{"id":198,"date":"2011-07-07T13:29:33","date_gmt":"2011-07-07T13:29:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/reading_1011\/"},"modified":"2013-04-16T14:19:28","modified_gmt":"2013-04-16T19:19:28","slug":"reading_1011","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/reading_1011\/","title":{"rendered":"President David R. Anderson’s Bookshelf (II)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Buried<\/a>Buried Prey<\/b>
\nBy John Sandford
\nG. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011
\nThis is the twenty-third novel in Sandford’s Prey<\/em> series (he has two other series going as well, the Kidd novels and the Virgil Flowers novels). When you get this far into a series the challenge is to maintain the elements that define the series and that your readers keep coming back for while at the same time introducing enough new materials so that the series doesn’t go stale. Sandford is good at this. Lucas Davenport, his detective, keeps moving around to different roles in law enforcement, his romantic interests change, his family grows, and so forth.<\/p>\n

Buried Prey<\/em> is a kind of prequel. (It’s interesting that the spell-checker in Microsoft Word recognizes “prequel,” by the way.) The novel takes us back to Davenport’s first case, back to a time when he was a uniformed officer and made the transition to detective. Kierkegaard observed that that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Buried Prey<\/em> is the understanding backwards novel in the Prey<\/em> series. You understand how Lucas Davenport came to be who he is, having gotten to know him that way first.<\/p>\n

The crime is “buried” in this novel both because it happened a long time ago and because the victims were buried under a construction project to hide the evidence. The first part of this novel takes us back to the time of the crime; the second part solves it in the present. It’s a great read, as all of Sandford’s novels are. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"Eating<\/a>Eating Crow: A Novel of Apology<\/b>
\nBy Jay Rayner
\nSimon and Schuster, 2004<\/p>\n

This is a very funny novel. It\u2019s narrated in the first person by Marc Basset, a cynical restaurant critic (at the time of publication, the author was the restaurant critic for The London Observer<\/em>). The novel begins with Basset publishing a searing review of a restaurant, after which the chef drinks a bottle of whiskey and climbs into the oven and pulls the door shut. A copy of the review is taped to the outside of the oven.<\/p>\n

Though he is proud of his snarky reviews, remorse over the death of the chef drives Basset to apologize to the chef\u2019s wife and daughter. That moment changes his life: “I, Marc Basset, who had never before apologized for anything, or at least not for anything important, who had never before see the point of repentance, had finally said the word ‘sorry.’ And I felt wonderful.” The feeling was so rewarding that Basset tries to find everyone he has ever wronged so he can apologize to them. Most of them have forgotten the offense, or never noticed it, or it actually changed their lives for the better, but nevertheless Basset continues to apologize\u2014eloquently, tearfully, profusely\u2014because it makes him feel so good.<\/p>\n

When Basset publishes in his column an apology for all of his mean reviews and promised only to comment on good food, he loses his job at the newspaper. Then he apologizes to a young woman whom he slept with and then bragged about his conquest to his friends. She records the apology and it finds its way onto the Internet, becoming an instant hit: the most watched video on YouTube. It sounds as though his life is spiraling downwards, but it is not. He has come to the attention of a group charged with forming a new section of the UN\u2014The Office of Apology, and they recruit him to be their Chief Apologist. He will be paid a percentage of the difference between what the offended party would receive in court and what they are willing to accept after his apology. He will be rich.<\/p>\n

A professor has developed a theory of apology that gets very funny attention in the novel, from fake footnotes and other scholarly apparatus reminiscent of Nabokov\u2019s Pale Fire<\/em>. Much of the rest of the novel consists of restrained but pointed satire of peacemaking and apologizing. I won\u2019t give away how it ends, but there is more to this novel than just making fun of na\u00efvet\u00e9 and pomposity. I encourage you to read it.<\/p>\n

(One of the pleasures of the book is all the talk about cooking and eating. Don\u2019t miss the chocolate tasting menu on pp. 233-4).<\/p>\n

