Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

In 1968, baseball's pitchers dominated hitters to such an extent that Bob Gibson of the Saint Louis Cardinals held opposing teams to barely more than one run every nine innings pitched and Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers won 30 games. Pitchers were so effective, a lear later, 1969, Major League Baseball had to improve batters' odds by lowering the pitching mound from 15 inches to 10 and it reduced the size of the strike zone. What makes Pappu's recounting much more than just a book about great pitching, is his ability to contextualize a sport beginning its decline in America's heart (football and basketball were beginning their ascendency) within a country tearing itself apart over the Vietnam War abroad and race relations. Here is a street scene from Detroit in 1967. Baseball somehow seemed both a reflection of America and unimportant.  The country was at war in Southeast Asia, with Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and its cities. Throughout The ...

Korede, the older sister, in this upper crust Nigerian family is feeling kind of bitter. Her younger sister, Ayoola, has just killed her third boyfriend and is sending out unrepentant Intsagrams way too soon. Ayoola can hardly help herself. She is stunningly beautiful, the kind of carefree, unselfconscious young woman that causes men of all ages to breathe through their mouths when she enters a room. Only she has a terrible tendency to put knives into them and call upon Korede to help when it is time to dispose of a body of a man who might or might not have come on a little too strong. Hovering at the edges of this screwball comedy are darker forces and larger questions. How dangerous is it to be single, wealthy, lovely, and female in Lagos, Nigeria? What are anyone's prospects when facing a Nigerian judicial system that begins with corrupt cops as likely to shake you down for a bribe while you are caught in a traffic jam as they are to hunt for a real killer? And what respons...

The tools of the trade were all on deck Saturday when I was making three kinds of bread at once. Left to right in the front row are a bowl of starter with recently added flour, a recently mixed bowl of rye starter (Danish dough whisk still present), the smooth caramel top of a whole wheat, spelt bread on its final rise, a small bowl of freshly milled rye flour, and a mason jar of rye sourdough starter. In the middle row are two jars and a bag of whole grains. In the back are more flours and second from right my grain mill. Making three kinds of bread requires the additional skill of tracking. Each dough, of course, requires different ingredients, but they have to be kneaded differently, raised for different lengths of time, stretched and folded at varying intervals over 24 - 36 hours, baked at different temperatures and put into the oven when they are ready. Knowing when to bake a sourdough bread depends a whole lot more on experience than it does for a yeast bread. One reason dis...

Lawrence Wright's credentials as an investigative reporter and journalist means that two of his recent books, Going Clear about Scientology and The Looming Tower  about Al Qaeda and 9/11 are among my favorite books. Unbeknownst to me before reading God Save Texas, Wright was also a lifelong resident of Texas, a play write, political journalist in the Texas statehouse, movie script writer, cyclist,  barroom musician, birdwatcher, and elite among Texas intellectuals. I know this last bit about elite because he drops a lot of names of other elites he hangs out with. Probably nearing the end of his career, God Saves Texas  is a swan song to Wright's native state. He dutifully recounts the impact of oil wealth on the behavior of Texas millionaires. He spends a goodly portion of the book regaling us with stories of nutcases and eccentrics in Texas's legislature. Austin is weird and about to outgrow its quaint beginnings. Dallas is a lot more multi-cultural than most outsi...