vineyard in tuscany

Ferenc Maté has been writing for years; this book is from 2007 but the time period it recalls is closer to the 1990s I think, after Maté and his wife moved from New York to Tuscany, and bought a small house near the vineyards with their young son. After staying in that small house, becoming friends with their neighbors--who operated their own small vineyard--Maté became enamored with the idea of owning his own vineyard. A Vineyard in Tuscany: A Wine Lover's Dream is his love letter to Tuscany's wine making culture and history, and is his story about how his dreams came true.

Organized in a mostly chronological order, this book follows the Maté family's journey from wine lovers to wine makers. The text appears to be based on Maté's diary entries from the period when the story takes place. The notes aren't complete enough to form an entire story arc, but enough to help you follow along. Its a curated glimpse into the origins of the Maté Winery, which is by all accounts, a very successful, small, family run winery.

Many chapters of the book are stand alone stories and anecdotes related to their search for and eventual purchase of a collapsing ancient villa, its restoration, the clearing and preparing of the fields, the planting of vines, to their first run of wines. They had a lot of expert help in all of these endeavors, and it seems to have cost a pretty penny. Maté acknowledges the help he received through stories and in explicit thanks in the back matter. The back matter also includes a number of recipes of the simple foods Maté raves about in the book. My guess is that you'll really need to have local ingredients to make them taste the way he describes them, but it can't hurt to try! one of these recipes is cooked on burning grape vines. yeah, hold my wine whilst I grab some of my vineyard trimin's

If I had to guess, this book appears to have been roughly outlined by Maté and then given to his editor along with the copies of his journal entries for polishing. I may be wrong, but if that's the case, then perhaps the editor deserves more credit. I have no evidence of that however, and it could just be that this book was meant to read like it does; a relaxed, slightly disorganized, free associative remembrance of a wonderful time in the author's younger life with his family.

A fun book to read before a trip to Italy, for sure.

science fictional universe

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu was pretty popular when it came out in 2010 if I remember correctly. I added to my reading list then, but I haven't gotten around to it until now. I get a kick out of the cover art, which appears to be a study in old school ray gun design, along with a Star Trek font for the text. A closer look at the ray guns shows that they aren't all different--which is slightly disappointing--and one of them isn't a ray gun at all.

What is great about this story is that it reads a little like an autobiography (written in first person, and the protagonist's name is Charles Yu) and a little like the diary of an emotionally damaged man, and a little like the service manual for a futuristic device that isn't really well explained, and a little like a letter to one's future self about how to be better, and a little like wholly metaphoric construct created to path to reckoning with regret and time wasted.

I think that amorphous quality of the story may be what makes it so popular. It has the ability, like a good fortune teller does, to spin a tale charged enough to latch onto our shared experiences, and vague enough to allow us to bring more of ourselves to the story as readers. In the end, it looks like Yu has told us a story of himself, and ourselves, and maybe hasn't told a science fiction story at all.

Read this book.

word freak

I picked up Word Freak at a library book sale, thinking my wife would want to read it.

Nope.

Word Freak, with its ridiculously long sub-title; "Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players" is by Stefan Fatsis, the writer and author who you sometimes hear on NPR, talking about sports. It looks like Fatsis went looking into the world of competitive Scrabble, to get a better idea of the strange world he only saw glimpses of in pick-up games in the park, played by sketchy-looking folks with time clocks--a la chess.

After digging into this weird, obsessive, sub-culture, Fatsis found himself losing his objectivity. Yeah, he went down the rabbit hole.

Now I guess Fatsis would say that he never lost his objectivity, and I guess that's probably sort of true, but if he was there originally to simply report on competitive Scrabble as an interesting sub-culture, somewhat related to sports do sports writers report on chess and crap like that? then I think changing that intent, or allowing it to evolve, into more of a spectator/autobiographical story, has a little taint of rationalizing after your project has gone off the rails. Fatsis makes no bones about the fact that he pretty quickly became obsessed with the game, and is now, incidentally, one of the higher ranked competitive Scabble players in America.

