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July 15
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Daniel
is currently reading:
Almost Heaven (Paperback)
by Martin Fletcher
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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July 02
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Daniel
gave
to:
Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating: How to Choose the Best Bread, Cheeses, Olive Oil, Pasta, Chocolate, and Much More (Paperback)
by Ari Weinzweig
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Daniel said:
"How much do you value your bread, cheese, salt, rice, pasta, oil, and meat? How about honey, chocolate, cornmeal, saffron, pepper, balsamic vinegar, tea, or vanilla? Ari Weinzweig instructs on how to find the best of each of these products, and sugge...more
How much do you value your bread, cheese, salt, rice, pasta, oil, and meat? How about honey, chocolate, cornmeal, saffron, pepper, balsamic vinegar, tea, or vanilla? Ari Weinzweig instructs on how to find the best of each of these products, and suggests a few recipes by which a novice cook might make use of them.
Zingerman's restaurant and deli in Ann Arbor does a brisk trade in eye-poppingly expensive goods, but Weinzwig contends that even those priced out of such treats will find other gastronomic delights within their grasp.
Perhaps!
No matter what your tax bracket may be, the descriptions of artisan food are good enough to eat and usually entertaining. Thankfully, the book keeps the gourmet snobbery to a minimum, going instead with a "salt-of-the-earth" concept, which is easier to swallow and adequately justified by the author's knowledge of the finer points of food production....less
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Daniel
is currently reading:
America and World Revolution (Hardcover)
by Arnold J. Toynbee
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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June 27
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Daniel
is currently reading:
Plan of Attack (Paperback)
by Bob Woodward
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Daniel
gave
to:
The Picayune's Creole Cookbook (Hardcover)
by Times-Picayune
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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July 02
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Daniel
gave
to:
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Paperback)
by Cormac McCarthy
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in July, 2008
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Daniel
gave
to:
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Hardcover)
by Barack Obama
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in July, 2008
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June 27
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Daniel
gave
to:
The Mantle of the Prophet (Paperback)
by Roy Mottahedeh
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Daniel said:
"In "Mantle," Ray Mottahedeh portrays a made up Mullah living during the time of the 1978 Revolution. In the course of narrating the Mullah's biography up to its main turning point, the author progresses through a series of topical historie...more
In "Mantle," Ray Mottahedeh portrays a made up Mullah living during the time of the 1978 Revolution. In the course of narrating the Mullah's biography up to its main turning point, the author progresses through a series of topical histories encompassing life and culture in Iran. The narrative is divided into themes such as poetry, medicine, and religious scholarship.
For the most part, the author connects these themes to modern Iranian culture, describing important events and lives, ultimately creating a detailed context for the life of an Iranian Everyman, Ali Hashemi. In the life of Hashemi, the author elaborates upon the nation's idiosyncratic modern-day blend of ancient traditions and 20th century upheaval, making use of the rich context provided in the thematic expositions to integrate the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions of an ancient country hurtling toward an uncertain but novel future. Meanwhile, passages describing to the small glories and fatal hazards of everyday existence provide the reader with a sense of what it feels like to be there....less
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May 16
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Daniel
gave
to:
Special to the Daily: The 1st 100 Years of Editorial Freedom at the Michigan Daily (Paperback)
by Susan Holtzer
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Daniel said:
"A compendium of articles encompassing a century of the Michigan Daily. Some early articles will be of interest to those studying student life at the turn of the 20th Century. Also interesting is the Daily's take on WWII - including a series on Michig...more
A compendium of articles encompassing a century of the Michigan Daily. Some early articles will be of interest to those studying student life at the turn of the 20th Century. Also interesting is the Daily's take on WWII - including a series on Michigan's own flying ace, who crashed behind enemy lines and lived to tell the paper all about it. There is plenty of material on the 1960s and 1970s. Articles from that era include investigative work on labor unrest, student radicalism, and the correctional system, including some amazing photo spreads on rallies and demonstrations. I used to flip through the dusty archives on Maynard Street and think about the Daily's old days, wishing there was a collection of highlights I could take with me after I graduated. Then, one fine spring day in 2005, I found this volume at King Books in Detroit.
