A Thousand Country Roads - Robert James Waller

On one of my infrequent trips back to the US in the early 1990's for a friend's wedding, I stayed with my friend Alexandra in Chicago for a few days. Back in college she promised to always  have pesto in the fridge for me if I should come to visit, and I promised something I can't remember - maybe matzo ball soup. Even if my memory is dim, her's was not, and she was true to her word. One day she handed me a book she said I had to read, The Bridges of Madison County. She said that one of the main characters, Robert Kincaid, a roamer and photographer for National Geographic, reminded her of me. I read it straight through in a couple of hours. Two things stood out immediately besides the fine writing. I am not sure what in Kincaid's character reminded her of me, but I am flattered to be thought of in that way. Second, one of the reasons Francesca falls in love with Kincaid is that he relates he was once in her hometown of Bari, Italy. He was on his way somewhere else, saw the town from the train and just got off. This freedom stunned Francesca, now a housewife in rural Iowa. What stunned me and made me laugh out loud was the thought of Bari as beautiful. I was there once, catching a hydrofoil ferry (run by Norwegians for some reason) to Durress, Albania and I thought it was a pit! Probably a lot had changed in 60 years. In any case, it is a brilliant book. After a lot of delays, I finally settled in to read the epilogue last night. A Thousand Country Roads finds the characters 16 years the older. It could have been a very sad book, as one suspects from the opening few pages; or it could have been a very happy book with the two lovers finding each other again and living happily ever after. But, in fact author Robert James Waller settles for a more introspective and realistic book (with the exception of a few silly coincidences). The prose is once again descriptively excellent as the story keeps us interested in what happens next. A great improvement on Waller's Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend, and Border Music. One thought from the book I would like to share:
"Reality is one thing, but a slow whittling down of dreams is next door to dying slow."

Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier
Edited by Boris Fishman
I must admit, having read a lot of crap expat and travel novels about the region, I started this book with signifigant trepidation. My nervousness was increased when I noticed short stories included by three authors I had read whose books I could not bear to finish - Gary Shteyngart's "Absurdistan," Arthur Phillip's "Prague," and Wendell Steavenson's "Stories I Stole". However, it was this book and this book alone that cried out from the bookshelves to be read last weekend, so I gave it a shot. Strangely enough, these same authors were some of the most impressive in this particular anthology. While I found Alexander Hemon's "Fatherland" unreadable and Charlotte Hobson's "The Bottle"

just slightly better, the rest of the contributions were good reads, including:
Tom Bissell - "The Ambassador's Son"
Wendell Steavenson - "Gika"
Gary Shteyngart - "Shylock on th Neva"
Arthur Phillips - "Weceslas Square"
Josip Novakovich - " Spleen"
Paul Greenberg - "The Subjunctive Mood"
Miljenko Jergovic - "The Condor"
John Beckman - "Babylon Revisited Redux"
Thomas de Waal - "The English House"
Vladimir Sorokin - "Hiroshima"

The collection features a mix of authors from CEE-CIS in translation, expat writers and travel writers.

Manufacturing for Life

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
By William McDonough and Michael Braungart
Published by the North Point Press, 193 pages

By focusing on design, Cradle to Cradle attempts to steer environmental debate about end-of-pipe solutions into a constructive re-conceptualisation of the way we think about the environment - largely by focusing on manmade products and their often destructive interaction with ecosystems.

In a Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon from years ago, Mother Goose is paying for her groceries and is asked if she wants paper or plastic bags. Faced with a choice of killing trees or exploiting oil, and being unable to decide, Mother Goose is finally put into a straightjacket and carried off to the loony bin. There are, of course, other solutions not illustrated in the cartoon - such as reusable string and textile bags - but resources are also mined and used in their manufacture, and there is still the question of disposal. Nor are so-called "biodegradable" bags the answer: Today's biodegradable bags comprise a mix of plastic interspersed with cornstarch. When and if the cornstarch biodegrades (which it does not unless exposed to sunlight, air and water - none of which are present in a landfill disposal or incinerator), many small plastic bits remain.

Cradle to Cradle asks us to look at everything from bags, shoes, carpets and entire buildings, and to contemplate redesigning them in such a way that waste does not equal waste, but equals food. A carrier bag, for example, can mean a fully compostable bag that can re-enter the ecosystem as food for biological processes, or be made from materials that can be re-fed into bag-manufacturing process. Sports shoes can be made with soles that erode slowly through wear and leave behind material that biodegrades into soil nutrients.

