Dean Picks a Fight

Acknowledgments
As we watched the second Presidential debate last Tuesday, Dean sweated the details and served up a fine all-American meal.  Any similarities to the banquet food in Fight Club were pure coincidence.  Yes, the pureed soup was suspect, but we were assured that Dean's pumpkin and summer squash were all natural and all from his very own garden.  We had no such concerns about our New York strip steaks, roasted endives, native rice, and apple crumble, as all were quite excellent.

The Book
We chose Fight Club from a list of titles that invoked the nihilists of the 19th century and the existentialists of the 20th century.  Some of us quibbled with the writing, but the content left no one wanting.  Pahlaniuk's short novel based on a short story (originally, only 7 pages) about disillusioned men who converge on late night bars to brawl in private is more than simply a mood piece about Yuppie angst.

We argued about the  writing and its inconsistent delivery (with Dean praising the narration and chapter inversions, and Doug and I picking at its consciously disjointed, anecdotal style) and some of us were put off by a world none of us could fully fathom (except Stan, who called Fight Club the "epitome" of fiction) .  However, all of us were struck by the atavism of Tyler Durden--schizoid or not--with Paul phoning his kudos in from Austin, TX.

The story's hard edge lost a few of us, though.  Tom, uncharacteristically, refused to read beyond 50 pages, and normally complaisant Jack excoriated the book's characters for their lack of empathy.   (I think that was sort of the point, Jack.)

Our votes were generally favorable, but the 4's from Jack and Doug limited Fight Club to no better than a 7 in our ratings book.

Next Up
We don't have either our host or a title selected for November/December, but that will be quickly remedied.  Stay tuned for more.

A Make-Up for 2012

As club secretary, I must fall on my sword for my repeated failure, over the last year or more, to regularly post summaries of our meetings. I blame Tom A. for initially stepping in to save me, only to later step out and expose my lack of constancy. With that mea culpa, herewith a very quick summary of our meetings since January's A Sport and a Pastime.

In February, Paul fed us victuals from the Kashmir as we considered the story of the 1999 expedition that discovered the remains of legendary British mountaineer, George Mallory.  In Ghosts of Everest, Hemmleb et. al. chronicle their successful attempt to re-trace Mallory's fateful route in 1924 in order to figure out what exactly happened to Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine.  Less successful was the manner in which Hemmleb and his co-authors joined their account with Mallory's.  The story of each expedition was fascinating, but the book's split narrative was awkward and resulted in a modest 6.7 rating. Maybe it was the intimidating presence of our guest and published author/teacher, Andy, that made us extra critical.

In March, we convened at Stan's (yes, another outstanding meal of grilled meat and roast potatoes!) to consider Sherman Alexie's modern-day account of life on the rez in Reservation Blues.  We split over the dream sequences and mystical moments, but were taken by the honesty with which Alexie paints his characters.  Alternatingly sympathetic and scathing, Alexie depicts life on and off the reservation (and his characters' infatuation with music) with a remarkable vividness, especially for those of us for whom the BIA is just another acronym.  The 7.0 rating understated the generally positive tenor of our discussion.

Armando hosted us in April with an ethnic feast that complimented Robert Laxalt's beautifully drawn memoir set in pre- and post-war Nevada.  As men of a certain age, perhaps we were predisposed to fall hard for Sweet Promised Land and its elegiac re-telling of a quintessentially father-son story.  The father, Dominique Laxalt, is a hard-working immigrant (herding sheep in the foothills near Carson City) whose sons achieve fully the American dream (one as a US senator, another as a university professor) but whose heart can't quite forget the family he left behind in a small town in the Pyrenees.  His return home with his younger son is both reunion and closure. Several guys commented that this story continued to resonate long after the pages were turned.  It certainly did for me.  For that reason, it earned an 8.3 rating and climbed into our current Top 5.

We met next in June at my house and enjoyed plenty of sushi and sake as we considered Louis Zamperini's unforgettable odyssey from Torrance, CA to the Berlin Olympics to a POW camp in Japan.  Laura Hillenbrand is a shameless crowd-pleaser whose recreation of the Zamperini story engendered questions from us (and others) about its authenticity of detail. That aside, most of us felt uplifted and exhausted by Zamperini's extraordinary resilience and will to survive.  Our conclusion was to forgive the sometimes tedious and occasionally hyperbolic passages and celebrate--with a 7.4 rating--an amazing story of survival.

In July we declared a bye and instead appeared with spouses and no books at Doug's house for his second annual summer party.  After commiserating with him over his recent burglary, we tucked in and stuffed ourselves.  Thanks again, Doug.

Our last meeting was delayed to September, when Glenn hosted us at Roy's house.  With food from Sol, we were all ears as Ralph Leighton regaled us with stories about Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist who was also his father's colleague at CalTech.  Glenn had proposed and we picked Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, unaware that Ralph Leighton was Roy's brother-in-law.  The book was filled with the infectious humor and antics of a renowned physicist who related his personal story to Leighton in a series of recorded conversations over the space of several years.  From those recordings, Leighton produced this delightful memoir.  Even those of us with little interest in applied physics found in  Feynman (via Leighton) a riveting storyteller indeed. 

