Booksellers' Selections for Summer Afternoons

Booksellers' Selections for Summer Afternoons

by Susan Stamberg
Morning Edition
May 23, 2008 ·

Novelist Henry James once said the two most beautiful words in the English language were "summer afternoon." And what better way to spend a summer afternoon — or a spring, fall or winter afternoon for that matter — than curled up with a good book?

To that end, we huddled with booksellers from three independent bookstores to get their selections for the very best reads this summer.

And the picks are in! This year's selections feature a little bit of everything: from Don Lee's wacky brussels spouts farmers in Wrack & Ruin to Irina Reyn's re-imagined (and thoroughly modern) Tolstoy heroine in What Happened to Anna K. [See below} Whatever your reading fancy, our booksellers promise many pleasant afternoons, summer or otherwise.

To listen to Susan Stamerg Click Here.

Click on images below to read excerpts.



























































































Click here for the complete list.

FAULTY PRESCRIPTION FOR MEXICAN DRUG VIOLENCE

FAULTY PRESCRIPTION FOR MEXICAN DRUG VIOLENCE

By Neal Peirce
May 25, 2008
© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group














Only lightly noted on this side of the border, our neighbor Mexico is engulfed in bloody, violent combat with and between death-dealing drug cartels.


















Click image to enlarge

In a stunning reversal for President Felipe Calderon’s crusade to subdue the drug trade and its perpetrators, Edgar Gomez, the national police chief and lead anti-cartel crusader, was assassinated this month outside his Mexico City home. “This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the risk of ungovernability,” Mexico City sociologist Luis Astorga told the Washington Post.

Yet it’s hardly unique. More than 20,000 Mexican troops and federal police are struggling against the private armies of rival drug lords. Literally hundreds of officials and police have been murdered in the struggle -- some 6,000 in the last 2½ years, far beyond U.S. casualty counts in Iraq. Further drenching the country in blood, mass executions and even beheadings have been reported.

Talk about a national security issue for the United States! We share a 2,000-mile border with Mexico; it’s our second-largest trade partner, especially huge in agriculture. Millions of families are related across the border; thousands of Mexicans regularly cross over for work. Yet cartel murders of police are commonplace, and 30 percent of police in Baja California alone are estimated to be on a drug cartel payroll.

There’s a U.S. response before Congress right now. It’s President Bush’s request for a so-called Merida Initiative- a $1.4 billion three-year program to undergird the Mexican government’s anti-drug efforts with helicopters and other military equipment, training for Mexican police forces, plus phone-tapping, mail-inspection and Web-surveillance programs.

But there’s substantial congressional skepticism about aid that could flow to notoriously unaccountable, frequently corrupted Mexican military and police forces. And then the tough, basic question - realistically, how much could U.S. aid of roughly $500 million a year do to stem the gargantuan illegal drug trade that now flows across the Mexican border -- some $23 billion a year by U.S. Government Accountability Office estimate?

And is the problem really Mexico -- or our demand for drugs? There are three much smarter steps that a rational United States would make.

First, face up to where the Mexican cartels get their weapons of death. Virtually all, including pistols, grenades, high-powered ammunition and assault weapons such as the AK-47, are smuggled from U.S. territory, across the border into Mexico, where the gangster elements pay premium prices for them.

The weapons are often purchased legally at gun shows in Arizona and other states where loopholes permit criminals to buy guns without background checks. Then corrupted Mexican customs officials wink an eye at the smuggling.

Our obvious answer: Seal all gun show sales loopholes, requiring checks on every purchaser. And reinstate the United States ban on assault gun purchases which Congress, under gun lobby pressure (and with Bush administration acquiescence), let expire in 2004.

A second smart move: reduce demand for drugs on the U.S. side through treatment for addicted individuals. Consider cocaine alone: the RAND Corporation, in a study for the U.S. Army and White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, found that dollar for dollar, drug treatment is 10 times more effective at reducing its use than drug interdiction.