The authors argue that all materials and products should be designed so that they safely feed the biosphere and/or technical processes. For example, car exhaust emissions could be reconceived and the process designed so that positive emissions can either help purify the air or produce drinking water. They add, however, that these types of solutions do not get to the actual root problems of an auto-based culture and infrastructure.

The authors also emphasise the big difference between recycling and down-cycling. Recycling is to make the same product from reclaimed materials. For example, Cradle to Cradle itself is made from non-toxic, 100% recyclable polymer material that can be recycled into a new book. Recycling might make you feel good, but the authors claim that it does not provide adequate incentives to minimise either the waste or the often-toxic chemicals used in production.

Energy-efficiency advocates might quarrel with the authors' contention that emission standards, permits, toxic release inventories and carbon trading schemes are just a "license to harm" - that making a destructive system less so is just not good enough. Being "less bad" or "sustainable" does not halt depletion, it just slows it down. The authors write, not without humour: "If a man characterised his relationship with his wife as sustainable, you might as well pity them both."

reprinted from REC Green Horizon Magazine

Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics - P.J. O'Rourke

Part "economics for dummies" and part travel guide, Eat the Rich not only tries to (and to a great extent succeeds) explain economics to folks like me, while at the same time trying to explain the bigger question - why are some countries richer or have a better standard of living than others? O'Rourke, a conservative Republican who is also able to write for more liberal magazines as Rolling Stone and Harper's deftly examines and compares culture, infant mortality rates, life expectancy, mineral wealth and other factors in a number of countries from Cuba to Sweden.

Why are culture-rich countries like Tibet or mineral rich countries like Tanzania so poor?  He takes jabs equally at both the left and right, for example comparing China's official One Child Policy, to America's unofficial One Parent Policy." Readers looking for a bit of good travel writing such as O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell will not be disappointed either. Here is a zinger from Eat the Rich, "Albania has the distinction of being the only country ever destroyed by a chain letter." A reference to the civil war that broke out in Albania in 1996-1997 when the largest pyramid scheme collapsed. I laughed so hard at "Third World Driving Tips and Hints" in Holidays in Hell, I photocopied the entire chapter. One of the most useful tips in the book may be this, "A fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people."

Letters from America - Alistair Cooke

I first heard Alistair Cooke's radio broadcasts very late in life, on the BBC over short-wave radio while working on an organic goat farm in the Netherlands. Late at night there was not much to do except watch football, smoke and drink whiskey - none of which were really of much interest. But Alistair Cooke's Letter from America was something different. Cooke, originally from Manchester, England broadcast his insightful, biting and human, funny and solemn cultural feature from America on the BBC for 58 years until his death in 2004. His style is reminiscent of Garrison Keillor and other great radio story-tellers in that he starts of at some seemingly harmless and unimportant news headline and takes you through a journey of association to bring you back around again to your starting point very much the richer for the journey through culture, history, politics, sociology and anything else that might have caught his fancy along the way. More importantly, even if you were unaware of the point, you always got there in the end with eyes more wide open and your heart just a little more in your throat than 15 minutes before. His voice was such that one could turn off the lights and pretend they were listening to old time radio with our parents in front of the big radio console as the Lone Ranger or the Green Hornet or Nero Wolfe saved the day.

Following his death, Penguin published a rich selection of his broadcasts in written form. Some of the highlights include his insights on Joe Louis, friendship with Charlie Chaplin, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Fall in New England.

Paper Mage

I am a big fantasy sci-fi buff, but after a time I just had to stop reading the books because they were so similar, or I would realise 20 pages into it that I had already read it. No such problems there with Leah R. Cutter's Paper Mage (ROC, 2003). What could possibily be new in the world of fantasy? "In a small Chinese village during the Tang Dynasty, an unsure young woman has managed to elude the conventions of her society to become a gifted paper mage-one who creates magic with the ancient art of paper folding." Not only is the idea coo-el, but it is also very well written. Leah has also written The Caves of Buda (which of course takes place in Budapest), and  The Jaguar and the Wolf. I do not know how these later books are, but her short story "Red Boots" in the anthology Black Heart, Ivory Bones is also a great read.

Bad Chemistry

My introduction to Our Stolen Future came about ten years ago at a sustainable packing conference when a young German woman sat down at our table for lunch and asked: "Did you know that male sperm counts have gone down 50 percent in the last 50 years?" I lost my appetite, but at least my interest in this topic was successfully piqued.