San Marino Cellars & Movers Win Gold!!!

On Sat. Aug 11 at Arrivederci Restaurant, a couple of dear friends entered our 2009 Dry Creek Cabernet Sauvignon in a blind wine tasting contest. Out of 40 wines, San Marino Cellars & Movers not only won the best red but also best overall!!!

Glenn's Nominations for August

After a brief hiatus, we are back with an interesting set of selections for late August.  It may still feel like summer, but these titles will remind us that reading can be both pleasurable and provocative.  Herewith Glenn's suggestions (with commentary) for August.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman , by Feynman, Leighton, Hutchings (352 pages)

First Plagiarized Review: ‘Surely you must be joking…’ does not read like an ordinary book. It reads like Reader’s Digest – a bunch of anecdotes bundled together and presented to you, with Feynman as the common thread that runs throughout. While at a glance, the book might appear to be a light-hearted series of exchanges and incidents, the reader could not be more wrong. Venture a little deeper, and the book stands out as the testimony of a man who refused to stick to any kind of conformity. Amidst all the pranks, the lock-picking experiences, hypnotism or even topless bars, Feynman just reinforces the fact that varied and even ostensibly scandalous interests can be pursued at leisure away from work. After reading the book, there is little wonder about Feynman’s life. Instead, there is a genuine urge to follow one’s insanities and nurture them. This book is not an exhibition of a man’s engaging madness – which is the general perceived view. ‘Surely you must be joking…’ offers hope. It seems to indicate that rules that make no sense need not be accepted. To the vast millions who are trapped in mid-life crises and bewildered in the anonymous corporate world, this book is a testament – you can go crazy, follow your quirks and do what you think is right. It can be done. And that is definitely no joke.

Second Plagiarized Review:  A series of anecdotes shouldn't by rights add up to an autobiography, but that's just one of the many pieces of received wisdom that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88) cheerfully ignores in his engagingly eccentric book, a bestseller ever since its initial publication in 1985. Fiercely independent (read the chapter entitled "Judging Books by Their Covers"), intolerant of stupidity even when it comes packaged as high intellectualism (check out "Is Electricity Fire?"), unafraid to offend (see "You Just Ask Them?"), Feynman informs by entertaining. It's possible to enjoy Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman simply as a bunch of hilarious yarns with the smart-alecky author as know-it-all hero. At some point, however, attentive readers realize that underneath all the merriment simmers a running commentary on what constitutes authentic knowledge: learning by understanding, not by rote; refusal to give up on seemingly insoluble problems; and total disrespect for fancy ideas that have no grounding in the real world. Feynman himself had all these qualities in spades, and they come through with vigor and verve in his no-bull prose. No wonder his students--and readers around the world--adored him. --Wendy Smith

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes (870 pages)

I've blown the doors off the page maximum with this one (870 pages).  However, this book chronicles the personalities (including Feynman) and the technical hurdles involved in the most challenging technical quest in human history.  Rhodes won the Pulitzer prize for his effort.  In two months, we could definitely finish it.

This book is a major work of historical synthesis that brings to life the men and machines that gave us the nuclear era. Rich in drama and suspense, ''The Making of the Atomic Bomb'' also has remarkable breadth and depth, revealing new connections, insights and surprises. The book bristles with detail and irony. There are raccoon coats and incendiary raids, heavy water and theatrical satires, patent fights and suntan lotion (worn in 1945 by physicists in the predawn darkness of the New Mexican desert to protect them from the flash of the first bomb). There was even a third ''gadget'' being readied to be dropped on Japan, even as Hiroshima and Nagasaki smoldered. ''The Making of the Atomic Bomb'' offers not only the best overview of the century's pivotal event, but a probing analysis of what it means for the future.

A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller (334 pages)

First Plagiarized Review:  Written at a time when the Fear of the Bomb was at full steam, the Hugo-winning A Canticle for Leibowitz stands head and shoulders above virtually every other post-apocalypse SF novel of its day, and it may be the most important SF novel ever written. It beggars the imagination to think that this was Miller's only novel; though in 1997, the year after Miller's death, a sequel titled Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman was finished out by Terry Bisson and released. Contemplative, elegiac, and gut-wrenching in its best moments, the story allows Miller to view the human race through a glass darkly. Will our species ever learn from its mistakes and not repeat them? Miller hopes so, though he doesn't exactly appear to think so. This book is a lament for humanity. 

