august-september

The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America. nonfiction. Michael Ruhlman.

Now, I often snuggle up with a cookbook, just for fun, and have been know to spend hours on end watching the Cooking Network. So it makes sense that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. But I was at times surprised that Ruhlman managed to carry me interested through the whole thing. So others may find it hard to finish: I�m sure of it. Not only that, but you really need a more-than-basic understanding of cooking�which I teeter on the edge of�to be able to follow at all times.

It was a very interesting book. You learn a lot reading it, while Ruhlman brings real people and situations to life, in full color, for you. And if you are thinking about entering the would of chef-dom, it�s a must-read.

Jacket Synopsis:
"In the ultimate food-lovers fantasy, journalist Michael Ruhlman dons chef�s jacket and houndstooth-check pants to join the students at the Culinary Institute of America, the country�s oldest and most influential cooking school. The Making of a Chef documents the training of America�s chefs with insider�s passion and attention to detail. Ruhlman learns to cook as though hi future depends on it, but discovers that a professional chef needs more than just knowledge and skill. Ultimately, he propels himself and his readers through a score of kitchens and classrooms in search of the elusive, unnamable elements of great cooking. This complete immersion enables him to create the most vivid and energetic memoir of a genuine culinary education on record."

Favorite Passages:
"What a fine evening to be drinking a gigantic mint julep, I thought, after a long day cooking, and now surrounded by a sea of corn, hazy and almost glowing, backlit by the sun descending over the mountains, the dogs dashing in and out between the stalks and romping throughout the herb garden. We were shaded by a young beechnut tree." (p305)

september

Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. nonfiction, sociology. Rachel Simmons.

Full of interesting anecdotes and personal stories, this is an intriguing and rare book. Until there are more on the subject, at least, every young woman, old woman, teacher, school administrator, guidance counselor, psychologist, and parent should read it. It begins a conversation on �alternative aggression� in girls that has been a long time in coming. It�s not very rigorous, as a study, but it never pretends to be. It�s more of a memoir and thoughts on the four years that Simmons spent in field research attempting to answer her own questions about "alternative aggression." But what we find in the results is a startling reflection of our own experiences as young women and little girls. It also tends to be a little repetitive, but the last couple chapters are worth the wait. This book should be passed to a couple friends and followed up with thorough discussion in two veins: first, in helping identify a problem and further the country-wide dialogue regarding it; and two, to aid in our own healing as former participants and the healing of our daughters, granddaughters, and loved ones.. My one real complaint: that Simmons wants to take the leap from subversive aggression in girls to allowing girls to deal with aggression openly, but never allows for the option of ultimately striving for peace and/or honestly humble character in our youth.

Jacket Synopsis:
"If your daughter has ever come home from school upset because her friends didn�t walk with her to lunch, if she has wanted to stay home or has run up to her room in tears and won�t tell you why, you may need this book. These may seem like minor problems�who cares about notes passed behind your back, ot a nasty look, or a party you�re not invited to�but they aren�t, and they can have a last effect on girls� self-esteem.

"In fact, as Rachel Simmons shown in Odd Girl Out, the secret world of girls� aggression is just as harmful as the aggression of boys, but it�s harder to recognize...

"Now, Odd Girl Out shines a light of understanding on the secret lives of girls. By articulating the dynamics of this behavior, she helps us see where it comes from and offers parents and teachers ways in which to help our daughters..."

Favorite Passages:
"...[Schools refusing to intervene in girls' conflicts] trivializes the role of peers in children's development, turning into school policy the myth that childhood is 'training for life,' rather than life itself." (p34)

"When confronted, girls often deny that they are angry, even as the project the opposite." (p46-47)

"Today's girls come of age in a world that has replaced the glass ceiling with a space station. That twenty-first-century girl is a pro ballplayer, a CEO-in-training, a fighter pilot� Today, girl power is a juggernaut. And yet. The message that modesty and restrain are still the essence of femininity still persist." (p106)

"It was the thread of fear that runs through so many girls� relationships: the fear that conflict of any kind will result in relational loss." (p163)

october

Glory In a Camel's Eye: Trekking Through the Moroccan Sahara. nonfiction, travel. Jeffrey Tayler.

While I started the first couple chapters very excited about it, I did have to force myself to finish Glory in a Camel�s Eye. I think, for one, that while the narrator was very informative and world-savvy, I found him pessimistic, gritty, even a little petty. I wouldn�t pick him as a travel companion, so it made it hard to travel with him in the book sense. And in a lot of ways the book just went on and on, and he trekked and trekked and trekked, indeed, all the way across the Moroccan Sahara. There were so many things to learn in this book, but there was some dimension missing� maybe brevity? Action? Warmth? I�m not sure, but I missed it, nonetheless. I would say, read this book if you are interested in Morocco and in the desert�but don�t bother if you�re not�except that I too am very interested in both Morocco and the desert. And still I struggled to finish. However, Tayler�s sometimes mean, but candid portrayal of people, and his insatiable appetite for adventure almost make me want to try him again. Perhaps in Congo?

favorite passages:

"Upstairs in my room I laid out my sleeping bag on the divan. The moonlight was flooding through my window, flooding over Jbel Kissane, flooding onto the oasis below. The palms, stirred by a breeze, rippled in the silver light as might waves on a gently surging sea. A donkey brayed from somewhere in the mellah, sheet bleated in their pens, the Draa trickled beaneath the casbah walls. Once this casbah had been the abode of a qa�id in the Land of Dissidence, and I imagined the severed heads of the enemy troops adorning stakes neat the gates.... In the dark I imagined more: I saw lengthy caravans moving through the oasis; I saw their Ruhhal leaders, exhausted from their desert crossing, riding emaciated camels down the narrow lanes; I saw shackled slaves dragging their feet, prodded along by saber-weilidng guards. Depotism and drought and disease, plagues of locustr and bouts of war, had in the past been the lot of the Draa�s people, who had accepted their suffering as the will of God.... I fell asleep, listening to the sheep." (p47)

"We started down the mountainside, each of guided by his own groove, each od us lost in thought. The firmament melted from azure to purple to cobalt; the earth seemed to fall from under our feet as we descended; we floated down through the dusk. The world emptied and in the void anything became possible. Ali loped ahead, trailing his firwal, a hooded silhouette under the Milky Way." (p110)

"We were camped in a crescent of a dune, the only raised earth on the ragg that, save for the towering stone wall of Jbel Bani five miles to the north, extended to every horizon. Lying around the fire, we luxuriated in the smoky blue cool of dusk. The fire was burning low, its embers carried dancing away by the breeze; the grazing camels were faraway shadows standing against the ashen afterglow of a sky just abandoned by the sun. Not a bird was singing, not an insect buzzing; the measured munching of the camels could be heard a quarter-mile away. We had just finished our third cup of tea, which I sugared but still found foul. We said little, absorbing the peace of the desert." (p134)

" ...The Arabic of the Ruhhal, I was learning, had a word for every sort of barren terrain, and none was to be used carelessly. .... But should a dune have a mottling of scrub on it, it would be called a nibka, and anything supporting more than three starving acacias would require the (wildly misleading, to my mind) appellation of ghaba (forest)." (p134)

"Believing in no such otherworld compensation for their suffering imposed by this vale of stones, I found my temper shortening, my strength sorely tested. The heat and chronic, sun-induced nausea and sweatless fever, which no amount of covering up seemed to cure, prompted me to withdraw into myself. I was soon filling the barrens with the image of my wife and verdant, dewy Russia; with the rancors and unsettled feuds of my past; and with, of all things, episodes of TV sitcoms remembered from childhood. By midday I was often traipsing across that Saharan inferno with an imbecilic smile on my face, answering Mabari�s pious chant about the oneness of God with "a story 'bout a man named Jed / poor mountaineer barely kept his fam�ly fed." (p171)

october-november

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. fiction. Julia Alvarez.

I hate this: when a great book is recommended to me (or forced on me in a class), I read the book, I love it, and then I spend the rest of my life playing catch-up with that same author and never finding anything as great. This is how I feel about Julia Alvarez, among others. I LOVED Yo!, and this is the second time I have tried to read something else of Alvarez�s only to be disappointed (the other time being In the Name of Salome). Garcia Girls was enjoyable enough, an easy read, and full of fun little stories. But I surely didn�t love it, and I almost even tolerated it for the sake of Yo!, which is the book that technically follows Garcia Girls in a sort of mini-series of two. I liked that she wrote it backwards�sort of funky�but then I realized that felt really backwards� I wanted to know more in the end. And I never did actually figure out what point of view the book was supposed to have. Maybe an experimental early work? Anyhow, I continue to await Yo!�s equal, hoping it�s out there in the past or future work of Alvarez. I long for that breezy, colorful, large writing that I read for the first time once upon a time in college when I cracked the first page of Yo!. Until then, take or leave Garcia Girls. Either way, you can polish it off in a couple nights cuddled up in your bed, and it could make a good interlude between some technical reading.

unknown

The Life of Pi. fiction. Yann Martel.

I would recommend this book, with reservations. It was pretty darn good, but I had unfortunately expected it to be better. It was insightful, interesting, unique, well-written (to a point)... and violent. We're not talking human violence, though, we're talking animal kingdom violence (sometimes against humans). I am apprently a lot more squemish than I thought. I guess that's what happens when you stop eating meat and distance yourself in the urban jungle. I liked the book.

favorite passages:

"I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both."

"It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will take them-and then they leap."

"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."

"And what a story... What? Humanity sins but it's God's Don who pays the price? I tried to imagine Father saying to me, 'Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas, Yesterday another one killed a black buck. Last week two of them ate a camel. The week before it was painted storks and grey herons. And who's to say for sure who snacked on our golden agouti? The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done.I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is to feed you to them."
"'Yes Father, that would be the right and logical thing to do. Give me a moment to wash up.'
"'Hallelujah, my son.'
"'Hallelujah, Father.'
"What a downright weird story. What peculiar psychology."

"There are those that take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless."

"It makes me sad, my father's ceaseless worrying. Mrs. Gandhi could have personally bombed the zoo, it would have been fine with me if Father had been gay about it. I wish he hadn't fretted so much. It's hard on a son to see his father sick with worry."

unknown

Peace Like a River. fiction. Not sure at the moment.

I would recommend this book for some people. It is an easy read and has just some excellent qualities about it. I especially (and my husband as well) really appreciated the character of the father. It is rare that you find someone like him in literature. But, as usual, I was a little too pumped up for this book, and so was a little disappointed again. It also tied up a little too neat at the end, but still, worth the read.

favorite passages:

"It's one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also. You are very near then to friendless in the world."