Our Stolen Future deals with endocrine disruptors and endocrine mimickers present in-among other things-plastic packaging that, through coming into contact with food, reduces male sperm count. When Rachel Carson's Silent Spring came out 40 years ago, DDT was already widely used to control mosquitoes. Although DDT did have an impact in controlling malaria, it also had a fatal impact on wildlife: and toxic chemicals made their way into the human food chain through the birds and fish that fed on these DDT-exposed mosquitoes. In fact, students at my university (years before I attended) collected some dead birds around campus after an aerial spraying of DDT, hung them from a clothesline strung across the middle of campus and announced with a scoreboard: DDT 15, Birds 0. Our Stolen Future is a somewhat more scientific attempt to sound the alarm on chemicals in plastics, PCBs and other chemicals that infiltrate our ecosystem on a daily basis.

Like DES (a synthetic female hormone used to stop breast milk and as a ‘morning after' pill, and readily available to woman for 40 years), DDT successfully mimics natural estrogen. Possible DES side-effects include vaginal cancer, uterine deformities, miscarriages, undescended testicles and devastated T-helper cells (which are essential to the body's immune system). Hormones and hormone receptors fit together like lock and key and activate different responses at required times, but when hormone mimics or hormone blockers (which make it impossible for natural hormones to bind to the receptors) enter the body through DDT, DES or a host of other chemicals in plastics and pesticides, the responses become incorrect.

PCBs and other persistent chemicals like dioxins and furans become magnified and concentrated as they move up the food chain-stored in fatty tissues until they reach the top predators. As PCBs move from phytoplankton to zooplankton to larger and larger fish and then to herring gulls, the chemical concentration in animal tissue can be magnified up to 25 million times! Effects on the animal kingdom range from insufficiently thick eggshells and infertile populations to birth defects and cancer. Synthetic chemicals often confuse the hormone-producing glands (e.g. the thyroid and pituitary), which means that the body doesn't know what to turn on, turn off, speed up or slow down, and this can cause defects or disease in organs like the testicles, ovaries and pancreas.

Water run through PVC tubing comes out containing Pnonylphenol, which is not only added to polystyrene and PVC as an antioxidant and to make plastics more stable, but is also found in contraceptive creams like nonoxynol-9. Also, polycarbonates and plastic linings of food tins contain P-nonylphenol and bisphenol-A, which leach in to water and food from packaging and act as hormone blockers. Even reusable plastic bottles can seriously damage our health.For such a scientifically daunting subject, the authors of Our Stolen Future have produced a very readable and understandable book that even people without a solid scientific background can appreciate. Reprinted from Green Horizon Magazine

Are we there yet? A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

English-born Canadian author Ronald Wright's weeklong series of Massey Lectures in 2004 comprise the basis for A Short History of Progress, a well-written work of 130 pages, an additional 50 pages of endnotes, and ten pages of bibliography.

Wright's book begins with an examination of Paul Gauguin's art: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?'" These are questions that pundits, philosophers, worried parents and millions of drunken college students around campfires late at night have considered through the ages. Surely, each of us have asked ourselves these very questions this at least once while watching the evening news, passing the 100th beggar that day, or choking on smog. A Short History of Progress asks us to do what we have been advised to do for centuries-learn from the past, and ensure a better future by not repeating the same mistakes. Personally, I despair daily that so few have taken this advice to heart. Ancient ruins that dot every corner of our world are "shipwrecks that mark the shoals of progress," and the patterns of decline are alarmingly similar.

Wright does touch on different measures of progress (technological, material, moral) but only manages to skim the surface. Perhaps he could have posed the question asked each election year by pollsters: "Are you better off now than you were a year ago?" The book fails to examine how we can better address solutions to ensure that we have a roof over our head, enough food, clean drinking water, peace, and a good education for our kids. Instead, Wright focuses on "the runaway progression of change" and the "collapsing of time"-and the fact that the world we enter at birth is vastly different than the one we leave.

According to Wright, all the big changes since humans left caves have been cultural, not physical. We are "running 21stcentury software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago. Most people, throughout most of time, have lived on the edge of hunger-and much of the world still does." Annually, the US and the EU each spend over USD 1 billion paying farmers not to grow crops, and another billion dollars each year buying up ‘surplus' crops in order to keep prices artificially high. Now, multinational companies are copyrighting staple crops.