Word Freak* traces Fatsis's trip down the rabbit hole, his struggles with the game, the obsessive studying of words and anagramming, and perhaps most interesting, is the history of Scrabble, and the personalities of the people who play competitively. It was an interesting romp.



* Hasbro, the new-ish Owner of Scrabble in the U.S. wouldn't allow the use of their trademarked board game in the title of Fatsis's book.

tropic of cancer

According to Miller's brief autobiography, he began writing Tropic of Cancer while living in Louveciennes,  a western suburbs of Paris, where he met Anais Nin. He had left his second wife, June Edith Smith, at home during this time and lived on the streets of Paris, and slept, as he says, where he could. This was in 1931-2. During this time he worked at the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune as a proof reader, and taught English for a while in Lycee Carnot. Nin was his lover during this period and kept him housed, fed, and helped finance the first printing of this book. Nin also wrote a short preface, which she ends by saying that Miller digs beneath the roots, for subterranean springs.

By 1933, Miller had visited  Luxembourg with his Clichy roommate, Alfred Perles, and begun work on Black Spring, and also a book on Lawrence which he never finished. His wife came back to Europe briefly, but left again after asking for a divorce. In 1934, Tropic of Cancer was published after a number of re-writes, a a decisive moment, in Miller's words. That was nearly 80 years ago. Tropic of Cancer could have been written yesterday. But if it was, no one would care; it could have only have been written then.

Miller writes with seeming abandon, using language that is both coarse and foul, and beautifully poetic. His prose is in many ways prose poetry. He talks about the underbelly of society and what it is to be a thinking, eating, sexual animal which lives in this society we've made for ourselves. He looks up from his depression-era squalor to the fat cats with 50 cent corona cigars, dripping juice down their faces, but not with hatred as you might expect, but with a journalist's impartiality. If he feels anything about the state of man, as horrible and useless as it all is, you could say its glee. He seems to laugh as he looks on, constantly amused by what he sees, as if he looked on the antics of young children, or dogs frolicking.

Miller lauds the works of those he sees as shinning examples in his prose, he talks of Walt Whitman as a poet who understood what is is to be a man, but worried that Whitman's language was now (in 1931) almost incomprehensible to modern readers. He also went on about Matisse, saying that he was at the very hub of the wheel that was falling apart around us.

One of my favorite lines:

"The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters."

There has been so much written about Henry Miller, that you certainly don't need me to go on about it too. What I will say is: if you've read some beat or surrealism and it worked for you, you'll enjoy this. If you're interested in the birth of modern American writing, it seems to me that this is one of the stops. Is it a little odd? Sure. Is the language foul and the treatment of women appalling? You bet. Is it amazing to read such honest writing, from an era before my parents were born? Absolutely.

Read this book.

nothings sacred

Has anyone noticed a bug on Blogger with apostrophes? Its seems to be fine in the body of the text, but not so good in titles; titles of entries, titles of comments, even abbreviated text that shows up in widgets like recent comments. So that's why the title of this post doesn't have an apostrophe in it. and its not capitalized either, but that's a style choice, baby The title of the book is actually Nothing's Sacred, by Lewis Black.

I'm sure you've seen Black, going off on some politician on stage at a comedy club, or in one of his TV specials or appearances. He's the guy with glasses, graying brown hair who looks like he's about to have a stroke if he doesn't calm down. Lewis Black gets excited; with the pointing, and the grimacing, and the teeth gritting. This angst comes through in his writing as well; a review quote on the back cover summed it up: Jon Stewart said Black could even yell in his writing. Its true, you can almost hear him spitting with disdain and incredulity as you read.

What was surprising about the book was the autobiographical structure. I was expecting a book of Black's humor--which I got--but learning about how he grew up, and what made him the man he is was interesting as well as funny.

