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Book Reviews by Mitchel Ahern
for NetSurfer Books

I have been reviewing books for Netsurfer Books since June of 2002. Please sign up for the free monthly newsletter, and check out the venerable and fabulous Netsurfer Digest as well. Here are my reviews collected for your edification and amusement.

Mystic River

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380731851/netsurferdigest

Dennis Lehane
HarperTorch; ISBN: 0380731851
I decided I had to see the movie made from this book as it takes place, and was filmed, about a mile from where I've worked for the last few years, on the other side of the Mystic River. My office is practically under the Tobin Bridge, who's distinct traffic noise you hear all through the movie. Despite the proximity I have no real knowledge at all of that neighborhood; it's a closed society, like so many neighborhoods in Boston. I read Dennis Lehane's Dorchester mystery over a couple of days before going to see the movie, and was fearful that the film couldn't live up to the power of the book. (It didn't quite, but was a terrific film nonetheless (but why is it so hard for actors to do a Boston accent? (and what accent was that exactly that Laurence Fishburne was going for?))). This is not so much a mystery, as a tragedy in which neighborhood is as much of a character in the story as any of the people. No one in the novel has any real choices, and options they had were either illusions or delusions. People are driven to their actions by blood, upbringing, and the neighborhood code. Terrible things happen, mostly as a result of attempts to escape predestined nature. Redemption may come, but it's cramped and mean, and contains the seeds of future tragedy.

Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060174099/netsurferdigest

Norman F. Cantor
HarperCollins; ISBN: 0060174099
A couple years ago I committed myself to becoming certified as a history teacher in the state of Massachusetts, which required hard-core cramming of the entirety of world history for a certification test. I wish I had read this book then. The author's goals are, if nothing, broad. He sets out to review human history from the beginnings of modern humanity (about 2.5 million years ago) to the fifth century AD, all in 227 pages. He largely succeeds, although he focuses exclusively on Western or European history, and largely ignores the rest. He specifically focuses on Egyptian, Greek, Jewish and Roman culture, what would be considered "classical" culture. Cantor first provides a narrative thread, and then goes back and discusses various cultural themes. His approach is scholarly and humanistic and his treatment of religious philosophies, themes, histories and mythologies is rather dry-eyed. He dismisses the enslavement and escape from Egypt of the Jews, and treats the resurrection of Jesus as mythological. Indeed he rather brusquely knocks over several cherished historical icons in the name of accuracy, which keeps the book interesting, but may distress some readers. Any book which attempts to cover so much territory in so few pages must reflect, at least in part. the author's own conclusions. Read this book, and use Cantor's conclusions to help draw your own.

Hot Plastic

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1401300448/netsurferdigest

Peter Craig
Hyperion; ISBN: 1401300448
I started this novel at 10:00 in the morning, and had finished it by the time I fell asleep at 10:00 at night. Do I need to write anything else? OK, then. Setting? Jim Thompson territory, almost self-consciously so, but it doesn't detract. Grifters, father and 14-year-old son, mother dead of cancer. Son falls sick so dad hires a teen-aged prostitute to sit with him. They all lam out together. Dad sleeps with the girl. Son falls in love with the girl. There's a whole series of cons, betrayals, and failures. Years go by. New relationships, new crimes, new challenges, new failures. This is a sneaky book, and it departs rather significantly from the Thompson mold. This ends up being not so much a crime novel (although there's plenty of that), but rather it's a relationship novel. The author Peter Craig doesn't have nearly a jaundiced enough view of human nature for the book to enter the noir territory you figured it for. Curiously enough this is all a good thing, as I said at the top I read it over the course of one day, and you can't ask more than that of genre fiction, even if at the end of it you're not entirely clear which genre it was you just read.

The Heat's On

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394759974/netsurferdigest

Chester Himes
Vintage; ISBN: 0394759974
What, you haven't read Chester Himes? You say you've read Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy and Dennis Lehane? Well you need to go back to the roots, and read the man who put the grit in urban crime drama. I happened to pick up The Heat's On at the library in a display of African-American writers during Black History Month. He's writing about Harlem in the middle last century, as a man who knew the streets. His police detectives "Coffin Ed" Jones and "Grave Digger" Johnson share the stage here with drug dealing faith healers, miscalculating safe crackers, and a giant painted albino. This isn't a novel about how the black community is oppressed by the white community; it's a novel about how the black community takes care of itself. For those of us outside of that community these novels give a little peak into that time and place, at the same time as they are plain old terrifically entertaining. And if some of Himes' novels seem a bit cinematic, perhaps it's because you've seen the movie.

The Great Movies

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767910389/netsurferdigest

Roger Ebert
Broadway; ISBN: 0767910389
Every so often I go to Roger Ebert's page on the Chicago Sun-Times to read about the movies. I find his essays a pleasure to read, even apart from whatever guidance they offer for my movie matinee jones. He has in this book collected and revised one hundred reviews of what he considers to be "Great Movies" (which is also a section of the site). He does take some pains to point out that these are not "the one hundred greatest movies", but rather simply movies he considers great, and it is hard to take exception to his choices. Spanning the the history of cinema the essays cover silent films, foreign films, science fiction, noir, romantic comedy, and pretty much every type of film. I've personally seen a little more than half of these movies, and felt guilty at missing many of the early, black and white, and foreign films he praises here. It's debatable whether it's more enjoyable to read about why it was one enjoyed a particular movie, or to read about a movie one has not seen but now feel compelled to add to one's rental que. Buy this book for a movie-loving friend, or buy it for yourself. Read it with a pencil in hand and check the movies you've seen and make notations when you see them again, or when as a result of reading it you see one of these movies for the first time.

Zeppelin

Ernst Lehman, Leonhard Edelt, Charles Rosendahl, translated Jay Dratler
Longmans, Green & Co.
Darn it, I'm going to review this book, even though there's no trace of it in Amazon; it doesn't even have an ISBN number for pity sake. Nevertheless this is such a vivid book I hope maybe you can pick it up somewhere, or perhaps some publisher will pick it off the scrap heap for a profitable printing. I inherited this from Uncle George, and it is more than just a history of the Zeppelin, but is a first person memoir by Captain Ernst Lehman, one of the first Zeppelin pilots, and one who was instrumental in the development of these leviathan airships. Perhaps if this had been a book about trains it might not create such incredible mental images, but Lehman's descriptions of life aboard these enormous hydrogen airships create an absolutely unique vision of the skies. His accounts of trying to deliver mail during a Brazilian revolution are gripping. His experiences as a Zeppelin pilot during the First World War are amazing. He also includes first-person accounts of other airship captain's wartime adventures. The book concludes with the last and most glorious phase of his career, the triumphant launching of post-war intercontinental Zeppelin passenger service. Tragically he literally could not write his last chapter (which was written by Charles Rosendahl), as he was on board the Hindenburg when it went down in flames in Lakehurst New Jersey. Someday this will make a fantastic graphic novel, and perhaps then someone will make the movie.

Dying for Dana

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765306492/netsurferdigest

Jim Patton
Forge; ISBN: 0765306492
It seems as if Elmore Leonard isn't writing nearly enough books these days. How else to explain the surge in Leonardial Fiction by authors other than Elmore himself? Not that this is a bad thing. That distinct gumbo of South Florida/urban Detroit small time hustlers, dopers, thieves and copes may turn out to be an American detective/crime genre comparable to the British Whodunit . Author Jim Patton has caught the easy pace and edgy characters of the style just about right. Perhaps a bit lighter on the comedic turns than a true Elmore, Dying for Dana nonetheless maintains just the right breezy tone as its various homicides, double-dealings and love triangles keep the night light on quite a bit later than will be good for you in the morning. The damaged hero of the piece is Portland Oregon (yes, yes, Portland not Miami) Prosecutor Max Travis (from Patton's first novel The Shake) who may be at the top of his game professionally, but is a serious emotional screw-up. When Travis falls in love with a sex-goddess, and her semi-ex-boyfriend robs a friend of his during which a celebrity ball-player gets killed by a whacked-out meth-head accomplice, who falls for a female news anchor . . . Well, you get the idea.

Country Guitar Chords and Accompaniment: Your Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide to Country Rhythm-Guitar

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1891370146/netsurferdigest

Yoichi Arakawa
Six Strings Music Publishing; ISBN: 1891370146
Get yourself a guitar, get a copy of this book, give yourself some practice time, and you'll find yourself a country chord strummer in a matter of weeks. This is a book for the guitar beginner. You'll get music basics, instrument basics, and then start right in learning chords and strumming techniques. Arakawa's methods are simple and easy to understand, you really don't have to have any prior knowledge of music (although a prior love of country music helps). Starting with the basics you'll learn how to make simple chords and strumming techniques. Then move on to the 12-bar blues, the Carter Family style, Finger Style Country and various other styles. If you stick to your practicing you'll be able to play songs such as that old favorite Wabash Cannonball, and maybe even sit down with better players and riff along as a rhythm guitarist. This book won't take you to the end of your musical journey, but it's a mighty fine place to start.

Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679456716/netsurferdigest

Robert K. Massie
Random House; ISBN: 0679456716
Here is a book that should be on the shelf of anyone with an interest of the Great War. No less than a comprehensive history of the war at sea between Germany, England, France and the United States this volume accomplishes the rare feat of being both thorough and captivating. Starting with the period just prior to the war <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0345375564 /netsurferdigest">Massie</A>provides a psychological portrait of the Anglophile German emperor William, and his need to emulate his relatives in England and their tremendous navy. Germany's rapid fleet building was one of the destabilizing factors contributing to the ignition of WWI, and an important factor in England's support of France against Germany, much to the surprise of the Kaiser. Germany was never able to do much with their great armada, principally due to the efforts of Admiral Jellicoe, Winston Churchill and Jackie Fisher. The latter two were responsible for the development of the Navy, and Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, understood that the best use of that Navy was to keep the German Fleet bottled up and out of play. This defensive strategy did not sit well with many politicians and the public, who lionized the aggressive but reckless Admiral Beatty, commander of the Battlecruiser Squadron, who eventually assumed command of the Grand Fleet. This is the rare combination of a terrific read and valuable reference.

Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786712503/netsurferdigest

David Pietrusza
Carroll & Graf; ISBN: 0786712503
Rothstein was the Moriarty of crooked Manhattan in the Twenties and Thirties, only he had no Sherlock Holmes
to bring him down, he had only himself. This intensively researched biography of Arnold Rothstein transforms him from the New York City criminal best remembered as Nathan Detroit from Guys and Dolls, to one of the most important criminal intelligences of the twentieth century. Know as the Great Brain or the Big Bankroll, Rothstein was a loan shark, race fixer, political operator, and he ran gambling houses in the New York City and Saratoga. He was an intimate with the high and mighty and low and mean. Nearly everyone of any notoriety of the era appears in this book, including Damon Runyon (one of his closest friends) Meyer Lansky, Funny Girl, George M Cohan, Legs Diamond, and Fats Waller must to name a few. The author makes a convincing case that the secretive Rothstein was not just involved in, but was the force behind the fixing of the 1919 World Series. He has less evidence, but good arguments, to show that he founded the first international drug-smuggling cartel, and developed the business model on which the illicit drug industry operates today. Given how enormously publicity-shy Rothstein was Pietrusza admirably captures this elusive criminal genius, the times in which he lived, and the way in which he died - gunned down in a seedy hotel room for a trifling gambling debt.

Guys & Dolls: The Stories of Damon Runyon

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140176594/netsurferdigest

Damon Runyon
Penguin USA; ISBN: 0140176594
OK, this isn't exactly the edition I read. After reading the biography of master-criminal Arnold Rothstein (reviewed elsewhere in this issue) I had to read some of the works of his close friend Damon Runyon. Rothstein himself appears in these stories as Nathan Detroit, the dapper character from Guys and Dolls. Written relentlessly in the first person present and in the vernacular of the Manhattan criminal street these darkly humorous character sketches immerse the reader in the era. You can't read these stories without hearing the dialogue spoken out loud in your head, in glorious black and white. Indeed the cinematic feel of these tales comes from the fact that so many of them were made into >movies (IMDB lists 32 movies from Runyon stories). There is a very casual almost lightweight feel to these short stories. They were written for their time, and taken all together may be a bit much for reading in one go. But as another of those perfect night-table books these tales are bite-sized journeys into another time and place. Oh, and the edition I did read? A long out-of-print WWII-era paperback titled Three Wise Guys. It smelled ever so slightly of the vanished past.

In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/037540354X/netsurferdigest

Wil Haygood
Knopf; ISBN: 037540354X
You can't read this book with being consumed with a desire to see Sammy Davis Jr.'s night club act. He was a master tap dancer, a singer, a comedian, an actor, and a gifted impressionist. He'd run across the stage, grab an instrument and jam with the band. He never gave the same act twice, even when that act was part of an ongoing broadway play. Whatver the audience needed, he gave them twice over. Seemingly no one ever saw his show without walking away amazed. Born in 1925 at the end of the vaudeville era Davis was nonetheless at heart always a vaudevillian. He first graced the stage at the age of 5, and performed continuously until his death in 1990. The ancient tradition of whites performing in blackface was still alive in his early years and Sammy himself occassionally performed in "whiteface" as a child. His experience of racism was so deep that he scarcely recognized it, at least until he entered the army during the Second World War. The author Wil Haygood spends a lot of time on how uncomfortable Davis seemed to be in his own skin. His white wives and girlfriends, his sucking up to Frank Sinatra, and his friendship with Richard Nixon all contrast strangely with his early support of Dr. Martin Luther King, his friendship with John and Robert Kennedy and his attempts to engage with the Black Power movements of the 60s. Nearly everyone remembers Sammy Davis Jr. fondly, but read this book and you too will be a fan.

Touched With Fire: Five Presidents and the Civil War Battles That Made Them

ttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1586481142/netsurferdigest

James M. Perry
PublicAffairs; ISBN: 1586481142
This is an excellent book for the Civil War neophyte, or for anyone interested in US Political History of the Late 19th Century. The author's premise is that since more future US presidents fought in that War than in any other in US history, and used their war experiences as a prominent piece of their campaign biography, that it behooves us to study the major battles they fought in, and to look at their own personal roles in the fighting. There were in fact five US presidents who fought in the war, Grant of course, as well as Hayes, Garfield, McKinley and Harrison. What makes this a great book for someone who is early in their Civil War reading arc, is its combination of deep trivia and shallow uber-history. In truth a significant part of the appeal of reading the history of The War Between the States is the discovery of charming little historical nuggets from which one can assemble one's own personal historical view. This book provides these aplenty, while providing genuine insight into the characters of some of our nation's presidents. For the committed amateur historian of The War of Northern Aggression most of this material is familiar ground, but an interesting read nonetheless, and illuminating of the Reconstruction era as well.

The Great Wave : Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375503277/netsurferdigest

Christopher Benfey
Random House; ISBN: 0375503277
There is a deep sense of melancholy and loss to this aesthetic history of the opening of Japan. For a sensitive artist in late 19th Century America the Gilded Age was a distasteful exercise in excess. Privileged aesthetes yearned for a society that valued spiritual life, and art that valued asceticism. Japan had existed in a state of self-imposed exile until forcibly opened by Admiral Perry's "black ships" of 1853. Japan represented something new to the disillusioned, a new culture whose values turned western culture on its head. The author follows the intertwined tales of several early western visitors to Japan as the focus of his study. Several of these are well known today, most were well known in there time. Henry Adams, John La Farge, Lafcadio Hearn and even Theodore Roosevelt were all part of the Japanese cult. Collectively these early wanderers brought home thousands of Japanese artifacts now housed at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, The Peabody-Essex museum and elsewhere. More important culturally were the visions and ideas they imported, which resonate today in art, architecture and philosophy.

The Hell Screen: A Mystery of Ancient Japan

ttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031228795X/netsurferdigest

I.J. Parker
St. Martin's Minotaur; ISBN: 031228795X
This here is a genuine whodunit, set in ancient Japan. Akitada Sugawara, the hero of Rashomon Gate, is returning from his successful tenure as a provincial governor, which had been something of a mixed promotion resulting from his prior sleuthing/meddling. He has to travel ahead of his family in order to visit with his estranged mother, who is dyingand stops for an evening in a wayside temple where and views an incredibly realistic and detailed screen depicting visions of hell. From here the mystery deepens into 11th century Japanese court intrigue, street life, family relations, religion and popular entertainment. The author uses his extensive knowledge of medieval Japan to take one on a cultural tour, while spinning out a thoroughly entertaining novel. True this doesn't transport in quite the same way Death of a Red Heroine did (see review above) but it keeps you snapping the pages, while sneaking just a morsel of education in when you're not looking. What more could you want?

