If you can’t stand the HEAT, read this book.
Heat permeates this book about kitchens and the cooking life – from sweat dripping into a long simmering ragu in Tuscany in a pot so large it takes a large paddle to reach it, to the sweat of the grill area in an upscale – also Italian – restaurant in NYC. Heat is the transformative element in preparing the food we eat from ingredients to meals and “Heat” the book is about the transformation from writer researching article about kitchens to foodie/chef/obsessive cook Buford follows.
From a dinner party in NYC that leads to the first “apprenticeship” to long stints in Italy with butchers, pasta makers, and night long dinners with Mario Batalia, Buford creates a multi-sensory experience that combines the brutally basic elements of butchery elevated by Dante-quoting artistic butchers. The food is a story of its own that is both backdrop and metaphor for the larger story of people – grunt-prep line workers with dreams of 3 stars and their own restaurant somewhere/someday to aging master pasta-makers in Italy where Buford becomes obsessed about determining just when eggs began to be added to pasta dough. We, the reader, accept this obsessive ness as normal when the implications of culture, of history, of changes in daily living that still evoke a timelessness are made so clear by Buford. And we share his obsessions in research, in perfecting techniques, in acknowledging “a feeling of loss. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that’s handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality.”
If that sounds sad, it is not. Mortality and immortality is what living fully on the sensual level – with attention to detail, to sources, to respect for the cow or the land or the technique and tradition, with respect for the time it takes to learn what we must and the brief but blissful time it takes to live what we must, that imbues this Heat with a fragrant and satisfying read.

Geneen Roth

This follow up book to the author’s bestselling “When Food is Love” is a not a diet plan, not a “how to” (diet, lose weight, find god or anything else) plan. It is simply a pep talk and introduction to the process that Roth has discerned over decades of counseling women on weight issues is the only thing that truly works: being aware that how you eat, what and when you eat can be the summary for everything you believe about life, yourself and the universe.
She makes a fairly good argument that the way one eats not only illustrates our own self-image, but creates a way to avoid deeper body and soul issues – overeating not only does not happen because we are hungry (rather from eating when we are already full, so we are not listening to our body), it comes because we are also not listening to some other signal our body is trying to send – pain, fear, anger, shame. Roth believes that the perfect diet and perfect thighs will not make you any more or less happy than that next lemon pie unless you confront your own inner voices that are pushing you to food in the first place. (and this relationship with food can be about deprivation and anorexia, as well).

By Seth Godin
2007 Do You Zoom, Inc Publishing

Simple: Believe in the Title. That is just what you get. You are on a path. That path leads to one of three things: a cliff, a dip or a cul-de-sac. The first is disaster, the second that long slog where many people give up or the cul-de-sac, which is a dead-end. Seth shows us how most people who succeed are both quitters and those who don’t quit. The trick is to know which things to quit, which to stick with. His advice is that if you can’t win, can’t excel, can’t make it through the dip (of a job, venture, relationship, artwork, whatever) for whatever reason (no skills, no funds, no real interest), then you should quit. Now. Right now. Better still – why start? You should not quit the dip when you know it’s a dip – i.e. the hard slog (the years of work to be boss, to be made partner, to attain a certain skill at the piano) but if you can’t make it through – it’s not a dip. It’s a cul-de-sac. And in case that sounds okay, he adds “Average sounds safe. But its not.” The advice is great. The problem is, telling which things to stick with is not as easy as he makes it sound. It’s a great pep talk to quit. It’s a great pep talk to not quit. It’s when you call a friend who is going to tell you what you already know. This is why he doesn’t tell you when to quit or give you a formula. Because he thinks you already know.
And if you listen to yourself – to your passion – or lack of it – you do, honey, you do.
Ride the dip, don’t be one.

Jonathan Fields

Broadway Books 2009

A renegade by definition must ignore the rules, break the rules, make new rules.
Jonathon Fields’s book is about breaking out of the “rules” in your head more than breaking the rules of the world. But as anyone can tell you, those are the one’s that are hardest to overcome. His beginning chapters talk you through a bigger way of imagining your talents and interests and how to apply them to possible ways of making money.
Note, I don’t say “career” despite the title because these transcend the word – the ideas he gives you can be a major life overhaul or a side job from your career or a transition.
The point is there are many ways of making money besides passively waiting for someone to hire you, pay you and of course, tell you what to do.
His book is a great first step resource in helping you to envision how you will do this – he provides a plethora of web sites, resources and inspiration. In fact, his compilations of resources are the main reason to get this book – he has done significant research on each site and what it offers.
These resources will be what really ignites the spark of renegade reinvention for you but Fields does get credit for getting you there and making you feel that you really can do it.
Downside: Fields offers sparse details of his own credentials – he mentions how his yoga studio opened in New York on Sept 10, 2001 and yet, he had hundreds of clients his first week – an impressive feat for anyone. But he never gives you an idea of how that happened, what he did to draw clients into this place.

