunctional, but I shouldn't feel that way, for every unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way, as they say.

I think this must qualify as a definitive study of the events and context of the February 29 1704 (Julian calendar) raid on Deerfield, although I must confess it is the only complete book I've read on the subject so far. The authors view the event and its times (1670s to the 1760s) from every cultural and political angle, trace the origins and fates of captors and captives, the shifting alliances of European and Indian nations, and provide a marvelous window on an historical period that had been fairly obscure to me. My own personal interest of course stems from the escape of my 6th great grandmother, Thankful Nims, age 19, from the French led raiding party. While children had their heads bashed open and men and women were taken into captivity and houses burned, she and her husband Benjamin Munn hid in a primitive cellar house that was so covered with snow that it escaped notice. Thankful and Benjamin would remove south to Springfield where my 5th great grandmother, their child Sarah Munn would be born some twenty years later, understandably less close to the frontier. The subsequent generation would settle further north in Marlboro (Marlborough) Vermont. On the whole, this branch of our ancestors was by all appearances poor New England farmers all, living in large families on or near the frontier, and typically moving in search of new land with each generation. I found Haefeli and Sweeney's history fascinating and mind expanding, and intuitively plausible as a description of the cultural and political context of my ancestors' lives. I hope, some day, as my children or grandchildren peruse this list of my long ago readings, they will take the time to discover a little bit about Thankful Nims Munn and her family and circumstances as described here. (She does not actually appear in this book, but her parents and many of her siblings are mentioned.) The stories here of the cultural relationships between the many Indian nations and the French and the English provide a sense of the fluidity and connectedness of the cultures. Among the many revelations, this book provides a sense of just how few in number were the early settlers of New England and, even more so, how few were those of New France. A raiding party of some 200 was a huge undertaking, and the Deerfield raid was a singularly successful action on the part of New France, one that was really never equaled. While it became, particularly as a result of the contemporaneous book published about it (The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion by John Williams, 1665-1729) a rallying point for New England colonialists, the military action itself seems to have marked a high water point for New France as a Continental power, with subsequent raids experiencing less success as the French project in America dwindled and then collapsed over the ensuing decades. The final chapter on historiography and the effort to define the meaning of the "Deerfield Massacre" is particularly interesting - I like to go meta. This book has gripped me for many evenings.

My old sidur from old times, avodat haboker, haboker.

This review of 9th Iowa Cavalry regiment is the story of my great grandfather Jacob K. Smith's brother, William H. Smith (b. 24 Jan 1844, d. 07 Nov 1913.) He enlisted at age 19. In it we learn that the 9th Iowa Cavalry did not participate in any of the major battles of the Civil War, but apparently saw some action, harrasing and pursuing rebel forces. It provides Smith's enlistment and retirement dates, and the following personal history. -- Smith, William H. Age 19. Residence Eldora, nativity Iowa. Enlisted Oct. 3, 1863. Mustered Oct. 3, 1863. Promoted Eighth Corporal March 7, 1854; Seventh corporal April 2, 1864; Sixth Corporal Sept. 24, 1864; Fifth Corporal Oct. 12, 1864; Fourth Corporal Dec. 28, 1864; Sixth Sergeant Jan. 2, 1865; Fifth Sergeant April 25, 1866; Fourth Sergeant May 6, 1865; Second Sergeant Aug. 18, 1865. Discharged for disability Jan. 8, 1866, Washington, Ark. -- We know from other sources that he went on to live a long life in Grundy County, Iowa as a farmer with the woman Ann Maria Arnold Smith whom he married shortly after the war. They had two children, Guy A. Smith, b. July 24, 1871 and Maude A. Smith, b. May 25, 1874 and it is unknown at this time whether either of their children also had children.

I am reading my way through the middle 19th century, these September evenings, in the first year of the Obama administration. Indeed, regarding Obama, it seems that "the past isn't dead, it's not even past." Then as now, a compromiser from Illinois tries to find a way to come to terms with uncompromising racists and institutions that treat human lives as so much property. Lincoln discovered that it took Sherman's march to set them straight. Does Obama have the spine to wage that war again, when the time comes? I have my doubts. I am having the experience of reading a familiar story in a way that fills in so many of the unknown details in a brilliantly satisfying way. But, then also, fascinating and illuminating as is Goodwin's methodology of comparing the foibles and struggles of prominent individuals, it was Northern industrial power, not Lincoln's personality or the composition of the Cabinet, that won the war in the end. Goodwin tempts us in the direction of history as the history of great men, but it is the history of railroad workers and farmers and foot soldiers, their education, their health, their nutrition, their culture, etc., that better explains many historical outcomes. We view the world through the eyes of emperors and presidents at our peril. I'd like to read a good Civil War battle history to complement this Washington-centric version of the era. Finally, as I read this I think of my great-grandfather Jacob K. Smith whose older brother Bill Smith rode out of Iowa with the 9th Iowa cavalary in about 1862 and survived to live a long life as a farmer in Grundy County, Iowa. I have recently located a battle history of the 9th Iowa cavalry and enjoyed the tale it told of William H. Smith. I completed my reading of Goodwin's book on motezei Shabbat Tshuva, the day before Yom Kippur, after havdalah with the kids and Leora. Rusty sleeps on my son's bed, on his feet, gratefully.

Fabulous memoir of an adolescence in western China, and the end of the Maoist era.

Beer built the pyramids, Coffee fueled the enlightenment, and Tea and Alcohol made the empire possible. This is the kind of history I love.

Amazing exploration of secrets never told and the violence people hold inside. I enjoyed the North Dakota setting too - my great grandfather Jacob K. Smith lived in South Dakota in the years when this story is set.

I'm running my fingers over the same old wounds, but Morris is a straight shooter and he does an excellent job. I find my support for the basic case of Zionism, the Jewish national claim to self-determination / autonomy / statehood in the historic homeland, to be enhanced, not diminished, by a frank acknowledgement and exploration of its sins. We'll wait a long time before the "other side" produces a similar accounting of its deeds and aims, and sadly, such an assessment is probably a prerequisite for the peace we all seek. Mid-March, 2009

In 1919 roads were bad, the War was over, and the future General Eisenhower was among those on a military mission to drive a large convoy of very primitive trucks across the American continent for the first time. They drove approximately on the Lincoln highway route. The Lincoln highway was to be the first transcontinental highway. They visited towns. People welcomed them, saying "Hey, a big convoy of trucks! Never seen that before." Then it was time to go to sleep. (I'm writing a book about transportation and society... this was background history. From a theoretical perspective this book explains nothing, but from the dry facts of road development you can gain intimations about the forces shaping motorized transport and their future social implications. There is food for thought here, but it will require more cooking.) March 3 2009