Our big mistake: Making Mexico the villain when it’s really the victim. And it’s “a familiar game,” notes Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance:

“U.S. leaders blame another country for our failure to reduce drug misuse here at home. That country escalates its war against drugs but asks the U.S. to pick up part of the tab. Aid is given, but it ends up having no effect on the availability of drugs in the United States. Politicians in Washington point their fingers again, and the cycle continues.”

Indeed, patterns of the international narcotics trade show that whenever some source of production or smuggling route gets clamped down, drug production and drug-trafficking gangs quickly regroup elsewhere.

Third and most basic of all: recognize that while prohibition of socially disallowed drugs can increase their cost, it can never halt demand. Why? Desire for mind-altering substances (opiates, alcohol, whatever) is virtually built into the human psyche.

Americans might recall the counsel of the late Nobel Prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman, who learned the immense dangers of repressing demand as, in his youth, he watched America’s misadventure into alcohol prohibition, and how it triggered the Al Capone-era wave of gang wars:

“Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials... Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and nonusers alike.”

So now comes the Medina Initiative -- fueling the drug wars, foisting the consequences of our misguided prohibition onto an already-beleaguered neighbor. Will we never learn?

Teach your dog to drive

The Man Next Door Is Teaching His Dog to Drive

by Cathryn Essinger
from My Dog Does Not Read Plato. © Main Street Rag Publishing Company.


It all began when he came out one morning
and found the dog waiting for him behind the wheel.
He thought she looked pretty good sitting there,


















so he started taking her into town with him
just so she could get a feel for the road.
They have made a few turns through the field,

him sitting beside her, his foot on the accelerator,
her muzzle on the wheel. Now they are practicing
going up and down the lane with him whispering

encouragement in her silky ear. She is a handsome
dog with long ears and a speckled muzzle and he
is a good teacher. Now my wife, Millie, he says,

she was always too timid on the road, but don't you
be afraid to let people know that you are there.
The dog seems to be thinking about this seriously.

Braking, however, is still a problem, but he is building
a mouthpiece which he hopes to attach to the steering
column, and when he upgrades to one of those new

Sports Utility Vehicles with the remote ignition device,
he will have solved the key and the lock problem.
Although he has not yet let her drive into town,

he thinks she will be ready sometime next month,
and when his eyes get bad and her hip dysplasia
gets worse, he thinks this will come in real handy.

Beyond the surface

Diving deeper into history of natural order

Princeton Weekly Bulletin
April 28, 2008, Vol. 97, No. 25
by Jennifer Greenstein Altmann

Princeton NJ — Eight freshmen gathered in a classroom in Blair Hall recently with history professor D. Graham Burnett to debate a fiery controversy from the early 19th century: Is a whale a fish or a mammal?

Caption: Associate professor of history D. Graham Burnett is the author of a new book [Trying Leviathan] that examines the debate over whale taxonomy as a turning point for the history of science in early America. (photo: Denise Applewhite)

The question was the subject of the 1818 court case Maurice v. Judd, which became the cause célèbre of the day. The trial was ostensibly about whether the whale oil of Samuel Judd, head of the New York Spermaceti Oil and Candle factory, should be considered fish oil and therefore subject to inspection by James Maurice, New York City’s inspector of fish oils. But the underlying question of whether a whale should be classified as a mammal or a fish became the subject of a sensational public debate where human taxonomy, the interpretation of the Bible’s book of Genesis, natural history and science itself were all at stake.

Burnett used the case as a focal point of his freshman seminar, “The Beast in the Sea: The Natural History of Whales.” To get the class immersed in the storied history of whales, Burnett asked his students to stage an appeal of the jury’s finding — which declared that a whale was a fish — as their midterm exam.

The trial also takes center stage in Burnett’s new book, “Trying Leviathan: The 19th-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature,” which looks at the debate over whale taxonomy as a turning point for the history of science in early America.

“The trial really seized people’s imaginations because the whole thing was so paradoxical,” said Burnett, an associate professor who specializes in the history of science. “There was broad consensus in the early republic that whales were fish — the notion this could be questioned, and by ‘philoso-phers’ of all people, struck nearly everyone as preposterous. There was much merriment at the expense of men of learning.”

