Emily Bach is the CEO of an internet startup on the verge of a high-flying IPO. Her younger sister, Jess, studies Philosophy in Berkeley and works in a used book store. Emily is brilliant, Jess is passionate, and it’s 2001 and the world (as always) is about to fall apart. A wonderful, elegant, and thoughtful book that gets the places and people exactly right.

September 21, 2010 (permalink)

This volume collects decades of delightful correspondence between two terrific writers who loved books, adored gossip, and enjoyed a complex circle of friends. All their friends are titled, rich, beautiful, or accomplished. In the later letters, so are their children. Almost everyone has a nickname, and editor Charlotte Mosley has a merry time sorting everyone out in abundant, concise, and witty footnotes.

Waugh and Mitford sure had a swell time.

It’s been interesting to chat about Mitford with my friends. Some people barely know her; I’ve never read any of her work myself. But surprising people know all about the Mitford sisters, six legendary beauties who had famously complicated lives. Unity shot herself for love of Hitler, Diana married British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, Jessica married a Communist, Deborah married the Duke of Devonshire. (See Jo Walton’s wonderful Ha’penny, too.)

September 20, 2010 (permalink)

Grace loves books, high school, her friends, and the wolves that live in the forest behind her house. In the first place, she’s the sort of girl who likes animals. Additionally, she had a frightening encounter with the wolves when she was eleven, when they dragged her off her swing and she was nearly killed. She feels like she has a special connection to these magnificent animals.

And, it turns out, she does. These aren’t wolves; they’re werewolves, people who transform into wolf shape every winter. And the wolf whose intercession saved her life, it turns out, is a delightful young man named Sam. Theirs is the ultimate Summer Romance, but winter is coming.

Occasionally, the YA seams show through. Occasionally, disbelief threatens to come unhooked; Grace’s parents are hands-off, yes, but surely they would notice that a boy has sleeping in their daughter’s room four nights running? They might not object, it might make them happy, but it seems to me they'd at least want to make sure there was enough coffee or did he like tea in the morning? But this delightful page-turner that avoids easy solutions while clinging to the precious conviction that somehow Love is enough.

September 6, 2010 (permalink)

Alexia Tarabotti is a Victorian spinster who labors under the weight of misfortune. Admittedly, her father is rich, and her mother, if no longer precisely good-looking, is at any rate fashionable and received in all the best houses. But Alexia is afflicted with a dusky complexion, an unruly spirit, two simpering half-sisters, a perception that she is unmarriageable, and a complete absence of soul. In consequence, the vampires and werewolves who populate the cream of London society are rendered temporarily human at her touch.

Inevitably, hilarity (and marriage) ensue. We visit the headquarters of London’s vampires in Westminster, and meet a Scottish Lord who happens to be (a) a werewolf and (b) the head of Her Majesty’s Bureau of Unnatural Registry. Centuries ago, the British reached an accommodation with their supernaturals, and the alliance of human and superhuman subjects has carried the British flag across the globe. In the end (of course) we also meet a scientific mastermind whose nefariously subterranean laboratories can only be reached through a tiny ascension room. Alexia inhabits a good, clean, and frothy world that is neither very deep nor very disturbing, and in place of overwrought angst we have good and (mostly) clean fun.

August 31, 2010 (permalink)

Dornenburg and Page use a distinctive style in their books about cooking and restaurant life, threading together numerous interviews about aspects of the art of cooking. At its best, this provides a consensus of successful cooks in their own words. At times, though, this book (like previous Dornenburg and Page ventures on chef training and restaurant reviewing) can read like Zagat’s, stringing together many short excerpts to construct an artificial consensus.

The core contribution of this book is a vast table of foods that go together, including both classic and modern combinations. Also of great interest are a list of parallel menus developed by prominent chefs of the 80’s and 90’s – comparing, say, the opening menu of Chez Panisse to what they’re doing today.

Why do some foods “go together”? Are these preferences purely memory and convention? Surely, contingency plays a big role in what we consider comfort food and in what we think delicious: Proust’s madeleines might have been donuts had he lived in San Francisco, though his time would still have been lost. Occasionally, you get a chemical incompatibility between two ingredients — asparagus is good and wine is good, you could imagine nice combinations, but the wine reacts with an enzyme in asparagus and so it’s not gonna work out. People form habits: some people always drink scotch, others drink vodka.