Like most people, I've often had my interest piqued by a clever presentation of a seeming incongruity around a major historical event, particularly the 9/11 attacks and the Kennedy assassination. In each case I've gone some distance down the hallway, always hoping for the deep dark conspiracy to be revealed to be true, and then slowly realized that nothing in the conspiracy theory really made sense when you compared it to the logic and the totality of the "conventional wisdom." I hate to think of myself as one who simply accepts the conventional wisdom. I think of myself as always open to alternative theories. But as Bugliosi demonstrates to my satisfaction, the conventional wisdom on the Kennedy assassination makes a heck of a lot sense. I'm not interested enough in the Kennedy assassination to hear out the rebuttals to each and every point he makes, although I'm sure that someone is busy making those rebuttals. Interest in the assassination is a generational phenomenon, and that generation is now in its late fifties, at least. Iinterest in the assassination is of greater interest than the assassination itself. In the end most of us are not in a position to ascertain the truth about most historical questions. Instead we are forced to align ourselves with a tone and sensibility, as much as with an interpretation of the evidence itself. We are recipients of interpretations not examiners of evidence, and each person must find story tellers and interpreters that he or she trusts. The story itself and the reality it reflects is more difficult to judge. For most people, most of the time, knowledge is a matter of who you trust and what methodology you trust, not what you know. This difference between examining evidence and accepting historians is obscured by the fact that historians attempt to bring us into their examination of the evidence, entrain us in their captivity to the evidence. But what they are really doing is attempting to gain our trust in their method, not in the evidence itself, which is largely beyond our reach. No matter what evidence they present, we are ultimately evaluating the intellectual architecture around the claim, the social context of the historian who makes the claim, and the historian him or herself.. Evaluating historical truth is an exercise in evaluating the apparatus and social context in which those truths are developed and presented. Thinking critically about history is really all about thinking critically about how history is presented, how historians are educated, how historical ideas gain currency. All of that is long way of saying that Bugliosi seems to be a reasonable fellow and presents the evidence in ways that makes sense to me and seem to uphold the general conclusions of the Warren Commission, as he presents them. The worry I have about Bugliosi is his annoying tendency toward hagiographic representations of the Kennedys themselves, who appear in this book as entirely noble, when everything we know about this family, from the fascist father to the philandering President suggest that these were no noble innocents. Even Hoover appears merely as a concerned and threatening busybody, and not as the psychopathic blackmailer that we now know him to have been. An author who distorts by not acknowledging this reality, and presents only the public image of Kennedy while delving deeply into the private lives of Oswald and Ruby, does raise questions in my mind. However if one reads only the first section about the four days around the assassination, a book in itself and never mind the next 1000 pages, one will have a very thorough and fascinating story of the assassination and rebuttals to various theories of which one was only vaguely aware. I didn't even read most of it, but I enjoyed it and learned a lot. February 24 2009

The problem with interesting fiction is that you begin to care more about the author than the characters. Nobody gives a damn what the author of a formulaic romance of adventure book was thinking or feeling when the book was written because everything is so obviously on the page. It's a shallow pool. But with a book like Mating the author's intelligence is written into every page. Mating is not about social theorist and anthropologist Nelson Denoon and the female anthropologist protagonist who loves him, or about their mutual thoughts about anthropology and social change. No, as one reads the book it is increasingly about questions such as "has Norman Rush done a persuasive job of writing an interior female character?" (Really, not so much), and "does Norman Rush subscribe to a Denoonian socialist feminist utopianism or merely use this a interesting framework on which to hang a good read?" (hard to say.) Denoon and the female protagonist are so very clever, and in so much the same way, that it is difficult to read them as anything other than an interior dialogue of the author, a device for him to express his ideas and explore his own mind. We spend the novel not so much reading the story as imagining the author behind the story. Alright. There is nothing wrong with an author intentionally or unintentionally writing a book about himself. You can read many books that way, and for many years criticism was all about finding the author behind the text. For my part, while I subscribed to textualism in my words, I've found that in actually reading all I can really think about is the author and the single mind that lies behind the diverse realities in the text. The more interesting the book the more this is true. I spent many many evenings reading this book, and enjoying it and complaining about it to Leora too.. How often do we encounter a book in which the fate of a village is at much at issue as the fate of the protagonists? This is a socialist adventure, although individuals are allowed, after a fashion, to steer their destinies. It does seem to go on and on, but I kept reading because there was a certain interest in the on-and-on-ness of it all, and Rush was busy telling a good story about his own mind, set in a utopian village in the Kalahari in the form of a love story between a man and a woman. In spite of the fact that I was never really convinced that the protagonist was a woman and not a man, the sincere effort of Rush to create a female character, yet somehow, ineffably, writing thoughts and approaches that were male gendered, was an interesting exercise to witness. The problem of writing across one's gender has always seemed to me to be a fairly deep one, and I can't think of any particularly convincing modern efforts by men or women to write interior characters across the gender line. Perhaps a blind test would be necessary to really evaluate the proposition that author gender is always written into character, no matter how hard the author may try to imagine the other gender. And what of culture? Can authors write cross-culturally in a convincing way? And convincing to whom? To one external to the culture, or to a member of the culture? Surely there must be PhD dissertations written on this very subject. . February 2009

A young adulthood in contemporary Bejing and a fascinating description of life in another world on the very same planet. February 10, 2009

Fascinating, as I write my own family history. January 19 2009

My son has been reading this series intensely, so I had a look. Good stuff! December 6, 2008

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't start your children too young... but intoxication with God through the process of submission to His authoritative divine will can take you to places you can't get to by any other means, and certainly not with the help of your loving understanding humanistic liberal Quaker Unitarian sort of personal diety who is, in the end, just the good therapist you always needed, but with lower fees. No. That's the no-alcohol version of religion and the parties where that is served are pretty tepid places. For a good time you need the straight stuff, strong, bracing, and if some people can't hold their fundamentalism, and start blowing up planes and massacering unbelievers, well maybe that's an issue of personal behavior and personal responsibility? I jest, and yet I do not jest. I do believe the following. Fundamentalism taps into a part of the human brain that finds transcendent experience in the submission to authority. I believe that the pleasure that people derive from submission, from the sense that they are perfectly obedient and aligned with the will of one more powerful than themselves, is a biological pleasure with sociobiological roots and evolutionary origins and with its very own "receptors" in our animal brains, much as alcohol plugs into specific biological receptors. People who dismiss the pleasures of fundamentalism remind me of people who dismiss the pleasures of alcohol or other drugs, fearful of their own potential to abuse as much as they are of the thing itself. And that is why, although Krakauer's book is a great pleasure, particularly for its telling of Mormon history without pious embellishment, the effort to write the history of Mormonism through the lens of violence and psychopathic murder seems so unsatisfying. There's a whole lot more going on in Mormonism, in Islam, in fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism, and in all modes of submission to "divinely ordained" authority. Fundamentalism is heavy spiritual bondage/sado-masochism, and its potential for abuse and insanity is considerable, but then there's the fact that people reliably report that through the means of fundamentalist faith or practice they reach God and dwell in His presence... which is not to be dismissed lightly, any more than the reports of drunkards that they are happy are to be dismissed simply because they seem so objectively misserable. January 17, 2006

Yes I read most of a book by America's number one most disliked and dislikable chief executive. Now I know how to win too. January 2006

More proof, as if it was needed, that there is sometimes more to be learned in fiction than in all your social science. December 30, 2005

Interesting window on late 19th and early 20th century America. Henry Ford was a nasty sick puppy, surrounded by boot licking facilitators and plenty of Americans who were willing to believe. Partly read, circa December 28 2005

A few chapters to my children before bed, 2 November 2005

Mostly read 10 minutes at a time, for the entire month of October , as I sat on the Max train going to and from downtown Portland. A pleasure. November 2, 2005

I really enjoyed this biography. Like me, Dickerson was born in 1959. Dickerson describes growing up as the daughter of a cruel father (a former sharecropper and Marine) and devoted mother in segregated St. Louis, and her struggles with Black and American identity. In the process she reveals a great deal about class and privilege in America. I liked being able to map my progress through life against hers. September 10, 2005

Just your typical transvestite terrorist neo-Nazi spy plotting to destroy America, seeming to work for the Saudis, while being controlled by the American government itself in the end. I enjoyed, as one does, the utter lightness of it all, and tried to imagine what I would write my novel about. It does remind me how good it is to be far from Washington DC. This was summertime reading, stretched over several weeks, usually at bedtime, and wrapped up as New Orleans flooded and burned, around September 2, 2005.