\"Knives<\/a>Knives at Dawn: America\u2019s Quest for Culinary Glory at the Bocuse d\u2019Or, the World\u2019s Most Prestigious Cooking Competition<\/b>
\nBy Andrew Friedman
\nFree Press, 2009<\/p>\n

This is a fun book, another one of those I just picked off the shelf because I was drawn to the title and the cover art and I like to read about food. The author writes for Sports Illustrated <\/em> \u2014 apparently his two passions are cooking and tennis \u2014 and the book has the energy and tension of good sports writing. It\u2019s the story of Timothy Hollingsworth\u2019s journey from sous chef at The French Laundry (a famous restaurant in Yountville, California) to America\u2019s representative at the 2009 Bocuse d\u2019Or and back again.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a whole world of culinary competitions out there \u2014 who knew? \u2014 but apparently the Bocuse d\u2019Or is the grandest. It was founded in the mid\u20131980s when the organizers of a food exhibition in France wanted to amp up their show by adding a cooking competition. It is named for a famous French chef, Paul Bocuse, who, according to this book, was one of the first celebrity chefs and is credited with helping to transform the chef from a person in the kitchen to a star.<\/p>\n

America has never won the Bocuse d\u2019Or, and we don\u2019t like that. One reason may be that other nations have taken the competition much more seriously than we have, grooming chefs to compete, funding sabbaticals for them to train for the competition, and supplying coaches and other kinds of support. France and Norway \u2014 again, who knew? \u2014 are the teams to beat. In 2009 America decided to emulate the efforts of other countries. An advisory board with famous chefs was formed, a coach was hired, and a systematic selection process for America\u2019s competitor was conceived. This book begins with Hollingsworth\u2019s triumph at that competition and tells the rest of the story of his training and his experience at the competition. In the process it offers an interesting view of the culture of top restaurants in America and their chefs, the culture of cooking competitions, the culture of The French Laundry, and in particular its founder and owner Thomas Keller.<\/p>\n

And there is lots of talk about cooking. Most of it is at a rarified level, the kind of thing a passable home cook like myself would never approach. For example, here are some of the items Chef Hollingsworth was considering to offer at the competition:<\/p>\n

The custard he\u2019d been imagining was coming into focus as a square or rectangle tinged bright green with spring garlic, which would no longer rest on top but instead would be infused into the custard itself, served on a brioche Melba toast with accompanying flavors of tomato compote and caramelized onion. He was also considering a deep-fried piece of shirako<\/em> (cod sperm . . . yes, you read that right), as well as cod roe wrapped in bacon, cooked sous vide, then crisped and finished with a Nicoise olive sauce. (p. 134)<\/p>\n

Competitors at the Bocuse d\u2019Or are expected to present a menu consisting of specific food groups, such as a beef course, a fish course, and so on. At the 2009 competition described in this book, Team USA presented:<\/p>\n

Olive Oil Poached Loin of Norwegian Cod
\nWild Prawn and Haas Avocado Tart
\nAgrumato Custard with Shellfish Bouillon
\nYukon Gold Potato and Bacon Mille-Feuille,
\nRoasted Aberdeen Angus Beef Rib-Eye
\nRosette of Scotch Beef Fillet
\nGlazed Beef Cheeks \u00c0 L\u2019\u00c9touff\u00e9e
\nCalotte Bressaola Fum\u00e9 \u00c0 La Minute
\nTruffled Pommes Dauphinoise<\/p>\n

And, they didn\u2019t win! To find out why (or what some of those dishes even were) you\u2019ll have to read this engaging book. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"Blood<\/a>Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef <\/b>
\nBy Gabrielle Hamilton
\nRandom House, 2011<\/p>\n

I saw a brief, favorable review of this book in a newspaper and forgot about it. A couple of weeks later, in a Barnes & Noble store looking for something to read on a long trip, I asked at the help desk if they could find \u201ca new book by a chef with a three-word title.\u201d They must hate questions like that, but they found it in about a minute and a half.<\/p>\n