The trial became a media sensation akin to the O.J. Simpson trial, with breathless coverage in newspapers, galleries crammed with citizen onlookers and celebrity figures engaged on both sides. William Sampson, the star plaintiff’s lawyer, and Samuel Latham Mitchill, a well-known naturalist, were “the Johnnie Cochran and Stephen Jay Gould of the day,” Burnett said.

Burnett stumbled on an account of the trial several years ago while researching the place of science in “Moby-Dick.” The case was such fertile ground for exploring changing perceptions of scientific knowledge that he ended up making the trial the focus of his study. He expanded the scope to examine the larger problems in the understanding of natural order that arose from the time of the pioneering 18th-century taxonomist Carl Linnaeus to Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary biology. Princeton University Press published the book last October.

“Controversies afford unique windows into knowledge being made,” said Burnett, who has taught at Princeton since 2001. “The agonistic setting of the courtroom obliges people not just to say what they know, but to defend it under cross-examination — to explain where they got their information and what buttresses it. You see down into the activities of science and the features of people’s relationship to the natural world, which are generally so difficult for the historian to recover.”

The trial also served as a moment in history when book learning was challenged by knowledge gained from life experience. Fisherman, whalers and craftsmen who worked with whale products testified alongside trained zoologists and comparative anatomists. Burnett also studied whalers’ logbooks at the New Bedford Whaling Museum to examine what whalemen knew about the anatomy and physiology of whales.

“It’s an interesting example of lay expertise,” Burnett said. “In what ways do people come to know nature through labor? It’s not the same kind of knowledge as in the university discipline of zoology or in academies of natural history, but there is deep expertise in the craft knowledge of those whose livelihoods necessitate intimate contact with nature.”

In March “Trying Leviathan” was selected as one of two recipients of the 2007 New York City Book Award from the New York Society Library, which recognizes books that capture the essence of New York City.

“Graham Burnett’s book is a terrific achievement,” said Anthony Grafton, the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. “He draws on an amazing range of sources, but wears his learning very lightly, writing an elegant and witty prose that anyone could read for pleasure. I love the way he tells the story of his central case, Maurice v. Judd, but I’m even more impressed by the way he uses the story to help us understand the meanings of law and science in a very different world. It’s wonderful to see scholarship of this depth and originality presented so well.”

Burnett graduated from Princeton in 1993 and went to the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, completing his Ph.D. in 1997. He taught at Yale University and was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Columbia University and a fellow in the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library before joining the Princeton faculty.

His first book, “Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography and a British El Dorado,” examined the relationship between cartography and colonialism in the 19th century. He also wrote “A Trial By Jury,” a narrative account of his experience as the jury foreman on a Manhattan murder trial. He said that the experience of an actual courtroom stimulated his interest in the historical relationship between science and the law.

Caption: A New York whaleman’s drawing of a sperm whale, circa 1810.

Mock trial tests students’ knowledge

To bring the subject of “Trying Leviathan” to life, Burnett split the students in his freshman seminar into two groups and assigned each team to act as lawyers in a mock appeal of the Maurice v. Judd trial. They prepared legal strategy memos for their “clients” and wrote briefs analyzing the problems at issue in the case. The assignment required that the students, in researching and framing their arguments, limit themselves to material that was available in 1818. The appeal was conducted before three graduate students in the Program in the History of Science, who played the roles of appellate judges.

“The rationale was to get them thinking like historians,” said Burnett. “I want them to get a feel for how you grasp the way people of the past made sense of the world. You have to submerge yourself in what they knew and blinker yourself with respect to the future — of which they had no inkling.”

That wasn’t easy, said student Erin Buchholtz.

“The word ‘scientist’ wasn’t even coined until the 1830s,” she said. “Additionally, it was hard to debate that whales were mammals — the word ‘mammal’ was considered obscene and offensive because it originated from the word ‘mammary.’”

Nevertheless, Buchholtz enjoyed posing as an attorney for the “whale is not a fish” team.