But I think there’s much more to be said on the subject. One suggestion here is that it’s nice to have ingredients that naturally get along: birds love grapes, for example, and poultry goes nicely with grape preparations and wine-rich sauces. Escoffier liked visual fantasies in this genre and things can easily get out of hand, but you can see why the affinity can make sense. Grant Achatz made an interesting observation about constructing tasting menus, finding that if people enjoy feasts more if they move from savory to sweet and then return to savory before dessert.

The title is perhaps unfortunate because Ruhlman’s Making of a Chef trilogy, the first volume of which appeared the following year, is deeply engaged in the question of whether cooking is an art, where Dornenburg and Page are chiefly using art as a consensus view of excellence. Their approach, depending as it does on the joint opinions of a spectrum of prominent cooks, cannot easily explore the question because every respondent considers their cooking to be good, each has their own definition of art, and most of them are far too busy running a demanding business to spend a great deal of time investigating the natures of art, craft, commerce, and pleasure. In place of the abstract joys of that philosophical inquiry, however, we have dozens of pages charting the best flavors for that lovely trout you caught, or what you might do with that bag of very ripe heirloom tomatoes that really need to be cooked tonight.Dornenburg and Page use a distinctive style in their books about cooking and restaurant life, threading together numerous interviews about aspects of the art of cooking. At its best, this provides a consensus of successful cooks in their own words. At times, though, this book (like previous Dornenburg and Page ventures on chef training and restaurant reviewing) can read like Zagat’s, stringing together many short excerpts to construct an artificial consensus. The core contribution of this book is a vast table of foods that go together, including both classic and modern combinations. Also of great interest are a list of parallel menus developed by prominent chefs of the 80’s and 90’s – comparing, say, the opening menu of Chez Panisse to what they’re doing today.

Why do some foods “go together”? Are these preferences purely memory and convention? Surely, contingency plays a big role in what we consider comfort food and in what we think delicious: Proust’s madeleines might have been donuts had he lived in San Francisco, though his time would still have been lost. Occasionally, you get a chemical incompatibility between two ingredients — asparagus is good and wine is good, you could imagine nice combinations, but the wine reacts with an enzyme in asparagus and so it’s not gonna work out.

I think there’s much more to be said on the subject. One suggestion here is that it’s nice to have ingredients that naturally get along: birds love grapes, for example, and poultry goes nicely with grape preparations and wine-rich sauces. Escoffier liked visual fantasies in this genre and things can easily get out of hand, but you can see why the affinity can make sense. Grant Achatz made an interesting observation about constructing tasting menus, finding that if people enjoy feasts more if they move from savory to sweet and then return to savory before dessert.

The title is perhaps unfortunate because Ruhlman’s Making of a Chef trilogy, the first volume of which appeared the following year, is deeply engaged in the question of whether cooking is an art, where Dornenburg and Page are chiefly using art as a consensus view of excellence. Their approach, depending as it does on the joint opinions of a spectrum of prominent cooks, cannot easily explore the question because every respondent considers their cooking to be good, each has their own definition of art, and most of them are far too busy running a demanding business to spend a great deal of time investigating the natures of art, craft, commerce, and pleasure. In place of the abstract joys of that philosophical inquiry, however, we have dozens of pages charting the best flavors for that lovely trout you caught, or what you might do with that bag of very ripe heirloom tomatoes that really need to be cooked tonight.

August 22, 2010 (permalink)

Dirda adores Davidson, and this new collection is a nice supplement to the Davidson Treasury. Some of the wonderful literary confections like “Traveller from an Antique Land” depend on your knowing a lot of Victorian literary biography but they’re fun anyway. “The Peninsula” has a lovely sense of American business history and its resonance for families. “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” is a wonderfully compact meditation on the terrible contingencies and chances of history.

August 19, 2010 (permalink)

More fun than a barrel of steampunk monkeys. The Civil War has been raging back east for more than a decade, and downtown Seattle has been abandoned even longer after a mad scientist’s excavator unleashed the Blight. Now the center of the city is surrounded by the Great Wall and filled with toxic volcanic fumes and the living dead, the rotters. The scientist’s widow, Briar Wilkes, revisits the dead downtown in search of her boy Zeke, who is looking for answers and finding a compelling culture of scavengers, criminals, and opportunists. When one character explains that the weapon he carries for defense against the zombie horde is “Dr. Minnericht’s Doozy Dazer, or plain old ‘Daisy’ for short” this seems perfectly sensible, – and that’s the mark of inspired world building.