This is an ambitious memoir that, unlike Heat<\/em> by Bill Buford or Kitchen Confidential <\/em>by Anthony Bourdain, focuses much more on the life experiences of the author as a person than on her life as a cook.<\/p>\n

The first, and most engaging, section of the book, \u201cBlood,\u201d tells about her childhood growing up in an eccentric family with lots of siblings, an artist father, a French mother, and a rich environment for the senses. The opening descriptions of the family\u2019s annual summer lamb roast for their friends will make you salivate. The tales of her misspent youth will make you cringe. This section is tender, happy, melancholy, regretful and defiant.<\/p>\n

Section two, \u201cBones\u201d presents the author after she\u2019s recovered from a whole series of bad decisions. She earns an MFA in writing from Michigan and works in corporate catering. Her description of a bunch of sensitive graduate students sitting around in someone\u2019s apartment and listening to each other read poetry is merciless and very funny. On the other hand, after reading her account of how many people handle the canap\u00e9s served at a function catered by the company she worked for in New York, you\u2019ll never eat at another reception.<\/p>\n

\u201cButter\u201d is the third section. Here the author has married an Italian opened her famous restaurant, given birth, and mellowed considerably, which is a good thing.<\/p>\n

Gabrielle Hamilton has strong views on many subjects, and she\u2019s a ranter, so readers of this book have to prepare themselves for some heated diatribes, but they are generally interesting ones. There aren\u2019t many detailed descriptions of how to cook particular dishes, but take note of the description on p. 156 of how Andre Soltner made an omelette.<\/p>\n

The general arc of this book bends from loneliness, unhappiness, and anger toward belonging, reconciliation, and happiness, but not completely. It\u2019s not a book about cooking; it\u2019s a book about being, or about learning to be.<\/p>\n

\"Lessons<\/a>Lessons Learned: Reflections of a University President<\/b>
\nBy William G. Bowen
\nPrinceton University Press, 2011<\/p>\n

William Bowen\u2019s voice is among the most important ones in American higher education. He is the author of a seminal work on diversity in our colleges and universities (The Shape of the River<\/em>), another on college athletics (The Game of Life<\/em>), and many others. During his long tenure as President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Bowen played a key role in advancing and shaping priorities at America\u2019s colleges and universities. Bowen is himself a graduate of Denison University, a fine liberal arts college, and he has been particularly influential in supporting the work of colleges like St. Olaf.<\/p>\n

Lessons Learned<\/em> represents Bowen\u2019s reflection on his sixteen-year tenure ending in 1988 as President of Princeton University. In some respects it is an insider\u2019s book, with wise and canny insights of the role of a president in the many campus issues that arise every day. Every president should read this book.<\/p>\n

But it is by no means just a book for higher ed. Many of the issues Bowen discusses and illustrates with stories from his own experience would be relevant to anyone in a leadership position or anyone who cares deeply about an organization? How do you foster and sustain a positive culture in your organization? What is the appropriate role of a Board of Directors and how does that role intersect with the role of the CEO? How do you foster and manage positive change? How do you engage, motivate, and benefit from the insights of stakeholders? If you\u2019re the leader, how do you know when it is time to go?<\/p>\n

Bowen\u2019s reflections on these and other topics are balanced, grounded in broad and deep experience, and compelling. This is a short but rich book. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"Plain<\/a>Just Plain Dumb: An Appreciation of Human Speech<\/b>
\nBy Karen Landahl, Ph.D.
\nIPP Litho, 2010.<\/p>\n

Karen Landahl \u201974 was a classmate of mine at St. Olaf and in the Paracollege. She was a brilliant woman, who developed an interest in linguistics while at the College, pursued that interest at Brown University where she earned a Ph.D., and eventually joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, rising to the rank of Professor. She died, after a battle with cancer, in 2003.<\/p>\n