Most of what Goodman says is familiar to me, but I was interested in her as a person, and so I enjoyed skimming this. Late August 2005.

To my children on a hot Sunday afternoon while waiting for the pizza to arrive, August 13th, 2005

An old favorite of my daughter, checked out from the library once again, and read to my children on a hot Sunday afternoon while waiting for the pizza to arrive, August 13th, 2005

To my children, before bed, August 9, 2005

August 8, 2005

The Super Adobe system looks like an inviting and promising technique, and yet, in the end, aren't you living inside a polyethelyne bag? But should we care? The buildings look beautiful, and it sure would be faster than cob, and cheaper than rammed earth. August 8, 2005

When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s I thought of Chalmers Johnson as a well respected scholar of an exceedingly boring subject: Japan and East Asia. In his retirement, he seems to have gained a whole new understanding and critical stance toward the American empire. His story of that transformation is perhaps the most interesting part of this book. August 8, 2005

Excerpts from this encyclopedia of images, to my son at the library, Sunday afternoon, August 7, 2005

To my son and daughter, on the front porch steps, on a Saturday evening, August 6,

The dog version, to my daughter on the front porch steps, August 6, 2005

To my daughter, before bed, August 5 2005

This chapter is surely my favorite of all the Pooh stories, and possibly my favorite story in the whole wide world. Every note is perfect. To my daughter, before sleep. August 2, 2005

A few chapters, to my son before bed. August 2, 2005

To my son and daughter, July 31, 2005

We have multiple versions and I've been reading many of them to my daughter. Certain young girls can't get enough of Cinderella. What am I doing to her soul? July 2005

My son has been reading this story of a romantic rat and laughing out loud. I read a few chapters to him the other day. He's so into it. His laughter brings me laughter. July 30 2005

Wow, what a lot of gritty fun this is. The author weaves a fine murder mystery through the lens of Thai culture and the Thai underworld. I have no idea how authentic it is but I feel enlightened. July 17, 2005

To my daughter, July 2005

There are so many differences since my time (early 1980s, Jerusalem) and yet so many common threads. Like Gordis, I experienced Israel through Angeleno eyes, freeway eyes, American eyes. I recall all the same feelings of wonder at Shabbat and Jewish life thriving in Jerusalem, all the joys of living within it. Unlike him I was a single man, while he has children and is married. Like him I today also have children and am married. I raise my children in Portland, Oregon, and can well imagine with his help what it would be like to raise children there in Jerusalem.

Like him, I confronted the contradiction between the noble idea of a "Jewish state" and the dark side of that same idea, with its implications of exclusivity and anti-democratic politics. Unlike Gordis, my time in Israel was in earlier days in the history of Israel, the first half of the 1980s, twenty years ago. In those days I was willing to believe that it was still possible to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, more or less, and somehow have a state both Jewish and Democratic. Sometime between 1967 and that became impossible to believe. Perhaps I was already deluded in thinking it possible in the early 1980s.

Gordis meditates on life in a state of constant anxiety about terrorist violence, and on the confusion of the left in the absence of a partner for a "two state solution." But he is quite unfair to the left. To blame the left for holding on to that idea for far too long is like blaming a man for clinging to his only life preserver when it becomes waterlogged and cannot save him. It's not like he's got a serious alternative. The failure of the two state solution was foredoomed by three decades and more of occupation forced upon Israel and the Palestinians by the settlers and their complicit allies in the center and right. No vision of political justice has animated that 4 decade long process of occupation. No generosity of spirit toward the Palestinians has been shown. To expect the spirit of compromise now is laughable.

The right has reaped what it sowed. It has a bitter enemy that will accept no compromise. If human life wasn't at stake, it would be hard to have much sympathy. The years of settlement and occupation have worked their effect, and Gordis is miserable with the reality in which he lives. Who wouldn't be? But for God's sake Gordis, understand how we got here.

After Arik Sharon wasted my cousin Mark Hochstein's life in Lebanon in about 1985 I saw a truth about Israel, at least as it pertained to me. Any real thought of becoming an Israeli ended. I understood at that moment with perfect clarity how easily the lives of young men could be wasted for goals that meant nothing to me. It took a little while for me to act on what I understood and leave, but eventually I did. The state was in the grip of men and beliefs that were alien to me. Land was more important than life and the land was filled with corruption.

You don't stop feeling for the people of a place when you leave it behind. You don't stop wishing them well, wishing them life, wishing them peace. You just acknowledge that you have nothing to contribute to their world, their collective sickness and sadness, and you move on to find a world in which you have a place and something to contribute. And so I left.

Gordis' book from 2002 is full of vows to stay and never leave. I look at Israel and I see nothing good in its future. (July 2005 .)

In June and July as I begin my new think tank job, I have been reading widely in health economics and health services research. I could not begin to catalog all the journal articles, policy briefs and research reviews that I've read in the last month, but it has been a busy time. July 2005

This book gets a lot of details wrong, but is very worthwhile because it gets a few big things right. Kunstler takes the idea of the oil bubble and world peak oil seriously, and does a masterful job of explaining how the population explosion to 6 billion people, the rise of 19th and 20th century technology and the green revolution are all manifestations of the oil economy. He thinks that the coming decline in oil supply is massively important for the future of humanity, and presages an end to civillization as we have known it for the last 150 years. I think he's largely right, even though his analysis of geopolitics and his efforts to predict what the specific implications of peak oil are for civilization, for daily life and for specific regions of the United States, are all rather less convincing. In these sections the reader is led to shrug and say "it could be that way but it might play out differently." For example, why does Kunstler insist that existing reluctance to use nuclear power will remain in face of the epochal changes he predicts? And if we are willing to use nuclear power then as large energy companies and governments commit firmly to nuclear power why should not hydrogen or other transportable storage modalities be developed? So, as with any exercise in futurism, there is room to argue. But what there is to like about Kunstler's book is the way in which he uses the idea of peak oil and its decline to imagine a world without cars, and to a large extent without transportation as we know it. I share that dream. I think he is right on target in describing oil and the transportation it facilitates as a terrible distortion of human life and ecology on the planet Earth. I consider Kunstler an optimist however. Unlike me, he believes that the transportation society is doomed. No matter how many times he protests that he does not relish the pain associated with this development, it creates for him a bridge to a more local and more sustainable future. I only wish that it were true, but believe that our social commitment to transportation may be so complete that we (our society, our citizens, the power elites) would do anything, including poisoning the earth with nuclear wastes to preserve that "way of life" for a few more years. The Long Emergency functions for Kunstler as a tragic but in some undeniable sense hopeful deus ex machina that will return us, after much pain and violence, to ecological balance. I do not share Kunstler's optimism.