Death of a Red Heroine

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1569472424/netsurferdigest

Qiu Xiaolong
Soho Press, Inc; ISBN: 1569472424
Every so often you read a book that transcends its genre. A book, any book, has the potential to take you someplace you've never been, but beyond that to put you into the shoes of someone you're never going to be. It is most delicious when this experience comes to you unexpectedly, as it has for me in Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine. This is what one might call a "police procedural" novel, not quite a mystery, although there is something of the "whodunnit" here. It's set in Shanghai in the middle 1990s, and China is in the midst of its transition to a market economy. Western ideas and concepts compete with those of the Marxist/Maoist, and the ground is shifting under everyone's feet. A National Model Worker has been murdered and Inspector Chen Cao, a rising star in the Party is investigating. What sets the novel apart from the general run of crime novels is the author's ability to put you into the place, physically, emotionally and philosophically. As a crime novel this is quite good, as a transporter into what it feels like to be deeply part of the Shanghai way of life the book is most excellent. I can hardly wait to read the next Inspector Chen novel A Loyal Character Dancer.

Six Books for the Coffee Table or Saturnalian Tree

All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609608029/netsurferdigest

Bruce McCall
Crown; ISBN: 0609608029
Bruce McCall lives in an odd tongue-in-cheeky place where the mundane is always taken to the level of the absurd, and it looks marvelous. His visions of the retro future of the past will almost certainly be praised as magnificently prescient by backward looking historians and pundits of the 2090's. One has only to spend some time with "Golf Carts of the Third Reich," or "New York's Transportation Future is Coming Tomorrow" before you too will see that indeed all meat does in fact look like South America.

Winged Migration

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/2020612925/netsurferdigest

Jacques Perrin, Jean-Francois Mongibeaux
Chronicle Books; ISBN: 2020612925
This book is the accompanying volume to one of the most amazing movies I have seen, Winged Migration. You leave the movie theater (and I highly recommend seeing it on a big screen, the bigger the better) feeling as if you are now an honorary member of another species. The up close cinematography of flying birds is so personal that it lets you see their expressions as they fly over some of the most thrilling landscapes on the planet. This large-format book includes several larger-yet gatefolds, and includes a section that answers the question "How did they do that?"

Zen Cat

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0875969232/netsurferdigest

Judith Adler (Author), Paul Coughlin (Author)
Rodale Press; ISBN: 0875969232
After gamely trying to work my way through two books on zen recently I have come to the conclusion that Zen is really Nihilism by way of California. Certainly there is no more nihilistic pet than the cat. This book charmingly pairs high-quality pictures of cats with top-drawer quotations that ring with the eternal charm of profound meaningfulness. Because certainly cats are profound. They're not just cozying up to us for free food and a warm bed. Are they?

Roadside America: 365 Days

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0810945401/netsurferdigest

Lucinda Lewis
Harry N. Abrams; ISBN: 0810945401
Do you know someone who's into cars? Do you know someone who truly digs the roadside iconography of automotive America? Do you know someone who needs a desk calendar? Then this is the book to get. This is 365 pages of pure car porn. No, there aren't any naked people in here; just pictures of cars and the places cars go. But what pictures. There's every sort of car in here from classic Packards to modern Ferraris. For myself though it's the photos of roadside juke joints, gaseterias and highway advertising that really grab me.

The Complete Far Side

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0740721135/netsurferdigest

Gary Larson, Steve Martin (Foreword)
Andrews McMeel Publishing; ISBN: 0740721135
Entomologists really love Gary Larson. It's not just that he is the rare cartoonist that uses bugs as an ongoing theme, it's that he really gets bugs in a deep interior sort of way. Not only that he really gets entomologists too. In fact Larson seems to deeply empathize with scientists, geeks, and all those folks from the, well, the far side. Perhaps this explains why he is still one of the world's most popular cartoonists years after he has stopped cartooning. Indeed it is remarkable for any cartoonist to be honored with such a high quality edition of their works. This two-volume set is an ideal gift, and a great tool for squashing bugs.

Invisible Universe, The

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0821226282/netsurferdigest

David Malin
Bulfinch; ISBN: 0821226282
This is a really big book, so big they have to put it in the oversize shelf in the oversize coffee table book bookcase. And it needs to be big. This is a book that means to over-awe the reader by sheer size and magnificence, and it succeeds. These are pictures of the universe, and they need to be big. These cosmic photos were all taken from the Anglo-Australian Observatory and include images of galaxies, nebula, and other interstellar wonders. The reproduction quality is top notch. These may only be pictures, but you will spend hours trying to read them.

The Best American Crime Writing 2003 : The Year's Best True Crime Reporting

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375713018/netsurferdigest

Otto Penzler (Editor), Thomas H. Cook (Editor)
Vintage; ISBN: 0375713018
This is a noble volume of excellent journalism. While many of the crimes are of a notorious character, 911, Enron, and Ruwandan Genocide, the stories are usually smaller. There is a theme expressed in these selections of examining the large by studying the particular. So we look at the attack on the twin towers by examining the life of John O'Neil, former head of FBI Counter Terrorism, and Chief of Security for the World Trade Center. He died in the attack. We look at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by following the lives of two teenaged girls, one a victim, one a suicide bomber. There are also plenty of smaller criminal stories here as well: the Asperger Syndrome man who just couldn't get enough of the NYC Mass Transit System who was incarcerated by an ignorant judicial system; the woman sold into sexual slavery in Bosnia. There are stories here that you may vaguelly remember, such as the woman killed by the neighbors dogs in her apartment hallway, that you will be grateful to have a moment to understand the strange details. There are stories here that you probably never heard of, such as the the man who couldn't decide whether to be an undertaker or a pimp, that may leave you with indelible mental images. These articles were written for the moment, but collected here they reverberate for the ages.

This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0252065948/netsurferdigest

Peter Cozzens
Univ of Illinois Pr; ISBN: 0252065948
Every major battle of the Civil War can be read as some sort of morality play. They each mark a mile post on the twisted path this country walked through that era that redefined what we are as a nation, and who we are as a people. That said it's hard to say what the lesson of Chickamauga was. The Union lost the battle, turned tail and ran, but ended up holding Chattanooga, a vital gateway to the Deep South. The South won the battle, but was unable to follow up on its victory and lost the strategic advantage they could have had. The Union General Rosecrans was removed following his defeat; the Southern General Bragg nearly lost his post when his general staff practically mutinied in protest of his performance. General officers had little control of this battle anyway. Divisions, regiments and brigades broke up in the deep woods to engage in horrifically savage fighting, well out of sight and control of their general officers, and often without the support of their commanding officers who were killed and wounded at an astonishing rate. This major work on the Battle of Chickamauga by Peter Cozzens is the definitive study of the battle. It can be a bit overwhelming at times (some recommend reading it with a good collection of battle maps close by), but the reader will be rewarded for the effort. Read it, and then visit the battlefield. You will be moved.

Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316739111/netsurferdigest

R.A. Scotti
Little Brown & Company; ISBN: 0316739111
A few years ago I was telling my father-in-law about some bad tree damage from a storm. He replied, "Well, in the hurricane of '38 all of the trees around here came down, and they've grown back pretty well. - Of course that was fifty years ago." Living memory of that great hurricane is starting to fade, and indeed outside of those who experienced it, one of the worst natural disasters in US history never made much of an impression on the US psyche. War news from Europe overshadowed it, and the destruction was so widespread, and so thorough that it was days and weeks before stories and images made their way out. The storm completely eluded the US Weather Service, which was drastically reorganized after the storm. The storm itself was a top-level Category 5, and moved very fast, over 60 miles an hour. Most who experienced it had virtually no warning at all. The day started out beautifully, started to get cloudy and then suddenly winds of over 180 miles per hour, and a wall of water washed boats, houses and entire communities out to sea. The author R.A. Scotti does an excellent job of balancing the meteorological, societal and personal stories of this tremendous disaster. Engaging and gripping this book will help you carry the memory of this large-scale calamity.

Origami As a Metaphor for the Nature of the Universe

Astute readers of NetSurfer Books will recognize that this reviewer has something of an obsession with physics, physicists, and the current debate over the quantum 10-dimensional string-like nature of the universe. Those who know the reviewer personally find this particularly amusing given his near-total inability to do anything that even smells like math. Nonetheless he is now going to make a bold personal stab at his own theory of the nature of sub-atomic particles. These particles are nay so much like strings, as like origami folds. If one takes the space-time fabric as the paper, then particles arise by a process of folding. The most simple folds represent the most basic levels of energy/matter wrapped in on itself in a specific way, increasing its energy levels and giving it form. Most basic folds occur in mirror-image variants, which explains particles and anti-particles. The most complex of origami models are all built out of these simple folds. Go to the beginning of any origami book to see those same simple folds as the basis for nearly every model. How this interacts with the wave properties of matter I'll leave to better minds than mine to work out. In the meantime here are several of my favorite small origami manuals, if nothing else these will give you something to do during those long winter nights.

Origami Rockets: Spinners, Zoomers, Floaters, and More

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312199449/netsurferdigest

Lew Rozelle
Griffin Trade Paperback; ISBN: 0312199449
These things are cool. These models are rockets not paper airplanes. They don't fly so much as shoot like a dart, but they are surprisingly aerodynamic. Broken into categories like Rockets, Landers, Zoomers, Floaters, Gliders and Soarers, these folds range from very easy to moderate in terms of difficulty. Take note: most directions end with "Caution! Don't Poke Your Eye", and its true you could really stab someone with some of these fast-moving missiles. Relatively easy folds that really zoom!

Origami for the Enthusiast

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486237990/netsurferdigest

John Montroll
Dover Pubns; ISBN: 0486237990
This is a classic book of origami animal folds by one of the masters of the field, John Montroll. This book was given to me by an origami-folding pal as being much too difficult for them, and it is probably not for the beginner, although some of the folds are simple enough for the novice. The more challenging folds are most rewarding however, and once you master the basic sequences you can create a number of different creatures. The best of these are really good; you can give them away as Christmas presents! My favorites are the mouse and the beetle.

Fabulous Origami Boxes

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0870409786/netsurferdigest

Tomako Fuse
Japan Publications; ISBN: 0870409786
I love this book. The folds are generally easy and the results are fantastic. This is an example of "modular origami" that uses several very simple folds to create pieces, which are then assembled into a larger project. In this case the final products are all boxes, most with lids. You can accomplish a lot using small variations of folds, and you can accomplish even more by careful paper use. By using beautiful hand-made papers you can craft an object that will be treasured.

3D Geometric Origami, Modular Polyhedra

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486288633/netsurferdigest

Rona Gurkewitz and Bennett Arnstein
Dover Pubns; ISBN: 0486288633
OK, I challenge anyone to make some of these models and not feel as if they're playing with the building blocks of reality. This book of modular origami uses very simple folds to make models of astonishing complexity. Most of these models scale up, such that if you use 12 units you'll make a Truncated Dodecahedron, if you use 24 unites you'll make a Truncated Octahedron, or if you use 60 units you'll make a Truncated Icosahedron. Sure it'll take you days to make all the parts, but the results are outstanding. I once made a 60-unit Truncated Icosahedron out of paper that was 30 inches per side which stood nearly 4 feet tall and contained a smaller identical unit suspended within. We set it on fire and rolled it down a hillside to celebrate the Summer Solstice. Most satisfying.

Brilliant Origami: A Collection of Original Designs

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0870408968/netsurferdigest

Mark Bowden
Japan Publications; ISBN: 0870408968
This is something of a "new wave" origami book, and it is quite good. These are all original designs by David Brill and represent something of an overview of modern origami. There are modular folds, people, animals, practical folds and examples of "wet-folding" which uses damp paper to get truly life-like effects. My personal favorite is a relatively easy one. Start with a single square of two-sided paper, and end up with a realistic 8-page hardbound book. Makes a wonderful gift for the literarily inclined.

Origami Sea Life

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486267652/netsurferdigest

John Montroll and Robert J. Lang
Dover Pubns; ISBN: 0486267652
Do you fold origami already, or know someone who does? This isn't a book for beginners, and will be a challenge for the adept, but the models are amazing. Who would have thought that you could fold a sea urchin, or a cuttlefish, or a blackdevil angler out of a single square of paper? I have only successfully made a few of these, the most complex of these will take hours to complete (good for long airplane rides). However this is the only place I have seen the "starfish" fold, which is very simple and most clever. A perfect star, out of a square of paper. I've made dozens of these out of foil for our Christmas tree, and those of friends, family and neighbors.

The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0142000957/netsurferdigest

Mark Bowden
Penguin USA; ISBN: 0142000957
Mark Bowden has a gift for writing non-fiction that puts the reader in the action. One feels this acutely in his Black Hawk Down (which was made into a successful motion picture by director Ridley Scott). In Killing Pablo Bowden brings the reader into the search and assassination of one of histories most notorious drug barons, Pablo Escobar. The book begins broadly, with a 45-year history of violence in Columbia, which is of almost unimaginable cruelty and capriciousness. This period of ultra-violence (La Violencia) segued neatly into the rise of the drug economy in which only the most violent, most cruel, and most extreme player would win. That man was Pablo Escobar. He was very smart, utterly ruthless, and a man of his people, or at least he portrayed himself that way. At the height of his wealth and power he was worth billions and his art-encrusted estates dotted Columbia. He sought political power, and gained a toehold in Columbian government. This proved to be too much for Columbia, and even more so for the US, who feared a narco-state practically at the US border. The last section of the book details the increasing brutal, and often illegal war the US and Columbia made on Escobar and his associates. It was of course, successful, but the cost was very very high.

Disturbing the Universe

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465016774/netsurferdigest

Freeman J. Dyson
HarperCollins; ISBN: 0465016774
Is Freeman Dyson the inspiration for Gordon Freeman, the gun-toting alien-offing physicist protagonist of Half Life, the first-person shooter computer game? Well, in a way, yes. Freeman Dyson was a noted physicist, accomplished author, and social critic. He worked for the RAF during the Second World War, and went on to become first a cold warrior and then an activist for peace. This is an intellectual autobiography, and Dyson wants you to understand the joy and promise he finds in scientific endeavor, and he wants you to understand why scientists are motivated to do science. To accomplish this he lets you into his personal relationships with many of the most important scientists of his era including Bethe, Feynman, Oppenheimer and Teller. Indeed one of the most oddly courageous things he does in this book is stick up for the much-maligned Teller (of whom his formerly close friend Bethe says the world would have been better off without). Throughout the book you are treated to Freeman's love of poetry, which he quotes extensively to make various points. You also feel his deep love of family, which includes well-known Internet theorist Esther Dyson. Oh yeah, and he was one of the first scientists to search for alien life. . .

Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, And the Theory of Everything

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316326143/netsurferdigest

John Gribbin
Bantam; ISBN: 0316326143
This is the search for the Theory of Everything by way of getting ever smaller. John Gribbon aims to make quantum particle physics understandable to the most mathematically impaired reader (of which I count myself as a member). You are taken through the devilishly subtle distinction between particle functions and wave functions of the same phenomena, but once you nearly grasp the differences and similarities you're off in search of those "little hard bits" of energy. From atoms, to the atomic components of neutrons, protons and electrons; to the components of the components, and the sub features of the components you are given a tour of the tiniest little pieces of everything you see around you. The remarkable thing is that you really almost get it, at least enough to give you really weird dreams. The book is leading you on to grasp current thinking on string theory, which is the idea that all of those tiny little bits of beingness are the result of tiny little bits of string vibrating in 10 dimensions. Yeah sure, but still it's an awful lot of fun trying to wrap your head around it.

Brotherhood of the Bomb : The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080506589X/netsurferdigest

Gregg Herken
Owl Books; ISBN: 080506589X
Robert J. Oppenheimer is my personal hero of the 20th century. A left-wing radical who personally fathered the atomic bomb. A man who read Sanskrit poetry in the original language who helped father the military-industrial complex. A man who fought for international control of atomic energy while fighting for his top military security clearance. In short a man of profound talent and deep personal conflict. Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and the recently departed Edward Teller had the most crucial roles in the development of atomic and thermonuclear weaponry. For a time they all worked together, and were even close friends, but by the time WWII ended their relationships had begun to shred and by the fifties they were in deep conflict. Not just a personal conflict but a conflict that played out in public and which shaped national nuclear policy for generations. Recent declassification of both US and Soviet archives sheds light on much of went on then, but for those familiar with the period with these files mostly enlarge and enhance what was already known. During congressional hearings on Oppenheimer's loyalty Teller famously questioned his one-time collaborator's trustworthiness, losing Oppenheimer his security clearance and losing Teller the respect and friendship of many of his fellow scientists. Oppenheimer returned to academia. Teller gave us "Star Wars."

Dreaming Pachinko

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060516232/netsurferdigest

Isaac Adamson
Dark Alley; ISBN: 0060516232

Really rather an odd sort of novel. Japanese magical realism? Psychedelic travelogue? This is the third Billy Chaka novel (although the first for me), and it rocks right along. Chaka is a correspondent for a Cleveland-based teen magazine called Youth in Asia (yes, yes, I know), hunting down a facially mauled has-been pop-star half-a-duo (the other half is dead) who has descended to pachinko parlor habitué for a "Where Are They Now" sort of story. He meets up with a woman with a strangely attractive mole who suffers an immediate seizure and then turns up dead. Her girlfriend befriends him, her boyfriend seemed to think she was somebody else, and then there's the ghost behind the welded-shut door downstairs. Meanwhile the city of Tokyo itself is the novel's counter-protagonist. It's violent past, chaotic present and uncertain future all intertwine with the characters and their actions. This is all great stuff, and has me hooked. I'm going to back-read the first two Chaka novels, and maybe by then there'll be a third.