I read the paperback version which I understand is slightly different from the hardcover in that it contains 'bonus material.' In the new introduction to the introduction, Black seems to be at a loss for what else to write about, and says as much, giving me the impression that the whole book was a bit of a mystery to him. I have this impression that someone (a publicist, an agent, whomever) suggested that he write a book and Black said, Sure! and then didn't know where to start. I guess what I'm saying is: Maybe the memoir theme was a surprise to Black as well.

As anecdotal humor is Lewis Black's forte, his use of an anecdotal chapter is the structure that supports his book. Each chapter is just a few pages long, in which Black relates an anecdote or an observation about the world, especially this country, our politicians, his school masters, his family or the people he grew up with. I laughed both with and at Lewis Black from the time he was old enough to masturbate, until now. in fact, I get the impression he hasn't given up on the self-love

Black may have cobbled this together, like the script to an extra-long HBO special, but it reads funny from beginning to end. I bet the audiobook is even funnier. Black has written three books; you can check them out on his site.

Thanks to Steve for the book loan!

carrying the fire

Mike Collins is not my hero.

He doesn't want to be. What Mike Collins is is smart, funny, charming and a little irreverent. Mike Collins is also a damn good writer; he insisted on no ghost writers, and its clear that he doesn't need one.

Here's a slice-o'-reading-life:

me (while reading): "Ha ha ha."
daughter: "What's funny?"
me: "Everything astronauts say is funny. Because they're the coolest guys in the world."

Collins traces he career from Air Force pilot, to test pilot, his try outs at NASA for the astronaut program, and then his two space fights aboard Gemini 10, where he did two of the first spacewalks, and then Apollo 11 which brought him, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the first moon landing.

Right, this is the guy who piloted the command module of Apollo 11, the Columbia, while Armstrong and Aldrin disengaged and flew away to make their dramatic moon landing aboard the lunar module, the Eagle.

The guy who orbited the moon alone, zipping around the dark side where all sight and sound of home disappear as the radio signal is lost and he, of all the billions of humans whose attention is fixed on the Eagle, is the only one who doesn't know what is happening. Was he lonely? No, he says, he was doing his job. And he was honored to do it.

The history of the Gemini and Apollo programs is laid out with a level of detail and insider insight that really bring the achievements of these projects home. Collins doesn't mince words or pull punches. He is as honest about himself, his fellow astronauts, their bosses and the multitude of engineers, scientists and subcontractors he worked with, as any autobiographer I've read. What they accomplished, with the technology available, was amazing.

A ghost writer might have edited this story down, but I'm not sure the honesty, or Collins' distinct voice would have come through, and I think that's what makes this book such a joy to read. When we're talking about something like the space program, and all we usually get to see is the bits they broadcast on television, I'm glad there are men like Michael Collins, with the guts and the patience to do the work he did, and then take the time to tell his story for the rest of us.

So Collins isn't a hero. As he says, he didn't save anyone from a burning building, or perform 'above and beyond the call of duty.' But what he did do, should make us all proud.

Read this book. And then, lets go put a man on Mars.

mountains of freedom

Mountains of Freedom is a small, privately published memoir written by a South African ex-POW about his experiences in Lybia, Italy and Germany during World War II. Martin Schou was in the battle of Tobruk, Lybia when nazi Field Marshall Rommel overwhelmed the allied forces there and retook Tobruk. Schou, and thousands of other allied forces, were rounded up and shipped to Italy to concentration camps.

For over a year, Schou was imprisoned, occasionally moving from camp to camp until he found himself on a working farm in northern Italy alongside a group of young, Italian women. Schou was very fond of the ladies after being in a concentration camp, so it wasn't too long before young Martin learned to speak Italian.

When the armistice came in September of 1943, Schou was released from the northern Italian working farm, and headed for the allied troops who had landed in southern Italy.

On foot.

This adventure, told in a series of stories or remembrances, has a glow about it that I think must come from the mellowing of years. Schou spent a number of years away from his home in South Africa in the service, and some of those years as a prisoner of war, but looking back from a current age of nearly 80 (in 1998 when the story was written) has warmed and softened the story so that it contains very little horror. The horror is there, but Schou doesn't seem to dwell on it too much.