To my daughter before sleep, once again. June 14, 2005

Read once again today, to my daughter. June 4 2005.

Read to my daughter this evening, for the umpteenth time. Katy the crawler tractor's reliability and determination are inspirations to us all. June 4, 2005

Since my daughter keeps track so carefully with her bookmark, either my wife or I might be reading a given chapter. I've never read the book straight through and remain a little confused about what is going on. June 2005

You can pretty much get the point of this book by glancing at the cover and reading selected sentences from pages 4, 75 and 137. Our capacity to thin slice is amazing. However I read the whole thing and enjoyed it. May 30, 2005

I fell in love with the title. The pleasures offered by this rather too conventional romance lie primarily in the author's depictions of medical devices and ideas from the 1880s, including the good doctor's theories about this new fangled "electricity" and its potential to cure the "ailments of women." His gradual discovery that "what women want" is someone to listen to them may be a rather anachronistic projection of 20th century ideas on a previous century, and the romance itself unfolds somewhat predictably, but the book is not without its rewards. May 2005

If you've ever loved Shakey Speare this Old New Mexico retelling of Measure for Measure and this "backstory" of Romeo and Juliet will be very rewarding. Great story telling and literary criticism all rolled into one. I loved them both. I would have gotten more out of the Measure for Measure story if I had any memory of it. Slavitt inspires me to read it (for the first time? again?) I love inter-texts, texts that harmonize with another text and rely on the dual conciousness of the reader to make their meanings. These are both great pleasures. May 25, 2005

Read in bed this evening to my daughter. Then we fell asleep together. Then I got up. May 23, 2005

Read the chapter about Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit's door to my daughter on the couch this Sunday morning. Later my son took a stab at Chapter 3, the Woozel hunt. It's still a bit difficult for him but he plows gamely ahead. May 22, 2005

My son continues to insist that I read and explain passages from this stultifyingly boring (but nicely illustrated) Star Wars book he always has on hand from the library. I was bored to tears by the damn "Trade Federation" when I saw the movie, and now I have to think about it again? These Star Wars books are so badly written you'd almost think they were designed to make kids give up on reading and go see a Star Wars movie or buy a Star Wars action figure instead. Could it be? May 22, 2005

Returning as an adult to Winnie-the-Pooh, I am of course impressed by the profound philosophical and psychological insights of AA Milne, and then just as quickly wonder whether the feeling of profundity is somehow related to the fact that any reasonably coherent text, experienced at a young age and then re-experienced much later in life, almost necessarily glows with an aura of revelation and profundity. Because my mind has been shaped by this very text and then has forgotten it, when I experience it today it seems to sparkle with otherworldly levels of meaning. I think this is how cultures make texts holy - by ensuring the re-reading of texts in childhood, youth and age. An interesting concomitant to that idea is that if we segregate what children read from what adults read, then we essentially cut off the possibility of experiencing this layered otherworldliness, this feeling of divinity in the text. It could be a strong argument for reading children the truly great literature from the youngest age so that they will one day have an experience of re-reading it and in that re-experiencing of the text experience God. On the other hand if we distrust such feelings of transcendence or mystical connection then the way to deny human beings access to them is to make sure they read only books to which they would never wish to return as adults (and ensure that they view TV programs they will forget, and live in places they will leave behind.) I found myself thinking such thoughts as I read, once again, this particular chapter of Pooh to my daughter this afternoon, May 19, 2005

"Too bad his duck is so crazy." I've read this book to my children dozens and dozens of times. I read it to my daughter, age 4 and a half, again this afternoon. She doesn't like it when I do the tiger voices in high English form. "Talk in your normal voice" she implores. Dang. I really like to do the voices. But these days keeping the father reasonable and under control is very important. No jokes. Be serious. Let's get a fix on reality says my daughter and stop all this playing around. I try to be good. I really do. But it's not in my nature, and a father like that is, apparently, very annoying if you are a certain four and half year old girl. May 19, 2005

... then when Kanga says, 'Where's Baby Roo?' we say, 'Aha!'"

"Aha!" said Pooh, practising. "Aha! Aha! ... Of course," he went on, "we could say 'Aha!'
even if we hadn't stolen Baby Roo." [...]

"There's just one thing," said Piglet, fidgeting a bit. "I was talking to Christopher Robin, and he said that a Kanga was Generally Regarded as One of the Fiercer Animals. I am not frightened of Fierce Animals in the ordinary way, but it is well known that if One of the Fiercer Animals is Deprived of Its Young, it becomes as fierce as Two of the Fiercer Animals. In which case 'Aha!' is perhaps a foolish thing to say."

I've been reading to my children from this book, most recently Chapter 7. May 15, 2005

This is a great great book. I want to do it justice in a few words. McEwan beautifully channels the voice and perspective of 13 year old Briony, witness to events she does not understand, as she and others attempt to cope with the terrible damage that her youthful perceptions and fierce nature do to those around her. But it's not that simple. If I tell you why it's more complicated I'll spoil the fun. Suffice it to say that the first few chapters of this book bored me, and then suddenly I was deeply and completely hooked. McEwan was laying a trap, and when he sprang it I could feel it's claws close around me. It was a joy to be trapped, and the only path to freedom was to read through to the end.

A good third of the book is the story of the British retreat to Dunkirk as experienced by one wounded soldier approaching death. This beautifully rendered piece with minute historical details that make it seem like a contemporary account could stand alone as a fine wartime novella. But it is only the keystone of the story arch on either side of it.

The word atonement is an odd one. I've seldom heard it used other then in reference to Yom Kippur. But this book is indeed about atonement, by many means, personal and literary.

One always feels that McEwan, or another author, is "playing" with the reader. One always feels in Atonement that there is a hovering author who could take the story in many directions. Someone is self consciously telling a story. This feeling of authorship, this wrestling with the nature of authorship, is perhaps the real subject of the book, and why I liked it so much. This is a book about writing as much as anything else. Of course one writes stories about horrible, passionate, angry and hard things that happen to people, and a book is hardly readable without a human story, and the story that is told here is a fine story, but the real subject of this book is something closer to the problem of how to write, and even, if I can say it without giving too much away, how to write one's own story and the way in which writing is the path to atonement, the way in which the author is a God (or God an author) and the way in which atonement is perhaps not really possible in this world, but only completed in death. Why all of this makes sense is something you'll just have to read the book to find out. Even if you get none of that out of it, you'll have a fine mid-twentieth century drama.

This is one of the most enjoyable books I've read this year. May 14, 2005

"But it's perfect," my father said. "A real beauty, just like your mother here." He came from behind and pinched her on the bottom. She laughed and swatted him with a towel and we witnessed what we would later come to recognize as the rejuvenating power of real estate. It's what fortunate couples turn to when their sex life has faded and they're too pious for affairs. A second car might bring people together for a week or two, but a second home can revitalize a marriage for up to nine months after the closing.