One of the treatments she and her doctors chose during that battle was removal of the tongue, and Karen thus lost the ability to speak. This book is about what it was like to become mute. Karen states very explicitly her purpose as a writer: \u201cI am not writing about my experience because I feel sorry for myself and am looking for pity. I am writing because I have long been interested in what we can learn from experiments of nature, and I myself am now one\u201d (p. 25). This book is partly a memoir, partly a contribution to disability studies, partly an essay about the role of speech in our culture. It is brave, sad, and compelling. I urge you to read it.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries<\/b>
\nBy Marilyn Johnson
\nHarperCollins, 2006<\/p>\n

I was in Rolvaag Library at St. Olaf looking for a good book to read when The Dead Beat<\/em> caught my eye. It\u2019s a strange, fun read.<\/p>\n

There is a basic pattern to the obituary, and Marilyn Johnson has invented a vocabulary to describe it. First comes the tombstone<\/em>, which is the quick description of the subject of the obituary that immediately follows the name, as in \u201cJames R. Garfield II, father of the modern Cleveland auto show and great-grandson of an American president, died \u2026 \u201d (p. 33). It\u2019s followed by the bad news<\/em>, or the cause of death, which is followed by the song and dance<\/em>, a longer section that tells a story that reveals the character of the subject of the obituary. Then there\u2019s the desperate chronology<\/em>, which takes the reader through the subject\u2019s life. It\u2019s followed by the telegraph<\/em>, a kind of punch line that rounds off the obituary with a particularly significant or surprising fact about the subject, such as this \u201ctelegraph\u201d from the obituary of the dowdy wife of a British Prime Minister: \u201cIt was also noted that her hobby was keeping pigs.\u201d The last element is a list of the survivors. Johnson\u2019s description of this template for an obituary is interesting, but the delight of this chapter \u2014 as indeed of the whole book \u2014 derives from the examples she quotes.<\/p>\n

This book reports on the happenings at a convention of people interested in obituaries and draws portraits of some particularly famous obituary writers, including a touching one of Jim Nicholson, who wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News<\/em>. There is a compelling chapter on how the obituary pages of New York newspapers handled the victims of the 9\/11 attacks and a creepy one about the author\u2019s obsession with a news group called alt.obituaries. The book also offers an interesting account of how obituaries have morphed over time from accounts of the lives of the rich and famous to vignettes that uncover what was uncommon in the lives of ordinary people.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s the quotations from obituaries, sprinkled throughout this book, that will keep you reading. Beware, though: you\u2019ll never turn past the obituary page in a newspaper again.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The Ethical Executive<\/b>
\nBy Robert Hoyk and Paul Hersey
\nStanford University Press 2008<\/p>\n

This book begins with a bold claim:<\/p>\n

The history of ethics is based on the utilization of philosophical principles. The precursor of psychology is also philosophy. Psychology was born when philosophical ideas were tempered by empirical science. It\u2019s time to acknowledge that philosophy is the forerunner of ethics and to move ethics into the realm of science and social psychology. (p. 10)<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe this for a moment. Science generally, and psychology specifically, doubtless make important contributions to ethics \u2014 principally by providing data about how we respond to our environment \u2014 but in my view ethical reasoning is far too nuanced a human phenomenon to be understood and explained simply by behavioral science.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, this short book is worth a read. It argues that stimuli in our environment motivate our behavior and that sometimes those stimuli are so powerful that they lead us, despite ourselves, to act in ways we might otherwise regard as unethical. When a stimulus triggers a behavior in us that leads to unethical behavior, it constitutes a “trap.” The authors have identified 45 such traps, classifying them in three groups: Primary Traps (external stimuli that “have the potential to impel us to move in a certain direction without regard for our ethical principles” [p. 7]); Defensive Traps (“maneuvers that are reactions to two internal stimuli: guilt and shame” [p. 7]); and Personality Traps (“personality traits that can make us more vulnerable to wrongdoing” [p. 7]).<\/p>\n

