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.

Stan's Selections for March

Here are Stan's suggested titles for March.  (All summaries courtesy of the publisher or the Evil Book Empire.)

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese  (667 pp)

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles--and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

The Republic of Wine, by Mo Yan  (384 pp)

When special investigator Ding Gou'er hears persistent rumors that there is cannibalism in the province called the Republic of Wine, he goes to learn the truth. Beginning at the Mount Luo Coal Mine, he meets Diamond Jin, legendary for his capacity to hold his liquor and fondness for young human flesh. A banquet is served during which the special investigator, by meal's end in an alcohol-induced stupor, loses all sense of reality. Interspersed are stories sent to Mo Yan himself by Li Yidou (aka Doctor of Liquor Studies), each one more mad than the next. Wild and politically explosive, The Republic of Wine proves that no regime can stifle creative imagination.

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones (432 pp)

One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, The Known World is a daring and ambitious work by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones.
The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues.  Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all its moral complexities.

Reservation Blues, by Sherman Alexie (320 pp)
Sherman Alexie has been hailed as “one of the best writers we have” (The Nation). Reservation Blues is his “irresistibly stunning debut novel” (San Francisco Chronicle). One day legendary bluesman Robert Johnson appears on the Spokane Indian reservation, in flight from the devil and presumed long dead. When he passes his enchanted instrument to Thomas-Builds-the-Fire—storyteller, misfit, and musician—a magical odyssey begins that will take them from reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan. This is a fresh, luxuriantly comic tale of power, tragedy, and redemption among contemporary Native Americans.

Jack's Pastime Is a Fine Cassoulet

Acknowledgments
Jack's hospitality was tested last Tuesday: he had to come up with a meal that would reflect the French sensibility of Salter's magnum opus, he had to do it on short notice, and he had to keep his doors open late enough to accommodate a couple of stragglers (I had an excuse; I'm not sure about Peter).  By all accounts, he set an outstanding table.  With a delicious cassoulet, flavored by bottles of Bordeaux and followed by his own chocolate mousse and a cheese and fruit platter, Jack proved that Garth isn't the only one capable of Marin-style haute cuisine.  Most of the men were gone by the time I showed up, and it was just as well. From the individual ratings given to this book, I was dismayed to find myself yet again the outlier.  The remaining cognac and brie were little consolation. 

The Book
James Salter's third novel, A Sport and a Pastime, catapulted him to prominence in the 1960's and established him as possibly the best living American novelist that no one reads anymore.  What a shame, as this short novel about an American college dropout's (ahem, a Yale dropout, naturally) affair with a poor young French woman is beautifully evocative of a straitened post-war, post-colonial France.  It also delivers its story via a painfully conflicted narrator whose self-conscious re-telling forces the reader to think critically about the relationship he describes between Phllip Dean and Anne-Marie Costallat.

Too bad I showed up after everyone had shared their thoughts about this fine, if somewhat precious novella.  Jack gave me his notes and, from what I can deduce, no one else but John found the narrator as intriguing as I did.  Instead, I gather there were references to the Mitchell Brothers theater in San Francisco (thank you for that special memory, Larry), an appreciation for Salter's frank sensuality (Dan can't wait to read more Salter titles), and a real conflict between those who enjoyed Salter's writing (Terry and Dean) and those who didn't (Tom, who labored through the first 50 pages, and George, who gave it a miserly 3!).  In the faint praise department, Stan decried the book as brief but banal, and not nearly as erotic as Dear Abby.  (Stan, since your wife shares her first name with the late Abigail Van Buren, what are we to make of your comparison?)

The end result was an almost equal number of 6's, 7's, and 8's, which--when combined with George's 3--pushed Salter a little below midpack at 6.6.

Next Up

Paul proposed four survival-themed titles for next month's meeting (our ski trip has moved to guarded status given the pessimistic snow forecasts).  His theme is apropos, as the meeting marks our 50th dinner together--quite an accomplishment for a group as diverse as ours.  As for our book selection, Man Eaters of Kumaon and Unbroken fell off in the first round of voting, leaving a duel between Ghosts of Everest and Endurance.  In the final round, the group chose Hemmleb's acclaimed account of the 1999 expedition that discovered the corpse of legendary mountaineer, George Mallory, whose disappearance whle summiting Everest in 1924 became the stuff of legend.