I've read this book before but I'm enjoying it again. It stands up well. You could learn how to write from this guy. April 29, 2005

I have a personal interest in autobiography, and Conway's meditations are proving very rewarding. What's missing are the autobiographies of the ordinary person. April 28, 2005

A few chapters into this book and I find I just don't care. All the hard poses, the macho posturing, the sorting out of the command hierarchy.... I suppose it is real. The book reads like the author knows military life in some sense. But I just don't care. So this one will be put aside. I'm reading novels like this one because I'm trying to figure out the mechanics of story telling, but it's not going to help if I can't get interested enough to finish the damn thing. April 25, 2005

I'm a little late getting to this book, but it is a still a pleasure. Al Franken is perhaps not outrageously funny. He's a ranconteur, whatever that means. One definition: " One who tells stories and anecdotes with skill and wit." He is gently amusing. He tells a good story. And sometimes he gets off a really good one. I heard him on Prarie Home Companion this week and he was very amusing there too. April 18, 2005

Ah, the lure of ... easy money and fast cars. But it could also be called "how faith makes people blind." The book contains more detail than most people could reasonably care about, but quickly read it's a good story about a clever scam. April 14, 2005

I thought this was a first rate "romantic mystery." April 1, 2005

29 March 2005

I'm studying how to write a basic novel. 29 March 2005

If she can write a whole novel about an upper middle class coming of age in one's twenties in New York City then... I'd better get busy writing my novel too.. Mine was only slightly less silly. Not that I didn't read and enjoy the whole thing in one sitting. But the unbearable lightness of it all... that's what makes it so readable, and so empty. March 2005

This book (by Judith Civan, my father's first cousin) knits together all sorts of themes and issues in Christianity into a coherent picture. For me, it took half known and partly remembered truths and showed the profound connections between them. Fascinating, disturbing and enlightening. Highly recommended. See also: AbrahamsKnife.com March 2005

I thought Richard Clarke would be one insider who would be worth giving a hearing. It's hard to wring much drama out of life in the national security bureaucracy, but he does as good a job as can be expected. He makes it clear that the Bush crowd was inexcusably asleep prior to the attacks. March 2005

As a child I was very interested in airplanes, particularly war planes. And so even today at age 45 I find it pleasant, relaxing and calming to leaf through a nicely illustrated volume like this showing killing machines from across the decades. It makes me feel all warm inside. All my old friends are there, with exciting new killing technology from the 90s too. The B-17 is my Winnie the Pooh. The B-26 is my Superman, the B-25 my Fred Flintstone. The warm feelings are layered over with an adult awareness of the violence represented by these machines. It's hardly inexplicable, but it feels odd even to me to be comforted by the pornography of war. It was the melody of my childhood. Early March, 2005

Hmmm... dog ownership. February 19, 2005

This is a wonderful explanation and exploration of Appalachian shoe making, with additional chapters on hide tanning, wooden locks and all sorts of important basic technology. February 16, 2005

A Mormon rooted memoir of one woman's experiences with geography, water, natural philosophy, cancer, nuclear bombs and Utah family life. February 2005

This is very engaging story of growing up Jewish in the 1950s, as the son of survivors in a very unJewish Connecticut town, and of searching for the reality of Jewish experience during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Its portrayal of the relationship between the author and his 12 and 7 year old sons was also fascinating and touching. I found the book gripping. February 15, 2005

Yes, I've been thinking a lot about getting a dog. Training two dogs was one of the most valuable and remembered experiences of my adolescence. This particular book accords well with my experience and intuition. as well as reminding me just how much work and time is involved in dog ownership. That's something to think twice and three times about. After all I'm already raising two human children. But it's not the same. February 12, 2005

This story of a women who entered a contemplative Catholic convent at age 20 in 1914 and left in 1941 at age 46 is fascinating to one such as myself who has also entered and left the formal strictures of an intense religious practice. The parallels to orthodox Jewish practice (and the differences) of course fascinated me. Although Baldwin expresses many of the limited attitudes of an early 20th century upper class British woman (she was the niece of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) and only partly explains how she came to make the mistake of making a lifelong commitment to be a nun in a contemplative order, she does do a marvelous job of explaining and describing the contemplative life and what she believes to be the rich lives of nuns. And do we believe her? That is for the reader to decide. I don't think I do. I think that the life she describes really is a flight from reality. But she believes in it, even as she finds that it is not for her. We listen to her memories of convent life interwoven with her search for gainful employment and housing in wartime England. When she leaves the convent she remains very much immersed in the world view of a contemplative convent nun. She describes herself as a Rip van Winkle, astonished and uncomprehending at many of the changes that occurred during her 26 years of complete seclusion. She entered the convent as a beautiful young woman who turned heads and leaves as an aging woman who receives the attention of no one. She mourns, but only slightly, the life she might have led, and meets old friends and imagines which of their lives her life might most have resembled had she not withdrawn from the world. I found her adventures and ruminations completely engrossing. She certainly gives one a new perspective on nuns. I wonder what became of her in later years? The book takes us through 1948. February 04, 2005

Thoughtful polemic on the really bad cities and the great ones, and how they got that way. History as the history of cities. Some essays are stronger (Paris, Atlanta, Mexico City) and some are less compelling (Rome) but every one is worth your time. January 26, 2005

Very brief and nicely illustrated with woodcuts, this history of cordwaining (that's another name for shoe making) in colonial America covers both the technology and the social role of shoe makers. It is quite enjoyable. January 21, 2005

This book is simply wonderful. Liza Normal, a punk with a chip on her shoulder and a pile of attitude a mile high, reminds me of what it was like to be an adolescent girl in the early 1980s. Oh sure I was an adolescent boy in the late 1970s, but nonetheless the book is close enough to my time to feel like a memory. It is set in LA, the Bay Area and Las Vegas, and does a great job of capturing the infected and festering down and out spirit of an era. January 2005

I only read the first half. I just wanted to find out what made the nut tick, and have a good true crime story. The intellectual antecedents, or the political ones, seem too tangential to the basic issue of lunacy, and any effort to discuss them seriously seems to verge on the "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?" form of analysis. January 2005

Why do I even subject myself to these venal ugly people, or give them a few evenings of my life? Reading this book does require you to accept the idea of multimillionaire corporate CEO Paul O'Neil as a hero of sensible rational thinking and moral rectitude, but compared to the Bush crowd this isn't too much of a stretch. One does wonder to what extent this book is simply sour grapes - O'Neil was frozen out of the policy process so he has some unflattering things to say. But that analysis only takes you so far. In the main it is hard not to be persuaded and dumbfounded at the extent to which the Bush administration viewed the Governmental apparatus as an enemy territory to be negotiated and battled into submission. "Mayberry Machiavellis" just about sums it up. Since I'm already disgusted with Bush and his administration (first or second, it's all the same), it is difficult to summon additional outrage, but Suskind fills in some telling details on which to hang one's general sense that something is profoundly wrong at the top. If you had any doubts, this book makes it abundantly clear that somewhere in Texas a village is missing an idiot. For confirmation of that little fact we can thank Suskind and O'Neil. December, 2004

This is one of the best books about the political economy and business of health services in the US that I've read. Paul Star's excellent history of American medicine gets you through the late 1970s. Oxymorons takes up where Starr left off and is an excellent complement to Starr's story. Although not a history in the same sense, in part because the history Kleinke describes is still being made, Oxymorons explains in a simultaneously entertaining, opinionated and well grounded manner how we got to where we are today from the perspective of an industry insider. I recommend it highly. November 2004.