The book is essentially a listing of these 45 traps with illustrations of how they might play out in real life, often with a brief account of the research that underlies the behavior being described. Take, for example, Trap 17: “Enacting a Role.” Psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who was trying to understand brutality in prisons, did the underlying research at Stanford in 1971. He constructed a realistic prison in a building on campus and populated it with student volunteers who were randomly assigned to roles as either prisoners or guards. After six days Zimbardo had to cancel the experiment because the “guards” were exhibiting cruel and degrading behaviors towards their “prisoners,” and the “prisoners” were becoming rebellious or apathetic. The authors conclude that when we take on a role, such as CEO of a company, we can identify so completely with that role that we behave in ways we might otherwise regard as unethical. For example, we might relentlessly pursue profits without regards to the means we are using to achieve them because that is our role as CEO, but if we were to slip out of that role, step back, and analyze our behavior, we would regard it differently. They cite as an example of Enacting a Role a damning quotation attributed to Jeffrey Skilling, the disgraced CEO of Enron: “My job as a businessman is to be a profit center and to maximize return to the shareholders. It\u2019s the government\u2019s job to step in if a product is dangerous” (p. 54).<\/p>\n

Of course, life is messier than a neat list of 45 traps would suggest, and the authors recognize this. Some of the traps overlap, some are embedded within others, some even drift between their three categories. The book concludes with an analysis of what went wrong in the Jonestown massacre in 1978 in South America, showing the various kinds of traps the led to that tragic event and the interplay between them.<\/p>\n

I think most of us need all the help we can get to do the right thing in a complex world. This book provides a tool to analyze your behavior. Faced with a difficult decision you could run through the traps the authors have identified, asking yourself if you had fallen victim to any of them. Simply being aware of these traps is likely to enhance your decision-making, even if you don\u2019t do a formal check-off of each trap every time you need to decide something.<\/p>\n

\"Sherlock<\/a>Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles<\/em><\/b>
\nBy Pierre Bayard (trans. Charlotte Mandell)
\nBloomsbury 2008<\/p>\n

This book is ver-r-r-r-r-r-y French. By that I mean that the author works from the theoretical perspectives of French criticism developed in the late \u201870s when I was in graduate school and refined since then into an elaborate, interesting, often brilliant, but ultimately trivial form of intellectual play.<\/p>\n

This book proposes a different solution than the one announced by Sherlock Holmes to the crimes in Conan Doyle\u2019s classic of detective fiction, The Hound of the Baskervilles<\/em>. This is the story in which Sherlock Holmes is invited to go to the Devonshire moors to investigate the death of Sir Charles Baskerville. The circumstances of his death are problematic, and his friend and neighbor Sir James Mortimer doesn\u2019t accept the results of the police investigation, so he enlists Holmes\u2019s help. I don\u2019t want to give away the ending, but let\u2019s just say that the police version was, indeed, incorrect, that there is much more going on in Devonshire than meets the eye, and that Holmes finds this all out.<\/p>\n

Not so fast, says Pierre Bayard, who is also a psychoanalyst and the author of How to Talk About Books You Haven\u2019t Read<\/em>. Using a critical method that he calls \u201cdetective criticism,\u201d he offers an alternative reading of The Hound of the Baskervilles<\/em> that names a different killer than Holmes had accused and posits a whole new way of understanding the relationship between Arthur Conan Doyle and his famous creation, Sherlock Holmes.<\/p>\n

You might ask why a serious literary critic would spend time second-guessing the plot of a detective story. It\u2019s a fiction, for heaven\u2019s sake: it\u2019s not as though these are real people engaged in real events and you can go back and discover that something different happened. Or can you? Bayard argues that \u201cto keep exclusively to what the text says<\/em> risks leading to readings that are unarguable but also uninteresting\u201d (p. 65, his italics). Instead, he takes the approach that, \u201cThe thoughts of characters in literature are not forever locked up inside their creators. More alive than many living people, these characters spread themselves through those who read their authors\u2019 work, they impregnate the books that tell their tales, they cross centuries in search of a benevolent listener\u201d (p. 6). In other words, characters in fiction have lives independent of the texts in which they appear, and you can use your imagination to find out what they think, even though their authors never wrote about that.<\/p>\n