The Penguin Complete Father Brown

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/014009766X/netsurferdigest

Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Viking Press; ISBN: 014009766X

I cannot fall asleep without reading. Most often I have an "upstairs book" I'm carrying on with, but occasionally find myself between readings and so keep a collection of permanent, re-readable volumes within easy reach. G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories are always in that stack. Chesterton was an amateur Catholic theologian of some repute, and these very English detective stories all bear signs of that stigmata. And yet they do not suffer for it, rather they are enhanced, for Father Brown is not principally interested in bringing the transgressor to justice before the law, but rather to bring the villain to his proper relationship with God. It gives these stories at times a curiously amoral effect. Like the great Sherlock Holmes very often Brown forgoes the laws of man altogether, when he is satisfied that true justice has been done. The tales themselves partake of all that one could wish of the British whodunnit, and they are all of an easily digestible size, just the thing to encourage a gentle nodding off.

WWII: Two Reports from the Burma Campaign

The Marauders

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585672343/netsurferdigest

Charlton Ogburn, Jr
Overlook Press; ISBN: 1585672343

Charlton Ogburn Jr knew well enough that if an assignment was desirable there was no need to ask for volunteers, but he really wanted to do his fighting in a warm climate. He got his wish. Merrill's Marauders were assigned an almost impossible task. To push back the Japanese in some of the most inhospitable jungles in the South Pacific, and to do so with minimal support, with nearly all supplies to be airdropped in. The men were nearly all volunteers, some were combat veterans of brutal pacific island fighting, and others were either volunteering or headed to the brig. Their mission from General Stillwell was to help drive the Japanese out of Burma. They would fight along side the Chinese, but the Chinese were poorly armed, poorly trained, and often of mixed allegiance. In a series of surprise flank attacks the Marauders succeeded in pushing back the numerically superior Japanese, but they were ultimately used up, creating something of a scandal in its day. This book documents their missions from the beginning until the unit nearly melted away. The Marauders reads like a movie, which of course had to be made by Sam Fuller.

Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802138527/netsurferdigest

Barbara Tuchman
Grove Press; ISBN: 0802138527

"Vinegar" Joe Stilwell was a famous SOB, but he could get the job done. He was in charge of a neglected theater of war, with few resources and allies with distinctly mixed motivations. He drove the men fighting for him to the limit of their ability and beyond (see above). He drove his superiors crazy. Barbara Tuchman uses her portrait of the general to show us a neglected but critically important corner of history. She uses the man to show us the times, and the maddeningly slippery relationship between personality and history. Stillwell, Chennault and Chiang Kai Shek were allies and competitors. Great historical trends are at work, and find their protagonists in these men. Like all of Tuchman's works this doesn't read like history, it is gripping and entertaining. It's only later you realize how much better informed you are having read it. The later wrenching controversies of "Who lost China" and "How did we get into Vietnam" find at least part of the answer here. Anyone with an interest in the times or place will enjoy.

Ball Four

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0020306652/netsurferdigest

Jim Bouton
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0020306652
I inherited this book from an uncle, or else I doubt I would have read it, I'm not really much of a sports fan, and certainly don't go in for sports autobiography. But this isn't so much a book about baseball; well actually it's a book totally about baseball. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's a book about being inside something that most people don't get to be inside of. It's not so much about the subject; it's about Bouton's ability to put you in his shoes, which have been nailed to the floor by one of his teammates. This isn't a book about baseball, it's a book about what its like to be a professional baseball player. And it's damned funny. I remember (barely) that when this book came out there was a bit of outcry from outraged fellow teammates and owners. I don't doubt it. The drugs, the women, the fans, and idiotic team owners and managers are yanked out into the daylight smelling vaguely of foot powder. I'm sure baseball has changed greatly since this book was written in the early 70s (for one thing big league players aren't grateful to be making $40,000 per year), but these short-form chapters on a year late in his career are an easy and hilarious read nonetheless.

The Hollywood Murders

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568581734/netsurferdigest

Ellery Queen
Four Walls Eight Windows; ISBN: 1568581734
OK I admit it, I didn't actually read this novel, I read a different Ellery Queen novel, but it isn't in print. In fact nearly all of the Ellery Queen novels are out of print. This is a shame, but unsurprising. For in the Queen universe things are much simpler than they are now. Men had not yet been transformed into the puling milketoasts they are in the new millennia. Men were tough guys, thugs, bullet heads, they smoked, they drank, and they knew how to use a gun. Women were prostitutes, or hopheads, or floozies, or maybe they were just plain dames. Striding through the tales are the Ubermen. Queens's heroes and heroic villains rise above the necks of the sidewalk citizens like gorillas amongst chimpanzees. I'm sure this book is every bit as good as the one I read, and you should have it. Every man's library requires at least one copy of Ellery Queen, if you're man enough, that is.

The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471272426/netsurferdigest

Robert T. Carroll
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471272426
Pardon me, but didn't we used to live in a rational society? I distinctly remember that when I was growing up the Age of Reason was considered a good thing. Don't they teach thinking in school any more? Or have mysterious enemies been poisoning our national vital fluids with goofy juice? Cast your mind in any direction and odds are you'll reel in inanity of some boggling dimension. Fortunetellers and seancists inhabit the airwaves like so many carnival hucksters. Schoolbooks in Georgia are required to have warning stickers espousing bio-evolutionary precepts as written in millennia-old religious texts. According to the bumper stickers Angels and other spiritual whatnots are hovering so thickly they need to be hip checked just to get an elbow on the bar. Next time some valued co-worker spouts some idiocy that leaves your jaw dangling for lack of response, trundle back to your desk and quickly consult the Skeptics Dictionary. You'll get a better idea of the rotten intellectual underpinnings of said tom foolishness, and have a couple of counter arrows of your own to sling back. It's probably too late to stem the human tide of numbskulls, but maybe you can take a few of them with you.

The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585422541/netsurferdigest

Jeremy Rifkin
J. P. Tarcher; ISBN: 1585422541
You should definitely buy this book, but don't bother to read it. Nobody really reads these sorts of books, do they? The whole point of having a book like this is for it to look good on your bookshelf, or maybe even on the coffee table, or in a pile of books displayed spine-out on the corner of your desk. Owning a book like this brands you as the sort of intellectual other intellectuals will want to procreate with. You will demonstrate you own individual buy-in to an energy-efficient future, even as you drive your Range Rover in the here-and-now. After all why bother about the present if the future is gonna be great. Think of this as a soft-cover band aid over your niggling sense of personal over-consumption. It might help to run your thumb over the corner a few times to give it that lived-in look. Maybe just take a look at the table of contents in case it comes up at a cocktail party. Read the dust jacket maybe.

Life With Jeeves: The Inimitable Jeeves, Very Good, Jeeves!, and Right Ho, Jeeves

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140059024/netsurferdigest

PG Wodehouse
Viking Press; ISBN: 0140059024
There is, I think, a certain sort of book which is published for the nightstand. My personal all-time favorite is the collected Sherlock Holmes (previously reviewed). One of these three books is generally right alongside it. These collections of short stories are by the master of the English comedy of manners PG Wodehouse, and include all of the short stories featuring Bertie Wooster and his gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves. Reading them all together like this one is struck by the repetition of technique. Bertie purchases a garment of extravagantly garish taste; Jeeves sniffs; troubles ensue, often involving domineering aunts, prospective fiancés, or the love traumas of his old school chums. After Bertie makes a clumsy effort to sort out the difficulty on his own, Jeeves steps in and all is made well, after which Bertie dutifully turns in the sartorial item of his man's displeasure (generally to find that it has already been disposed of). But of course you don't read Wodehouse for the plot, really even the novels run on basically the same tracks. You read Wodehouse for the indelibly delightful turn of phrase. You read and reread him for the same reason.

2003 Guide to Domestic Spying, the USA Patriot Act, and the DARPA Information Awareness Office: Surveillance, Computer Intercepts, Technologies for Anti-Terrorism (Core Federal Information Series CD-ROM)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1592482155/netsurferdigest

US Government
Progressive Management; ISBN: 1592482155
So lets just be clear. US intelligence services, including the FBI, CIA, Border Patrol and others had all the information they needed to prevent the 9-11 attacks. They were simply unable to process and collate that information, mostly due to bureaucratic / political infighting, and lack of focus. Therefore it seems obvious that the Patriot Act is not at its core about combating terrorism, but is pointed at some other target. But whom? Again the answer is obvious in the very name of the act. The Patriot Act is written to combat anyone who is not a "patriot." And who would they be? The administration occupying the White House, Justice Department and Legislative Branch have made this clear as well. Anyone who is against them is aiding the terrorists. This would include anyone who won't sing the Attorney General's psychotic patriotic songs, or pray at his staff meetings. This includes anyone participating in an "alternative lifestyle." This includes anyone who is in favor of a woman's right to choose. This includes violators of "intellectual property." This includes violations of secret ordinances, which you don't know about. Or read The War on Our Freedoms to find out more.

All This and the World War Won

It's August and the lights are going out. The guns are echoing in the distance. First person memories of The Great War are slowly fading into the eternal night, leaving the living to consider the meaning of global imperial war at the turn of the century - but which century? The First World War, The Great War, or the War to End All Wars, is still being fought. The Arab/Israeli wars, the Gulf Wars, and the Balkan Wars, all have their roots in the World War I. It began in August, so August seems a good time to take a look at some books about the conflagration that burned up the old way of life, and buried a generation of men in chalky European mud.

An uncle recently passed away, and I inherited his history library. Uncle George Walker read all of these books (some 2 or three times), and I thank him and his daughters for the privilege of reading them. They aren't all in print, but you can usually find them in Amazon's used book area.

July '14

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005XKJZ/netsurferdigest
Emil Ludwig
Putnam; ISBN: B00005XKJZ
Whose fault was the war? According to Emil Ludwig it was the leadership of Europe who marched the world to war at the point of a bayonet. He writes in a curiously "anthropomorphic" style, where he tries to get inside the head of his subjects, which comes off as a bit quaint nearly 80 years later. And yet whether or not he really knew what the great men of empire were thinking, one comes away with a real sense of the nature of the era's national leaders, and how their personalities motivated their decision-making. Leopold Count von Berchtold comes off particularly badly, as the man most responsible for manipulating the continent into the cascading series of events that led to mobilization and war. Ludwig, who clearly most sympathized with the Socialists, saw French Socialist leader Jean Jaures as the last best hope of peace. With his assassination, that hope died and war was waged.

The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345405013/netsurferdigest

Barbara Tuchman
Ballantine Books; ISBN: 0345405013
Whose fault was the war? According to Barbara Tuchman (the most readable of all historians) it was everybody. This analysis of the years leading up to the days before the war began is not concerned with the military nature of the war, but rather the social conditions that lead to it. She writes to dispel certain popular illusions about the period leading up to the war. The first is that this era was a "golden age." She notes that the only time one finds discussion of the era in those terms, it is after the war was fought. She particularly wants to put to bed the notion that the working class, and bourgeoisie peoples were largely against the war, and the war was forced upon them by their rulers. Tuchman doesn't force her conclusion on the reader, but she paints a picture of an era in which societal institutions are being dismantled by rapid technological changes. The war is the final symptom of collapse. The book ends with the death of Jaures, who is not seen as the last hope of peace, but the end of an era of more gentle illusions.

Then read <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/034538623X/netsurferdigest">The Guns of August</A>
by Tuchman.

August 1914: The Red Wheel

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140071229/netsurferdigest

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Penguin USA; ISBN: 0140071229
Who fought the war? All of Europe, including Russia. The war has already started when this novel begins, a novel which can and should be read as history. It has been difficult for me to understand Russia in the First World War, there is something about Russian nature that is too foreign for me to easily empathize with. Solzhenitsyn lets the reader see the war as a Russian might have seen it. As a novel it's big, long, and somewhat incoherent. Characters are developed and disappear. Some of the device the author uses to present a broad picture of a military action that any one individual would only see a tiny slice of seem a bit forced. But read as a military/social history this is brilliant and engaging.

First Day on the Somme

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140171347/netsurferdigest

Martin Middlebrook
Penguin Uk; ISBN: 0140171347
Who lost the battle of the Somme? Martin Middlebrook sides with the soldiers and points his fingers at the Generals. The Battle of the Somme took place on the First of July 1916, and was the first great attack by the British. The army that fought it was nearly all patriotic volunteers who thought that this was their moment of Glory. The 8-day artillery bombardment was the longest and heaviest in history until that point, and had been expected to cut all the barbed wire, disrupt logistics, destroy the artillery, smash the trenches, break the dugouts, kill most of the German soldiers, and disorient the rest. It did not. Once the signal came to go "over the top" of the trenches they were met with a rainstorm of lethal metal. By the end of the day 62,000 soldiers would be dead, two for every yard of the British line. The Battle was to ultimately last for over 3 months and kill 420,000 British soldiers, but each subsequent day of battle merely tragically refought the first.

My Company

Captain Carroll J. Swan, USA
Houghton Mifflin
Who won the war? By golly it was the USA! I include this deservedly out-of-print company history because it too represents a point of view. Written as a sort of Boy Scout camp memoir I can't really recommend this except as a historical artifact. The photos are quite interesting though.

A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195159241/netsurferdigest

John E. Ferling
Oxford University Press; ISBN: 0195159241
There is no period in American history more scabbed over with politico-educational can than that period during which this country was formed. Everyone uses the founding fathers to further their own limited partisan squabble. This has turned me and others off to the reading of American revolutionary history, compare the inches of shelf space devoted to it as opposed to Civil War era history. This is too bad, because it was a fascinating and important time. The forces of history, geography, geopolitics, partisan bickering, and intellectual ferment created a nation out of a collection of colonial entities, and created a democratic vision of governance that is the dominant model over 200 years later. The personalities who accomplished these things resonate with us still: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and are themselves the object of several recent studies. John Ferlings book A Leap in the Dark is an excellent place to start the study of the birth of this nation. He covers all of the many factors that made this a critical time, and does so in an interesting narrative manner, taking the reader from the first glimmerings of revolution through to the inauguration of Jefferson in 1801. Once started in on this period, I think it will be hard to stop.

Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385507879/netsurferdigest

Mimi Swartz, Sherron Watkins
Doubleday; ISBN: 0374236488
It was recently announced that Enron's creditors were going to get a lot less than most bankruptcy creditors, about 18 cents on the dollar, and with Enron's bankruptcy being one of the biggest of all time, that makes for a lot of lost dollars. The story of how one of the world's largest companies with enormous international operations, billions of dollars in equity, and so politically connected that it bankrolled the current president's victory and had many former employees ensconced in the administration, revealed itself as the proverbial house of cards makes for page-turning reading. There are plenty of bad-guys to go around here, from founder Kenneth Lay who seemed adept at maintaining plausible deniability, to Jeffrey Skilling browbeating anyone who questioned him. But the most astonishing is Andy Fastow, the Enron CFO who, while supposedly representing Enron's interests, set up multiple bogus corporations ostensibly to help shield Enron from financial risk, which coincidentally put tens of millions of dollars into his own pocket. Co-author Sharron Watkins was the famous whistle blower (although she only blew her whistle internally) who worked for years in several different divisions. He inside insight pins the blame not on one person, but rather Enron's culture of pure, unadulterated, greed.

Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374236488/netsurferdigest

James McManus
Farrar Straus & Giroux; ISBN: 0374236488
Now, I'm not what you might call a degenerate gambler, but I do enjoy the occasional game, which has mutated a bit over the years. Once we played all those goofy wild card games, Follow the Queen, Auction, Pass the Trash, etc., but now we're playing a bit more hard core: Texas Hold'em, and Hi-Lo Omaha. The pinnacle of Hold'em is the pinnacle of poker: The World Series of Poker at Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas. Harpers' sent Jim McManus to Las Vegas to cover the 2000 World Series of Poker, as well as to cover the murder trial of Ted Binion former host of the game and son of the notorious Benny Binion founder of the World Series. Telling his wife that he needed to play the game in order to write about it he sinks a goodish chunk of the family fortune into entering a satellite table which will feed into the big game. Not only does he win the satellite, but he goes on to become the only journalist/player ever to make it to the final table. Not only that, as a result he gets to meet the Binion family and be there with them when the final courtroom verdict is read. These twined tales, along with other Las Vegas nuggets, make for good seamy fun all around, and as an added bonus his bibliography contains all of the author's poker self-help books. They worked for him . . .

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465078362/netsurferdigest

Lee Smolin
Basic Books; ISBN: 0465078362
Physics is the new LSD. Forget the ingestion of mind-altering substances, simply try to wrap your head around what's happening today in the particle accelerators of academia and not only will the walls breath, they'll cease to exist. Lee Smolin writes this cutting-edge-science-for-liberal-art-majors text in an easily understandable style, using simple illustrations and examples, but the material he's presenting is so utterly counter-intuitive and bizarre that you'll be hard pressed to make any real sense of it. Start with this: everything you know about reality is wrong, in fact everything you know about what was wrong with reality is wrong too. I can't honestly summarize the book for you, I'm going to have to reread it a couple of times to do that. But among the weirder things it has to say about current thinking in quantum physics is that space is granular, that in fact there is a smallest piece of space, beyond which you can no further divide. Another factoid which caught my fancy is that the big bang wasn't a big bang, but rather a big freeze. The universe is the result of a big cool-down from the Planck temperature which is so hot that the geometry of time and space melts. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, bub.

Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767905385/netsurferdigest

Stan Redding, Frank W. Abagnale
Broadway Books; ISBN: 0767905385
Frank Abagnale, the "hero" and co-author of this amazing true tale of mile-high con-artistry was a pioneer of modern check fraud and identity theft. Well not so much theft of identity, but rather theft of role. Passing himself off as an Airline Pilot, University Professor, Doctor, Lawyer and, when pressed, FBI agent, Abagnale pocketed millions of dollars, and bedded scores of pretty girls. Many of his most outrageous charades were accomplished when he was still in his teens. Combining limitless audacity, an observant eye for human behavior, and a delicate touch of forgery he begins his criminal career by passing himself off as an airline pilot, the height of early 60s cool. With a PanAm captain's uniform and fake papers he flies "deadhead" in the jump seat from city to city cashing bad checks wherever he goes. When things get a bit too hot, he passes himself off as Sociology professor, a Harvard-trained lawyer (he even manages to pass the state bar exam with help from his friends), and a Pediatrician - briefly heading the pediatrics department of a hospital in Atlanta. I read this book on a family vacation. We ended up reading chunks of it aloud to each, it was so amazing and amusing. Also available in audio versions
and as a very enjoyable movie.

The Bug: A Novel

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385508603/netsurferdigest

Ellen Ullman
Doubleday; ISBN: 0385508603
In her first novel/memoir, Close to the Machine, Ellen Ullman successfully depicted the interior life of a computer programmer (herself), and, more improbably, made it interesting and fun to read. In <I>The Bug</I>, Ullman achieves something even more improbable - she builds a novel around the desperate programming struggles of a software coder. She does this entirely honestly, with no resorting to plot gimmickry. Ethan Levin is a thwarted academic writing software at the dawn of the graphical interface era for a start-up database company. He is writing at the limit of his abilities, but proud to be keeping ahead of his deadlines, when a new and particularly stubborn bug turns up. Already short of interpersonal skills (a programmer stereotype, yes, but an earned one), his deepening focus on solving the problem begins a cycle of interpersonal damage that erodes his career, and his relationships with fellow humanity. I suspect this book will appeal less to code warriors themselves than to the rest of us who live amongst them. It is an illuminating glimpse into the mental landscape of those for whom machines are more fascinating than they who use them.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517220784/netsurferdigest

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Gramercy; ISBN: 0517220784
I write in praise of Sherlock Holmes. One of the most printed and read books of all times, the consulting detective stories and novels of Sir Conan Doyle are as fun to read now as they were in the Victorian era in which they were written. Holmes himself is a curiously modern man, utterly devoid of the sentimentality of his age, he is utterly focused on the pursuit of crime, not for money, or from altruism, but because it amuses him. Watson, an intelligent and resourceful gentleman in his own right, is our window into Holmes' very private obsession. Modern detective fiction springs complete from Doyle's vision, indeed the very concept of a private detective begins here. I was struck on my most recent reading that the script model for the popular television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigations is lifted directly: a mysterious crime takes place, the detective arrives on the scene and examines the evidence minutely using specialized tools, the evidence suggests further researches, and finally he announces his conclusions to the amazement of his peers and consternation of the accused. No library is complete without Sherlock Holmes, and he can profitably be read again and again and again.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609608444/netsurferdigest

Erik Larson
Crown Pub; ISBN: 0609608444
The 1893 Columbian World's Fair in Chicago was a wonder to the world. It introduced wonders and terrors to its visitors that reverberate to this day: the first Ferris wheel, AC electricity, shredded wheat, and a new understanding of architecture that would change the way building and cities were thought of and designed. The story of how the fair came to be reads like an issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. The nation's greatest architects, Burnham, Olmstead and McKim working alongside Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B Anthony, Thomas Edison, George Ferris and others created an entire city on a gargantuan scale in less than 3 years. This history is written in such a compelling and dramatic fashion that it makes most novels seem rather flat by comparison. Larson tells another story alongside that of the Exposition, that of Henry Holmes, who build his own horrific hotel of horror just blocks from the fair, in which he tortured and killed unsuspecting visitors. One often finds artifacts and traces of the 1893 Columbian World's fair: trinkets in antique shops and historical references. Reading this gripping history will make it all real.

Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679463224/netsurferdigest

Bruce Sterling
Random House; ISBN: 0679463224
Bruce Sterling knows something about the future, having written about it himself. Well, to be fair, or if not fair accurate, or if not accurate, balanced, he's written about the future and his many fans give him credit for prescience. He has apparently traded on his prescience credit to join the ranks of the corporate-societal futurists. These are a class of people (with their own magazine), who go about telling businessmen and politicians what's going to happen next. This is a big business; if you know the future, even a little part of it, you could be rich, or powerful, or both. The essays included in this book cover most aspects of modern life, birth, death, war, and wealth. They are not so much prediction of the future, but examinations of the present and its implications on the future. The present is after all the past's future.

The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-To-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0815412215/netsurferdigest

Marilynne K. Roach
Cooper Square Press; ISBN: 0815412215
This is a terrifying book. As the father of a 15-year-old girl, I try to imagine what it would be like to give her the power of life and death, based on how her ability to throw a fit. It's not a pretty contemplation. In an era, not unlike our own, when occult powers were given great credit, and religious principles formed the basis of government, the infamous witch hysteria swept out of Salem Village into New England, eventually claiming twenty lives. Using over 25 years of meticulous research the author Marilynne K. Roach chronicles the accusations, trials and consequences of the Salem Witch Trials day by day from 1692 to 1697. The formal examinations of the accused suspects are particularly disturbing. Imagine standing in the dock in front of convulsing teenagers who claim that your invisible spirit (visible to them) is pinching, choking and stabbing them. Imagine that despite your protests the judges agree with the tormented children, and sentence you to death for your misdeeds. This is not merely ancient history. I live about 5 miles from where these events took place. Recently a stone sculptural image of one of the victims was formally removed from a neighboring high school, guilty once of associating with the wrong sort of spirits.

Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679463062/netsurferdigest

Helene Stapinski
Random House; ISBN: 0679463062
Forget the Sopranos and their upper-middle-class angst-ridden name-brand criminal saga, the Stapinskis are the real New Jersey deal. Jersey City wasn't a place where immigrants settled, it was a place they settled for, writes Helene Stapinski in this family autobiography. It collected those too exhausted from the voyage to make it far enough away from the ferry from Ellis Island. The child of a Polish father and an Italian mother Stapinski evokes the sounds, tastes and smells of two cultures. Ah yes, the smells: coffee from the Maxwell House plant, soap from Colgate-Palmolive, Cocoa from the Van Leer factory, or other less savory smells from the bone-rendering plant. Living above a bar, across the street from City Hall all the sounds and hard-lived life of the city come through these pages. It all seemed pretty normal to a child who hadn't known anything else, there were always friends and cousins to play with and food on the table. And the food was terrific. Father would come home with steaks, restaurant entrees, lobster tails and incredible frozen deserts all courtesy of the cold storage facility where he worked. But the heart of this story is family. Uncle Tommy in the nuthouse, Aunt Mary stealing books from American Bookbinding, or Grandpa "Beansie" who tried to kill them all.

Pattern Recognition

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0399149864/netsurferdigest

William Gibson
Putnam Pub Group; ISBN: 0399149864
William Gibson has been one of my favorite authors since I bought Neuromancer to read on the plane to England on our honeymoon. There wasn't anything quite like it up til then, and he's consistently been one of my favorite science fiction authors ever since, never disappointing and often revealing a new vista of the near future. Therefore it was with some trepidation I picked up his first non-science-fiction novel. Was Gibson going for "respectability?" Was he trying to climb out of the sci-fi ghetto and go for the Kathy and Regis book tour? The first few pages weren't reassuring, too much Bret Easton Ellisonian brand name dropping. And then it was 4:00 in the morning. Gibson no longer needs to write about the future, it's already here. Video phones are a mass-market item. Information is ubiquitous. Paranoia is the new reality. Memotic viruses spread through the population faster than biologic viruses, sometimes indistinguishable from each other. Organized crime, organized politics and organized religion are all faces of the same power structure with which the vast majority of us react to, but do not participate in. It's a dystopian future we live in, true, but the toys are really cool.

Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743225708/netsurferdigest

Ben Mezrich (Author)
Free Press; ISBN: 0743225708
Self-appointed Moral's Czar William Bennett's recent exposure as a degenerate gambler did not come as a shock to too many people. Rich, important, smart, powerful people need an outlet. What comes as a shock is that his game of choice was high-stakes slot machines. A sucker's game. There's only one game of skilled played against the house in the gambling halls of the world: blackjack. The only game where skill and teamwork can give you an advantage over the casino. Bringing Down the House tells the tale of an MIT team who used role-playing, card counting, and human engineering to win millions from Las Vegas. Mysterious backers front the money to a picturesquely motley crew of non-descript brainiacs led by a secretive mad scientist who teaches them all how to break the bank scientifically. It works. They make millions for the team. They're comped into the ritziest casinos in the USA. They date supermodels. They are betrayed. Someone, never revealed, sells them out. They get caught, threatened, and beat up. Apartments are searched and trashed. If it all seems too much like a movie to be real, I can tell you that I play poker with one of the characters ("Andrew Tay") and he really is a tall, arrogant dufus who plays a mean mean game of cards.

The Master of Go

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679761063/netsurferdigest

Yasunari Kawabata, Edward G. Seidensticker (Translator)
Simon & Schuster; ISBN: 0679761063
I've been learning to play Go, but not very successfully. I don't really know anyone who plays, so I've been reading books, and playing a bit online. The problem with online play, though, is that it's hard to ask people what's actually going on; why are they making particular moves. However, I have learned enough to follow the game that is the heart of The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata. This is a slightly fictionalized version of a famous Go match played by the elderly ranking master, and an upstart young pretender to the throne. Played over six months in 14 different sessions at various locations in 1938 the match was eagerly followed all over Japan, and reported on by the author. The match itself is only the foreground of this book; the real story is the change in Japan from its traditional ways to the modern era. Taking place just before war with the US this story is both a narrative and a glimpse into a time and culture very foreign to most western readers. The Master of Go won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, and should be read by anyone familiar with the game, or anyone interested in Japanese culture.

Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684873230/netsurferdigest

Hunter S Thompson
Simon & Schuster; ISBN: 0684873230
Holy shit, Hunter S Thompson is still alive? Yes he is, and he's the same bastard he always was. Has he slowed down at least? It doesn't seem so, by reading this, his autobiography. An autobiography of sorts anyway. Did all of this really happen? Inside or outside of his head? Does it matter? Not really, one doesn't' read HST for the facts anyway. You read him for what he has to say, and you read him for his undeniable skill as a writer and humorist. He's funny and observant, even when, or even especially when, it comes to his own life. Indeed nearly all of his writing is autobiographical at some level. "Gonzo Journalism" is characterized by the interjection of the writer into the story, at the expense of "objectivity." Of course the truth is that journalists are always a part of their story, often the reason for the story, and that objectivity is a construct that tends to fall apart when poked too hard. There is a story early on in the book about a mailbox, FBI agents and asking the pointed question. This seems to be the defining moment of Thompson's life. The lesson: authority backs down when confronted with the quest for truth. It's a good lesson. Read on to find out how he applies it to political opponents, judges, nutcase fame groupies, and weasels of every stripe.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Movie-Tie In: An Unauthorized Autobiography

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743529383/netsurferdigest

Chuck Barris
Farrar Straus & Giroux; ISBN: 0743529383
I was a TV-kid. I remember Chuck Barris and his shows. He was far and away the craziest character on television. Not put-on crazy like the people on Laugh-In or the contestants on Lets Make a Deal; more like there-something-wrong-with-this-guy crazy. He'd stagger and lurch around the Gong Show stage wearing an oversized hat spouting dangerous nonsense. He was rude to his guests, his sidekicks and his panelists. He was publicly denounced by commentators of his time as a dangerous and pernicious influence on the culture. They had no idea. Sam Rockwell utterly channels Chuck Barris in the movie version of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, (directed by George Clooney). I experienced a delicious sense of déjà vu watching reenactments of the Dating Game and Newlywed Game - cutting edge reality programming, as it turned out. And then there's the killings. According to Barris' "unauthorized autobiography" during all those game show years he was also a contract assassin for the CIA, dispatching communists while chaperoning contestants on their dream dates to exotic locations, like West Berlin. Is it true? After watching the movie, I wasn't so sure. After reading the here (which is now out of print) I was nearly convinced. If it's a fantasy, it's a darned meticulous fantasy.

The Sopranos Family Cookbook: As Compiled by Artie Bucco

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446530573/netsurferdigest

Allen Rucker, Michele Scicolone
Warner Books; ISBN: 0446530573
Ok, there are more than one guilty pleasures involved in this review. As one who normally tries to cop an attitude of holier-than-thou cultural superiority, publicly admitting to a Soprano's fixation requires a bit of footscraping and eye-dodging. Nonetheless it's true. Even after we turned off the cable, I get people to tape episodes for me so I can keep current. But even being a fan of the show is no reason to have the show-themed cookbook. That would be a bit of the kitsch-too-far. So why? Well, it is pretty funny. Presented by Artie Bucco, the (fictional) cowering chef of the (fictional) Vesuvio restaurant, the cookbook has sections from the show's principal characters and clans. The piece on why Americans eat Italian food like Germans (too much sauce) is hysterical. A second guilty pleasure? The food. As something of a foodie myself I have several "authentic" Italian cookbooks from which I have prepared really fabulous and tasty meals. The problem is that secretly I don't really feel like it is Italian cooking, it's too exotic. The dishes I think of as Italian aren't in those cookbooks, things like Baked Ziti, or Ricotta Pie with Pineapple aren't really "Italian," they're Italian/American. Like the Sopranos. Buy this cookbook for the recipes. Honestly they're terrific. This is Italian cooking like you remember it. Not Chef Boy-ar-dee, mind you, not simplistic, but excellent Northern Jersey Italian fare. So maybe you might be a bit embarrassed to have this on your cookbook shelf. Just serve up some of that "Sunday Gravy," sit down and eat. Not a Sopranos fan yet? Start here.

Ferrari in the Bedroom

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385237928/netsurferdigest

Jean Shepherd
Doubleday; ISBN: 0385237928
Jean Shepherd translated to a new energy level in October of 1999. His words live. His art was of the comic debunkment; the philosophic exposure of imperial nudity. The topics and situations which are the essayists subject in The Ferrari in the Bedroom are a trifle dated, it is true, but Shepherd's phenomenological reduction of them reveals the universal human experience inside each of them. These stories are all fresh. They are all funny. They are all easily readable. My particular favorite in this collection is the story of the time he was invited to appear on a TV fishing program on a pond on the estate of the Playboy Club Hotel in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Playboy bunnies were going to meet them out on the lake and serve them hot drinks. Of course what the viewer saw, and what it was like to be there were two entirely different things. Shepherd doesn't do much analysis in his writing, he observes. But he observes so deeply that there is no need to analyze, just watch with him, and see what he sees, how he sees it. Really you could read any of his books as well as this one: Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories: And Other Disasters, A Fistful of Fig Newtons, or In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. Or you might check out the hilarious Christmas classic A Christmas Story written and narrated by Jean Shepherd. Many think the high point of his career were the radio monologues he rattled off in the 1950s. I can't find any copies of them, but they're still alive as radio waves, spooling out from planet earth, forever.

Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1562828789/netsurferdigest

Andrei Codrescu
Hyperion; ISBN: 1562828789
I read this book at the Lucy Parsons Center, a Marxist-Syndicalist bookstore in the South End of Boston listening to free jazz by Music Now, a powerful trio from New York City. It's a mighty intimate performance space, with revolutionary posters glowering down at you from all the walls and books filled with conspiracies and earnest advice begging you to read them. By contrast habitual NPR denizen Andrei Codrescu's books seemed positively suburban strip mall material. Reading a book while listening to improvisational music has the effect of burning the material right into the old cerebellum, bypassing the usual worn-out judgment centers. Direct from eyeball to memory cores. The effect is made slightly weirder by Mr. Codrescu's deep Transylvanian burr - it's impossible to read any of his writings without internally hearing him read the material aloud, assuming of course that you've heard his essays on ATC. There's a fantastic old-old-Europe feeling to his writings, even when he's critiquing American culture. Is it just the accent? Or is his a sensibility as honestly dry and dusty as an Eastern European literary archive. He never learned to drive a car, but did so for the purposes of making a film. This book is the result; I don't know what happened to the documentary. As always he is looking at the same scenery you or I might see, but he doesn't see the same things. His empathetic style is very nearly sad, but his cockeyed sense of humor makes each episode a hoot to read, even when there's much to think about. Is this a zany road-trip book? Or the painful subsumption of Mr. Codrescu's Eastern European identity into the big American sky. Read it and judge, if you still can.