2000 Jossey-Bass Inc Publishers

This book whispers in to you. It whispers in the way that a small whisper across the room catches your attention and forces you to focus on what is being said. Palmer’s slight in length (just over 100 pages) but deep in thought book offers insights that resonate with experience. When he talks about the need to face your fears and face your failures, he first lets you know of his own failures, his own fears that he would never measure up or find the way. An example of the deep and yet subtle method of teaching that marks this set of essays is found in this anecdote: when Palmer spent time at a Quaker retreat after a crisis in his professional life, he waits impatiently for “the way” to open up to him. A respected elderly Quaker tells him wryly: ‘In 60 plus years, way has never opened in front of me…but a lot of way has closed behind me and that’s had the same guiding effect.”
Palmer combines honesty forged from a rigorous personal integrity with the compassion as he reveals his own two struggles with clinical depression. The depression is presented as a deep disconnect that includes a disconnect with well meaning friends who just don’t know what to do. Yet, he celebrates the deep connection with community that is at the root of all vocation and even self – stating that “Who am I?” leads inevitably to the equally important question “Whose am I” for there is no selfhood outside of relationship.” (p 17).
The last chapter – a beautiful meditation on the gifts of each season, would be worthy of a freestanding status. He presents the argument that autumn is full of life for it is full of seeds and new life, just as our own emotional downtimes can be. He urges us to appreciate the clarity of “winter” when all is icy white. His approach to spring is truly a gift – for he illustrates how the excessive abandon of joy and color and bloom that occurs then can only occur when nature acts as a community and that in the end, we humans must also be aware of and work with in the framework of our community. For, ““community doesn’t just create abundance, community is abundance”.
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_top&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=maison0d-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=0787947350

Nation Books, New York, NY
2010

At the age of 53, a friend of mine visited Europe for the first time this year. He bought hop on/hop off tickets, saw the major sites and had a great time. He “saw” Europe, but he didn’t “travel” there, in the sense that Rick Steves, or I might use the word, as he navigated in his comfortable bubble of luxury hotels, group bus tours and English menu restaurants.
Well known for his popular tours, TV shows and line of travel books, Rick Steves presents something altogether different here: yes, it is a travel guide but not in the usual sense. It is a guide for those who long for travel that is more than just so much fun and fancy meals, with quaint photo opps on the way back home. Far too often, American travelers view travel as a respite from the routine. Rick shows that the real point of travel is to get not just outside of our home routines but your routine ways of thinking and being in the world.
To accomplish this, Rick highlights several countries – Bosnia, Turkey, Denmark, Ecuador and finally, Iran. While one can imagine that Bosnian travel would be an eye opener, bringing with it the reality of a country far too recently far too overcome by violence, humanizing the news stories we read or ignored at home, Rick shows that even countries that on the surface seem far more serene and similar to us, such as Denmark, have much to teach us about differences and similarities. For example, the Danish accept far higher taxes than most Americans and as a result have a lower discretionary income, and far less “luxurious” lives than one might assume of Europe. But these taxes support a far more encompassing social welfare system that is as much the result of values as it is a formative force of values. The emphasis on the community and communal good is expressed in other ways – scofflaws and greediness in business is little tolerated, and rule breakers are scorned. But, if it doesn’t impact the community in a negative way, only the individual, it turns out the Danes are far more tolerant than our “individual freedoms focused” nation: tolerance of drug use is one example of this. Rick admires the pragmatic position that tolerates without encouraging drug use but also without stigmatizing it and turning addicts into financially desperate criminals.
The chapter on Iran is worth the price of the book alone. Rick is both fascinated and put off by this unfamiliar terrain. He admires some things – the warmth and friendliness of the population and criticizes others – the aggressive slogans, the imposition of religion in the universities, the treatment of women. Still, it is not his observations per se, but the way he tries to make sense of them, that is the real justification for this book. Filming a prayer service in a mosque in Tehran, where the day before, the film crew saw “a huge shell”, Rick can’t help but make comparisons between his own church services at home and these – the restless eyes, the guy whose cell phone goes off mid-service and the sheepish look on his face, the over-long sermon, the “passing of the peace”, etc. But Rick also points out that when he asked what the banners say floating overhead, one states: “Death to Israel.”
Some things politicize without further comment.
Perhaps many will be put off by the word “Political” in the title but they should not avoid this book because they think Rick will preach a certain point of view to them. In truth, Rick does make his views known on drug legalization, politics and aid and war in many places. But his “Political Act” is a far broader definition – instead of encouraging people to think like him or agree with him on politics, Rick encourage everyone to get outside of their comfort zone of customs and customary thinking and actually see the countries they are visiting, not just the tourist sites. Talk to people, chat with clerks, be open minded. And if you do visit a popular cultural site, try to learn from that as well – how are the people of that country treating this monument or using this religious site? How do the worshippers in a mosque resemble your church services back home?
And then, when you engage with people while traveling, the shift occurs naturally. As Rick states – “Travel doesn’t end when you step off the plane into the familiar” – you will continue “traveling” and processing this new information when you get home. Rick confesses that without having seen shantytowns in Istanbul, he would not have gotten involved in affordable housing issues in his home state of Washington.
Thus, the last chapter is a guide for what to do with the new information you have. Or what to do if you can’t travel for monetary or other reasons: classes, host a foreign exchange student, get involved with the community.
How you listen to the news, what stories in the media you seek out, how grounded your perspective of the human cost of our governments decisions will be different than they were before. They have to be, for the true political act is to enlarge not just your knowledge but your community of belonging beyond the local to the global.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=maison0d-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=1568584350