This book makes an elegantly constructed argument, and it\u2019s fun to read if you have time to think about the question of whether a detective story should have ended differently, but I was left with one simple question: who cares?<\/p>\n

\"How<\/a>How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In<\/b>
\nBy Jim Collins
\nHarper Collins, 2009<\/p>\n

This book was a gift from a recently retired, and very successful, CEO of a major financial services firm. He is a keen observer of organizations, and his endorsement of this book was an incentive to read it right away. I thought Collins\u2019 Good to Great<\/em> was a very helpful book (see my reviews from 2006\/07)<\/a>, and the topic of this one is most timely \u2014 another attraction of the book. It did not disappoint.<\/p>\n

The Great Recession is certainly not over, but thus far St. Olaf has weathered the storm: our enrollment is flourishing, our balance sheet is strong, our facilities are exemplary, and our identity remains secure. But this is no time to breathe a sigh of relief and go back to business as usual. You frequently hear the phrase \u201cthe new normal\u201d used to describe fundamental shifts in the economy and in how we will lead our lives from now on as a result of the recession. I don\u2019t believe that we yet know what the \u201cnew normal\u201d will be for higher education, but I am absolutely convinced of the truth of Collins\u2019 main point in this book: \u201cWhether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what can we learn from the experience of other organizations, whose CEOs might have written words like those I just used to describe St. Olaf\u2019s current situation, right before their company collapsed? Collins argues that organizations go through five recognizable stages on their way to failure: Hubris Born of Success; Undisciplined Pursuit of More; Denial of Risk and Peril; Grasping for Salvation; and Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death (pp. 21-22). If you are aware of these stages and learn to recognize them, you can tell when you\u2019re headed down this road and reverse course before it\u2019s too late. As with his other books, Collins lays out this paradigm and then illustrates it with examples from companies he and his team have studied.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re a college, not a company, but there are ample propositions to ponder in this book. Here are some examples. Successful companies have more disciplined focus on \u201cimproving and evolving\u201d their core business than failing ones do (p. 32). Successful companies foster a \u201cproductive tension\u201d between continuity and change (p. 36). A flourishing organization is \u201cmore likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little\u201d (p. 55). When making a big, risky decision, a good rule of thumb is to ask what the benefits will be if it turns out well, what the costs will be if it turns out badly, and \u201cCan you live with the downside? Truly?\u201d (p. 74). An \u201cintense, methodical, consistent\u201d approach is most likely to produce success (p .95). Don\u2019t lose \u201cthe ability to make strategic choices\u201d (p. 107.) And none of this changes the key principle of Good to Great, which is that the best organizations flourish because they have the right people in the right places doing their work exceptionally well.<\/p>\n

The college is engaged in strategic planning, and the conclusions exemplified above are relevant to the kinds of choices we need to be making about St. Olaf\u2019s future and the strategies we need to adopt to secure it. It is particularly interesting to me that at a time when we are searching to identify the \u201cnew normal\u201d and to find strategies and tactics to respond to it, Collins draws the focus back to core competencies, to disciplined patience, and to the people in the organization.<\/p>\n

Anyone interested in how to help an organization flourish will benefit from this short, clearly written book. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The Professional<\/b>
\nBy Robert B. Parker
\nG. P Putnam\u2019s Sons, 2009<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading Robert B. Parker\u2019s detective novels for as long as he has been writing them \u2014 since 1973. He died suddenly on January 18, 2010, and on hearing that news my first thought \u2014 selfishly \u2014 was, \u201cOh, no! No more Spenser novels!\u201d The good news is that there is apparently at least one more Spenser novel forthcoming this October. Meanwhile, I finally got to the most recent one, The Professional<\/em>. I dropped everything and read it in an afternoon.<\/p>\n

