Book: Defending Jacob by William Landay

A novel I couldn't put down, written by a former district attorney, about a murder. 

A young boy on his way to school is stabbed three times and he dies. He is found just off a path in a park close to the school. Who did this? There isn't much evidence other than a distinct bloody fingerprint. The crime occurs in an upper middle-class suburb with concerned, decent, actively involved parents. These are not throwaway kids so the ripples from the murder are considerable. 

It's as good as a John Grisham novel and certainly is provocative as it is more than just a legal thriller or a murder mystery. It is also a novel of how we raise our kids in the Internet age, a novel that addresses issues of nature versus nurture, a novel that develops a riveting story and denouement.

Book: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. The photo on the cover is riveting. It is of a young girl in a light printed dress sitting on her haunches in a puddle. Her eyes are closed and her head is raised to the sky. The slum shacks are in the immediate background and high-rises in the far back.

The "undercity" is one of many in Mumbai, one of thousands worldwide. It is called Annawadi and the author spent time reporting and videotaping there. She says, "My reporting wasn't pretty, especially at first. To Annawadians, I was a reliably ridiculous spectacle given to toppling into the sewage lake while videotaping and running afoul of the police. However, residents had concerns  more pressing than my presence. After a month or two of curiosity, they went more or less about their business as I chronicled their lives."

It is therefore a true story of families and their children living in abject poverty in the shadow of an airport and its high-rise hotels. They are a community unto themselves, like your community and my community, but with the differences of economics and opportunities. We have so much; they have so little. Some survive; a few move on; most stay and live lives of tenuous security and nearly constant struggle for the most basic of daily necessities. But, somehow, after reading for awhile, it became an odd normalcy (their lives) and I was able to continue and was not affected as emotionally as I was in the beginning.

I feel strongly that all of us who live safe and secure lives with clean abundant water, modern plumbing, enough food, jobs, a guaranteed education, relatively clean air and access to health care should read books like this one. Kids in schools should read it. It isn't a book offering solutions or explanations and blame so much as a literary photograph of our global neighbors. We need to know about them.

What also struck me was that the good intentions and policies put in place to ease the lives of the poorest of the poor were so often derailed because of greed and graft. Monies were diverted, plans were
never implemented, power was misused.

So these slum dwellers with their complicated lives continue, persevere, love their kids (or not), keep hoping, keep struggling. There are schools and politicians' promises and police...sort of...sometimes, but    more often than not, illusory and ineffective. Not in every case, but most of the time.

"Inside the hut, Abdul was bagging up shards of brick; the cooking shelf was now installed. For some days, Abdul had imagined his mother's pleasure at seeing it done. Instead, she was being held by the police. The floor was half rubble, half wet cement, awaiting tiles his father had not yet bought. The installment-plan television, stored in the brothelkeeper's house, had been broken by the man's son. Abdul's little brothers and sisters had been frightened by all the shouting, and his father, surveying the wreck of his home, appeared to be losing his mind."

"It was a display so abject that Sunil felt prepared to disdain it, until the guard emptied two large trash cans at Sonu's feet. Then Sunil saw the cunning. In the middle of unruly, cutthroat Cargo Road, a slight teenage boy had all to himself, behind security gates, a wealth of plastic cups, Coke cans, ketchup packets, and aluminum foil trays from a canteen where Air India works ate."

"To jumpstart his system, he saw he'd have to become a better scavenger. This entailed not dwelling on the obvious: that his profession could wreck a body in a very short time. Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair and gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brother kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die."

Scavenging the stuff we all throw away every day is one way the kids earn money but "Big recycling concerns took most of the luxury-hotel garbage ("a fortune beyond counting" as Abdul put it in a whisper). And on the streets, new municipal garbage trucks were rolling around, as a civic campaign fronted by Bollywood heroines attempted to combat Mumbai's reputation as a dirty city."

Barbara Ehrenreich: "Boo's book is one of the most powerful indictments of economic inequality I've ever read."

David Sedaris: "It might surprise you how completely enjoyable this book is, as rich and beautifully written as a novel."

Ramachandra Guha: "Without question the best book yet written on contemporary India. Also the best work of narrative nonfiction I've read in twenty-five years."

