Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

  A fish owl stands as tall as your chest. It plucks salmon with its talons from roaring rivers in the Russian province of Primorye, in the far east of the country. And before Jonathan Slaght started his PhD and wrote this book, not much more was known about the owls. The book is one-third scientific investigation, one-third description of a climate of winter blizzards that rage with such intensity and duration that transportation by any means is impossible, and one-third conversations with the people of the forest: hermits, indigenous, old Soviet castaways, and vodka-fueled nutcases. While I suspect Slaght's interests run in order from bird conservation to the weather that gets in his way, and finally the people with whom he must work to observe his birds, far and away the most interesting descriptions are of people living so very far from globalization. The book probably is more engaging for readers who know little about how ecologists work. For me, the long efforts to build succ...

This book accomplishes exactly what the author hoped for. As small as the planet seems to have become -- we all share a disease, the internet, What'sApp -- the ocean still covers three-fourths of it, and the activities aboard ships at sea is nigh impossible to scrutinize. Urbina does it for us, fearlessly reporting from ship decks sailing all of the world's seas. His reporting is shocking, but not surprising in the degree to which international law is so easily undermined.  The world's oceans are a global commons, and much like the atmosphere, available for everyone's abuse, but not in one country's individual interest to police. Fish are taken in illegal quantities and with illegal methods. Uncountable so-called low-quality fish are discarded along with tens of thousands of fin-less sharks. Ship workers from developing countries are beaten, battered, raped, underpaid, and held captive by unscrupulous captains and shipping companies that are corporate shells for oth...

As he did in Dark Star Safari , Paul Theroux's north to south bus trip through Africa, On the Plain of Snakes  recounts Theroux's north-to-south overland journey through Mexico. Now in his 80s and feeling disregarded by an American society that forsakes the elderly, Theroux headed to Mexico to write a travelogue in a country that reveres its older citizens. He drove his own car beginning from home in Massachusetts. Racing to cross the border Dodging Narco-warlords who control life along the US-Mexican border and coyotes who smuggle Mexicans into the United States, Theroux started his journey by skipping back and forth across the contended border from west to east before making a full plunge southward. On the US side he spoke with Mexican agricultural workers, most of them undocumented in the US laboring to tend and harvest our food supply. On the Mexican side of the fence, he met Mexicans working for a few dollars a day to manufacture the appliances and cars that NAFTA makes av...

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...

Lara Prior Palmer was not just the first woman to win the cross-Mongolia horse race, she was also the youngest, capturing first place at the age of 18. It seems anyone can enter, and on a whim, without training, but a general knowledge of horses, Prior Palmer entered the race as a better post-high school adventure than entering college. Racers traverse 1,000 km of Mongolian steppe by riding one semi-wild pony after another. Chafing, blisters, sunburn, falls, diarrhea, drunk Mongolians, injuries, and exhaustion overtake more than half the competitors every year. And yet, as they say, she persisted, enduring all those calamities.  What emerges in this memoir is a woman who can communicate with horses in ways I did not know were possible, probably a compensation for her relative inability to interact with people. Prior Palmer's internal dialogue appears on paper with the wisdom of a woman double her age and craft of a writer with four times her experience. Her ability t...

You need not have ever surfed nor even cared about the ocean to be swept away by the glorious writing of Barbarian Days . I'm guessing that William Finnegan describes more than five hundred waves in this book without using the same terms twice. Every wave is distinct and therein lies Finnegan's definition of a life well-lived. Here is one example from page 356 about waves in Madeira, an island off the coast of Portugal.  "Heavy, long-interval lines marched out of the west, bending around the headland into a breathtaking curve. They feathered and bowled and broke at the outermost point of the horseshoe, and then reeled down a rocky shore...As we got closer to the lineup, the power and beauty of the waves got more drenching. A set rolled through, shining and roaring in the low winter afternoon sun, and my throat clogged with emotion -- some nameless mess of joy, fear, love, lust, gratitude." Finnegan is a lifelong reporter for The New Yorker and could have writte...

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...

In 1968 the United States was nearing its first landing on the moon. It was also the year that a British newspaper offered a 5,000 pound reward for the first sailor to circumnavigate the world, solo, without stopping. Another 5,000 pounds was to be awarded for the fastest trip. We were exploring the far reaches of space; simultaneously, humans were testing endurance here on earth. Nine sailors set out from England heading east around Cape Horn, south below the southern reaches of Australia, past South America's Cape of Good Hope and then north up the Atlantic back to England. Each sailor hoped they were carrying sufficient water, food, and supplies to repair any damage that was sure to occur on a boat sailing so far south it had to endure the Roaring Forties. Below the two Capes, the sea surrounding Antarctica is unencumbered by any land masses. Storms have unmitigated fetch over which to whip up gale force winds and towering waves. Beyond the elements, sailors had to endure...

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...

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...

Sing, Unburied, Sing  is a travel log written with the intensity of a stage play. Nearly all the action and poetic-dialogue takes place during an interminable car ride from the south of Mississippi toward the Parchman penitentiary. Leonie, African American (race and pervasive southern racism are central to the story), a mother for the first time when she was 17 is driving. Her son Jojo now 13 is in the back seat caring for three-year-old Kayla who has a stomach virus. In the passenger seat is Leonie's white friend Misty. They are heading to Parchman to retrieve Michael, Leonie's boyfriend, father of her children. Michael is about to be released following three years in prison and his own parents are so angry that he is dating a white woman they have never visited him. The car is hot, sticky, and covered in Kayla's sick. Misty and Leonie are stopping to score a pickup of meth and Jojo is much too quickly reaching adulthood: caring for his baby sister in the shadow of a b...

Hodgman was a staff writer for The Daily Show and regular contributor This American Life .  He's a practiced story teller and genuinely funny guy.  Vacationland  is a memoir of how he came to own a house in the Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts and then another home in down east Maine even while owning an apartment in Brooklyn.  There are lots of humorous accounts of how one learns to cope with owning an old house:  sneaking your way into the town dump; facing off brave raccoons; plugging your own septic system with ancient cheerios.  The saving grace for this quick read is Hodgman's full understanding of the privilege afforded him by his wealth and whiteness.  Owning more than one home, vacationing in Maine among the prep school set, or simply walking in western Mass or coastal Maine while being black he lets us know is not a choice most people of color ever get to make.  In a subtle way, Hodgman is the joker speaking truth to power.

The book is only 7500 words; it originally appeared in Holiday as a magazine article in 1949.  E.B. White, one of America's great wordsmiths spent a long hot weekend in New York City and wrote this homage.  He captures a city that is concurrently paradox and paradigm: the center of the world's commerce, entertainment, and politics -- the United Nations building was under construction that summer -- a melting pot of freedom-seeking exiles from across the globe and stifling American towns, home to opportunity and racism, exhausting wealth and desperate poverty, and in flux.  Famous old neighborhoods, monumental edifices, and landmark destinations were already being mourned as they were displaced by newer, shinier, glitzier skyscrapers.  And yet, White recognized that to be in New York was to simultaneously challenge a visitor to become part of the crush and to lose oneself in anonymity, appreciating the past while understanding the future was fully under constructio...