“The class has gotten us to look at history and science in a way we’d never thought of,” she said. “It’s opened up new thought processes and perspectives for a wide variety of ideas. It’s not uncommon for us to continue discussing things we talked about in class on the way back to our dorms, or at dinner the next day.”

“The trial was a lot of fun,” said Cameron Myhrvold. “Professor Burnett makes the subject exciting — he injects a lot of enthusiasm into our discussions.”

Sarah Strobel also has enjoyed the seminar. “We talked for two and a half hours — without stopping — about our favorite parts of ‘Moby-Dick,’ a novel that intimidated me before this class,” she said.

The massive subject of whales is one that Burnett will continue to explore. He is currently completing another book on whales, which will finish the trajectory of “Trying Leviathan.”

“The book focuses on the 20th century and the vast exploitative whaling industry, which was critical to a number of countries,” Burnett said. He chronicles how the perception of whales was radically transformed in a century’s time. Seen as mere beasts in the 1800s, whales during the 20th century moved to “the center of a transformed relationship to the natural world and became critical to the emergence of the global environmental movement. They were totems of the peace movement and symbols of the counterculture.” Changing scientific ideas, Burnett said, turned the “soulless monsters of the 19th century into soulful friends of humanity.”

Sarcasma

Click to enlarge

Solar-powered trash cans come to downtown Portland

Portland businessman puts out solar-powered trash cans downtown They're expensive, but the Oregon Zoo saves fuel and labor with similar cans

Oregonlive.com
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
STEPHEN BEAVEN
The Oregonian Staff

Portland parking mogul Greg Goodman was walking in Boston last year when he saw something that looked like a mailbox with a solar panel.

Only it wasn't a mailbox. It was a solar-powered trash can that smashes garbage -- making room for more garbage, limiting how often it's emptied and theoretically saving fuel and cutting greenhouse gases.

So Goodman bought two. He donated both to the city of Portland, and they now sit on Southwest Morrison Street, one at Broadway and one at Fifth Avenue. Each features logos for Goodman's City Center Parking, which operates 200 parking facilities, and the Oregon Environmental Council, a nonprofit he supports.


The cans have been on the street for three weeks now, so it's a little early to judge whether they're saving fuel or anything else, city officials said.

But the Oregon Zoo has five similar cans, which have saved fuel and labor, said Michael Weatherman, the zoo's custodial manager.

"I am very happy with them," Weatherman said.

The cans work like this: When garbage reaches a certain level, a sensor triggers the compactor, which smashes the trash. Lights on the front of the can -- green, yellow and red -- tell garbage haulers when it should be emptied. And the solar panel works even in the rain.

The city manages about 600 trash cans, most of them downtown, and has no plans to buy solar-powered models. So two cans are a drop in the bucket if you're looking at the big picture.

But that's exactly what Goodman, a developer and sustainability advocate, is looking at.

Soon, he plans to lobby other businesses in town to donate roughly $4,000, the rather hefty purchase price, to buy more of the trash cans for the city. Like the first two, each would include a logo for the business and a nonprofit the business chooses.

"I've already got others who've told me they're going to do it," Goodman said. "But I want to make sure they're working perfectly before I go out and sell them, because they're not cheap."

Stephen Beaven:
503-294-7663
stevebeaven@news.oregonian.com

Shmeat.

Lab-Grown Meat a Reality, But Who Will Eat It?

by Ketzel Levine

To Listen to the story Click Here.

Morning Edition, May 20, 2008 · Countless families are familiar with the domestic challenge of vegetarians and meat eaters living under one roof. Vegetarians often find the mere presence of meat repugnant; meat eaters prefer their wings and ribs seasoned without guilt. But these days, as "mixed" households explore their dietary options, a handful of scientists are cooking up what might be a possible alternative: meat grown in a lab.

Caption: The "semi-living steak" (above) was made of embryonic sheep muscle cells that were grown on a polyester scaffold for more than two months. This research was done in 2000 by the artists/researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, as part of their project Tissue Culture & Art. Courtesy Tissue Culture & Art

Though the idea of growing animal parts in a lab rather than on a farm has been around for a century, it has never seemed like a good time to talk about man-made meat. But the concept has had some famous proponents, including Winston Churchill in his 1932 essay "Fifty Years Hence": "We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."

