Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Frank McCourt's first book, Angela's Ashes , recounted his impoverished childhood in Ireland. His mixture of pathos, humor, and superlative Irish story telling put readers in peels of laughter and tears of despair. Angela's Ashes  won the Pulitzer Prize. 'Tis  begins with McCourt's introduction to adulthood as a very young immigrant in New York City. With an impeccable eye for the sights of 1940s New York, a nose for the city's smells, and an ear for the voices of other working class immigrants of Greek, Italian, and Caribbean origin, McCourt again paints a picture of his conflicted past, this time American. New York in the 1940s and 1950s comes alive as a city pulsing with opportunity and breathtaking racism. As McCourt works his way up the economic ladder from bellhop to school teacher you can feel his imposter syndrome, root for his advances, and suffer the indignities of what feels like an insuperable class divide. Frank McCourt can spin yarns chapter aft

We belong to a CSA that supplies us with vegetables. During the winter in Northwest Pennsylvania, aside from a few greens raised in hydroponic greenhouses, we receive more root vegetables than any family of any size could possible process. We have eaten curried sweet potato stews, baked potatoes, cabbage and kohlrabi slaws with Asian dressings, and carrot soups. Parsnips, however, bedevil me. They aren't bad roasted and there are some interesting parsnip stews and soups, but I have been having a difficult time keeping up with new shipments. So I boiled up a bunch, milled some fresh whole wheat, used my whole wheat sourdough starter that comes from the Cripple Creek gold rush of 1893, and out of my oven came some of the most beautifully formed breads I have seen in quite a while. The interior was moist, but not gummy in the least, the crust was firm, and the aroma was naturally sweet with a hint of the growing season now just a distant memory. I'd share the recipe, but I

Pachinko is a Japanese gambling game that is part slot machine and part pinball. Fleets of small steel balls tumble past obstructions before dropping into collection buckets worth money or disappearing into worthless drains. Much of the game of Pachinko depends upon the interaction of the player with the loud, musical, highly chaotic descent of a group of balls launched (the player chooses the speed, but not much else) onto the playing surface. Pachinko is a lot like life. A Pachinko machine. An operator adjusts the pins that determine where the balls land. Min Jin Lee delicately and with great sensitivity envelops the lives of four generations of a Korean family. Their saga begins under the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 1900s. The second and third generations live most of their lives in Japan as second class citizens, roundly despised by most Japanese nationals. In Japan, the Korean family of the story copes with Japanese discrimination, depending upon the characte

Making a sourdough bagel that tastes good is not nearly as difficult as making one that looks good. The chewiness of a good bagel -- in contrast to a cinnamon raisin or blueberry bagel, which are forbidden in my house -- comes from the use of white flour with very high gluten levels. The dough is heavily kneaded to build the gluten. Look how smooth the surface is on each pre-bagel. But then look at how my bagels dimple when I boil them. After boiling, they get seeded and baked. Here is a bun that also did not look great, but oh my the taste.  Jewish rye, potato, onion, poppy, sesame rolls. Oy, with a schmear of cream cheese or some pickled herring, you should only try one. Finally, some breads that don't only taste good, but also look good. Turns out my son Isaac and his girlfriend Delaney are master babka makers. These weren't sourdough, but next time they will be. Hah! Preparing raspberry jam, pistachio, almond, chocolate chunk babka. Some more

John Carreyrou is the reporter for the Wall Street Journal whose investigative reporting brought down Theranos and its wunderkind founder, Elizabeth Holmes. Before its demise in 2018 and subsequent bankruptcy it was valued at $9 billion. Carreyrou does a masterful job of reassembling his notes into a logical chronology beginning with Holmes desire to develop a method of testing blood with just a finger-prick and high-tech, nano-assays. By working her connections and charisma across Silicon Valley -- and the willingness of venture capitalists and a goggle-eyed Board of Directors -- Holmes became a front-page phenom with ample cash flow. Only her technology never worked. Holmes pitched in effect a pyramid scheme by lying, bullying, and obfuscating for years with a product whose misinformation endangered the lives of those who received its unreliable results. This book is a warning about demagogues that believe in their pronouncements more than the truth (I'm thinking of you, Donal

Bryson can write about wandering aimlessly around Europe - a feat that is not especially unusual - because, simply put, he is such a fine writer. For four months he wanders about Scandinavia, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. Yes, Yugoslavia. The book was penned in 1991 and there is something warmly nostalgic about a period before the complete break-up of the Soviet empire, before huge displacements of Middle Easterners and North Africans reminded us of the costs of totalitarianism and residual imperialism, in a time when Yugoslavia was one country, not a hodgepodge of states about to embark on genocidal madness. Bryson arrives in one famous city after another and finds hotels without aid of cellphone or Yelp. Then he has us look and really observe. He notices architecture down to the brass knockers on ordinary residences. He tells us how well the waiters treat him, how difficult it is to cash a travelers check (remember those?), an

Perveen Mistry is the first female solicitor in Bombay, India. Bristling under the dual oppressions of British colonial rule and overwhelming male domination in Indian society, Perveen is assigned a legal case for three women whose lives are even more circumscribed than her own. Her clients are the three wives of a recently deceased Muslim owner of a textile mill. They live in Purdah, the far side of a screened-off portion of their home out of visual contact with all men. When their husband dies, his estate is placed in the hands of a (very mean) male overseer, who midway through the book dies by the hands of an unknown assailant. On the plus side, the sense of 1920s India feels quite realistic. Moreover, I cannot think of another book of this type in which a woman's menses features so prominently. Unfortunately, the book is slow-ish, the dialogue stiff, and Perveen's feminist ideals might be in line with what was percolating among suffragists in England and her colonies, o