Poker Nation

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060958472/netsurferdigest

Andy Bellin
Harperperennial Library; ISBN: 0060958472
Once again Poker is hip. True, it never really goes out of style but as the subject of recent books, movies, and movies in development it is a phenomena. Andy Bellin's Poker Nation is part memoir, part how-to book and partly social history of the game. It works at all levels, and for players of all experience and ability. As a memoir it might well have been subtitled "My Life as a Degenerate Gambler." As an editor of Paris Review, Bellin has a prestigious job and genuine literary chops. But it's not the literary life that drives him. It's the gambling. He takes you right into the smoky, stinking all night private poker clubs of New York City, and he tries to capture the appeal, but really unless you yourself are a degenerate gambler you'll probably be more horrified than titillated. As a how-to manual this is quite worthwhile as well. Not as thorough as a true poker strategy book, there are still a lot of good tips in here, from understanding the odds, to watching your fellow players for "tells" or physical giveaways to what sort of hand they're holding. The section on "pot odds" was particularly valuable, and will serve me well during the regular game I've attended for several years (no I am not a degenerate gambler, really). This is a fast read, and a good read, and will be interesting even to non-players. But if you are a player, this will be both interesting and useful

Antietem: Crossroads of Freedom

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195135210/netsurferdigest

James McPherson
Oxford University Press; ISBN: 0195135210
The study of history has typically been undertaken with 20/20 hindsight. We examine what happened, who did it, and even why it happened. The events themselves seem to have a curious inevitability. To the participants of those events there was no such clarity available, they had to work with the limited resources they had and hope for the best. The current study of historical contingency, or counterfactual events seeks to strip away the hindsight and examine historical events as one outcome of many potential outcomes. Viewing history from this reference point makes certain events stand out as crucial tipping points, where small differences in what happened could have had huge effects on the larger historical context. The battle of Antietem/Sharpsburg was one of those tipping points in the US Civil War. Providing a critical Union victory after a string of defeats Antietem provided Lincoln with the political cover to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, forestalled European momentum towards political recognition of the South, and helped Lincoln gain a second term as president. And yet the victory was not assured. The commanding general, McClellan, had proven himself timid and losing in battle, and the Union forces had been repeatedly mauled by their Confederate foe. The chance discovery of the Confederate battle orders gave McClellan just enough of an edge to overcome his own weaknesses as a military leader. James McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom, is one of the most respected and readable Civil War Historians writing today. This volume gives even the casual Civil War reader a thorough understanding of the context of the battle, and of the battle itself. This book is one of a series of books "Pivotal Moments in American History," which will study similar historical contingencies. If the rest are as good as this one, this will be a terrific set of books to read.

The Cold Six Thousand

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/037572740X/netsurferdigest

James Ellroy
Vintage Books; ISBN: 037572740X
Brutal book by James Ellroy. 672 pages. Sentences five words or less. No connective tissue. No easy similies. No adjectives. No adverbs. Obsessions: violence, drugs, voyeurism, betrayal. Assassinations: Jack, Bobby, Martin. Locations: Las Vegas, Cuba, Saigon, Louisiana. J Edgar Hoover hates, manipulates. Cryptic cop shorthand perplexes. Reading takes work. Reading changes language's perception. Reading alienates. Short chapters: police reports, survelliance reports, bug transcriptions. Public secrets. Private obsessions, publicly exhibited. Racism. Extortion. Coercion. Torture. Murder. Dismemberment. Sexual inadequacy and perversion. Begins November 22, 1963. Ends June 9, 1968. The mob. The CIA and Bay of Pigs. The FBI and Martin Luther King. Vietnam and the Heroin highway. Howard Hughes and Las Vegas Casinos. Jimmy Hoffa and the Kennedys. Mormons and the skim. Richard Nixon and the Cosa Nostra. This is a hard book. This is a dense book. This book is the American Ulysses.

Vegetarian Restaurants & Natural Food Stores in the Us: A Comprehensive Guide to over 2500 Vegetarian Eateries

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1887089446/netsurferdigest

John Howley
Torchlight Publishing; ISBN: 1887089446
For many people, such as my wife and daughter, this book will be essential for happy traveling. For those of the meat-eating persuasion this book is still darned handy. Vegetarian restaurants are also, very often, really good restaurants. The focus on fresh fruits and vegetables and the need to use creative techniques generally leads to imaginative and tasty dishes. I can certainly attest to the dining quality from the local Boston area eatery picks in this volume, and the choices from the town I grew up in are equally good. A corollary rule-of-thumb works just as well for vegetarian groceries. If you like to cook, vegetarian or no, the choice and quality of ingredients found in many health-food stores is superior to that found in most grocery chains. The selection of cheeses and spices is usually better too. A bit of a caveat though, you might want to double-check the driving instructions. I found them to be accurate, but a bit circumlocutious. I suggest calling ahead and getting the "straight" scoop. It can be very trying to be a vegetarian on the road in America, and having this volume with you could mean the difference between a delicious sit-down meal, or the dreaded salad bar and side-dish solution.

Wrong Movements: A Robert Wyatt History

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0946719101 /netsurferdigest

Michael King
S A F Pub Ltd; ISBN: 0946719101
Every fan of Robert Wyatt, the Soft Machine, Gong or the Canterbury scene should have this book. The sad truth is though, that there aren't enough fans of this great music, although there should be. Still, this is quite an interesting snapshot of a time even if you're not already familiar with the music. This is not so much of a biography as a collection of primary sources. Clippings of newspaper and magazine articles, band photos, posters, and other ephemera are arranged chronologically in their original format. All performance and recording dates are listed in the sequence and short reminiscences of the people who worked with Wyatt fill in the details. Wyatt was one of the most interesting drummers and musicians of the late 60s, and was a founding member of Soft Machine and Matching Mole. An accident in 1973 left him a paraplegic. He continued to write and record. His voice is immediately identifiable, you recognize him within a few seconds of hearing his voice. Wyatt's writing has become increasingly political over the years, but not at the expense of beauty. It's very rare that a song can carry political content without becoming unlistenable, but his songwriting is both thoughtful and engaging. His first two albums with Soft Machine are classics of jazz-tinged pop-psychedelia, and I'm extremely fond of Matching Mole. But of all his work I'm most of fond of some of his solo efforts, particularly Ruth is Stranger than Richard and Old Rotten Hat.

Lying, Crying, Dying

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786709553/netsurferdigest

Dominic Martell
Carroll & Graf; ISBN: 0786709553
I like a book that gets me up at five in the morning so I can finish it before waking the kids up. "Lying Dying Crying" is a nutrition-free, page-turning, thriller noir. The hero, or anti-hero, Pascual Rose, is a college-educated former terrorist who got to retire by finking out all his former friends but one. Living quietly as a translator and tutor in Las Ramblas in Barcelona he lives quietly without ambition or much of a life. Then the one friend and lover he didn't betray turns up with a bag of cash belonging to the ETA Basque separatists and once again his life has meaning, but it doesn't look like its going to last long. The CIA, Mossad, National Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Spanish security services all come after him, the money and Katixa, his lover. The novel moves rapidly and believably, with all the twists, turns and betrayals you'd hope for. Martell just released a new Pascual Rose novel The Republic of the Night . I'm going to be reading it soon, but plan to wait for a weekend when I can make up the sleep I'll miss finishing it in one big gulp.

The Collected Dialogues of Plato

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691097186/netsurferdigest

Edith Hamilton (Editor)
Princeton Univ Pr; ISBN: 0691097186
There are those that think nearly all of Western Civilization starts with Plato, and others who think that that's not such a good thing. Socrates was Plato's mentor, and Plato used Socrates as the protagonist of his philosophical dialogues. At this remove it's neither clear nor important where one ends and the other begins. This collection contains all the dialogues in highly regarded translations and is the "standard" text. While this can be pretty heavy sledding, some of the dialogues are relatively easy to read, and they are all valuable to read. I recommend starting with "Symposium," his study of love, which would make a lovely work to read aloud on romantic occasions. "Republic" should be required reading for all voters, particularly in this age when we find ourselves with a president who fancies himself king, and perhaps even a philosopher. "Apology," "Crito," and "Phaedo" cover Socrates' trial and death. He was convicted of "corrupting the minds of the young, and believing in deities of his own invention" and ordered to commit suicide by drinking the hemlock. For myself I find myself wishing there were a philosophical mind at work today that could stir such passions that the state felt threatened. Of course if there were the state would certainly have taken care of the problem already, and if they hadn't who could hear a teller of truth against the background noise.

Personal Memoirs: Ulysses S. Grant

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375752285/netsurferdigest

Ulysses S. Grant
Modern Library; ISBN: 0375752285
As our president propels us into a second war, with a third on the way, it may be instructive to review the memoirs of a president who had first hand experience winning a war, and it can be fairly said that it was Grant who won the civil war, at least militarily. This, his memoir was written near the end of Grant's life, as he was dying of throat cancer, and wisely focuses on his military career as his presidential record was mediocre at best. He entered the war as a washed up businessman, once reduced to selling firewood on the streets. By the end he was Lieutenant General of he United States Army, with full strategic responsibility. Grant was neither the smartest, nor most inspiring of the generally undistinguished Union generals. He habitually dressed in a private's tunic, with only his stars to distinguish his rank. Often visitors had to have him pointed out to them. He drank, by rumor to excess. What caused him to rise to top command was that he fought, and fought hard. Not given to elaborate tactical maneuvers, he had a direct style of command that delivered results. His orders were a model of simplicity and clarity, which carries over into his natural straightforward writing style. Unlike many contemporaneous memoirs Grant is unconcerned with self-justification, or running down his fellow generals. He is a bit partial to WT Sherman, his favorite commanding general, but it is justifiable praise. This is one of the best memoirs to fall out of the US Civil War, and the very best by a general officer.

Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520204409/netsurferdigest

Hugo Ball
University of California Press; ISBN: 0520204409
Hugo Ball was one of the founders and most influential practitioners of the art of Dada, indeed he himself coined the term "Dada." After first volunteering and being rejected on medical grounds he visited the front and became a determined pacifist. He fled Germany to Switzerland at the outbreak of the First World War, where he lived under various pseudonyms. He was a writer, editor, actor and poet, but was best known as the organizer of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. Some of the most fascinating accounts in his diary describe programs at the cabaret, including detailed descriptions of his own performances. He used elaborate cubist costuming that all but eliminated the human element, and invented a style he called "tone poems" that used nonsense words in a dramatic, almost liturgical manner. Ball was a correspondent of many leading artists, writers and intellectuals of his time, including Kandinsky, Hesse, Franck, Marinetti, Bakunin, and of course his fellow Dadaists Janco, Tzara, Arp, and Huelsenbeck. In his diary he struggles with the titanic intellectual forces at work on the world he lived in. It is strange, and a little bit frightening, how much his world resembles the one we find ourselves in today.

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560252758/netsurferdigest

Herbert Asbury
Thunder's Mouth Press; ISBN: 1560252758
Gangs of New York the movie is IMHO the worst sort of historical movie, Oscar nominations or no. This comes home to me even more having read the book on which it was based, the cult classic The Gangs of New York, now back in print. In a good historical movie the history is accurate, or at least as accurate as it can be given the medium - Black Hawk Down, or even Titanic, qualify. The story needs to engage, but you can also learn something, feel something of the time. The movie version of Gangs tramples all over the history: there was no bombardment of the city during the draft riots, there was virtually no abolitionist component to any of the gangs, and events from different period are mashed together for questionable dramatic effect. It's really a pity because the book version is a page-slapping voyeuristic stare into a violent and corrupt New York City that functioned like a different country. Covering almost 200 years of the low life, it's hard to say if this is good history, or if it's just a collection of tall tales and reporter's excesses. There isn't a lot of solid documentation left of those who lived fast and died young. But it doesn't matter really; the stories of madmen, murderers, swindlers, harlots, pickpockets, river pirates, gamblers and the politicians that used and protected them are readable just as they are. And the history of the draft riots is one of the most complete I've ever read. Maybe someday someone will make the real movie of this book, are you listening HBO?

One Day on Beetle Rock

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1890771538/netsurferdigest

Sally Carrighar
Heyday Books; ISBN: 1890771538
It all takes place one day on Beetle Rock in Sequoia National Park in California. The day seems peaceful, but for the animals who live there and the occasional people who wander through, it is a day of full of the tension of staying alive. Each story is written from the perspective of one of the resident animals: weasel, grouse, chickaree, black bear, etc. A funny sort of anthropomorphism is used; the author tries to get inside the head of her animal subjects in order to put the reader into their shoes, if they wore shoes, that is. I'm sure this is frowned upon by the scientific community, but the effect is charming. Sally Carrighar spent much time on Beetle Rock, and the behaviors and environments depicted are very accurate. She also employs a Rashomon-like narrative technique where each story interlocks with the others, with each tale taking a different view of the same events. This adds a nice energy to the book - I really wanted to know "What Happened to the Steller's Jay," which was fortunately chronicled in the second-to-last chapter. This book is a delight, and should be in the home of anyone with an interest in nature, particularly anyone with children. Originally published in 1944 this edition is beautifully illustrated by Carl Dennis Buell.

Life along the Silk Road

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/0520232143/netsurferdigest

Susan Whitfield
University of California Press; ISBN: 0520232143
There's historical fiction such as Cold Mountain, or The Red Tent, which use historical settings or even historical characters to tell a story. The story is the focus - the history is the stage on which the story is played. What Susan Whitfield has done in Life Along the Silk Road is to invert the focus of historical fiction; the story becomes the frame on which the history is displayed. The Silk Road was a collection of roads, paths and trails that through which China and the Far East communicated with Europe and the Middle East. It was nearly the only way such traffic passed from around AD 750 to AD 1000, the timeframe of the stories in the book. By looking at the life stories of various real or imagined characters living in the area we get a very personal sense of place and time, and how the environment, culture and conflicts felt to a person living in them. The effect is often much more satisfying than a more traditional historical narrative. Each character is distinctly different from the others including a merchant, a soldier, a monk, a widow, and artist, and others. The tales themselves are little more than portals through which to view history; this isn't to be read as a novel. However, taken as a group one gets a very tactile sense of what life must have been like on the Silk Road well over a 1000 years ago.

Mencken Chrestomathy

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/0394435958/netsurferdigest

Henry Louis Mencken
Random House; ISBN: 0394435958
Mencken never goes out of style. He never becomes irrelevant. He's always funny. He can see right through you even though he's been dead for dozens of years. If you've never read Mencken then you must, simply to understand the innumerable references to him in books, articles and interviews. If you read Mencken you'll have to go and read the authors and writers he's commenting on. If you've read Mencken you'll read him again and again, and laugh at his humor and marvel at his absolute mastery of the English language. Words aren't static things for Mencken; they writhe and leap at his command. If the right word didn't exist, he made one up that was so good we still use it: "ombibulous", "booboisie", indeed "menckenian" is to be found in the dictionary as well. To be skewered by Mencken, and so very many were, was to be flayed, trussed, pierced, rotisseried and eaten for dinner with a giant glass of beer. This volume was edited by Mencken himself from many sources, and represents an excellent cross section of his reviews, articles, essays, diatribes and quips. Mencken resurrected the title word, which means "a collection of choice passages from an author. There is also a second volume of second volume of Chrestomathy edited by Terry Teachout who recently came out with a new biography of Mencken. Mencken wrote over five million words before his stroke in 1948, you owe it to yourself to read as many of them as you can.

What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/0425176428/netsurferdigest

Robert Cowley (Editor), Stephen E. Ambrose (Editor)
Berkley Pub Group; ISBN: 0425176428
History has a way of seeming inevitable. Alexander the Great laid waste the Persian Empire, Cortes savaged the Aztec Empire, and Washington triumphed at Yorktown. The traditional job of the historian is to describe past events, and their impact on subsequent history. But just as the present offers choices and chances, so does the past. History was no more inevitable than the present is. Not only could things have gone differently, in many cases things were far more likely to have come out in a differently than they did. This book offers many of the world's leading historians an opportunity to study the "what ifs," or "counterfactuals" of world history. Proceeding chronologically they examine pivotal historical events, and pick apart the key moments when the action hung by a thread. Taking a possible, or even more likely outcome they try to imagine an alternative future based on the natures of the people and nations involved. Victor Davis Hanson imagines what the world would have been like had the Greeks been defeated by the vastly superior Persian army of Xerxes. Would there have been a Western culture? Lewis Lapham speculates on what a Roman victory over the Germanic tribes would have meant. Would Rome have fallen? Would there have been a Kaiser? Or a Hitler? Thomas Fleming lists the thirteen ways the American could have lost the revolution. The writers are the best academic and popular historians of our day, and their essays are both fun and provoking.