Churchill was likely inspired by the work of Alexis Carrel, who at the time of Churchill's comment had been keeping alive a cultured piece of chicken heart tissue for 20 years. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist kept his experiment small, but it fed many an imagination, including that of author Frederik Pohl.

Pohl wrote the 1952 sci-fi novel The Space Merchants, in which tissue-cultured meat gets a starring if inglorious role — it's the starter ingredient for an ever-growing lumpen food source known affectionately as Chicken Little.

But Pohl, now almost 90, suspected the novel he wrote with Cyril M. Kornbluth wouldn't stay science fiction for long.

"Actually, when Cyril and I wrote the book, I thought we would see much of it actually happening," he says.

The Complexity of Meat

Meat isn't being cultured on the scale of Chicken Little yet, and because most carnivores don't spend much time worrying where their meat comes from, there hasn't exactly been a public demand. But there are in fact scientists who, despite little acceptance of what they do, are working this very minute to grow tissue-cultured meat.

It's happening in labs from Norway to North Carolina, and it's being done exactly the same way patches of human skin are already grown. All that takes is a skin cell marinated in a nutrient-rich concoction. Within a few weeks, it's pretty much ready to wear.

But British biologist Brian Ford, author of The Future of Food, says meat has always been a more difficult proposition.

"Meat is a complex mixture of tissue," he says. "Under the microscope, you can see all sorts of gristly bits and fatty bits and muscly bits. ... It's this sort of mosaic of different cell types that changes cells into what we know as meat — and that is a problem that nobody has successfully, as yet, addressed."

But somebody is getting close.

Food of the Future?

Vladimir Mironov, a biologist at the Medical University of South Carolina, is among a handful of scientists culturing meat from animal tissue. His work involves turning formless, textureless patches of the stuff into mass-produced form — like meat sheets, or what one might affectionately call "shmeat."

"I personally believe that this [is the] inescapable future," he says.

But standing between Mironov and shmeat right now are production models, production facilities, venture capital — and consumer demand.

"Technology, I think, is doable, and if you have reasonable investment it can be done. But ... you can't create [a] product which nobody wants to buy or is too expensive to buy. So the right timing ... is everything," he says.

So is this the right time? One unlikely nonprofit thinks so: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA recently announced a $1 million contest to create commercially viable chicken meat, sacrificing neither chicken nor egg. The deadline is 2012, the contest rules Herculean and the prize money paltry. But the thinking is pragmatic: If people must have meat, and factory farming is an animal nightmare, why not find a high-tech alternative?

Peter Singer, author of the 1975 treatise Animal Liberation, is all for it.

"I always thought it would be a good thing," he says. "The same way that I think it's good that the abuse of horses for pulling loads has ended. ... I think it would be good if the abuse of animals for raising them for meat were to end, because we had a technological solution to that. We had an alternative."

Uncertain Technologies

But molecular biologist Margaret Mellon from the Union of Concerned Scientists disagrees.

"Tissue-cultured meat just doesn't make sense to me," she says. "I think it's a very bad idea."

Mellon believes that all our food should be grown lightly on the land, using the riches of the Earth and the power of the sun — not in a factory.

"Picture it: You've got a big compound of buildings with scientists running around tending big vats of cultured cells, making sure that they're all at a constant temperature, that the cells are being kept sterile," she says. "I mean, where does that energy come from? That's a lot of fossil fuel."

So, to recap the opinions on the state of shmeat: It's animal-friendly but bad for the environment; we have the how-to, but not the how-come; unleashing unknown technologies is fodder for nightmares.

And at least one carnivore thinks it's real meat.

"If it [looks] like muscle, if it [smells] like muscle, if it tastes like muscle, that's muscle," Mironov says.

Which brings up one last point: the taste of shmeat. Like chicken, right? Not so, says a source who has sampled tissue-cultured turkey. It tasted like turkey.