G.K. Chesterton observed: "Man is an exception, whatever else he is [...] If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.'' Progress has not been made in distribution, infrastructure, transport-or in political will. Regardless of ‘progress' in irrigation, hybrid crops and other technological ‘fixes,' humans still can't feed themselves and continue to fall into ‘progress traps.' For example, when the ancients in the Fertile Crescent discovered irrigation, they then fell into the salination trap and their lands lay barren for centuries. If we want to reduce our environmental impact and not go the way of the Sumerian, Roman and Maya empires, we must reform society.

Unlike the grim Wright, I believe we can say no to GMOs and nuclear power, and that we can re-embrace renewable energy sources, reusable bottles and organic farming.

Historical Fiction

I have become a real fan of historical fiction. I guess it started in gradeschool when I had to read Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. Based on the bully in Tom Brown's Schooldays, George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series is a great romp through historical fiction during the 19th century British Empire. Unlike the heroes in the same genre such as Johnnie Tremain, C.S. Forester's midshipman Horatio Hornblower, Bernard Cornwell's rifleman Sharpe, and Patrick O'Brian's captain Jack Aubrey, Flashman is an accidental hero. A womanizer and bully, it is Flashman's cowardice (if not his flatulance) that constantly propels him though each tale, and into the history books. Did you know that the Charge of the Light Brigade, with the heroic Flashman at the front, was actually started by Flashman's cowardly loose bowels and an enormous fart that scared his horse? There are over a dozen books in the series, taking Flashman through most of the British Empire and its campaigns, including India, Crimea, the West Indies, China and the US.
     For anyone that has read Patrick O'Brian, C.S. Forester's Hornblower series, starting with Mr.Midshipman Hornblower, is the original. Through about 11 books, Horatio Hornblower rises from midshipman to Admiral and Lord during the Napoleonic Wars. Although steeped in naval lore, it is less technical and more approachable than the sometimes too linguistically precise O'Brian. I read Midshipman 30 years ago in school and finally saw Hornblower happily into retirement last week. Forester is also the author of The African Queen, of which a movie was later made staring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.

Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis

322pp., 2005, Portobello Books
As Al Gore so poignantly said in "An Inconvenient Truth," we so often go from denial to despair without doing anything in between. This is how I feel while reading most environmental books. Jeremy Leggett's new book, "Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis" while depressing about the state of the world, offers significant hope if, like most things, the political will can be found.The introductory chapter is written as a Daniel Quinn-like parable, but in an enjoyable and ironic Douglas Adams style, and clear like a Stephen J. Gould essay. The majority of the book deals with the question of peak oil, and the debate between "early peakers" and "late peakers." It goes without saying that oil will run out sooner or later, and one does not need a book about this. However, if you want to know the science and economics behind the forecasts and the debate, then this is an excellent book to give you a grounding. When I read about the peak oil debate, my first reaction is "Good!, let the oil run out tomorrow, then maybe people will finally tackle renewable energy and energy conservation seriously." But then I start thinking about my gortex jacket, shoes, oven cleaner, plastic water pipes, and a million other things I use every day made from oil products.

Leggett presents five premises:
1. It will be possible to replace oil, gas and coal completely with a plentiful supply of renewable energy, and faster than most people think.
2. The shortfall between current expectation of oil supply and available of oil and other sources of energy will not be able to plug the gap in time to prevent economic and environmental trauma.
3. Renewable energy, along with energy efficiency will increasingly substitute oil and gas, growing explosively.
4. The ruins of the old energy modus operandi will try to turn to coal, the outcome of which will ultimately determine if economies and ecosystems will survive the global warming threat.
5. There is much that people can do to influence a the use of renewables, and ameliorate the worst excesses of the global energy crisis.

It is not a question of when oil production will peak and decline, but instead, what happens then. The world may leap to coal or nuclear, even worse options. If we burn most of the remaining oil, or even a fraction of the coal, it will
destroy our economies and environment. However, there are viable and quick solutions recognised even by the some of the world's worst polluters.

Shell's scenario planners in 2001 declared that renewables have the potential to provide power to a world of 10 billion people with ease, even if per capita use increases. If only 600 km2 of the Sahara desert are covered with PV cells, it would match all existing power station production worldwide. The wind-power potential of Texas, N. Dakota and Kansas is enough to meet the energy demand of the entire US. All of non-electrified sub-Saharan Africa could be provided with small-scale solar for less than 70% of what OECD countries spend on subsidies to the fossil fuel industries annually (Annual government subsidies to gas, oil and coal companies is over 235 billion USD!). The UK town of Woking has cut its CO2 emissions 77% since 1990.