Allegra Goodman

The Dial Press 2010 New York

This book is about a cookbook collector only in the once removed sense – it is about a collection of characters, none of whom are the cookbook collector but some of whom come together around this collection and all of whom come together and of age and come into wealth and sometimes wisdom and often disappointment around the dot.com bubble’s rise and fall and slide into the new millennium, 9/11 and the changed word it brought.

Goodman’s novel reads well and easy, her storyline arcs nicely with the chronology of actual events, providing a structure, albeit a predictable one, to her novel. She weaves the plot into the timeframe well but that is also her biggest flaw.

For we are drawn into the stories by the people, who begin as likable, varied individuals. There is Jessamine, a wildly idealistic, floundering philosophy grad student who cobbles a life of other’s passions, even the cookbook collectors:

“She worked with Tom McClintock’s ghost, and where he sighed, she sighed, and where he seemed to smile – Syrup of Maiden-hair – she smiled….she glided through the house, and ate the plums George left.” Her sister, Emily, is a co-founder of a tech start up that amasses a great fortune. We see meet these two on the first pages but there in is the flaw – we keep reading because we like these two, not because the dot.com story needs to be told. But soon, far too many other people and side plots take over, sprouting like IPO’s on the           stock market.

Goodman however compromises character development to plot development – namely her need to follow a set and defined chronology based on these actual events. The result is that months and chapters go by so that the bubble can burst or the millennium or some other event can shape the overall plot arch and the people reappear on the page exactly as they were the last time we saw them…no deepening, no changes so that they become like book titles on a shelf – we read the “names” but don’t know the contents of their inner lives or choices. Relationships stay like photos in a book, always waiting to be served and never changing for far longer than is believable.

In cooking, when you brown items in a pan, you don’t crowd them or they steam and turn mushy instead of browning and developing flavor. That happens here: she is reduced to clichés for characters because she doesn’t allow them to linger on the page long enough to develop their full flavor. The other flaw that arises from this superficial treatment is that Goodman then has almost every major relationship go through a crisis at the exact same point in time in the book, which just isn’t credible or interesting. It feels artificial and it is – an easy out for the writer.

Throwing so much in means that certain sub-plots that could have been developed and added depth to what was going on, as opposed to distractions, such as the cookbook collectors mystery woman, are given superficial treatments and summations instead of becoming an integral part of the book.

Ultimately, while this is a good “read” it could have been a better book if, as experienced collectors must, she had culled the drafts to edit it down to the best storylines, the most crucial characters.  At the end, this is enjoyable but not memorable.