The Quiet American

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/0140185003/netsurferdigest

Graham Greene
Penguin USA; ISBN: 0140185003
Read any history of the Vietnam War, and you'll find a reference in it to this novel by Graham Greene. Written in 1955 as the war was going badly for the French, the novel chronicles the relationship between a bitter old British journalist and the idealistic young American, who's wading in to do good for the natives. Greene is so perceptive in his observations that the novel reads as it were written today, with full knowledge of all that was going to happen in Vietnam, and how American good intentions were to come to such a bad outcome. The American Pyle, and the Fowler the reporter come to grief themselves, with a fatalistic Vietnamese woman coming between them. The sense of place Greene brings to the novel is palpable, but the sense of time is even more sensual. Everything is balanced on the edge of a machete; there is a calmness, but it is the calm that comes before everything breaks loose and in a cascade of destruction. The book has been made into a just-released movie with Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine. Of course you can buy the soundtrack too.

Hacker Cracker: A Journey from the Mean Streets of Brooklyn to the Frontiers of Cyberspace

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/0066210798/netsurferdigest

Ejovi Nuwere, David Chanoff (Contributor)
William Morrow & Co; ISBN: 0066210798
This is another one of those books to leave lying around in the hopes that any teenagers moping around the place might pick it up and read. Ejovi Nuwere was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant New York to a poor single-parent mother who became HIV-positive, was often absent or in jail, and died young. In short he had no advantages, and plenty of strikes against him. It isn't too surprising then that he ended up as a street fighter with the Zulu Nation gang, but how he came to be a network security specialist on Wall Street is a truly remarkable tale. Grabbing on to an old computer at school, he taught himself computer graphics, and then monopolized his uncle's PC to go online and make a lot of friends in the chat rooms. Drawn into the scene by his online pals he becomes a black-hat hacker, breaking into corporate and government sites for the thrills. Turning to the legitimate site Ejovi made a name for himself as a security specialist, keeping people like himself out of the same systems he used to invade. He took up San Shou kickboxing, and became a National Champion through sheer determination and hard work. While Hacker Cracker is in a sense "uplifting" it doesn't come across a smug or smarmy. Nuwere and Chanoff have written a straightforward entertaining memoir that will hold on to anyone interested in hacker culture, martial arts, or in learning how to get to where you want to go, without letting any obstacle stop you.

David Copperfield

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/0679405712/netsurferdigest

Charles Dickens
Everymans Library; ISBN: 0679405712
There's something about the winter months that makes me want to read Dickens. This may have something to do with his many famous Christmas tales, but it is somewhat unfair to the author. These books would be just as good of a beach-read as they are a fireside entertainment. Although you'll find his books in the "Literature" section of the bookstore, don't be put off, for Dickens wrote page-turning, potboiling best sellers for the popular taste. Filled with villains, foul deeds, terrible calamities, love-interests, family struggle, and pointed social criticism, most of his novels were serialized so nearly every chapter ends with a cliff-hanging climax. This winter I began with Martin Chuzzlewit, principally because I wanted to understand what H.L. Mencken meant when he flung the epithet "pecksniff." It was a jolly fun read, and the hilarious caricatures of double-dealing Americans ring as true today as they no doubt did in the nineteenth century. I started to re-read David Copperfield, but started it again as a read-aloud book with my 10-year-old daughter. This is one of the best books for the purpose I have ever read aloud. The chapters are just the right length, the language is understandable, the characters broadly drawn, and the title character is a child himself. It is hard not to notice that the very popular series of children's books, the Lemony Snicket series, owes a very great debt to David Copperfield. And of course so doesUriah Heep.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679642218/netsurferdigest

Samuel Pepys, Richard Le Gallienne (Editor)
Modern Library; ISBN: 0679642218
Samuel Pepys' famous diary still has the power to delight, over 350 years after he encoded it in a difficult-to-read shorthand. Writing from 1660 to 1669 he witnessed and recorded some of the most incredible events of his generation, including the restoration of King Henry the Second, the great fire of London, and the terrible plague of London which he saw first hand without fleeing the city like so many who could, did. But as interesting as these major events are, the principal attraction of the diary are his shockingly honest accounts of his day-to-day life. He never flinches from his own faults, and cheerfully notes his one-upmanships of his friends, and serial infidelities to his wife. Indeed by today's standards he was guilty of first-rate sexual harassment many times over. There is a terribly modern feel to these entries, which were certainly not intended for publication (at least during his lifetime), and there is virtually none of the moralizing or religious overtones so common to writing of the period. He was a regular churchgoer, true, but he was more interested in showing off his new clothes, ogling the female parishioners, or critiquing the literary powers of the minister than indulging in any overt religious transportation. This is a one-volume condensation of the nine-volume diaries, and subsequently suffers from some continuity problems, and much (but not all) of the racier bits have been edited out. Still, this is a fine place to start. You may well find you wish to go back and re-read the full version, or read the recent biography.

Devil in a Blue Dress

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743451791/netsurferdigest

Walter Mosley
Washington Square Press; ISBN: 0743451791
The thing I really hate about a great series of mystery novels is that point you get to once you've read about two thirds of the author's work over the course of two or three years and you can no longer remember which of the gol-darned books you've already read. Worse yet is getting two thirds of the way through a book by a mystery author you like when you realize that the reason it's so familiar is that you've already read it and just remembered how it comes out. This time I'm going to write the names of the books on the wall in pencil as I read them. The reason? Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins detective novels of which I've just the first in the series: Devil in a Blue Dress. This is great stuff, set in post World War II LA's black community. It reads somewhere between Chester Himes and Raymond Chandler, with well drawn characters and great dialogue driving the reader through a classic detective yarn. Start it early in the day, because you'll be awake until you put it down.

Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679720391/netsurferdigest
Three by Raymond Chandler
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375415017/netsurferdigest
Here's an easy series to keep track of
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449003787/netsurferdigest

Hole in My Life

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374399883/netsurferdigest

Jack Gantos
Farrar Straus & Giroux; ISBN: 0374399883
This is the sort of book you leave lying around hoping your teenaged kids will pick up and read, and they might too if they've read any of Jack Gantos' kid's books like Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374399883/netsurferdigest). This is no fairy tale, but the true story of how the young Jack smokes a lot of dope, drops out of school, gets stuck in the Virgin Islands, tries to get his act together by sailing a load of hashish into New York harbor, gets busted by the cops, goes to prison, and finally gets out to take the writing courses that transform him into a successful children's author. It reads a bit like William S. Burrough's Junky (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140043519 /netsurferdigest) without the romance, of which in truth the dope fiend lifestyle is in precious short supply. He's a good writer and doesn't try to make himself look cool, heroic, or even smart. He knowingly signed on to help crew the dope shipment to New York City, which had been compromised even before the boat left the dock. Once the authorities got bored watching Gantos and his co-dealers sell off their stock they busted all of them, including the customers. There is a morally uplifting message here, but it isn't much of one and amounts to "no shortcuts." The lack of righteous melodrama adds to the impact of this memoir though, by making it read as very, very real.

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060938455/netsurferdigest

Eric Schlosser
HarperCollins; ISBN: 0060938455
This is the book Michael Moore (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0060392452/netsurferdigest) would write if he researched his topics, stayed focused on his message and lacked a sense of humor. Read this book and realize that every time you walk through those golden arches you're trashing the environment, crushing the workers, destroying the economy, and ruining your health. Reading like a modern day version of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0553212451/netsurferdigest) this book should smack the American eating public upside the head and inspire a consumer/regulatory revolution, as its predecessor did in the early part of the last century. It won't. As well written and terrifying a book as this is, in our era it's only entertainment. Read it. You'll be entertained, and maybe you'll make dietary changes in your own life, the only sphere of action over which you still have moderate control.

High Fidelity

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573225517/netsurferdigest

Nick Hornby
Riverhead Books; ISBN: 1573225517
For entertainment we find great satisfaction in the snake that ate itself, eating itself, eating itself, and it sure is good, umm hmmm. High Fidelity is a very good novel about a man who makes lists about very good music and bad break-ups. His revisitation of old girlfriends reveals what he should have know all along about the care and maintenance of relationships. This very good novel, rather improbably, made a very good movie, something of a trick since the protagonist talks directly to the reader for most of the book. One of my favorite actors, John Cusack, has the bravado presence to carry off his movie length conversation with the audience, just as if you were there with him, and it's hard not to like a movie with Jack Black, Joan Cusack, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. And wouldn't it be great to be able to listen to the music from the film of the book about the lists of the music and the bad break-ups? Of course it would, and of course you can buy the soundtrack, and unlike many soundtrack album these aren't just the cuts playing as you shuffle out of the sticky movie theater, but rather the good stuff from the film, although none of the several Brian Eno Albums he fondles during the movie are included. The coolest tune is Jack Black's remarkable rendition of "Let's Get it On" as made famous by the late Marvin Gaye. Don't forget the book-on-tape either. My only question is, why isn't this a network sitcom yet?

The VHS:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000524E7/netsurferdigest
The DVD:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00003CXGA/netsurferdigest
The CD:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004S51T /netsurferdigest
The Book on Tape:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573221023/netsurferdigest
The Brian Eno Record:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000003S0Z/netsurferdigest

Voyages of Discovery: Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520065646/netsurferdigest

Lynne Withey
University of California Press; ISBN: 0520065646
The introduction of European civilization to the Pacific cultures is rightfully regarded as a disaster for the indigenous local populations. Since it was Captain Cook who did most of the introducing, it is something of a surprise to find that he was genuinely interested in the cultures he met on his voyages of discovery and, within the confines of British imperialism, was purposefully respectful of the people and their prerogatives. Sailing three times, in 1768, 1772 and 1776, Captain James Cook explored the South and North Pacific, taking as his first priority the discovery and mapping of the islands and shores he found, many for the first time. Priority of discovery gave priority of colonial occupation, and he brought along animals and plants to cultivate for future missions. Of secondary importance, but of keen interest back home, was the study of flora, fauna and local cultures he encountered on route. Sir Joseph Banks himself accompanied the first voyage and discovered thousands of new species of plants and animals. This volume chronicles these voyages, and focuses particularly on the specific interactions between the voyagers and the locals. The ships were dependant on the islanders for trade and must have local provisions to survive. The only way to accomplish this was through trade, which brought a high level of local interaction with the officers and crew. Both sides learned from each other, but with much misunderstanding, the final misunderstanding resulting in Cook's death in Hawaii in 1778. Voyages of Discovery is an excellent study, and brings new perspectives to this pivotal period in history.

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394528360/netsurferdigest

Robert A. Caro
Knopf; ISBN: 0394528360
I was ten years old when President Johnson left office and I didn't much like him. To the extent that I understood the politics of the time I thought I knew that Johnson was responsible for the war and all of us under the age of 30 were against it, even those of us twenty years under the age. Since then Johnson has emerged as a richer, more interesting character than his caricatures, and owning a greater impact on our political history than his relegation. Certainly Robert Caro finds him interesting, this book alone is over a thousand pages long, and it's the third volume of three. Is the present volume worth the investment of time it takes to get to the other side? Absolutely, and you don't need to read the first two volumes to pick up the story. During the twelve years from 1949 to 1960 Johnson rose to absolute mastery in the U.S. Senate, remaking the institution in the process. His ability to win over nearly anyone in one-to-one interaction, and his relentless manipulation of people and systems is chronicled in a gripping, nearly novelistic, style. Caro has the ability to make clear and fascinating the subtle minutia of high-performance politics, and to get inside the skin of the characters and politicians pursuing the ultimate Washington goal: power, preferably supreme power. Watching Johnson use the Civil Rights Bill of 1957 to leverage his own position is breathtaking, and is only one of the pleasures to be found in this meticulously researched political history.

Pop. 1280

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0679732497 /netsurferdigest

Jim Thompson
Vintage Books; ISBN: 0679732497
Pop. 1280 is one of the scariest crime novels ever written, by possibly the scariest crime writer to ever live, Jim Thompson. It's not that Sheriff Nick Corey's actions are so very terrifying; by crime novel standards they're rather mundane. It's the inside of his head that's so terrible. Written in the sheriff's first person one is slowly drawn into Corey's little universe, population 1280 people, in deep rural Texas. He doesn't seem like much of a Sheriff, he's pretty easy on the crime, mildly corrupt, fat lazy and he seems pretty stupid. People take him for granted, he's not particularly liked, but he fills his role in a comfortable way. It's a tribute to Thompson's brilliance as a writer that the reader is taken in by Sheriff Corey the same as the people of Potts County, even though you're seeing everything through the Sheriff's eyes. Events from earlier in the book change meaning and purpose as later events unfold. Laziness turns out to have been patience. Stupidity is a disguise for deep, duplicitous cunning. And the comfortable state of contempt people hold for Nick Corey merely allows him to get close enough to force them to his purposes. As have so many of Jim Thompson's novels this masterpiece has been made into a movie, Coup de Torchon, in French, by Bertrand Tavernier. MKA

Lee Wade's Korean Cookery

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0930878450/netsurferdigest

Lee Wade, Joan Rutt editor
Hollym International Corporation; ISBN: 0930878450
Korean cooking is hot and spicy. Not everything, to be sure, but when your restaurant server asks if you like spicy food, answer with a certain amount of circumspection. Korean restaurants are to be found in most major metropolitan areas now, and that nearly always means you can find a Korean grocery as well. There are relatively few Korean cookbooks however, and if you are unaccustomed to Korean ingredients and preparation techniques you may well need a good illustrated cookbook. Fortunately Lee Wade's Korean Cookery is still in print. This is traditional Korean cooking, not any sort of "Asian fusion." There is a substantial primer that covers techniques and ingredients. Each recipe gets its own page with a large picture of the final product, smaller thumbnails of the preparation techniques and clear, easy to read ingredients and directions. Everything is delicious and generally surprisingly simple to prepare. I'm particularly fond of the sorts of small dishes one is served as an accompaniment to dinner. The fried cucumbers, and dried squash are particularly nice. Lee Wade was a librarian for the US Army in Korea and an enthusiastic home chef. She was collecting recipes and techniques for a Korean cookbook when she died at age 36. This cookbook, edited and completed by her friends, stands as a testament to her love of Korean cookery.

Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0700612130 /netsurferdigest

Frank Snepp
Univ Pr of Kansas; ISBN: 0700612130
This book could not be published today, in no small part because what happened when this book was first published in 1977. The author, Frank Snepp, was the chief CIA policy analyst in Vietnam when the North Vietnamese won their final battles, drove into Saigon, and chased the Americans out of the country with their tales between their legs. Snepp watched it all happen, participated in the delusional processes that made it happen, and took notes while it was happening. This reads like pure Shakespearean tragedy. Kisssinger was engaged in high-level negotiations with the Communist Russians and Chinese and had to maintain the fiction that American policy in Vietnam was stable, committed and functional. Ambassador Martin, the "next best thing to a B-52," was committed to maintaining that fiction, to the point of utter belief. To this end all intelligence reports were increasingly bent, twisted and mangled to support the increasingly untenable position that South Vietnam was a viable and supportable regime. Even as the military situation deteriorated and large chunks of the country were being overrun by the North Vietnamese regular army, Martin stymied evacuation efforts as unnecessary, and "sending the wrong signal." The last few chapters are harrowing as USAID, CIA, and Embassy staffers desperately try to save their Vietnamese workers, and finally themselves. The CIA sued Snepp for publishing this book and won, keeping Snepp from profiting from its sales. New laws and regulation have effectively prevented anything this revealing from being published again. A pity. As we prepare to invade another country, and our intelligence analysts predict an "easy victory," this book illuminates how far wrong wishful thinking can be. MKA

The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0380763664 /netsurferdigest

Charles Papazian
Avon Books; ISBN: 0380763664
Relax and have a home brew! With that advice, interspersed liberally throughout this classic text, I embarked on my own voyage of home brewership. If you've ever thought about making your own beer then you have to have this book, and you may never need another one. In direct, simple and clear language Charles Papazian takes the reader through every aspect of the brewing, so that the novice brewer will totally understand the process. Very simple recipes for the absolute novice are practically foolproof giving most beginners excellent results the very first time. Intermediate brewers are rewarded with recipes for many different styles of beer, ales, pilsners, bitters, porters, alts, and many more. Soon one has the confidence to adjust malts, grains, and yeasts and hops to create your own particular signature brew. Most home brewers will be well satisfied with this level of accomplishment, but for the truly committed expert-level techniques are discussed as well. For myself I think I'll leave the malting and yeast culturing to the truly obsessed (although we did grow our own hops this year). Even if you're not thinking of brewing your own, but just want to know more about your favorite libation, this is an informative and readable resource on beer styles, ingredients and techniques. Relax, and have a home brew! MKA

Madhur Jaffrey's World-Of-The-East Vegetarian Cookbook

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394748670/netsurferdigest

Madhur Jaffrey
Knopf; ISBN: 0394748670
There are certain cookbooks on the shelf which are in very bad shape, the cover's torn, spine broken, pages wrinkled and stuck together, and various bits of scrap paper are sticking out of the top. These are the books you come back to over time and again. Books to seek out new kitchen experiences, books to track down something discovered in a restaurant, books to find a child's favorite dish. Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking is one of these iconic cookbooks. Still in print after fifteen years this book was my introduction to Eastern cooking styles, and remains a foundation to our family mealtimes. This is a survey of Eastern cooking, although it is mostly focused on Indian and Japanese cuisines, perhaps because of strong vegetarian traditions in those cultures. Flipping through the book to the places where the binding has been damaged by being wedged open with a skillet I find several standout recipes. Zakiya's Potatoes and Onions are simple to prepare and are, as a scribbled note in the book reminds me, a tasty filling for the Rice Flour Dosas with Mustard Seeds and Black Pepper. Juji's Naan is a home-kitchen adaptation of those wonderful breads served in Indian restaurants. The instructions for rolling Japanese Maki are simple, well illustrated and east to follow. While writing this review I've discovered a couple dishes I haven't tried yet. I think I know what's for dinner tonight!

