Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

I know I have posted pita pictures before, but every time I make them I am astonished by the transformation of a flat disk of dough into a puffy pillow of stretchy, slightly sour, soft bread. Whenever I make pita I use my Cripple Creek wholewheat starter and mix together a fifty-fifty blend of freshly milled whole wheat and white bread flour. I crank my oven to 500 degrees and pat small balls of dough into flat disks using only the palms of my hands. I lay three or four at a time on my heated pizza stone and in  less than four minutes  they transubstantiate from this. to this.

David Treuer, an Ojibwe from Minnesota, lays out his thesis up front. "We are still here: proud, growing in numbers and strength, American and  Indian." The book's subtitle suggests the primary focus is Indian history from the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee to the present. The first third of the book, however, begins 10,000 years ago as Natives established more than 500 tribes in North America with populations in excess of 20 million people at the time of European conquest. What follows is genocide as European settlers set to eradicate Indians. When armed slaughters, disease, displacement, and demolition of Indian sources of food failed to complete the project, Christianizing do-gooders took over. Even into the mid-19th century, when Abolitionists were making clear that black-skinned Americans were as American as paler Americans, there was general agreement that Indian unwillingness to absorb Christianity meant that America's first people were neither worthy of ci...

The guild of elevator inspectors is divided in two. Empiricists measure and document an elevator's safety features. Intuitionists can ride a car up and down and sense with certainty the security of gears, levers, and pulleys. Whitehead's signature is to provide exceptionally deep research, in this case on the history, personalities, and mechanics of mechanical elevation and then blur his writing into fiction and ultimately mysticism. He used the same technique in subsequent novels, notably The Underground Railroad . The Intuitionist  is simultaneously parable and parody of race relations in an unnamed American city that has to be New York. While the book deserves high praise for its inventiveness and stylistic ingenuity it also takes work from the reader. Myriad short scenes begin in the middle with several pages passing before it is clear which character is under discussion and in which locale. You must also be comfortable feeling great about learning things you did not k...

My fall has been so busy my rye starter caught a bug. A healthy sourdough, like a healthy person, needs regular exercise, good quality nutrition, and regular interactions with friendly people. As too many of my weekends have been booked, all of my starters are suffering from neglect. So when I took my rye starter from the fridge on Friday, its surface had been taken over by a firm crust of foul-smelling, bacterial biosolids. Think cheese that has gone bad. I pried off the yuck and fed the remainder with fresh water and newly milled rye. I let it recover over night. As I assembled Stanley Ginsberg's Old Milwaukee Rye, I recovered, too. I've missed my weekends of mixing, kneading, and anticipating. I didn't need the extra loaves, but to keep my starters happy I also warmed up my Cripple Creek starter and prepared a whole-wheat squash bread with pumpkin seeds.

In 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer-to-be of New York City's Central Park, took off on a six month exploration south of the Mason Dixon line. The United States was on the verge of becoming dis-united over the issue of slavery and Olmsted wanted to meet slave owners, southerners, and slaves. He filed regular stories with the New York Times in hope of opening dialogue in a country where right and left, red and blue, black and white, held different truths, read different sources of news, and had almost no means for communicating with one another. Using Olmsted's route, Tony Horwitz set out on Olmsted's path, in rental cars instead of horse-drawn conveyances, to see how the country had changed. Horwitz's travels took place in the year before Trump was elected and as you might have guessed, America's divide has not narrowed nearly as much as it might have. In West Virginia and Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi, blacks and white live separate and very uneq...

This is Anne Hillerman's second go at continuing the long-running series begun by her father, Tony Hillerman, as the Navajo police force investigates crimes in the Four Corners section of America's southwest. Detectives Chee and his newlywed wife, Bernie Manuelito, are puzzled by a very nervous driver stopped by Bernie for a minor traffic violation. Nearby, an LA movie crew shooting a zombie movie in a scenic part of the reservation stumble upon a recently dug grave. (Even after re-reading the discovery of the grave half a dozen times, I could not figure out where Anne Hillerman had placed it.) There's also a business man promoting a large solar field and a bodyguard for the film's ingenue who manhandles some young female star-seekers. The roughed up sisters drive off the stage, so-to-speak, with their dad near the end of the story without much explanation and certainly no destination. Which is all to say, that Tony Hillerman's keyboard might be too large to ta...

Joe King Oliver was once a pure-blue New York City policemen until he was framed for sleeping with a young, excessively attractive perp. Well, she was under suspicion, and he really should not have, but she asked so kindly... King was detained in solitary and abused by guards and inmates for 90 days on Rikers Island before being released without charges. His physical and mental scars still afflict him a decade later. His ex-wife, and her new husband, torment him. He makes a living as a private investigator probing New York's underbelly. His seventeen year old daughter, on the verge of womanhood, but still in high school, serves as his assistant. Two plots entwine Oliver: an opportunity to clear his name for the set up with his femme fatale and a an appeal to save the life of an inmate on death row who is a radical black activist who definitely killed two policeman, but who also might have been ambushed in a shootout that led to their deaths. Joe King Oliver is a black man with...