August 7, 2010 (permalink)

Recommended at DailyKos (of all places!), this post-apocalyptic war adventure from 1974 pits a unit of Israeli mercenary armor (in the service of what’s left of the US Army) against the Texas Rebellion. We have an odd mix of science fiction and fun here; we're thinking seriously about some things (like women in combat) and just having fun with others (let’s get some WWII armor out of the museum! Let’s sail a cruiser into Dallas!) The world is in terrible shape after Britain started a nuclear and biological war against South Africa, but while there’s no longer a functional Coke bottler in North America we’ve still got the logistical capacity to keep an awful lot of armor (and tactical lasers) in the field.

It’s odd to see the cover of an old book which looks to 1999 as the distant future. And it’s interesting to see how the image of The Israeli has changed since the 1970’s. These Israelis are secular, socially liberal, undoubtedly vote Labor, and mostly are looking to start over in a new land that’s less crowded than home. The rebels, on the other hand, are divided between the Good Enemy (who believe in states rights) and the Sons of the Alamo (SA), who torture prisoners and deserve what they get. Reminiscent of Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, this is a guilty confection.

July 30, 2010 (permalink)

It is 1916. Major Richard Hannay and his fellow officer Sandy Arbuthnot are relaxing over breakfast at a big Hampshire country house, convalescing after some nasty scrapes at Loos and expecting presently to receive a battalion or perhaps a staff post. What arrives instead is a mission that leads them across the map of Europe, through wartime Germany and Austria to Istanbul and beyond. Their mission is to discover the source of unsettled rumblings of an Islamic revival and to prevent that revival from raising the Middle East against the Allies. A classic adventure yarn, well worth a fresh visit.

July 28, 2010 (permalink)

A collection of essays by a chef who, old and broke, found himself launched by an angry and unexpectedly-successful book into the world of celebrity. In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain adopts a frankly misogynistic, homophobic tone that plausibly reflects the hard-working men who populated his kitchens. In these essays, where we are often writing about the pleasures of Hanoi cuisine, St. Barts parties, or Per Se, the same tone becomes schtick. Bourdain’s topic in many of these essays seems to be Bad Lifestyles, but since he take great pains to deny any claim to wisdom, their point is not entirely clear. An essay that deplores tasting menus, especially Alinea’s, because they're too elaborate and attention-grabbing is in terrible taste, for Bourdain is here projecting the esoteric afflictions of the food celebrity (oh no! Not another rich delicacy!) onto his readers.

But there’s a terrific look at true skill in “My Aim Is True,” a New Yorker-style profile of the guy who cuts up fish at Le Bernardin. This is classic Bourdain territory, showing us art where we never thought to look. And the closing chapter, recounting what has happened to everyone else in Kitchen Confidential, redeems the whole volume with gentle and generous spirit.

July 24, 2010 (permalink)

Get the book.

In early modern Europe, three cities dominated the Eastern Mediterranean: Istanbul, Vienna, and Venice. Two were fading, and the third would never really become what it promised to be. The contested land that separated them became a byword for benighted backwardness and intractable conflict.

This accessible and intelligent introduction to the modern history of the Balkans runs from from the late Ottoman Empire through the aftermath of the fall of Communism. Mazower sees the long picture clearly, and is at pains to avoid romantic and sentimental myths that are at odds with the facts. This sometimes leads to odd effects, as in his treatment of the Communist era as a coda to the Second World War. He has a point: 1989 was thirty years ago and 1948 was just 41 years before that. History marches on.

What now seems especially interesting is the late Ottoman Empire and its approach to managing religions and ethnicities. It was, obviously, a failure. At the time, it seemed that Austria was making an enlightened effort and the Turk was bumbling around, but Mazower suggests this is precisely wrong — the Hapsburg’s Balkan policy can be seen as a late and futile attempt to emulate the Ottoman world without fully understanding it.

July 15, 2010 (permalink)

Hornby has a wonderful knack of making everything funny without being silly. Here, he’s being funny about teen pregnancy while, like his protagonist, taking it very seriously indeed. Fifteen-year-old skateboarder Sam Jones gets lucky with his new girlfriend, and then gets very unlucky. He takes everything very, very seriously. Naturally, hilarity ensues.

July 3, 2010 (permalink)