Southeast Asia Specialties (Culinaria)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3895089095/netsurferdigest

Rosalind Mowe (Editor)
Konemann; ISBN: 3895089095
On the North Shore of Boston there is a large and vibrant Southeast Asian community consisting mostly of Vietnamese and Cambodian peoples. There are many small family-run restaurants where you can sample many unusual foods. Even more interesting there are several small Cambodian and Vietnamese markets where you can find sauces, noodles, fish and an incredible variety of produce. The produce has been the puzzle for my kitchen, it all looks terrific, but what do you do with it? Is a given item spinach? An herb? Eaten raw? Cooked? A fruit? A vegetable? Having searched for months for a cookbook that would enlighten me, I have gratefully discovered the Southeast Asian Specialty volume of the Culinaria cookbook series. Focusing on the cuisines of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia this is nearly as much of a culinary travelogue as it is a cookbook. Organized around ingredients, or groups of ingredients, you learn the nature of the food, how its grown and harvested and how its used in the culture. Unlike many Asian recipe books these are not interpretations for the western kitchen; this is local market cooking. Armed with a little bit of knowledge you'll be able to wade into a Southeast Asian grocery and bring back the makings of a meal from the far side of the Pacific. Try the Durian for dessert, sure it smells bad, but the taste is worth it.

The Greens Cookbook

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/07679082361/netsurferdigest

Deborah Madison, Edward Espe Brown, Marion Cunningham, David Bullen (Designer)
Broadway Books; ISBN: 0767908236
As the sole non-vegetarian in my household it has behooved me to learn to create an edible non-meat meal. One cannot live on grains and stir-fry alone. Of the many vegetarian cookbooks in the family shelf, my favorite is The Greens Cookbook. These recipes are collected from the renowned vegetarian Greens Restaurant in San Francisco California. These are not your seventies-era cheese-bean casserole recipes; this is gourmet cooking with the "foodie" in mind. The recipes call for quality ingredients and care in preparation, but the cook's efforts will be rewarded with dishes your dinner guests will fondly recall. There are simple recipes as well, the grilled tomato sauce was easy and was a perfect solution to pounds of plum of plum tomatoes from the garden. This is a full cookbook covering salads, breads, soups, pizza, stews, gratins, timbales, pastries, side dishes and desserts. I had never tried a tart before this cookbook, but the results of the Sorrel-Onion Tart were so exciting I had to rush out and buy a specialty tart pan. MKA

I Was a Rat!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0440416612/netsurferdigest

Philip Pullman, Kevin Hawkes (Illustrator)
Yearling Books; ISBN: 0440416612
From the very first paragraph this book is full of mystery. This is a hilarious book that always keeps you guessing. We follow a little boy through 'London, and meet the crazy people he attracts. It's the amazing story of an outsider trying to figure out his magical past. I recommend this book for kids that are about 12+. Phillip Pullman has written many other wonderful books, including The Golden Compass. There are little plot twists here and there that keep you on your toes. You will be both surprised and delighted at this twisted ending! ODB

Reviewed by my daughter Octavia, age 14

The Screenwriter's Workbook

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0440582253/netsurferdigest

Syd Field
DTP; ISBN: 0440582253
This is not a book that will teach you how to write a screenplay. As the author notes this is not a "how-to" book but rather a "what-to" book. The object is not to teach the reader how to write a movie script, but rather the dramatic elements that the writer must contemplate to create a movie screenplay. Syd Field is a well-known teacher of script writing, and writing coach who conducts script seminars for the aspiring, and the working pro. This book is derived from these seminars and is basically a seminar-in-a-box, or rather a book. The screenplay is dissected into its parts, and each part is discussed, with examples provided and writing exercises given. One could start with a basic movie idea and with the help of this book end up with a fully formed screenplay at the end. There are some aspects of the screenplay this book does not cover, such as what is the actual form a screenplay is written in. This is something of a companion volume to Field's Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, where more nuts and bolts information is discussed. It is also true that there is a certain reduction to formula that this book engages in, that can feel a little contrived and stale, not unlike many current movies. However for the novice movie writer this is an excellent place to start.

Frindle

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/06898187691/netsurferdigest

Andrew Clements, Brian Selznick (Illustrator)
Aladdin Paperbacks; ISBN: 0689818769
This book, about defying authority, is the perfect book for any kid who likes to think outside the boundaries. It is the story of a boy who questions his teacher, the dictionary, and even the Latin language. It starts when a boy begins to call a pen a frindle, slowly but surely he gets other people to call pens frindles, which leads to greater things. This is a good book for a kid who is 10+. Andrew Clements really captures what it's like to be an adolescent, who just wants to be noticed. This is a good two-day paperback. It will make change your perspective on the English language! ODB

Reviewed by my daughter Octavia, age 14

Master and Commander

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393307050 1/netsurferdigest

Patrick O'Brian
O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 0393307050
For years I have been unable to bring myself to finish the last four novels of Patrick O'Brian's magnificent twenty-volume series of sea sagas beginning, with Master and Commander. By leaving them on my shelf unread I could leave the story open, as if there weren't four more novels, but rather that they stretched on forever. Of course nothing stretches on forever except eternity, which claimed Patrick O'Brian in January of 2000. Starting over, and so far having re-read the first seventeen novels in sequence, I am struck by how like one single novel the series reads. To be sure each novel is written to be read as a stand-alone, with explicative plot-so-far summaries slipped in as an explanation to a new crewmember, or simply as an authorial voice-over. These arrive with a sense of the familiar; the unchanging pace of the novels is the unchanging pace of life at sea. The two protagonists, Captain Aubrey and his "particular friend" Stephen Maturin each represents a pinnacle of their respective types: the naval officer and the humanist of Napoleonic-era Europe. Their unlikely friendship is the warp on which O'Brian weaves his tapestry of social, military, political, botanical, sociological, medical and familial themes. This series is one of the twentieth centuries magical literary accomplishments, and cannot be too highly recommended. MKA

Perl for Web Site Management

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565926471/netsurferdigest

John Callender
O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 1565926471
It once was said that reading an O'Reilly book from cover to cover was enough to raise your salary level one whole step. The days of skyrocketing web salaries are gone, but the raw utility of an O'Reilly text continues. Perl for Web Site Management serves multiple purposes. It is not only an excellent introduction to Perl; it is also a useful early book for anyone hosting a web site on a Unix-based host. Its primary stated purpose is to teach the reader how to use Perl to for basic web site management. It accomplishes all of these goals. Perl is a relatively simple programming language used primarily for web-based tasks. The author, John Callender, determined that since most books Perl were written for people who were already programmers, there was a strong need for a book written for non-programming web content creators. The book starts at a very basic level, and quickly progresses to a level where the reader can write his or her own very useful tools. Included are basic directions on operating a UNIX web server as well, sufficient to get a novice administrator up and running quickly. In this post-bubble online age those still on the job find themselves wearing more hats. This book will be extremely helpful to anyone needing to tackle Perl projects for the first time, and for those who taking on web management functions. MKA

Fool's Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1890771414/netsurferdigest

Carey McWilliams,
Heyday Books; ISBN: 1890771414
Carey McWilliams was editor of The Nation magazine for over 20 years, author of 14 books of social criticism and California history, and a towering figure of the American Left. His exposure of farm worker's terrible conditions caused him to be labeled "agricultural pest number one in California" in a pamphlet by the Associated Farmers. For all his harsh criticism he loved California, and this shows through in the essays included in Fool's Paradise. Compiled from The Nation, The American Mercury and other publications, these articles form a topical portrait of the state that is alternately amusing, cynical and scornful, but always deeply insightful. The six essays grouped under the heading "Mecca of the Miraculous" which cover the cults and communes to which California is still host, covers such famous figures as Sister Aimee, the fictional Ramona, and the folklore of earthquakes. Much of the book is taken up with politics, and the article detailing the chicanery of Los Angeles' water supply will be familiar to anyone who's seen Roman Polanski's movie Chinatown. California has been the leading edge of American culture for over a hundred years. Reading Carey McWilliams essays on California will provide fresh insight to any student of American cultural and political history. MKA

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/030681188X/netsurferdigest

Toby Young
Da Capo Press; ISBN: 030681188X
Toby Young went to New York City to follow Graydon Carter, former editor of Spy magazine, to write for Vanity Fair. He imagined he was going to be Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, or Cary Grant in His Girl Friday. Visions of Dorothy Parker and the round table dangled before his eyes. It was not to be. What he woke up to instead was a monstrously shallow American supermarket aisle celebrity chasing lifestyle magazine to which he was supremely unprepared to contribute in any worthwhile way. Hilarity ensues. His pathetic attempts to fit in mostly earn him the contempt of his co-workers. Driven by some sort of perverse celebrity worship Toby Young fawns over movie stars and super models and strives to get invited to shop openings, movie premieres and the hottest club-of-the-week. He fantasizes about abusing the bouncer with his exaltedness while tagging along after gossip columnists. He weasels his way into the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and then gets publicly dressed down for "bothering the celebrities." He won't be remembered what he wrote at Vanity Fair, but his invitation of a stripper to the office for a friend's birthday on Take Your Daughter To Work Day stands as an iconic example of poor judgment. Through it all he is funny and self-perceptive, even though he keeps dragging out Tocqueville, seemingly to prove himself an intellectual. I predict this will make a funny movie someday soon. MKA

April 1865: The Month That Saved America

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060187239/netsurferdigest

Jay Winik
HarperCollins; ISBN: 0060187239
Most histories of the Civil War end with the surrender of the South at Appomattox, and the assassination of Lincoln in Ford's Theater. The way the war was concluded and the manner in which the peace was begun are treated as if they were inevitable. Histories of the Reconstruction era, and there are far fewer of them than histories of the war, generally start with the Civil War's conclusion. Jay Winik's book, April 1865: The Month That Saved America, focuses on that critically important month on which these two periods pivot. Far from being inevitable, the events of April developed in quite a different way than they had in other similar historical situations. There were many opportunities for things to have gone terribly wrong, with disastrous long-term consequences for the nation. General Grant could have offered a humiliating surrender. General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's men could have easily foregone their magnanimous gesture of honor to their surrendering foe. General Lee could have dispersed his men and fought a long-term guerrilla war; General Johnston could have followed Confederate President Davis' instructions and done the same. Lincoln's policies of reconciliation could have been ignored. Historically many, if not most, civil wars have ended in just this destructive way. The author is not a professional historian, but a specialist in public policy and very active in government. This is not a history of the time, but rather a study of how we, as a nation, managed to forge a nation out of one of the most brutal civil wars in history. MKA

Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812236696/netsurferdigest

Leonard L. Richards
University of Pennsylvania Press; ISBN: 0812236696
Shays's Rebellion, which so alarmed George Washington that he came out of retirement to lead the nation as its first president, is considered something of a footnote to history. The participants are painted as disgruntled poor farmers unhappy with local authority and taxes. Leonard Richards' new interpretation is based on careful study of the participants and written materials from the period. The American Revolutionary War was fought not just over England's suppression of its colonies, but also over the repression of the common people by the nobility. A strong theme of Enlightenment egalitarianism runs through the philosophic underpinnings of American patriotism; while the war against England was clearly won, the fight for individual freedom was not. Shays and most of his fellows were landowners and veterans, fighting for what they thought of as self-determination and self-representation. After the rebels were arrested, hung or dispersed the power elite in Boston and elsewhere worked very hard to downplay the social standing of participants. If it were understood that they were men of property and substance, and even patriotic veterans of the Revolutionary War, then the true reasons for their frustration might endanger the base on which the mercantilists and speculators rested their fortunes. History was indeed written by the victors, this volume seeks to write history again to better reflect what really happened in 1787.MKA

Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060193638/netsurferdigest

Noah Andre Trudeau
HarperCollins; ISBN: 0060193638
Historical study of the US Civil War is a thriving literary sub-industry; an Amazon search on "Civil War" turns up over 10,000 titles. Within that specialty, histories of the battle of Gettysburg command its own legion of devotees, with over 400 titles on Amazon. The complex three-day battle is rightfully regarded as the turning point of the war, and has spawned numerous books on each of its days, commanders, units, major battles, minor engagements and political repercussions. Noah Andre Trudeau's goal in writing Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage is to synthesize recent studies of the battle into a detailed overall portrait of the battle. He has gone to original sources to analyze how individual actions unfolded, and he unearths many new quotations to illustrate participant's battlefield perceptions. All major, and many minor, actions are carefully mapped, which is most useful in sorting out troop movement and action. The level of detail is very high, without becoming numbing and the author's narrative writing style is enjoyable to read. Many myths and legends have grown over the years; participants often remembered details in a glowing light, years after the event. Trudeau deflates and redefines several of these by carefully detailing the actions of individual units and men. His study of Sickles deployment on the second day is most precise, and his evaluation of Chamberlain's defense of Little Round Top has raised hackles in Maine. This book may be a bit deep for a Civil War novice, but for even the casual student this is a must-have volume. MKA

The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374187029/netsurferdigest

David Gilmour
Farrar Straus & Giroux; ISBN: 0374187029
In the glorious days of the British Empire, when the sun never set on all that England owned, a teenaged writer named Kipling wrote for a newspaper in Lahore India. He annoyed the authorities with his verse, was bored with the insular Indian Civil Service social life, and most loved to hang out with the common soldiers in the local regiment. He often prowled the streets at night, patronized opium dens and brothels, observing everything. Kipling's stories so captured colonial life that he was soon considered the prophet of British Imperialism. David Gilmour's biography of Rudyard Kipling becomes not just a story of the man, but a history of the waning of the empire Kipling loved above all else. It is the central tragedy of the man that he was a witness to the dismemberment of England's possessions. In his later writings he fought fiercely to preserve that which he thought most noble of endeavors. The author of the poem "White Man's Burden" truly believed that it was the Anglo-Saxon's duty to go forth into the world to improve the "lesser races". Indeed his poetry was so profound and influential that those in power feared and flattered Kipling; there is no poet and scarcely an essayist with a fraction of his power working today. While he does not emerge as a sympathetic character, this very readable book brings the man and his time alive. MKA

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520224655/netsurferdigest

Marion Nestle
University of California Press; ISBN: 0520224655
Eating nutritiously is easy and can be thouroughly described in this review: eat less in general; eat proportionally more fruits, vegetables and grains in specific. The fact that you are confused and muddled about what is good, bad or harmful to eat is deliberate. An enormous 900 billion dollar industry is working very hard to keep you in a perpetually punch-drunk state regarding your nutritional health. In her book, Food Politics, Marion Nestle describes in clinical detail both the general goals and motives of the food industry as well as many specific examples as to how they go about keeping the consumer mystified as to what is good for them. She gives a particularly thorough discussion of industry interference with the "Nutrition Pyramid" finally released by the US Department of Agriculture in the early nineties. She describes how nutritionists, universities, government agencies and doctors are coopted. She shows you how to decode dieteary doublespeak released by agencies too cowed to stand up to powerful lobbying interests ("choose" = "eat less"). She examines the rise of "techno-foods" (named for want of a more pejorative term), and how unproven bogus health claims are allowed to be marketed unhindered. This is an important book in opposition to a multi-billion dollar money-making machine. Read it, change your diet, live healthier.MKA

Reading About the History of the World

After a heady combination of mid-life crisis and personal .com layoff I decided to become certified as a Massachusetts public school history teacher, grades 6-12. As a mid-career professional I can do so by taking a literacy subject matter tests. While I have read dozens of books on various historical periods, visited many historic sites and soaked up as much history as I could during the last twenty-odd years, I've never studied history formally. The test subject matter guidelines were very thorough and appeared to include every aspect of global history that a committee of history teachers could think up in a year's time. Clearly I was going to have to cram. The source material for said cramming I share with you here. The material presented is all quite good, I would recommend all of them (and I do mean all of them) to anyone cramming for a similar test. Whethor or not I passed the test (the failure rate is high) the experience of trying, however briefly, to keep an overview of the entire history of the world in my head was quite rewarding. Did I pass? I won't know for three more weeks. I'll let you know. MKA

World History to 1648

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0064671232/netsurferdigest

Jay Pascal Anglin, William J. Hamblin
HarperCollins; ISBN: 0064671232
The HarperCollins College Outline series are just that, straightforward historical overviews written to the introductory college level. General geographic areas are covered sequentially as to major historical events, peoples, movement of peoples, politics and culture. The maps and illustrations are clear and informative, and help place cultures and events in historical context. The writing is expository; this is not written for the popular audience, but rather the student needing context. This volume covers world history to 1648.