This is one of Parker\u2019s most ambitious recent Spenser novels \u2014 more troubled in its treatment of the flawed characters who inhabit it. This is a novel about faithfulness and infidelity. A handsome and attractive man has been having adulterous affairs with the young wives of rich, older men. When he starts to blackmail them, they approach Spenser to make the blackmail stop. One of the cuckolded husbands finds out about the blackmail, and hence the infidelity. He has Mob connections, which brings two of his enforcers into the picture. They have their own complicated relationship and fidelity issues, and of course Spenser and Susan Silverman have their history around this subject.<\/p>\n

(It turns out that an earlier victim of the blackmailer was the president of a liberal arts college, but let\u2019s not go there.)<\/p>\n

What interested me about this novel is the degree of sympathy that its mostly flawed and failed characters elicit. Spenser can\u2019t bring himself to condemn, or even to dislike, the blackmailer whom he tracks down and confronts. Same problem with the two Mob enforcers. Same problem with the murderer.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll say no more. Read it for yourself. I think you\u2019ll be pleased.<\/p>\n

\"Working<\/a>Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs [Most] Americans Won\u2019t Do<\/b>
\nBy Gabriel Thompson
\nNation Books, 2010<\/p>\n

When I first saw this book on the shelf of new books at the Northfield Public Library, I thought, \u201cHasn\u2019t Barbara Ehrenreich already written this book in her classic Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America? These two books certainly overlap, but Thompson\u2019s covers new ground and presents a different tone.<\/p>\n

Thompson addresses the question of overlap with Ehrenreich directly in the opening of his book. Unlike her, he is not conducting an experiment to see whether it\u2019s possible to live on the earnings of a low-wage worker in America. Instead he wants to write about the experience of those in the low-wage immigrant workforce. He calls this \u201cimmersion journalism,\u201d placing his book in the lineage of George Orwell\u2019s The Road to the Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London as well as Nickel and Dimed. This book\u2019s particular focus on the immigrant experience \u2014 and more specifically Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants \u2014 is timely and relevant given our current national debate about immigration and the recent, controversial immigration law passed in Arizona.
\nThis book describes the author\u2019s experiences at four different occupations in three regions of the country: harvesting lettuce in Yuma, Arizona; packing chicken on the night shift at a poultry processing plant in Russellville, Alabama; working for a horticultural wholesaler in New York\u2019s Chelsea district (he gets fired after one week); and delivering food for an upscale restaurant in New York.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s intrinsic interest to Thompson\u2019s descriptions of the work. Yuma is apparently the lettuce growing capital of America, and during peak growing season workers there harvest 12 million heads of lettuce a day. An individual lettuce cutter will cut 3,000 heads a day. You bend over, grab the head with your left hand, cut it free from its root with the knife in your right hand, shake the lettuce until the outer leaves fall off, and put it in one of the plastic bags suspended from your belt by a device called a gancho. His starting wage as a lettuce cutter was $8.37 an hour. Workers at the poultry plant are constantly shifted from one job to another. Apparently the worst job is deboning, which Thompson never gets to try. But tearing chicken breasts sounds pretty awful, too. You stand at a conveyor belt while whole chicken breasts travel by. You grab one with both hands and tear it into two halves. A worker would tear something like 7,200 breasts during one shift. The starting wage is $8.05 an hour, but if you show up on time every day the first week you get paid for that week at the rate of $8.80. Being a bicycle delivery person for a restaurant is pretty much just what it sounds like. His base pay is $4.60 an hour and the workers split their tips. After reading Thompson\u2019s descriptions of what it was like to work at these jobs, you understand why people would want to avoid them. (You might also wonder whether it\u2019s still true, with unemployment where it stands today, that most Americans won\u2019t do these jobs.)<\/p>\n

In each of these jobs Thompson is surrounded by immigrant workers, so this book offers not only insight into the work they do but also into what their lives are like off-hours. Many of the lettuce cutters live in Mexico and travel to Yuma to work, going home evenings. Many of the poultry workers in Alabama were Guatemalans. The arrival of the poultry plant in Russellville, which was not prospering, brought an influx of immigrant workers, but it also brought small businesses to the main street and children to the schools. Thirty-one percent of the children in the town\u2019s school are Latino. These sections of the book provide helpful information for our current national debate about immigration, describing as they do the different paths to residency that people take, the contributions they make to their workplaces and towns, their role in our economy, the taxes they pay, the strength of their families and friendships. Thompson provides a human face to immigration.<\/p>\n