Tracy Kidder: "Garbage pickers and petty thieves, victims of gruesome injustice--Boo draws us into their lives, and they do not let us go. This is a superb book."

Book: Talking with My Mouth Full by Gail Simmons

Gail is host of Top Chef: Just Desserts but I don't get the TV channel that carries that program so haven't seen her (or heard of her, for that matter). She is also Special Projects Director at Food and Wine magazine, and this is a "foodie" book. She grew up in Toronto, went to McGill, and couldn't figure out what she wanted to do with her life when she graduated until a helpful friend asked her what she most liked to do. Gail writes on a piece of paper: "Eat. Write. Travel. Cook." There it was--her future--and so that is what she did.

If you like restaurants and food and reading about food and food shows on TV, you'll like this book.

"My absolute favorite South African food is biltong: air-dried, salted meat, cut or shaved into bite-sized pieces or sold in large strips that can be sliced up as you desire. It has a very specific savoriness and is not sweet the way American beef jerky is....Ostrich is also outstanding. The flavor is halfway between steak and chicken..."

"Our choice wasn't easy. Marcel worked hard at creating an experience we would never forget. He made sea urchin and Meyer lemon gelee with fennel cream, caviar, and kalamata oil; cucumber and radish salad with ouzo vinaigrette; hearts of palm and maitake mushrooms with sea beans and kaffir lime sauce; strip-line steak with garlic puree; blini with Kona coffee "caviar"....Ilan's meal was Spanish-inspired, starting with angula (baby eels) and pan con tomate, but he did a great job including local Hawaiian ingredients too--a gazpacho of native macadamia nuts and a fruits soup with Surinam cherries...His seared squab with foie gras, shrimp, and lobster was simple and flavorful. The Romesco sauce on is beef course was the best I'd tasted---coarse and garlicky with just the right amount of smoky paprika."

Gail worked in some high-end restaurant kitchens, Le Cirque for instance, learning about ingredients, signature dishes, food preparation, chefs, the rest of the staff and those who come to a restaurant and pay several hundred dollars for a meal. She gets married to a man named Jeremy who looks very much like Jerry Seinfeld and describes her wedding menu: three chilled soups, seven fresh summer salads and a fish course, "grilled striped bass with red wine, roasted figs, young turnips, braised romaine and polenta."  Their dessert was not a traditional wedding cake but rather "small bites of sweets that were easy to pick up and eat while dancing, even with a drink in the other hand...mini fruit tarts (peach, strawberry and raspberry), French macaroons in vanilla and coffee, bite-sized banana marshmallows on sticks, strawberry sorbet bars dipped in dark chocolate..." and City Bakery's chocolate chip cookies.

Gail tells of trips (eating cod sperm in Japan), of her parents and brothers, of her childhood, of the annual Food and Wine Classic in Aspen each summer, all entertaining vignettes and glimpses into her world, basically, the world of food.

I had also read that book about oysters not so long ago. I did then and still do have niggles while reading of food, which people spend an inordinate time securing, preparing, praising, obsessing over and then serving in meals that cost hundreds of dollars. Although Gail does devote a paragraph or two to her charitable work, I thought that inclusion was token. Maybe if I hadn't just finished Behind the Beautiful Forevers I might not have been thinking so much about the monstrous disparity between the two worlds represented in this book.

Whatever anyone thinks of it though, the foodie world is thriving and Talking with My Mouth Half Full is a feast of words on that subject.

Book: Lost on Planet China by Maarten Troost

I LOVED this book. It was written in 2008, about 5 years ago, when the author traveled in China for several weeks. Before the trip, he tried briefly to learn Mandarin (Chinese for Dummies) but that didn't work out; he goes anyway. There is humor...my kind of humor, and I laughed out loud several times..spontaneously, no matter where I was, while reading certain passages. Like this one: Maarten arrives in Shanghai where he has prepared by having little strips of "crisply written Chinese characters" for his destinations. He tries several of these on the taxi driver, and none seems to be the right one, so finally the author just gives up and says "Yep, that's the place....and I settled back and relaxed into this ride toward I-didn't-know-where. I'm flexible that way."