Second Plagiarized Review:  Walter M. Miller's acclaimed SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed Saint Leibowitz, that reads: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma." To the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness and ignorance. As 1984 cautioned against Stalinism, so 1959's A Canticle for Leibowitz warns of the threat and implications of nuclear annihilation. Following a cloister of monks in their Utah abbey over some six or seven hundred years, the funny but bleak Canticle tackles the sociological and religious implications of the cyclical rise and fall of civilization, questioning whether humanity can hope for more than repeating its own history. Divided into three sections--Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man), Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done)--Canticle is steeped in Catholicism and Latin, exploring the fascinating, seemingly capricious process of how and why a person is canonized. --Paul Hughes

Armando's Choices for April

Below are the titles Armando has suggested for our consideration.  His summaries are unattributed, but I'm guessing Amazon may deserve some credit.

Sweet Promised Land, Robert Laxalt, 207 pages

Dominique Laxalt was sixteen when he left the French Pyrenees for America. He became a sheepherder in the Nevada desert and nearby hills of the Sierra. Like all his fellow Basque immigrants, Dominique dreamed of someday returning to the land of his beginnings. Most Basques never made the journey back, but Dominique finally did return for a visit with family and friends. Sweet Promised Land is the story of that trip, told by his son Robert, who accompanied him to the pastoral mountain village in France. Dominique came home victorious, the adventurer who had conquered the unknown and found his fortune in the New World. He walked the paths of his youth and again experienced the traditions of his Basque heritage. He told of his life in America, the hardships and challenges, and began to realize that he had changed since his departure from the village of Tardets. By the end of the visit, he knew with certainty where he belonged. Sweet Promised Land was first published in 1957 by Harper & Row. During the past fifty years, the book has become a classic in Western American literature, still beloved by the Basque-American community and widely used in undergraduate classes. In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication, western literature scholar Ann Ronald has written a new foreword, discussing the book in the context of American and Nevada literature.

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin,  293 pages

That, ostensibly, is what Songlines is about. What it really is is Chatwin's rambling, discursive, ultimately brilliant exploration of territory, nomadism, and the the origin of violence in humans. Some have labeled his account presumptuous, but I find it wholly intriguing. While Chatwin repeatedly engages in pop-anthropology of dubious quality, what impressed me was the breadth of his imagination and his willingness to set it down in prose. He may give his views a little too much importance, but this does not detract from their scope.Bruce Chatwin's book is ostensibly an examination of the Australian Aboriginal notion of the Songline: a song that relates a series of geographical locations ranging from one coast to another, tied to the (mythical) creation of an animal, that in a variety of languages unified by tune sings out the geography of the route. He explores this abstract concept through the agency of Arkady and a cast of other Whites who live and work amongst the Aborigines in the harsh heart of Australia, defending their rights and interpreting their rites.As a book, this is a rather odd concoction. I expected it to be a spiritual ramble, but it is in fact a direct account of his travels in Australia. When he is trapped by rains, he plunders his accumulated notebooks, and sets down what is effectively his own Walkabout, the series of episodic meditations that are the real focus of the book.Chatwin's Rousseauvian worldview (pg. 133) and rough-and-ready anthropology are not to everyone's taste, his exchange with Konrad Lorenz (!) is odd, and the book has been controversial for his sometimes-fictitious accounts of the Aborigines. Despite that this is an ambitious book, and if you ignore that the Aboriginal veneer, it is at once more compelling than almost all the travel writing that populates bookshelves put together.

Assembling California, John McPhee,  294 pages

At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.

Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez, 496 pages

This is one of the finest books ever written about the Far North, warmly appreciative and understanding of the natural forces that shape life in an austere landscape. The prize-winning author (Of Wolves and Men spent four years in Arctic regions: traveling between Davis Strait in the east and Bering Strait in the west, hunting with Eskimos and accompanying archeologists, biologists and geologists in the field. Lopez became enthralled by the power of the Arctic, a power he observes derives from "the tension between its beauty and its capacity to take life." This is a story of light, darkness and ice; of animal migrations and Eskimos; of the specter of development and the cultural perception of a region. Examining the literature of 19th century exploration, Lopez finds a disassociation from the actual landscape; explorers have tended to see the Arctic as an adversary. Peary and Stefansson left as a troubling legacy the attitude that the landscape could be labeled, then manipulated. Today, he contends, an imaginative, emotional approach to the Arctic is as important as a rational, scientific one. Lopez has written a wonderful, compelling defense of the Arctic wilderness. 

Unquenchable, Robert Glannon, 414 pages

America faces a water-supply crisis. Profligate consumption of water for agriculture, power generation, industry, and homes has led to reduction of groundwater, threats to rivers, and mortal danger to many of the nation’s lakes. Much of the blame for this state of affairs lies with uncontrolled growth in the nation’s South and Southwest. Desert cities such as Las Vegas use fountains as decorations. Phoenix households draw down the finite resources of ever-shrinking Lake Mead. In great detail, Glennon documents present and future water crises in Georgia, California, and even seemingly water-rich Michigan, noting that states generally end up competing with one another over water allocation and that international conflict follows in short order. Desalination offers little immediate hope because of economic and ecological barriers. Glennon submits a list of possible reforms to decrease water consumption. Some, such as waterless toilets, are technological innovations. Others, such as restructuring sewer systems, require governmental intervention.