In 2005, a ship traveled to the North Pole for the first time without the aid of an ice breaker - time is short, but it is not impossible. Help your friends and loved-ones, and the planet, by giving smart. Give them a certificate that no gifts are necessary. Or if you really feel the need, insulate their windows and doors and pipes; give them energy efficient light bulbs; A+ energy and water efficiency appliances; and extension cords with a master off switch (these days many appliances do not even come with an off button).

This book review was written for the REC Bulletin, to be published sometime in March.

Stephen King Scared the Shit Out of Me

He did for years and I had never even read anything by him. I saw how his books scared my friends. They got obsessed with the books and could not put them down even though they were terrified. A girlfriend's mother grabbed Salem's Lot out of her hands and threw it on the fire (of course she went out and got another copy). Horror and romance are about the only genres I do not read, and Stephen King being the pinacle of horror, I would not touch him. Hey, at 41 I still get scared of the flying bloody monkeys in Wizard of Oz and hide my face behind a pillow until the scene is over. That said, I read King's non-horror Hearts in Atlantis last year and consider it the best book I read all year, with his Dolores Clairborne a close second. He may be primarily a horror writer, but the man can write! I also enjoyed his From a Buick 8, and Bachman Books. I discovered his Dark Tower dark fantasy series and finished the seventh and final book last night, and it is one of the finest sci-fi fantasy adventures, hell, of any work of fiction, I have ever read.

Do you have just American authors?

god I hate this question...listen folks, Treehugger Dan's is an English Language bookstore. It does not matter where the author is from, just so long as the book is in English. We do not divide the books up by the author's country of birth. People also expect me, because of my name (Swartz), to be conversant about Jewish authors. I honestly do not know who they mean. I do not divide the books up by the author's religion or the religion of their mother either. There are the more obvious ones like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Primo Levi, Isaac B. Singer, Gertrude Stein..., but what about Anita Brookner, Miguel de Cervantes, E.L. Doctorow, Belva Plain, Dorothy Parker...? Here is an interesting and sometimes surprsing list. With the exception of E.L. Doctorow and Cervantes I have not read any of these authors and do not intend to. However, I do enjoy the occassional Kinky Friedman book. Kinky Friedman is a Jewish cowboy musician, former gubenatorial candidate for Texas and occassional crime writer. Anyone who pens such classic songs as "They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore" deserves our full support. I am currently reading Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore. Moore is the author of Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, perhaps the funniest book I have ever read. It explains those age old mysteries such as why Jewish people, myself included, go for Chinese food at Christmas. I do not accept being Jewish though, since I see Judaism as a religion, a matter of faith, not blood. Nor have I ever had any desire to see Israel, though I do make a fantastic matzo ball soup, and pretty good bagels. That said, Edward Whittemore's excellent Jerusalem Quartet, beginning with Sinai Tapestry, did for a time make me very curious about the city of Jerusalem. By the way, the series does feature as a supporting character a mustached garlic eating  Hungarian count/baron.