Observing her eleven year old boy's struggle to catch the attention of girls Walker asks a great question. I enjoyed her authors' responses but none of them really satisfied me. Naturally, I want to talk about evolutionary biology and sociology, a subject far from the concerns of this interesting set of essays about growing up male (and to some extent African American male) in America. October 2004.

I always enjoy arguments concerning approaching apocalypses, and Jacobs is right on many details, but this book doesn't work for me as a synthesis of facts into a coherent argument. I've heard that Jane Jacobs' earlier work on urban planning was groundbreaking and I'd like to read it, instead of this. October 2004.

After spending time in a military prison a man just needs to laugh. I'm reminded of how John Cleese said that all of his humor is ultimately based on the inability to make oneself understood. Perhaps much of tragedy arises from that same root too. Mackey's The Interrogators below is all about the intersection of cultures and languages and there is not much funny about it (although surprisingly there are some translation related humorous moments.) Jonathan Safran Foer mines English-Ukranian translation to similarly light hearted yet deadly effect. I also remember Kaplan's French Lessons a great book about life between two languages. And of course I had my own experience trying to figure out another culture and language when I was younger. The world of translation is rich, in humor and tragedy. October 25, 2004

A ground level glimpse into the world of battlefield interrogation and that old contradiction, military intelligence, which seems slightly less stupid but not much less brutal than you imagined. I don't fully understand what part is fictional and what factual, and if factual how such recent interrogations and techniques could be so readily revealed. I suppose the 2001-2002 Afghan war is considered "ancient history" now. Also notable is this US Army interrogator's dismissal of the competence of the CIA agents and (to a lessor extent) the FBI agents he works with, who are portrayed as bungling, self-important, disrespectful and uncooperative, all of which leads him to work closely with British intelligence instead. Very interesting indeed. When you're done you will know what and where Bagram and Khandahar really are and have vital background for understanding the Abu Ghraib events in Iraq. In multiple senses, this book poses the problem of how to know truth - both the little truths and the big truths that people fight and die for. It's one dirty bad world when viewed from the inside of a military prison. October 21, 2004

OK, so at age 24 he wrote a powerful original and overwhelmingly creative novel, winning awards and a chorus of critical praise, but will his second novel be any good? Just kidding. Read this book! - Says one character: "I am not a bad man. I am a good man who lived in a bad time." October 2004.

September 2004.

An enjoyable tale of betrayal and murder, exploring the multiple reasons not to marry a psychopathic liar, and just how difficult it is to penetrate the lies that surround us. Curiously the author names her heroine Leshansky (one of my family names) and has her select "Sarah Leshansky", (the name of my great grandmother) to be her adopted ancestor in lieu of the one she never knew. -- How do I select novels? I pull them from the library shelf based on titles that appeal to me (this one did!) and I read a few lines or the book jacket. It's pretty random. September 2004.

"Life tosses us up in the air like a pebble and we say 'Look, I'm moving.' -- Fernando Pessoa." I don't know how to describe this book, so I'll let the opening paragraph give you a taste. "Today, no yesterday, I buried my father. Now in the Astoria Hotel at Kossuth Lajos utca number 19-21, I am lying in bed with his son. Does the fulfilment of a thirty-year-old wish qualify as happiness? Or can it ever be too late for happiness? The impossibility of our union has finally brought us together." September 2004.

"Disappearing is a form of suicide. It is a revocable kind of death where one destroys his old life but not his chance to start a new one." This is a really badly written book, that I found fascinating for similar reasons to those for which I enjoyed Kosinski's Cockpit - its subject is flight, identity and the masculine version of the fantasy of leaving some horrible mundane reality behind. Many of its techniques probably wouldn't work very well today, but who cares? I purchased and read this 10 years ago, and reread it in September 2004.

September 2004

The hard struggle to rescue life from the mundane in one's early thirities, set in a metal shredding business in Ohio that has been in one family for too long. September 2004.

While many of the myths that Lomborg attacks are strawmen (not beliefs that I ever held), this is a useful set of arguments about the state of humanity, and therein lies one problem. Lomborg doesn't address adequately the issue of habitat loss and the loss of biodiversity, because his is an anthropocentric perspective. On the issue of global warming, he notes it is complicated, which it surely is, but whether this is reason enough to be blithe about it, I do wonder. Partially read, September 2004.

Skimmed, September 2004.

Keillor meditates on writing, adultery, how to love well and how to grow old. I quite enjoyed this. September 2004.

This book, a collection of essays, is really good. It explores the same issues of commerce and family life that Crittendon and Folbre discuss (below) but from a more theoretical sociological perspective. September 2004.

This is an important book about a subject I care a great deal about. DeMause's take on the history of childhood as tantamount to the history of child abuse seems to go overboard, and I find it difficult to accept deMause's psychohistorical perspective and the inferences he draws from the evidence. The darkness of historical attitudes toward children is well documented here, and there is no doubt that children were (and are still) widely abused and neglected, but I find myself adopting a certain *historical* relativism, hesitating to apply contemporary judgments about abuse to distant centuries. My reluctanceis curious because I am not a *cultural* relativist on this issue. I'm quite happy to apply a uniform human rights standard to every culture in our own time, and demand that abuse of children be rooted out, regardless of claims that such abuse is justified by tradition or culture. But I'm much less certain that it is meaningful to understand historical childhood as essentially abusive, even though the evidence that the treatment of children often did not conform to our standards is compellingly presented in this series of monographs. I find myself unable to believe that a significant percentage of childhoods throughout human history were not marked by love, gentleness and affection. If they were not, how would we have that capacity at all today? Do we not observe kindness in animals toward their young? Does not loving nurturance confer advantages on children that homosapien parents have always had a genetic interest in conferring? So even if historic childhoods were shorter and more abuse prone, I question inferring the absence of parental nurturance and love from its absence from the historical record - it seems almost implicit in the fact of survival. In any case the issues are well presented and this book is well worth your time. September 2004.

OK, this collection is really good, and not only because it is erotic, but also because it is such an intense exploration of the ways people can be human and passionate. One of the best stories was one of the least conventionally erotic -- Promises to Keep by Kate Dominic which explores the inner life of a women as she descends into abject crack addiction and prostitution - sometimes a good writer takes you to a place that you simply could not otherwise imagine. September 2004.

Call it "Nice Jewish Girl Becomes Successful Pornographic Movie Producer." Isenberg captures the sheer awfulness of the mainstream movie biz and its people, and finds that the porn movie biz is, by comparison, honest and humane. Interesting how a novel about pornography can hold so little erotic interest, but as the protagonist observes, there's nothing like working on a porn set to kill the libido. The parts about negotiating contracts and getting stabbed in the back by agents seem dead-on. Somehow, I don't think you can write this stuff unless you've lived it. Reads like hard won experience that became a script that became a novel. August 2004.

The title says it all. August 2004

August 2004.

