Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

During the opening stages of WW II Germany marched virtually unimpeded across its neighbors. British soldiers were sent to France to hold back the German tide, but Germany's soldiers flattened Belgium, turned the corner on France's Maginot Line and pinned Britain's troops against the English Channel. Germany could have, and should have, pushed what really amounted to virtually all of England's army into the sea, mowing over France's along the way. Faced with no option, Britain chose to abandon the continent, save its army to fight another day, and attempted to send enough ships across the notoriously fickle English Channel to rescue on the order of 300,000 men. If the German's succeeded the war might have ended in their favor rather quickly. If England could manage to ship out its army, the Nazis might one day be defeated. More than 300,000 Allied troops were rescued from Dunkirk in 1940.  A quick summary. What this book makes clear, perhaps more implici...

Anna, the protagonist of this WW II era story, is a kind of Rosie the Riveter. After beginning as one of the girls in the administrative pool at the Brooklyn Naval yards, as a 19-year-old she lives her dream to become one of the boys that SCUBA dives into the harbor of Wallabout Bay. The book's description of 1940s New York is so expertly delivered you can only envision the luncheonette's, men in fedoras, and bustling traffic existing in black and white. The characters that surround Anna are also well drawn, but taken as an ensemble seem rather pointless. Anna has a crippled younger sister. Her father works for the underground black market but disappears for the middle half of the book and near the end survives 21 days at sea on a raft in the Indian Ocean. Anna's Aunt is a floozy. Her paramour is a gangster running shady nightclubs. Her mother returns to Minnesota. And so on. It is hard to tell why this book made the long list for the National Book Award in 1917. It feel...

I was headed to California on a business trip when someone in the Environmental Action department at Pitzer College figured out I was a sourdough baker. She asked if I might bring her some starter and I always find requests from people interested in beginning sourdough baking irresistible. The night before I left I needed to grow some starter to put into my lotion container to smuggle to California and there is absolutely no point in expanding a starter if there isn't going to be bread at the end. I cooked up some oatmeal, ground some spelt flour, and shaped an English Cottage Loaf. 

If the first wave of coffee was its globalized ubiquity -- think Nescafe and Maxwell House -- then the second wave was launched by Starbucks presentation of better coffee and a coffeehouse experience. The third wave treats coffee as an artisanal product meant to be savored like fine wine. Coffee tasters seek out rare bushes, fine soils, great growers, expert roasters and careful transportation of specialty beans from remote tropical slopes to high end producers. The first third of Eggers' book describes coffee production, and coffee tasting, in huge detail so we can appreciate Mokhhtar Alkhanshali, a native of California who decides he is going to import coffee from Yemen. Mokhtar is of Yemenese descent and still has family back in Sana'a, the capital, but his motivation is primarily entrepreneurial. He thinks he can make money. His pitch is that coffee's origins might well lie in the hills of Yemen. While the potential for some of the best tasting coffee the world ha...