World History from 1500

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0064671380/netsurferdigest

J. Michael Allen, James B. Allen
HarperCollins; ISBN: 0064671380
The companion volume to World History to 1648. As with all this series the level of detail is very broad. Essential events are covered, but at a summary level. After all this is the history of the entire world . . .

United States History to 1877

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0064671119/netsurferdigest

John A. Krout (Contributor), Arnold S. Rice, Arnold M. Rice, Charles M. Harris (Contributor)
Harper Perennial; ISBN: 0064671119
This volume and the United States History from 1865 provide a very solid overview of US History. Also includes important documents such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independance.

United States History from 1865

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0064671003/netsurferdigest

Arnold M. Rice, John A. Krout (Contributor), Charles M. Harris
Harper Perennial; ISBN: 0064671003
This second volume of US History takes us to the present day, circa 1991. Well if you want to stay current read you local newspaper, the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005R8BI/netsurferdigest">Wall Street Journal</A> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005NIP1/netsurferdigest">The Economist</A>.

World History for Dummies

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764552422/netsurferdigest

Peter Haugen
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0764552422
Never til now having regarded myself as a dummy I have avoided the "Dummies" series, possibly to my detriment. World History for Dummies was engagingly and intelligently written. More to the point it mapped quite closely to the themes around which the teacher testing was based.

U.S. History for Dummies

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076455249X/netsurferdigest

Steve Wiegand
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 076455249X
If I passed the test this book is the reason why. Not just easy to read and informative, but the "chunking" of the material conformed almost exactly to the test subjects. Regardless of the stated test guidelines probably 60 percent of the questions could have been answered out of U.S. History for Dummies.

American History 1

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572225149/netsurferdigest

Barcharts Inc; ISBN: 1572225149
This isn't a book, it's only four pages long. It's a cheat sheet, but very helpful. When studying such a volume of material it can get hard to see the good old forest for the goll-darn trees. This 4-pager succinctly shows you the shape of the forest.

English Grammer and Punctuation

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572225319/netsurferdigest

Javier Salado
Barcharts Inc; ISBN: 1572225319
OK this isn't really history. But, as a teacher of teachers told me: "on essay questions the easiest way to lose points is by misplacing commas." I know for a fact that this sheet saved me from making several costly mistakes.

Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060392452/netsurferdigest

Michael Moore
Regan Books; ISBN: 0375421874
Ever wanted to be the aggrieved guy waving his arms wildly, and ranting at some poor unfortunates he's managed to trap in the corner of the kitchen at a party? This book shows you how! Michael Moore's Stupid White Men is a compendium of anti Bush dynasty screeds, catalogues of gross corporate malfeasance, racial polemics, political diatribes, and various assorted personal self-loathings. In other words classic Michael Moore. Written after the GW Bush elections controversies, but before 9/11 and Enron/Harken/WorldCom/etc. this book feels a bit prescient; it didn't take long, but chunks of the future he predicts are already here. He provides ample factoids for you to launch at the disbelieving, and includes a number of suggestion-filled sidebars of handy steps one can take to impede the imanent appocolypse. If this isn't your sort of thing, then don't bother. But if you enjoy Moore's over-the-top, off-the-razor-wired-wall humor you'll find this book hard to put down. MKA

Global Community: The Role of International Organizations In The Making of the Contemporary World

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520231279/netsurferdigest

Akira Iriye
University of California Press; ISBN: 0520231279
Everyone talks about gobalization, but in some ways it's less well studied and understood than you think. One of the most important changes over the last hundred years in the conduct of international relations has been the tremendous growth in the numbers and kinds of non-profit, non-governmental international organizations. Beginning with technical cooperation groups such as the Universal Postal Union and the International Telegraph Union in the late nineteenth century, Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) were soon engaged in a wide variety of operations. Akira Iriye looks at those NGOs dealing with humanitarian relief, cultural exchange, peace and disarmament, developmental assistance, human rights and environmentalism. It seems odd that so little research has been done on this important area of human relations. Perhaps it is because, as the author suggests, history and public attention are drawn to conflict and these organizations are devoted to avoiding international conflict. Any one who is interested in globalization and international relations, conflicted or not, would do well to read this book. MKA

Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1890771481/netsurferdigest

Rose Marie Beebe (Editor), Robert M. Senkewicz (Editor)
Heyday Books; ISBN: 1890771481
The most authentic, and often the most enjoyable, way to read history is to read original source material. Such things as memoires, letters, announcements, official reports and contemporary news reports, provide a direct view of the past that is often muddied by authored historical studies. Unless you are a historian yourself it is unlikely you have much access to these materials, particularly if they require translation. "Lands of Promise and Despair" paints the history of early California using these early first hand materials. Much of this material was originally in Spanish and is translated to English, some for the first time. The interaction between the early Spanish soldiers and the native were catastrophic, so the Catholic Church stepped in between the soldiers and locals only to virtually enslave them. The document "Requerimiento" is a marvelous synopsis of the sixteenth century Spanish world view which was read to the indigenous peoples upon a first meeting which offered them the choice of convert or take the consequences. Many of the selections are illustrated, with several pages of gorgeous color plates. Each selection is fully introduced and placed in historical context, which makes this Californian history suitable for the casual reader, as well as the more focused student of history. MKA

The Fever Trail

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374154694/netsurferdigest

Mark Honigsbaum
Farrar Straus & Giroux; ISBN: 0374154694
Where I grew up, near Rochester New York, Malaria was known as Genessee Fever and was a great killer of early settlers. During the early western exploraton and colonization phase of world history malaria killed the majority of entire expeditions: "Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin, there's one come's out for forty went in." This made finding a cure for malaria not only a humanitarian mission, but a critical geopolitical goal for European governments. Mark Honigsbaum's book tackles the history of the search for the cure for malaria as part history, part travelogue, part botanical guide, but principally as adventure/mystery. The tales of the often eccentric explorers fighting the South American jungle make for great armchair travelling. Once doctors and botanists identified the magnificent red-leafed Chinchona tree as the curative bark, South American governments hoarded their supply and used any means possible to keep the seeds and saplings from being spirited out of the country to be grown in other European equatorial colonies. Improbably, "The Fever Trail" would make a great beach read, and you'll end up better informed about one of the world's great medical dramas. MKA

Summer Reading List

“I got my summer reading list, but it’s really awful,” says my daughter over Saturday breakfast. “Well of course it is,” I think to myself, nothing as stultifying as assigned edificative reading. “It’s all this girly stuff,” she says. Girly stuff? I should think that girly stuff would appeal to a 14-year old girl. “Well let me see it, there must be something good in there.” We look it over. I blink. I clench. I fume. Finally I sputter “This is horrible, dreadful, and a nasty twisted assault on the boys in your class.” My daughter, convinced again of my basic emotional instability, wanders off. Whats wrong with the list? It reflects an extremely narrow view of human relations. Of the seven female protagonists *all* of them are either struggling to overcome poverty, or vicimization. Of the nine male protagonists six of them are either crippled, victimizers or both. The only non-fiction books are women's personal tales of overcoming adversity and victimization. The only light fiction are tired old warhorses. I can't imagine a list more likely to turn teenagers off of reading, particularly the boys.

So here is my own recommended summer reading list for incoming highschool freshman. They are selected with these criteria: I have personally read them, they're a good read, they're at an appropriate length/language level, they have broad appeal, they were written for adults and they're not desparately trying to shove some message down your throat (although I don't bar subtle nudging).

Homage to Catalonia

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156421178/netsurferdigest

George Orwell
Harvest Books; ISBN: 0156421178
George Orwell fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. His stories of battles, life at the front, his nearly fatal wounding, street fighting and betrayal are terrifically exciting. His observations on the totalitarianism on both sides of the fighting foreshadow his future novels, and the struggles of the twentieth century.

The Star Diaries

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156849054/netsurferdigest

Stanislaw Lem, Michael Kandel (Translator)
Harvest Books; ISBN: 0156849054
Ijon Tichy travels the stars, knocks himself over the head, and rewrites civilazations in a hilariously polite style.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786884061/netsurferdigest

Paul Hoffman
Little Brown & Company; ISBN: 0786884061
Paul Erdos' only home was mathematics. He would show up unannounced at the home of any number of mathematicians and announce "My brain is open." He would stay (as the world's worst house guest) until a mathematical problem was solved and then move on. A much-beloved and generous man, Erdos was also one of he centuries great mathemeticians.

Mythologies

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374521506/netsurferdigest

Roland Barthes, Annette Lavers (Translator)
Noonday Press; ISBN: 0374521506
An easily readable collection of essays on the use of symbols in everyday life and how they are used to control the reader/audience. An excellent and enjoyable introduction to semiotics by one of the important figures of modern philosophy.

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0872863328/netsurferdigest

Ellen Ullmann
City Lights Books; ISBN: 0872863328
An honest account from a software engineer, who runs her own consultancy in San Francisco, of her ruminations on what its like to live life inside high technololgy.

The Killer Angels

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345348109/netsurferdigest

Michael Shaara
Ballantine Books; ISBN: 0345348109
This fictionalized but accurate acccount of the Battle of Gettysburg lets you glimpse the lives of the leaders on both sides of the most critical battle of the Civil War.

Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345434870/netsurferdigest

Alison Weir
Ballantine Books (Trd Pap); ISBN: 0345434870
April 3, 2001
Eleanor was wife to two competing kings and the mother of three more. She wielded power over her own lands, helped create the Chivalric code, and had enourmous impact on the cultural life of twelfth century England and France.

Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312862113/netsurferdigest

Ursula K. Le Guin
St. Martin's Press; ISBN: 0312862113; Reprint edition ; November 1996
Three novels in one volume. One is easily swept into the world's Le Guin creates, she is one of the most engaging of science fiction writers.

Robert Francis : Collected Poems

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0870235109/netsurferdigest
Robert Francis
Univ. of Massachusetts Press; ISBN: 0870235109; Reprint edition; ISBN: 0345434870
February 1986

Though a Fool

The wayfaring man though a fool
Will often fare as well
As one who has been to school
And knows how to scan and spell.

The scholar is often melancholy
Too often on his way
While the fool may well be jolly
Though why he cannot say.

 

What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375421777/netsurferdigest

James Gleick
Pantheon Books; ISBN: 0375421777
May 7, 2002
I think it depends on how close you were to all that Internet Hoo-Ha. If you were close enough you know damned well what happened. The scars, burns, and your career might *never* heal. Those folks can consider this tome a souvenir, sort of a yearbook of the Internet Era without any pictures: The giddy excitement, the model-smashing paradigms, the business plans, the savage tyros, the multi-million dollar domain names, the spam, the patented mental images, its all there. Well nearly all there. There isn't much explanation of the BubblePop and its after effects. For the rest of you that didn't quite get sucked into the vortex of the dot com frenzy this is a valuable recapitulation of the arc of hype. James Gleick is a very good writer with a gift for drawing out the lever-point of a complex situation. This collection of Essays, most of which appeared in the New York Times Magazine between 1991 and 2002, covers a broad range of once-timely topics. Of course the Internet has not gone away, and much of what Gleick covers is still valid, some of it extremely so. I do wish that he had included a bit of current commentary on each article to help frame some of these topics for the reader who hasn't been paying attention. But, like any yearbook, it's what *you* bring to the book that give it it's poiniancy. I suggest bringing your worthless stock options to use as a bookmark. MKA

To an Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312262396/netsurferdigest

Garrett Epps
St. Martin's Press; ISBN: 0312262396
March 2001
Looking for a good legal page-turner? Tired of noble, heroic lawyers saving the day with improbable fisticuffs and turgid courtroom theatrics? Do you want to be genuinely frightened? Consider this: The US Supreme Court decided that your personal freedom to practice your religious beliefs as you see fit is properly in the hands of your state legislature. I don't know about where you live, but in Massachusetts that's terrifying. The story of how ancient native American religious practices and an unemployment claim came to imperil our fundamental religious rights makes fascinating reading. None of the participants were out to do damage, they were all trying to do the right thing (OK, I'll make an exception for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia). And yet they were inexorably driven by who they were, their view of the world, and the interpretation of the law to the highest court in the land. Garrett Epps give you a look into the lives and environments of the principle actors in this true life drama. He also explains quite clearly the legal aspects to this tale in a way that is easy to understand, but does not trivialize or skimp. Highly recommended. MKA

The Minority Report

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375421874/netsurferdigest

Philip K. Dick
Pantheon Books; ISBN: 0375421874
Philip K Dick got the future right. Not the details, we haven't colonized Mars or endured nuclear catastrophe; you can't buy a can of UBIK and I've yet to meet a Ganymedean Slime Mold. What Dick understood about the future (which, by the way, is *now*) was the paranoia. You can't trust the media, you can't trust the government, and you can't trust your friends. You can't trust yourself; you can't even be sure that you *are* yourself. Perhaps this is why seven of his books and stories have been made into movies in recent years. "Minority Report" is a novella in the classic PKD vein. Commissioner John Anderton is responsible for the Precrime System. Police "Precogs" can see into the future and finger future criminals who are then sent away to detention camps. Crime is prevented and society is safe. When his own name turns up as a future murderer he has to face the implications or his own creation. Steven Spielberg releases Minority Report, the movie, in June starring Tom Cruise. Many Dick adaptations have missed the mark by focusing on the plot and ignoring the essence of PKD's dystopic future. Read the novella and judge Spielberg's success for yourself. MKA

Interested in some Philip K Dick novels that haven't yet been Hollywoodified? Try:
Dr. Bloodmoney
Clans of the Alphane Moon
Ubik

Tested Advertising Methods, Fifth Edition

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0130957011/netsurferdigest

John Caples, Fred E. Hahn
Prentice Hall Trade; ISBN: 0130957011
The professional tragedy of the "desktop publishing revolution" is the obverse of its great promise: that everyone can create their own marketing materials without having to spend all that money on marketing professionals. What happened to the skills those marketing professionals had? The first against the wall was Typography (more about that some other time). The next to go was copy writing. Tested Advertising Methods has been in print since 1932 and is considered the bible of advertising copy writing. John Caples started with simple premises: that advertising has a purpose, and that you don't know if an ad is working unless you test it. This is simple, yet profound, and yields clear creative techniques and testing strategies. Years of testing, adjusting, re-testing and re-adjusting proved that the headline is the most important part of an ad. There are simple, useful things you can do to make your headline do what you want it to do. The reader will find clear instructions on how to do them in this book, as well as ways to improve body copy, and design techniques as well. To really know what's going on with your message though, you have to test, test, test. This updated edition shows you how and why. Writes Caples, "I have seen one advertisement sell 19-1/2 times as much goods as another." Everyone who authors a Power Point presentation, creates web pages, writes business reports, publishes a newsletter, issues a press release, or is in any way responsible for their organization's public face should read this book. Now that we're all professional designers and copywriters we all ought to do what we can to bring our work up to those lost professional standards. MKA

Peer to Peer: Sharing Over the Internet

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201767325/netsurferdigest

Bo Leuf
Addison Wesley Professional; ISBN: 0201767325
Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing is having a profound effect on the intellectual property economy. There's a lot happening in technology, intellectual property law, usage patterns and corporate implementation. This book covers the territory. The author Bo Leuf, one of the Wiki gurus, identifies P2P as more of a conceptual/marketing concept than a defined technology, and then does a superb job of identifying, describing and explaining the various aspects of the P2P space. I had not really thought about messaging as a P2P environment before, but of course it is. The book is well organized and the illustrations, charts and tables are terrific. I particularly liked the parallel comparison charts and the figures diagramming the information flow of various P2P types. All terms were properly explained. The target audience for this book is wide, ranging from management/executive level to technical-implementation level. This is very difficult to do, usually the tech side ends up making the non-tech aspects unintelligible or the tech side is execu-dumbed to the point of uselessness. In this case the author succeeds in hitting the proper balance. The technical information is not of intensive depth, but enough tech info is included to frame the different P2P examples for the technical reader. The general discussion is very concise and on target; the language is graspable and easy-to-read. This is an interesting topic, well organized, engagingly written, with excellent illustrations; a good read. MKA

Confessions of a Yakuza

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/4770019483/netsurferdigest

by Funichi Saga, John Bester (Translator), Junichi Saga
Kodasha International; ISBN: 477019483
An old but strangely virile tattooed man visits a country doctor. He knows he's dying, doesn't much care, but he wants to talk. Doctor Junichi Saga listens and records the memories of one of Japan's last traditional gang bosses. Starting as a fifteen-year-old when "things first started to go wrong" for him Ijichi Eiji escorts you into the hidden world of Japanese gangster society, the Yakuza. His wonderful memory and particular gift for noticing small but significant details gives you a visceral sense of time and place. And what a time and place! His story begins before the First World War and takes you through the fifties. Tokyo, as seen from below, was a world of kept women, flophouses, natural and human disasters, gamblers, brigands, corrupt officials, and grinding poverty. As a novice gangster Eiji finds his way, his life and his family - ultimately rising to boss. Through all his tales of violence and honor the man himself comes through: unrepentant, funny, insightful and a delightful storyteller. MKA