It's getting dark. Very dark. I read this a long time ago too, probably before 1977. It was very interesting to re-encounter as an adult. As in Steps and Painted Bird, Kosinski is always writing about himself and trying to come to grips with his own darkness. It isn't pretty to watch, but it is absorbing. August 2004.

"What is," I asked her, "the secret of Cuban beauty? Cuban girls are so beautiful." It was a stupid question, but the answer was real. [She] said, "We eat very badly. There are no vitamins. We are beautiful because we are dying." My whole macho world came to a grinding halt. I looked at her again and saw that she had changed. Her body seemed evanescent, nearly transparent. Fashion -model skinny, she looked beautiful to my American eyes, accustomed to the death look of models and movie stars.... It was a horrific revelation. My doctor laughed: "We just want to dance, " she said. "Girls just want to have fun." August 2004.

August 2004

Jewish magical realism in early 17th century Prague - lots of fun. August 2004

I was so excited to read this play, after reading a biography of Thoreau and rereading Walden and other essays. Lawrence and Lee do a wonderful job of weaving together quotations and facts from Thoreau's life, against a background of war - the Mexican war in Thoreau's time, the Vietnam war in Lawrence and Lee's time. The play makes compelling reading in these days of war in Iraq. I would love to get a bunch of friends together and read this play in my living room. This play well describes the essence of the man. August 2004

Fascinating story of a man with a compulsion to betray intimate secrets of his marriage and of his employer. It is hard to imagine how a person gets to this point, although surely a culture of strict morality invites flouting. The relationship between sexual betrayal and patriotic betrayal seems to be the key, but like the author, I remain puzzled after reading this account. August 2004.

This book beautifully captures the intensity of a certain kind of work friendship that burns brightly and then vanishes as coworkers move on. It explores and organizes a world we all brush against, but know little about. Said Thoreau "The laborer's day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to another." August 2004

Ah, Thoreau! The perpetual adolescent, beautiful crank, unencumbered soul, goyishe luftmensch, free spirit, Victorian prude, bachelor farmer, underground railroad conductor, nature poet... and manufacturer of pretty good lead pencils too. July 2004.

I always liked this book. I've been rereading it closely. July 2004

I love the writing of Kosinski, for its baroque bleakness, for its intimacy with Eastern Europe and communist tyranny. Kosinski reminds me of Isaac Bashevis Singer - another immigrant to a new world, obsessed with the violence and sexuality of the old. They write and rewrite their immigrant stories, past mingling with present, peasant village with New York cafeteria, petty communist bureaucrat with petty American mobster, into every story. Kosinski is distinctly old fashioned, sometimes worried about things that no longer worry enlightened post-moderns, but nonetheless he fascinates. July 2004

A classic. July 2004.

When you really want to understand where the corruption begins.... June 2004

June 2004, first read in 1993, as suggested by a receipt from the Bohdi Tree book store, found tucked inside.

June 2004

June 2004.

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April - May 2004

This is an excellent book. Highly recommended. April 2004.

The invisible heart is the other side of Adam Smith's invisible hand. This is an interesting read, and well worth your time. April 2004

This book is full of "voices" from a narrow class of seemingly upper middle class Long Island women and offered little of sociological value to me. April 2004

There is much to learn from Stevens analysis of the differences between heaven based (Christian) and earth based (Inclusive) home schooling. He also points to the feminization of the work of homeschooling. Yet his dismissive (or merely skeptical?) attitude toward the premise that enabling the growth of individuality is a supremely important social value, and his seeming implication that entirely too much attention is paid to children by homeschoolers, all leaves me cold. To this unschooling parent , somehow this fascinating and valuable book also feels like a slap across the face. I want to write a better one. April 2004

Partially read April 2004. The history of celibacy is really the history of sex, or its negative footprint, and the history of sex is, in some sense, just the history of being human. April 2004

Read April 2004. Reviews contemporary voices on Mormon polygamy in Utah, including a few "feminist" polygamists. Sociologically polygamy is clearly associated with oppression of women and exploitation. Tracy raises issue of whether polygamy is inherently exploitative, and largely argues that it is, but provides food for thought concerning polyandry and polyamoury as well. April 2004.

This study of the demonic real world of slave holding in Hannibal Missouri where Mark Twain grew to adulthood (1840s to 1853) is highly recommended. This was the town in which my gggf Carl Herman Schmidt would live just 15 years later, after the Civil War, and the town to which my Stobernack ancestors (John, gggf, and Katherine, gggm) would migrate before the Civil War, and just a few years after Twain had departed. April 2004

Thinking about gay marriage, I became interested in the question of why in the US we prohibit polygamy. The answer seems to be "for no good (contemporary) reason at all." The constitutional issues of the 19th century involved states' rights and constitutional understandings that have long been superceded, and a belief that the US was a "Christian" nation. It is hard to believe that the prohibition against polygamy would withstand court challenge today if any organized group took it upon itself to claim polygamy as a right. I've always found the Saints to be a theologically and historically interesting group, and Gordon gave me a new understanding of the importance of the Mormons in modern American history. April 2004

I love Paul Krugman but this is a shallow book. He is dead on accurate in his essay on the Bush Administration as a revolutionary power that will stop at nothing to achieve its evil ends. But a collection of three page columns does not create a satisfying analysis, and stringing them together like this makes them seem superficial. That's sad, because Krugman is a national hero for his New York Times columns in which he documents for a wide audience the utter venality and moral corruption of the Bush administration. March 2004

Although vaguely aware of the 1968 Humphrey Wallace Nixon campaign, I first awakened to politics in the summer of 1974, praying that Nixon would resign by my 15th birthday, Aug 7 1974. Sadly he did not leave until 3 days later on Aug 10, 1974. Garment's retelling of Watergate through the lens of his search for Deep Throat is a replay of my own primoridial political drama. Everything I know and believe about national politics was shaped by the events of that year. Nixon was the worst, until Reagan, who seemed unthinkably evil, until, surpassing my worst nightmares, G.W. Bush lost the 2000 election and became our thug in chief. Garment writes a good insider tale. Was John Sears Deep Throat? Garment convinces himself, and I'm not in a position to judge. But Garment's review of names and characters brings back a flood of memories. Nixon was a psychotic madman, but he was perhaps largely alone - today the psychosis at the top is collective and more dangerous.

Among the hundreds of children's books I have read and re-read in recent years this is one that my children and I have particularly valued in the time since my father-in-law's (their grandfather's) death on July 1, 2003. July 2003 - March 2004

I read this as background research on my great great great grandfather Joshua Bland, who served in an "indian company" in the Black Hawk war in 1831-1832 in Illinois. March 2004

Everything I needed to know about life on Earth, I learn on Easter Island. Strongly recommended. This article contains the core thesis of his book. March 2004

Segev's earlier One Palestine Complete is a more important book and work of historical scholoarship, but this, in spite of some over-simplifications, is an instructive and useful examination of contemporary Israeli politics and well worth reading. February 2004.

