Maybe I should go jump over park benches

Natural Born Heroes

Despite the "Chris MacDougal" style--build up and switch--this was gripping and altogether unforgettable.  This time his alternating plot lines were the British undercover operatives on Crete during World War II and the superhuman feats attained by people who practice Parkour and other extreme athletic regimes.  He likes to spend a chapter or so on the main plot line--the extreme level of fitness (physical or mental--who knows) required to do the stunts the operatives did--then switch off for a bit describing the history of Greek athletes or the Parkour regimen for extreme fitness or other lost arts of near-superhuman achievement.

His style works for me, once I got used to it again.  (See: Born To Run)  But it bugs some people supremely. Others probably just plain don't believe him.  I can understand that--he gets going with an idea and goes a little far, hyperbolically, at times.  If you can forgive him those occasions and stick with what can be demonstrated in the history books or proven by observation, then this book will blow your mind and expand your vision of possibilities.

Shouldn't try to read cookbooks

Modern spice
by Monica Bhide

As I expected, a cookbook with extras.  What I didn't expect was the volume of the extras, both the big, 2-3 page stories and the occasional little mini-stories in with the recipes. Very enjoyable.

Both the little stories and the big ones are chatty, informal tales of cooking, traveling, meeting people and more. You practically get to know her just by reading her recipe notes. By cooking the recipes you'd be stepping even further into Ms. Bhide's crossover life. She explains at the beginning that this is her own, highly personal introduction to Indian food and flavors--it's not a reference manual.  It's an attempt to capture the soul of the cuisine and not be too fussy about authenticity.  And borrowing on her own claims to authenticity, she allows herself to improvise.

I enjoyed the book but didn't copy down more than two of the recipes. As much as I love the cuisine and will continue to cook my own Americanized versions of dals, curries, and 'masalas', I simply will not begin every recipe with "2 tablespoons vegetable oil".  That's just a little too Americanized for me.  In my stubborn know-it-all opinion, a teaspoon of olive oil or ghee rubbed around the skillet will improve most dishes, but I'm not going to have everything swimming in 'vegetable oil'.  Yuck.

So I won't attempt to review the recipes but I will recommend the book--it's a lot of fun.

Lovely, lively memoir

Life from Scratch
by Sasha Martin

I was just plain bowled over. From page one she had me.  This book had been described as "one woman's quest to cook around the world," but there's a whole lot before that.  You could almost call the cooking part an anticlimax--I think the book really set out to explain why she felt the need to cook a meal from every country in the world.  And it did explain it, admirably.  She had one of the most screwed up weirdo childhoods you'll ever encounter, barring actual abuse.  Abuse wasn't the problem--it was stupidity!

I'll let you read for yourself why she started the cooking quest--no more spoilers.  The only thing I might have liked was a little more detail about the blog she wrote and about her recipe selection. How did she choose a menu from a country like India or China, which have lots of regional cuisines that we Americans all lump into one? But it turns out her website is still out there and possibly the blog archives are, too...yep. globaltableadventure.com   Maybe it will tell....I see that its organized by country, but that's the order she cooked in, so okay. 

One of the most amusing parts of the cooking adventure was how she found the ingredients even though she lived in Tulsa, which ain't all that big and is not at all a big immigrant center.  I live near a larger city with a lot more people and I'm still trying to locate black mustard seeds.  Obviously you can order such things online, but she found local sources for foods you wouldn't imagine, and often, she even found the people who knew how to cook them.  Call that part two of her adventure.

Despite all my talk of food, that's not the point of this book.  It's not for 'foodies', but rather, for anyone who enjoys memoirs.

A family tale in the works

The Girl From Foreign

It's hard to say why this book gripped me so much. Ms. Shepard has gone to India on a research grant, to make a documentary about the Bene Israel settlement on the coast near Mumbai.  The Bene Israel is a community of Jews who were shipwrecked on the coast two thousand years ago; they have lived until recently in isolation from the rest of the Jewish world but but still practicing what they could remember of their religion.

That's the focus of Ms. Shepard's research grant, but you quickly learn she's also hankering after a different story--the story of her grandmother.  Her grandmother was a Jewish woman who became the third wife of a Muslim man, taking on his religion and raising her children in it, but never truly forsaking her own. She was a highly educated woman, a nurse--why did she choose to give that up and become a second-class citizen?  Why did she quit her own work to take care of her husband's properties and live in his house as the 'favored wife'?  What were her thoughts--her daily experiences--her deepest feelings?

Maybe the author wasn't able to answer all these questions, but she made a great try.  And answered a few of her own existential questions at the same time.  Not perfect but very interesting.