A Hedonist in the Cellar

On the purchase of my flat last year, after renting 20 places in 18 years (including 6.5 years in one place), an ex-girlfriend gave me Jay McInerney's book, A Hedonist in the Cellar. She was overjoyed to find a book this bookman had not read, and one so appropriate to my newest passion in life, wine. McInerney is perhaps best known for his book Bright Lights, Big City, something everybody my age was reading in college, and then watching the movie version of starring Michael J. Fox. However, McInerney is also the wine columnist for American magazine House & Garden, and Hedonist in the Cellar is a collection of some of those columns. I find his novel much more accessible than his wine writing, however, I did learn a lot if I skimmed past the details of vintages and domaines. I believe that wine writing at its worst uses floral and excess verbiage, whereas at its best it simply says, "an excellent dry red, good with pasta, serve at ??? degrees C." Honestly, do I need to know anything more? Wines tend to suggest aromas from 4 main sources, the spice rack, cigar box, orchard and tack room, not to mention the minerals in the soil. In fact, wine aromas are "a catalog of minor vices." I know I should care, but I am not one to recall "wildly floral, modest, affable, honeyed, peach-like and delicate" while it is gracefully sliding down my gullet after some Croatian black olives salted in barrels of Adriatic seawater. This is why McInerney's wine writing, as is most wine writing, completely lost on me. I am a heathen, a peasant, a philistine, and just pass the bottle. As with poetry and art, Michel Chapoutier of Tain l'Hermitage (northern Rhone) said, "If you think about it too much you can kill it. The brain is a pleasure killer. You don't need to be a gynecologist to make love." There are some wines I love and some wines I hate, but don't ask me to tell you why. Maybe it is a lack of taste, in both senses of the word, but I just don't have the adjectives in me. Apparently, "anyone with taste buds can easily detect, in various combinations, such fruit flavors as lemon, lime, green apple, grapefruit, apricot, and even pineapple in the glass." Hmmm, not me, though I can easily identify various spices in my food. What I can tune into is anecdotes, such as the following paragraph: "My teeth are still stained from the experience of tasting the '99 Barbera d'Alba Gallina and the '99 Barbera d'Asti that spring...reminded me of a blackberry fight I had with two fifth grade classmates in Vancouver, Canada. We were picking blackberries, and after we'd willed two buckets and eaten several handfuls, we started throwing the surplus at one another. Thirty years later, Giuseppe Rivett's Barbera made me almost that exuberant." Or, "Bandol Mourvedre tastes like ripe blackberries squashed up with old teabags." Or, "If you are the kind of person who would never consider sharing a room with a wet Labrador or a lit cigar, then I advise you to skip the rest of this column." This makes me want to try a bottle. I learned some other things as well.

Whereas most dry whites can turn nasty and bitter with Asian cuisine, I learned that German Riesling is "the most food-friendly wine on the planet." Meaning, you can drink it with almost anything. McInerney says that the 2004 is like "inhaling a small electric eel." Even so, white wine goes so well with fish because it acts like lemon juice and highlights the flavor.

Whereas I tend to leave spiders alone because they are my best defense against mosquitoes and flies, wine cellars are full of cobwebs not to heighten the ambiance just for you, but because spiders are a great natural way to keep cork flies under control.

Ever wondered why wine makers add sulfur? According to Willy Frank, "Sulfur gives wild yeast a headache so they don't go into an orgy."

The owner of the Domaine de la Citodelle, M. Yves Riusset-Rouard, producer of the famous Emmanuel films, is also proprietor of the world's largest corkscrew museum.

The next wine books on my list, as suggested by McInerney, include:

Auberon Waugh's Waugh on Wine (son of Evelyn)

Kermit Lynch's Adventures on the Wine Route

Perhaps my favorite description in the book is this: "as smooth as baby Jesus in velvet pants." I suspect only god knows what this is like.

A Few Book Reviews for the New Year

The Return of Little Big Man - Thomas Berger. Little Big Man is one of my father's favorite books, and somehow I have never read it. When I grabbed this book, I did not make the connection, but this is the sequel. It is a fictional account of the life of the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Jack meets one famous person after another, from Buffalo Bill to young Winston Churchill, and everyone in between. Kind of like Forrest Gump meets the wild west. Strangely, with all these famous events happening around him, I got caught up in the on-going worry if he would EVER pay Wild Bill's widow back. I cannot decide if I liked it or not.

Fillets of Plaice. More Gerald Durrell, but this time it concentrates on his family and friends more than on his animals. It is in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh's aristocratic snobbish young English people, but with slightly more likable characters. It was well-written, but I prefer his animal stories.

The Dragons of Autumn Twilight - Margaret Weis. A continuation of the Dragonlance hero Huma's saga. Would fantasy authors please do something different instead of copying directly from Tolkein or Salvatore or even Jordan? Where is the originality that Harry Potter is so full of that made it a joy to read?

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break - Steven Sherrill. A very good book.One of the best I have read this year. It was a real surprise, and I admit, I bought it for the title. This time, it lived up to my expectations. Mine was an advanced reader's copy, so I am not sure what, if any, final changes were made in the final publication. The 5000 year old Minotaur is cooking in a North Carolina ribs joint. Well thought-out, well-written, original ideas.