Let's just say I can relate to the the search for the spiritual dimension of entrepreneuring. This book speaks to me and my situation at the moment as I start a new business. Read February 2004

I read these short stories in late January 2004

There are two novels called The Scarlet Letter. The first is a classic novel of that title written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and read in the 9th grade with little comprehension by a 14 year old adolescent boy. But the second novel, also called The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is something else entirely. Read at the age of 44 with a half of a lifetime's experience and understanding, there are no longer any great plot mysteries to decipher and few language barriers to unravel. While the territory is only dimly remembered it is also deeply familiar, and the reader sits secure in Hawthorne's confident hands, intimate with his mind and soul, as the tale unwinds. Each turn in the story is a rediscovery or reawakening of things already known. Unlike the first, this second Scarlet Letter is cinematic and richly satisfying. Read late January 2004

An early 19th century version of a B-movie, a cheap romance, an airport novel, it was written by a young man whose gift for language far exceeded his knowledge of life. Apparently Hawthorne thought so little of it that he burned it, and for good reason. This is not the great Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter. This is 10 easy reading chapters of New England mores and culture, horseback riding, and many a dark and stormy night, written by a young man who understood nothing about women... or perhaps everything that his sex understood about women in that day and age, which amounts to the same thing - nothing. Yet all in all it is a curious antiquarian pleasure, particularly interesting for what it reveals about Hawthorne's own development as a writer and as a man. January 2004

Read during November 2003 to January 2004, this book is a glorious mess. It is almost unreadable, but Codrescu's inimitable voice shines through to create a glorious gumbo of religious messianism and science fantasy, in which angels, devils, lamas, priests and messiahs work their way to the end of the world. Curiously, on page 327 Codrescu prophesies the accordion like collapse of the World Trade Centers. Although almost unreadable, I stuck with it for two months and I have to say that I enjoyed it. In the end, I'm not sure what happens, but I think love, maybe lesbian or maybe a menage a trois, saves the world.

This is a beautifully illustrated exploration of ancient Roman life and city building in the imaginary/composite city of Verbonia. Nov 2003.

A delicious taste of Africa. Nov 2003.

Partially read Oct 2003.

Partially read Oct 2003.

Partially read Oct 2003.

Partially read Oct 2003.

This is a powerful exploration of how ordinary military training brutalizes young men's minds and hearts. Set in Israel of the mid-1950s, it is anthropologically immersed in its time and place, specific in its details of Sephardi/Ashkenazi confict of the 1950s and in its descriptions of the depressing and dehumanizing training camps of the IDF. Kenaz creates compelling portraits of young men coming of age. The issues they confront are universally relevant to the problem of militarism and how normal human beings are violated and made violent. 10/2003

An unforgettable child's eye view of violence, genocide and sex. I read it as a child or young adolescent in the 1970s when I was perhaps 12 or 13 or 14 and I re-read it in 9/2003.

Loh comes closer to expressing the spirit of Los Angeles than anyone I've read. (9/2003)

Partially read in 2002. My great great grandfather was a soldier in the war that is documented in this book, the Mexican American war of 1846.

I much preferred this to Wright's "The Moral Animal."

I know that I read this circa May 1997 because I found the original receipt inside it in .

This way madness lies... Unreadable in the very best sense.

There are several about this subject. Which did I read?

My father Paul Hochstein really liked this book and recommended it to me. I liked it a lot.

When I look over his many titles I can't for the life of me remember which I've read and which I've only considered reading, but never gotten around to.

Also, Elenore Lester and Frederick E. Werbell, "The Lost Hero of the Holocaust: The Search for Sweden's Raoul Wallenberg," The New York Times Magazine, Mar. 30, 1980, pp. 20-28, 32-39, 62-63. This article was inserted by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan into the Congressional Record - Senate, Apr. 10, 1980, pp. S3782-3785. (Elenore Lester was my father's sister, my aunt.)

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This was the article that gave me the idea to write a dissertation with a comparative analysis of modern genocide. Cited in my dissertation, chapter 1, 1994

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Regarding E. Nolte, Dissertation, chapter 2, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 2, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 2, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 2, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 2, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 2, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 2, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

This was the paper that started it all. Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

Dissertation, chapter 3, 1994

My aunt Elenore Lester encouraged me to read several Grade novels. She much preferred him to Bashevis-Singer.

A favorite of mine from college. Don't recall exactly why, but I recall the mood.

Mostly in Hebrew or English, with occasional forays into the Aramaic.

Martin Gardner's delightful annotated version.

Israeli newspaper, by means of which I became fluent in Hebrew, and the lens through which I view Israel today still.

Not the whole thing obviously... just bits and pieces.

To which I return continuously, as a pilgrim.

The idea of negative theology made a very significant impression on me at the time - only God could explain an absence this large.

An early Yishuv author, whom I met in Haifa when my aunt Elenore interviewed him in the early 1980s.

An excellent window on the middle of the Vietnam war.

Read in 1981, on kibbutz.

Yes, I actually read all of I and II and if I recall correctly, some part of III. I may have read this while in high school, or during my early college years.

" I believe that all troubles stem from the misconception that human brains are located in the head. They are not: human brains are blown in by the winds from somewhere over the Caspian sea."

In which I wrestled with patriotism, service to country, and related issues for the first time, around age 13 to 15.

In this case I remember rather specifically where I read Hemingway. It was in the summer, on a trip with my family, perhaps to a rented cabin in Lake Tahoe. I had a stack of serious novels that I felt I was obligated to plow through in preparation for the coming school year. I might have been preparing for 10th, 11th or 12th grade, so it would have been the summer of 1974, 1975, or 1976. I'm pretty sure I read these two novels and other stories by Hemingway. I had a few others with me too. I remember my mother suggesting that I had completely missed the point of the Sun Also Rises, but her explanation was so oblique that I was not enlightened as to what the great problem of the protagonist could be, just vaguely embarrassed. It would be just one of many laden and uncomfortable conversations with my mother about such matters.

This was one of many sex books from my mother's shelves with which I educated myself.

A memorable adventure series from my adolescence - highly recommended, except for the first book in the series, which was written after the last.

Five central books of my childhood - I could never understand The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, but I figure this was a pretty good substitute.

These were books about making paper airplanes. I made them all. This man had a major influence on my childhood.

I must admit I had no appreciation in the 1970s for how profoundly true Peter's insights were. Only working in a bureacracy can teach you that.

This is a memorably empowering book about bike repair and maintenance from my early teens.

There was a story that ran in the margins of our copy that fascinated me in my early teens, full of adult situations and sex talk.

My discovery of Jewish life happened here.

This was the first "real" novel I read, at age 12 or 13.

This was read to me in the 6th grade by my teacher Mrs. Murratta.

Read in 6th grade or early in Junior High, early 1970s, around age 10-12.

This story of a boy blinded by a firecracker and his relationship with his guide dog touched my 12 year old heart deeply.

...after that, it's turtles all the way down.

I've tried. Believe me I've tried.

What for God's sake is it about anyway?

These were all way too complicated for me. I could never get lost in Tolkien's world the way so many seem to do. I just got bored.

6th grade... what torture!

Almost entirely unreadable, but somehow worth the effort. I read Paul DeMan and a few others like that too.

Yes I read most or all of it, but I did so at a young age and didn't get much out of it.

I probably tried it at too young an age, but before long I was utterly lost and confused. I haven't gone back.

What a beautiful title! What an unreadable book!