What impressed him was the horrendous pollution (interesting, as just the past few days, the news has been of the horrendous pollution in Beijing from all the coal-burning factories), the crowds (millions all over), the little kids with split pants pooping and peeing in the gutters, the coughing  and hawking of the populace (no doubt because of polluted lungs), the oddities he ate (the book is subtitled Or How He Became Comfrotable Eating Live Squid), the inexplicable weird allegiance (still) to Mao, the very rapid globalization/Westernization happening before his eyes...

He learns to bargain and haggle for everything he buys; he hikes on a terrifying trail at Tiger Leaping Gorge; he travels west to Tibet and north to Dandong which is right across the Yalu River from North Korea; he goes to Hong Kong, to Nanjing, to Macau and Xi'an (terra cotta warriors); he climbs the Great Wall (with "a million, possibly 2 million visitors"); he goes to Lanzhou, Chongqinq and Guangzhou, traveling via train, plane, bus and boat.

"In Ningbo, I changed buses and bus stations. I can say with some confidence that the part of Ningbo located around the two bus stations is hideous. It was filthy. It was, of course, teeming with crowds. Cigarettes and phlegm hurled hough the air in every direction. The buses droned by in a blue haze of exhaust fumes."

"I spent several days in Lhasa, rarely leaving the tight confines of the old town. I could have remained for months...Perhaps I could move my family here, I thought. Kindergarten in Tibet. That would be cool. And the air was clean up here. Of course, there wasn't much of it, so perhaps that would be a problem. Is it good parenting, taking kids up to 12,000 feet?...the Tibetans were kind and affable. I 'd expected to find a people crushed by Chinese oppression...Indeed, they are the jolliest people I'd encountered in China."

He keeps commenting on the horrific pollution: "How could people live in this? I wondered. How could they put up with it? The air was so rank and dense with pollutants that even a Republican would be hollering for clean air. Really, it's that bad. And then, as I perused my newspaper, it occurred to me that it's very possible that the Chinese are not aware, exactly, of how appalling their air truly is."

And along the way, there are paragraphs of history and social science and economics, so after reading this book, in addition to being highly entertained, I also learned a lot about China...modern China, on the cusp of........ I guess that remains to be seen.

Book: The Man who Saved the Whooping Crane by Kathleen Kaska

The man was Robert Porter Allen and this book tells of his work as an ornithologist and naturalist, not only studying whooping cranes but also flamingos and roseate spoonbills. Allen spent thousands of hours searching for cranes, observing them and writing detailed reports. Historically, the cranes wintered in the Aransas NWR along the Gulf Coast of Texas but their nesting grounds were elusive. It took several years before they were eventually found in Wood Buffalo Provincial Park in Saskatchewan, and then it was really an accident...

It was Wednesday, June 30, 1954, and the forest service in Canada were checking the status of "Fire 24, which had been burning for several days....As Landells turned to head back to the station, something in the marsh below caught his attention. Landells nudged Wilson, decreased altitude, and flew back around; there was no doubt in either of their minds that below, feeding in the marsh were two adult whooping cranes. That in itself was a rare and wondrous site. Spotting the rust-colored chick following behind was like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow....For the last nine years, virtually everyone living, working, or visiting the area had been on the lookout."

"Finding the nesting site was just the first step; securing and protecting the habitat offered hope for the whooping crane's future."

But it wasn't until June of the next summer that Allen finally was back in Canada. Bob had already spent four summers in a futile search for the cranes' breeding grounds.

"They headed out across the burn, its mushy surface feeling much like a saturated sponge. Where the burn abruptly ended. a thicket of stubby conifers had braided their branches into a tangle. When the branches became too stubborn to push aside, Allen and Stewart slashed their way through, fighting to keep their boots from being sucked off by the soppy ground. Sweat saturated their clothing before they'd covered 50 yards. Black flies and mosquitoes descended in clouds."

Seeing the birds from the air was far different from trekking overland to their nesting site, but they were rewarded: "At precisely 9:25 a.m., they stepped in to a clearing, the blinding sun reflecting off the still surface of a small pond. In the distance, a flash of white caught their eye. An adult whooping crane stepped out of the reeds. Moments later, another crane emerged."