Some Good Crime

Although I am not a big crime novel fan, I read a lot of Patricia Cornwell  and P.D. James during my early years in Hungary when I read what I could get my hands on. A lot of this came from my friend Martin who picked up his books at airports. In short, it is not really my genre. However, when American artist (living in Hungary) Stephen Zeigfinger saw a few John D. Macdonald books I had recently acquired at the shop, he highly recommended them.  I had never heard of MacDonald, but I am very happy I took his recommendation. Perhaps today's readers would recognize as the author of Cape Fear, but it was a huge surprise for me to see he also wrote two of my favorite childhood movies, "The Girl, the Goldwatch and Everything," and "The Girl, the Goldwatch and Dynamite." Ok, so I thought Pam Dawber (Mork & Mindy) was hot. Almost as much a surprise as when I discovered that The Planet of the Apes was penned by French author Pierre Boulle, the same man who wrote The Bridge Over the River Kwai.The Macdonald books I like, are the ones starring "salvage consultant" (read: fixer) Travis McGee (originally going to be called Dallas McGee, until the Kennedy assasination). McGee lives aboard the Busted Flush, a houseboat he won in a poker game, docked at Slip F-18 in Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. McGee is "retired" until a friend, or a friend of a friend needs help, and he needs money. He takes on a salvage job if by other means the lost item or person is otherwise deemed unrecoverable. If he is successful, he gets 50%. The 21 books in the Travis McGee series begin with The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964) and end with The Lonely Silver Rain (1981).  I have read about half of them now, and just enjoyed reading The Scarlet Ruse. In fact, I have enjoyed all of them so far, with the exception of Free Fall in Crimson, which I thought was very weak. The Green Ripper won the National Book Award in 1980.

Another favorite author, Carl Hiaasen, acknowledges the influence of MacDonald on his own work. Both men set their action in Florida, but whereas MacDonald's characters are from the hard-bitten crime genre, Hiaasen's are more quirky. What both authors share is being witness to the environmental destruction of Florida by big business, factories, real estate developers and the government, and condemning it in their books.  You may recognize Striptease as the basis of the Demi Moore film - skip the film, read the book. It is the book that got me hooked on Hiaasen. Some of his books include:

• Tourist Season (1986)
• Double Whammy (1987)
• Skin Tight (1989)
• Native Tongue (1991)
• Strip Tease (1993)
• Stormy Weather (1995)
• Lucky You (1997)
• Sick Puppy (2000)
• Basket Case (2002)
• Skinny Dip (2004)

Crazy in Alabama

I just finished Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress, while eating a massive slice of Kiev cake. A very good book, and good cake. I had never heard of this author before, but several customers recommended him. This book is for everyone who should have grown up in the Sixties, but whose parents did not oblige. Funeral homes, race relations, childhood, crazy Aunt Lucille and the Beverly Hillbillies. I will never look at Tupperware again in the same way. Good thing it was not Rubbermaid.

He has also written:
    * A World Made of Fire (Knopf, 1984)
    * V For Victor (Knopf, 1988)
    * Tender (Harmony, 1990)
    * Gone for Good (Knopf, 1998)
    * One Mississippi (July 2006, Little, Brown).

Bitter Sweet: The Secret History of the Chocolate Industry

One of my favorite movies as a kid was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971). What child did not want to win the golden ticket? Who didn't want to see the mysteries hidden behind the tall walls of the factory? Who didn't feverishly ride their bikes to the Penny Candy Store at every chance and buy sweets with grubby hands and hungry eyes? Isn't this why we worked for our allowance money? It was not until 15 years later in college that upon watching the film again after many years that I realized the film was actually about imperialism and colonialism. That while I was taking out the trash and mowing the lawn for 5 dollars a week, other children in the Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Cameroon, Mexico, Ghana and elsewhere were literally slaves and worked to death by the thousands for those same chocolates. In fact, most do not know what they are harvesting or what it is used for.