Classic and for a reason

The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck

At times I was listening with fists clenched in fear and fingers crossed in hope. At times I had to grit my teeth to keep from hollering--don't do it, stupid!  At times I was amazed to think that people could have subsisted on so little food and saddened to know that they did.  When drought strikes the whole land, if the rich used their silver to bring in food and share it with the hungry, would their goodness be remembered?  We'll never know.

I was so caught up in the powerful story that even as I shuddered at people's foolish decisions, I didn't get angry at the author, only the people.  There were only two really 'good' people in the whole book and I never fully understood what made them tick, but they weren't the story--the story was of Wang Lung and his father and his sons.

Actually, I'm not sure I want to use the term, 'good'.  It's not about good vs. evil, it's about human beings and what they do to survive. If I call Wang Lung's wife 'good', I'm ignoring her whole role in life. She exists to serve--she's a wife and a mother and she meets the obligations as she has been taught them. She seems to be grateful for what she's been given and seldom envious of what she can't have. She's simply a survivor.

But you never know what's going on inside her. If Pearl Buck had written this book forty years later (it was published in 1931), would she have considered writing from the woman's perspective?  Did she feel that to be taken seriously she had to write about men?  Was it verboten to show a woman's true feelings--would that have typecast her work as chick lit and trivialized its existence?  I'm not sure we'll ever know, and it's a pity.

Wrong again--we might know!  She wrote a series of essays,  Of Men and Women, and is considered a feminist writer by some people.  I'm going to check this out!  See you later.

A quick YA so-so

Breakfast served anytime
by Sarah Combs

For all that I enjoyed this little book, I don't feel comfortable assigning it a high rating. It's thin and disjointed and seems to be aspiring to be literary or symbolic.  The heroine never seemed like someone I knew, let alone liked. She was amusing, that's all.  There were hints of a painful past, a missing mother and a lost grandmother, but that's all--hints.  There was some internal conflict about acting that I never understood--did she want to? Did she have bad experience with it?  Did I flip two pages and miss something critical?

I think there was even some kind of moral lesson, too. No idea what.  Sorry not to like.

Happy feet and lala legs

Feet, Don't Fail Me Now: The Rogue's Guide to Running the Marathon
by Ben K

Funny-ish and full of useful information. If I could only sustain the speed of my younger days, I'd try his training schedules. But, I fear, I'd be disappointed really quickly.

He structures the book around four races that you're going to do--a 5K, 10K, half-marathon and marathon. In a year. Sounds silly, no? But it's been done--and he's going to tell you how.

So each chapter starts off with a few weeks of training schedules--how many days to run, how much time to run and walk, how to balance the times spent running and walking. Later in the book he has to switch from time to distance as distance becomes more critical.  Then each chapter goes off on a topic of interest.  They're widely divergent but always important.  There is talk of what to eat, of working your core, of Kenyan runners, of networking with other runners, and of motivation--always, motivation.  At the end of each chapter is a list of inspiring music for the run, and often, interviews with the artists who recommended it. Some are runners--Willie Nelson, really?--but many are not. Fun stuff.

The reason I can't try his schedules is that when he says, "Run for six minutes," all I can muster is a fast jog.  He even says "jog" from time to time, but I honestly think he's expecting people to start off doing eight-minute miles.  The only way I could effectively use his schedules is to substitute my 'jog' for his 'walk' and then run like heck when he says to. But maybe I could...and maybe I will. Since I'm not yearning to run the marathon in a year, maybe I could stretch out his schedule a bit....

Wow--that right there tells you how inspiring this book is. It's actually making me want to try it out.  I guess that means, highly recommended.

Not so bad celeb memoir

Loretta Lynn
by Loretta Lynn, George Vecsey

Her voice, her true voice, shows on every page. This is her as she wanted to show herself, and she doesn't gloss over the bad times or embellish the good deeds--I don't think.  We all hide a little evildoing in our histories, so I won't insist on a biographer to come along and dig the dirt.  But she, as big and goodhearted as her 110-pound body will support, gets to tell her own story her way.  And I wouldn't have it any other way.

(If you're not already a Loretta Lynn fan, you probably don't need to read this. But I enjoyed it.)

just a little more YA to go and I'll quit with it again

What Can't Wait

by Ashley Hope Pérez

Now this is a real YA realistic fiction.  It's not "the evil teacher" or "the school bully" who's preventing Marissa from realizing her dreams--it's a loving family and her own sense of responsibility. Her family is pressuring her to skimp on school (and especially calculus for her AP college credit) so she can put in extra hours at Kroger, cook dinner, or babysit for her sister.  What's the point of college anyway?  And even if she gets into the engineering program at UT, how can her mother let her go so far away?

There's boys in there too--she's a teenager, after all.  And about as stupid as a highly intelligent high school senior can be...maybe. We hope not. We'll see.