It must be said that it's a bit thin on 1930s and 1950s material. But as a collection of student voices doing original reporting on 20th Century history as they saw it, it's quite a find. Daily staffers who wrote during this period include Arthur Miller, Thomas Dewey ("Dewey Defeats Truman"), and Tom Hayden....less
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May 14
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Daniel
gave
to:
City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, Vol 1)
by Paul Auster
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Daniel said:
"A very intriguing exploration of the power of language to make (and unmake) the borders of our existence and the reality we experience.
The main character, Quinn, is a writer of detective stories. One day, he decides to take on a serious detectiv...more
A very intriguing exploration of the power of language to make (and unmake) the borders of our existence and the reality we experience.
The main character, Quinn, is a writer of detective stories. One day, he decides to take on a serious detective job. His decision to do so, prompted by a mere phone call (the power of suggestion), demonstrates a key element of the story: its theory of language. As events unfold, the reader becomes aware that a point is being made. She/He is confronted with a choice: to be mystified by seemingly disjointed events, or to acknowledge this point. Auster has orchestrated the story to illustrate that language, despite its manifest shortcomings, has an ability to leap over cognition to create and destroy human experience.
The title is an allegory, representing the fragility of the human condition as portrayed in the downfall and disappearance of the book's characters. It also refers to the biblical Tower of Babel, a story which is retold here through the interplay of the characters (save one, Auster himself, who stands aside as an un-cursed counterpoint to it all.)
As the characters grope with the unknown limits of their lives, including their identity, their survival, and the peace of mind they all struggle to obtain, Auster sets up the destructive power of language (and mankind's susceptibility to it) as the cause of their misery. This power is given a central agent, an insane professor (now a harmless codger) whose release from prison sets the main character on an quest to protect the professor's victimized son. The professor, in his heyday, attempted to abolish language and raise his son in isolation from it. This child abuse, and the linguistic hubris from which it was born, creates a legacy of suffering which ultimately destroys all it touches. In turn, each character affected by the professor becomes broke, insane, dead, or missing.
Even the main character, formerly an author - a magician with the power to turn words into money - is powerless to stop his own descent into indigence as he continues his quixotic pursuit of the word-abolisher. Meanwhile, the professor's son and his wife disappear, leaving a trail of bounced checks. During this time, Quinn lays in wait, hoping to catch the professor before he can do any harm. Unbeknownst to him, the professor commits suicide, leaving the "detective" in the absurd position of waiting for a dead man, sleeping in a dumpster and losing his bearings in the process. Finally, Quinn gives up. He returns to his apartment, his quarry lost, his paychecks bounced, and finds that a new tenant has taken his place. In search of some redemption - anything at all - he returns to the professor's son's empty apartment. The doors are unlocked, seemingly in silent assent to his condition and fate. He removes his clothes and begins scribbling inane phrases in his notebook. Food appears before him as he writes, but soon he disappears. Later, we are led to understand, his notebooks serve to inform the narrator of the above events.
If we choose to view the text as a commentary on language, we may see a significant pattern in the impotence of the characters to prevent their demise, a dramatic representation of an innate human tendency to understand reality on a pre-conscious level of verbal/linguistic constructions. Each character accepts their tragedy without question, playing the roles of "detective," "madman," "victim," and "bum." As the touch of madness unravels the protagonist's author-life, the reader recalls the mysterious deaths described by Auster at the beginning of the story: of a prior life lived by the protagonist with his family, which ended prematurely. Between the end of this life and the beginning of "City," the main character developed a hunger: for companionship, for another life, for a new role to play. In his hunger, the protagonist assented to the blindness implied by this primal urge, leading him to yield to the downfall described here, on a grand scale, in the "City of Glass." In becoming his own detective character, Quinn paid his final homage to the power of words, a mistake for which he paid with his home, his identity, and his mind. Babel, indeed....less
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