What Martin Schou does dwell on are the relationships he formed with the local people in Italy as he made his way down the Italian peninsula through the Apennines. At almost every step of the way, the poor mountain people of iItaly helped, hid, clothed, fed and directed Schou and many others on there way. And it was dangerous. The Italians had given up and surrendered to the Allies, but Hitler had filled Italy with hundreds of thousands of German troops, who took control of the concentration camps only days after the armistice, and patrolled the streets throughout Italy, and could have shot Schou if he was discovered.

Schou's adventures had their ups and downs, but he obviously made it home eventually to settle down, start a family and write his book. The stories are lovingly told, by a man who knows he's not a writer but felt obligated to tell his story and to say thank you to the simple people who helped him, just because he needed help.

His book is both a thank you note, and a love letter to Italy and the people who saved him.

This book isn't for sale in bookstores* that I've found. We bought a copy at a fundraiser to support local communities while we were in Italy. Martin Schou spent quite a bit of time in and around Sulmona, Italy and he met people there who helped him do the research for his book, and I think that's why we found it there.

* I got one hit. Mountains of Freedom is included in this list of military books from a South African bookstore. Its number 152, and its listed as sold for 195 South African Rand (about $24 US).

kitchen confidential - ii

This was one of the most entertaining non-fiction books I've read in a long time. Bourdain is brutal in his honesty, which I give him credit for. It must have been hard, but not too hard. Bourdain's personality comes through pretty clearly in this mostly autobiographical story of how he came into cooking professionally, how he got where he is now, and the many, many mistakes he made along the way. But its his personality that brightens, and darkens, this story.

I say that it mustn't have been too hard for Bourdain to make these confessions about what goes on in restaurant kitchens, while we sit in the dinning room, or about the choices he's made in his life, because I get the distinct impression that he doesn't care what you or I think. He's lived a different life than the rest of us, so who are we to judge, seems to be the message.

But after what he's been through, he's still not all hard edges and callus, there is a softer side that shines through as well, albeit, not that often. I said earlier that reading his stories was like hanging around at a party with an old friend telling war stories. I still think that. It think it would be great fun to hang out with him for a night, and maybe bar hop, in Hong Kong or somewhere, and listen to him talk about food, how its made, and why we love it so much. In the end, Kitchen Confidential is a love letter to food, from the old boyfriend whose been thrown out so many times, he can't remember, but he can't give her up.

kitchen confidential - i

Kitchen Confidential is written by Anthony Bourdain, now host of the Travel Channel Show, No Reservations. I've never seen that show, but I did see him a few times in his Food Network show called A Cook's Tour, which is also the name of a book published in 2001. I gather he wrote that book while on the tour filming the TV show.

This the first book I've read by Bourdain, but he's written a few. Amazon lists 9 titles. Bourdain's writing style is infectious and fun. He talks to his readers like we're all standing next to him at a barbecue, and he's telling war stories. His advise is the kind you'd give a friend, the kind of friend who can take a joke, absorb the criticism and see the value and humor borne by years of experience. You know what they say about the heat in the kitchen.

My first job was in a mid-sized, family owed restaurant in my hometown. My second job was cooking for worldwide burger chain, whose logo wasn't for Mmm good. My third job was at the Hilltop Steak House, when Frank Giuffrida was still the owner. All three of these jobs were eye-opening experiences, and while I can't pretend to know what its like to cook for a profession, I do know that Bourdain tells it like it is in the kitchen.

In the intro, he tells us that this book is for the cooks, and so he hasn't provided definitions for terms like chiffonaded parsley, boudin noir and soufflé blah blah blah, that dot his stories, but it doesn't detract from the pleasure of reading them. I have this feeling, that if I could understand all these terms (I looked a bunch of them up, and got nowhere with my dictionary) I'd learn a lot about cooking, but as he says: tant pis, man.

I'm about a third of the way through this one, and I'm thinking about what else of his to read. And I've GOT to get my brother and his wife to read this, if they haven't already.

More soon!

PS: Between the three, eat at the Hilltop.