This dedicated man persevered in his demanding field work for years, moving his children and wife Evelyn around the country, often taking them on his field trips. Evelyn was an accomplished pianist, having graduated from the School of Musical Art, the school that became Juilliard, shortly before meeting Bob Allen. She gave up a debut concert tour to live in a trailer on Tavernier Key with him, writing in her diary "I cannot do this. No water, no electricity, no phone." But she could and did, and when "the music circuit got word of this talented young pianist...jazz musicians from Key West began to arrive on Saturday nights to sit in with Evelyn. The McKenzie drugstore quickly became the hot spot in the Upper Keys."

There are also wonderful black and white photographs showing Allen, his family and his scientist friends in various places in North America: canoeing in Canada, the portages and log jams, whooping cranes, camping...

In 1941 the whooping crane population was 15 birds; today they are still rare, numbering only in the hundreds..not even 1000 yet. They are larger than sandhill cranes. The magnificent adults are all white with black wingtips and red caps. The efforts to protect them continues and the web site www.operationmigration.org shows the amazing work of how cranes are nurtured and raised in Wisconsin, how imprinting is accomplished and how ultralights are used to teach the cranes how to migrate. The web site is well worth a visit. As the author says: "You won't be disappointed."

Sadly, Robert Allen died of a heart attack when he was 58 year old. Three previously unnamed keys near Bottleneck Key are named The Bob Allen Keys in his honor.

Book: The Last Man by Vince Flynn

Another Mitch Rapp novel, Mitch being a killing machine in the clandestine service of the CIA... Bad and good guys in Pakistan, lots of guns all around, a traitorous CIA agent, corrupt Afghanis....

Fast paced but without subtlety. I kept comparing Flynn's characters to those of Sandford's and Sandford's are real (well, sort of) while Flynn's are almost caricatures. Rapp gets sent on the hardest jobs (to kill the most successful and devious enemies of the US) and this time he sustains a head injury, pretty much forgets everything, albeit temporarily, and is back in the game within a week or so. Interesting that both these authors live in Minnesota. Maybe I'm missing something here....

Flynn writes well enough, I guess, and reading one of his books is like watching a shoot 'em up, violent, cops, car chase, bad guys movie. It's a way to pass a few hours, although I usually wonder why I choose and finish books like these. Probably men like his books better than women. 

Book: Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz

John Schwartz also wrote Reservation Road which I thought was about Native Americans until I realized I had read this book and not all that long ago. Ah well....

This is a sequel to Reservation Road, written about a dozen years later. In the first book, a man and his young son are driving home when their car hits and kills a small boy. The man, Dwight, drives on, not because he is a bad person, but because he is shocked and disbelieving and panicked and heartbroken. However, after four months, he turns himself in and is sent to prison. His wife divorces him and remarries; he is estranged from his son. He was a lawyer but when he gets out of prison, he moves to California and finds work in a sporting goods store.

Back east, his now-grown son gets into bar fight after a humiliating performance in a college baseball game. For him, for a few hours, it is the end of his life. He is provoked and hits a guy with his baseball bat. The guy walks away but then shows up in a hospital emergency room a few hours later with internal bleeding.

The son, Sam, flees to California and shows up at Dwight's place. What happens to these characters is this story and it is well worth reading.

"I'll say here straight out that I believe there's a legitimate case to be made for softball as the true American pastime. The dowdy, smaller-than-regulation, always a little unkempt plots of dirt and sparse grass tucked away in city parks and derelict sandlot zones all across this land of ours: these are the fields of dreams for your average citizen....My son, quite naturally, doesn't see it this way. When Sunday rolls around and I venture into his cave den--covered in dirty sweats and T-shirts and jeans, the guest bedroom has become a rogue state in the act of seceding from the rest of the house--to wake him at nine, he expresses in foul terms his disinclination to join me..."

"Exhaust fumes the air between them. Her bare arm rests on the sill of the open car window. Staring at her wrist, with its drugstore Timex on a cheap leather strap, he's haunted by the wish to buy her a fine watch one day, something with real diamonds. Sentimental tears instantly threaten--in his heart he knows he'll never buy her that watch--but he fights them off."

Aren't all stories about humans also stories about love?

Dennis Lehane reviews:  "The masterly Northwest Corner is that finest of things--a moral novel about mortal events."

Abraham Verghese says: "I had the sense on every page of a writer whose abilities are at their peak, the parts of this tale interlocking just so, and yet being anything but predictable as Schwartz defines the nature of of atonements, the many shades of love, and the face of redemption."