By Lauri Ward

Harper Collins

2007

Okay, I didn’t know she had a TV show. I don’t even own a TV. How is that for downsizing for you?

Nor do you need to know her or her show to like this book. Moves are rarely lateral – we are moving up or moving down in size. And even for those who are making that rare lateral move, why not make it efficient and streamline what you take.

Ward does a great job showing you how to prepare before the move by careful planning, rethinking of uses for what you have now, and strategic letting-go. While not a book on de-cluttering, Ward does assist on a very practical level in offering tips for that overwhelming project.

Ward is great at using many tools in helping you to achieve style in your new smaller home, from tips on paint and colors, to how to find “lost” space and use it for storage.

She is big on closed storage and open plans, great on offering practical ways to make it happen. Her’s is not a book on “style” but on ease of living and proportions of properties that will work with anyone at any stage – the just graduated to the just retired downsizer. Her advice is perky; the illustrations show real believable places where you can picture your neighbors and friends at home, rather than esoteric magazine shoots that are always going to look good because no one lives there. Her list of what to keep, what to sometimes keep and what to let go (you know you are packing those as we speak, so stop!) are spot on.

A quibble, and it becomes a big one by book’s end, is that each chapter ends with several pages of sources and suggestions for the ideas in that chapter. Not only does this date the book (how likely that a store will carry the exact same item she highlights? That tray, that chair?), it begins to feel like both “a message from our sponsors” and fills a lot of space.

Also, her ideas are good but her writing, especially in introducing the topics, is chunky and lacking in grace.

My advice: Downsize your reading to skip the first paragraph and the last pages of each chapter and the book is worth your time.
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_top&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=E19E9E&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=maison0d-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=0061170984

The Imperfectionists

A Novel by Tom Rachman

2010

Just like the international English-language newspaper the characters in this novel produce, this novel is both a singular edition/storyline and a montage of stories that together make up a cohesive flow of what is going on, has gone on and will go on in the lives of these reporters, editors, copy editors, readers and publishers – all of whom get their own story or chapter of focus.

The amazing thing is that while virtually all the stories could stand on their own as a story, together they become richer and even more vibrant, so that you find yourself looking back from one chapter on Dario – a minor character who shows up in 3 stories – to see how he fit into another story. This creates a depth and resonance that satisfies the reader with a complexity that most first novels lack.

Open the newspaper, any newspaper, and begin to read. At first you think you are reading individual stories, about this conflict or that art review. But soon enough you realize that this paper – a collection of self-standing stories – is itself a story that has a voice and editorial vision created by just how these stories interact and are placed together on the page or another section. This is the structure of the brilliantly written novel by Tom Rachman. Each chapter focuses on a different individual associated with an English language international newspaper based in Rome. There is the underachieving and bitter copy editor, the series of managing directors, the accounts payable – so disliked she is referred to as such by the staff, the obit writer who learns his own lesson about death in a juxtaposition of interviews and incident. Rachman is able to make each voice unique, each chapter a skilled stand-alone story depicting reappearing characters in a fresh way.

One of the best chapters rivals most short stories for the austere and elegant way it creates a world of its own. It begins “She had been dreading tomorrow ever since it happened the first time.” The chapter ends “Marta replies, looking down. ‘Tomorrow.’ Between those lines is a great study of facing the future while staring down the past with a character who defies time by reading old papers. In a world where the phrase “yesterday’s news” is used to show obsolescence, where tomorrows edition is always the next focus, the resonance of the past is often lost in the details of what happens next, without analysis. In a way, this chapter – focusing on “The Reader” – highlights the impact of a world created in just that way.

The book weaves between characters and between times, echoing one character who is being interviewed for her obituary before her death, though everyone but her denies that is the case. She knows. And she states “We enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory.” Papers give an illusion of continuity by each day showing up on our steps, as if what happens today follows what happened yesterday and leads to what happens tomorrow. Until one day, it doesn’t – for so many of the characters, for the newspaper business itself.

As for endings – there is only one chapter that fails to meet the stand-alone quality of the others – the last chapter. The character portrayed never comes alive, the actions are predictable, and the chapter feels tacked on like a bad insert flyer. My advice is to skip this chapter and end with – what else – Accounts Payable. That is where many newspapers do end, after all.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_top&bc1=FFFFFF&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=maison0d-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=0385343663