In the short section titled \u201cConclusion\u201d at the end of his book, Thompson makes a passionate case for labor reform generally and for the ability of labor unions specifically to improve the lives of workers, and he writes eloquently about the need for immigration reform. But in most of the rest of the book he lets his description of his experiences speak for itself. In this respect Working in the Shadows is less polemical that you might expect it to be \u2014 much less so than Ehrenreich\u2019s work. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The Last Chinese Chef<\/b>
\nBy Nicole Mones
\nHoughton Mifflin, 2007<\/p>\n

If you ever find yourself in Searsport, Maine, on a lovely summer day \u2014 and I hope you do \u2014 stop in at Left Bank Books on East Main Street. In this small and intelligent bookstore I happened upon The Last Chinese Chef<\/em>, a novel by the author of Lost in Translation<\/em>. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

Ostensibly, this is a story about food and love. The narrator, Maggie McElroy, is grieving. Young and recently and suddenly widowed from a loving husband, Maggie is shocked to learn that a paternity claim has been lodged against his estate by a woman in China, where he frequently traveled on business. She must go there to resolve it. Because Maggie is a food writer, her editor suggests that she take the opportunity of her trip to China to profile a half-American, half-Chinese cook in Beijing named Sam Liang. Sam\u2019s grandfather wrote a famous book about Chinese cooking, and he is making a name for himself as a chef who eschews edgy, cosmopolitan trends for traditional Chinese cuisine. You can see where this is headed. They meet, learn to know each other, and good things happen. It\u2019s a lot more complicated than that, of course. There are rich subplots relating to a cooking contest in which Sam is engaged, to the resolution of the paternity claim, to Maggie\u2019s emergence from grief, and to Sam\u2019s fraught relationship with his father, also a great cook, who was driven from China by the Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n

This novel offers a running commentary on Chinese culture generally and specifically about the place of food in that culture. Here\u2019s a representative passage:<\/p>\n

From the family on out, food was at the heart of China\u2019s human relationships. It was the basic fulcrum of interaction. All meals were shared. Nothing was ever plated for the individual. She realized this was exactly the opposite from the direction in which Eurocentric cuisine seemed to be moving \u2014 toward the small, the stacked, the precious, above all the individual presentation. The very concept of individual presentation was alien here. And that made everything about eating different. (p. 164)<\/p>\n

(As an aside, I like to refer to the \u201cEurocentric cuisine\u201d the narrator describes in that passage as the \u201cBig Plate, Little Food\u201d movement.) I am by no means an expert on China, but I have visited there once, and I found that analysis of food and culture interesting and rewarding, and readers with an amateur interest in China will, too, I think.<\/p>\n

Unlike the other books about food and cooking that I discuss elsewhere on my bookshelf, most recently Bill Buford\u2019s Heat<\/em>, this is a book written and narrated by a food writer rather than a chef. Consequently, the passages on food dwell more on the experience of eating than that of cooking. For example:<\/p>\n

She plucked a morsel from the side of the bird, low on the breast where the moisture of the thigh came in, and tasted it. It was soft as velvet, chicken times three, shot through with ginger and the note of onion. (pp. 78-9)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing wrong with this writing \u2014 I just prefer the play-by-play from the kitchen, but that\u2019s not where this book goes. There are some recipes included in an afterward, including Beggar\u2019s Chicken, which I am going to try at home.<\/p>\n

A blurb on the back cover describes this book as \u201cthe perfect leisure read.\u201d I think that under-estimates the novel.<\/p>\n

\"Imperial<\/a>Imperial Bedrooms<\/b>
\nBy Bret Easton Ellis
\nAlfred Knopf, 2009<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what prompted me to try another novel by Bret Easton Ellis.\u00a0 Don\u2019t read this vile book.<\/p>\n

 
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