Cocoa was first used by the Olmec in Mezo-America as a drink, so highly prized, that the Mayans and Aztecs later used cocoa beans as currency, not gold or silver. Cocoa pods are the size of butternut squash, containing grey-purple seeds the size of almonds in tan-colored pulp. The pods are split and the seeds left to ferment and dry before being roasted. The Spanish first developed a triangular trade bringing weapons and salted cod to Africa, African slaves to the Americas (12-15 million) to work the cocoa plantations, and chocolate to Europe. It was Spanish priests and monks after Cortez conquered the area that began adding sugar and later spices to the brew. Chocolate's pharmaceutical properties are thought to include theobromine and caffeine that stimulate and dilate blood vessels; Phenylethylamine which stimulates sexual drive; Serotonin , a mind-altering chemical that can relieve depression; and perhaps antioxidants. Up until the 1800s, Europeans still bought cocoa in pharmacies.
Until 1828, the cocoa butter content, so highly valued and warred over by the Aztecs and Mayans, was routinely thrown out by Europeans who found it unpleasant on the palate. They tried everything to reduce the cocoa butter content, but it was still 50% fat. Dutchman C.J. Van Houten invented a hydraulic cocoa press to squeeze the grease from the roasted beans. He later determined the right fat content to easily emulsify it for home preparation. In 1840, Quaker Joseph Fry attached a steam engine to Van Houten's press. He also began to mix back some of the cocoa butter  into the cocoa powder, and the resulting mass could then be molded into the modern "melt in your mouth" chocolate bar. Quakers were integral in the chocolate trade, because unlike other commodity production, they did not find it sinful. Another Quaker, Cadbury created the first box of bonbons in the 1860s, intimately linked chocolate to Valentine's Day, and in 1875 introduced the first chocolate Easter Egg.

English investigative reporter Henry Woodd Nevinson began investigating the cocoa trade about this time. The Portuguese-controlled islands of Sao Tome and Principe (Cameroon) were both the leading producers of cocoa, as well as the location of some of the worst abuses. The Portuguese brought salve labor from Angola, none of whom ever returned home. The British Government turned a blind eye to the Portuguese practices because they did not want dirt dredged up about their own use of slave labor in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa. Twenty years after the first reports, neither the British Government nor the supposedly socially-concerned Quaker chocolate magnates had done a thing to stop the slavery.  Cocoa production was not the only commodity based on slave labor, nor was the worst abuses in this sector, but Cadbury, Rowntree, Fry, and others had made chocolate special, a symbol of joy, an innocent pleasure; but in reality it was made with blood, death and slave labor. Because of chocolate's symbolism, people expected a higher corporate and moral standard from chocolate companies than the diamond and gold pillagers.

In 1887, Swiss Henri Nestle blended milk with cocoa solids to create milk chocolate. Hersey later used condensed and powdered milk to the same effect in the US. Meanwhile, UK companies moved their operations to Trinidad and Jamaica, partly because their plantations in Africa were being decimated by disease, but also to avoid scrutiny.  Corporations imported slave labor from China and elsewhere to work the new plantations.  In 1910, the US passed a law prohibiting the import of cocoa produced with slave labor.  However, US companies controlled sugar production in Cuba, a major component in chocolate, with slaves from China and Africa.
In the 1930s, Forrest Mars introduced the Milky Way (Mars Bar in UK), Snickers and Three Musketeers candy bars, using solidified malted milk drink and nougat coated in chocolate. Rowntree introduced the Kit Kat, Black Magic and Aero about the same time.

While cocoa plantations in the Americas were in turn destroyed by disease, and companies relocated to Africa again, Mars and Herseys joined forces to produce Smarties and M&Ms. The Gold Coast (Ghana) in turn became the world leader cocoa production, but were then surpassed by the Ivory Coast in the 1980s. Benevolent dictator Felix Houphouet-Boigny converted the country's economy and bet the country's future on cocoa in the 1960s. But by the 1990s, the country had descended into poverty, chaos, war and child slavery. Child trafficking from Mali and Burkina Faso to the cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast assisted the country in continuing to supply over 50% of the world's cocoa. "Child slavery had become the secret ingredient in chocolate." UNICEF and the US State Department estimated that more than 15000 child slaves worked the plantations in 1998.  Children in the thousands were being enslaved and abused - for CHOCOLATE. The Mali Government did very little to stem the practice, since the country depended on trade with its neighbor.

US Congressman Eliot Engel introduced a law in 2001 that would have created a "slave free" label for chocolate like the "dolphin safe" label for tuna fish. Senator Tom Harkin joined him in the fight. However, the Senator had already learned that there was a fine line between human rights and economic necessity. Harkin had introduced the Child Labor Defense Act in 1992 that boycotted goods manufactured with child labor. Bangladeshi garment manufacturers panicked and 50000 children were fired, who then took on even more dangerous jobs like rock crushing to help support their families. The balance is to "find a way to take the hazards out of the work, not the child out of work."

Big Chocolate hired Bob Dole and George Mitchell to lobby against the bill. The resulting wrangle produced an industry voluntary agreement called the Harkin-Engel Protocol that delineated six points to eliminate child labor in the cocoa chain by July, 2005.  However, the protocol was voluntary, and did not include provisions for a fair wage, or a fair price for the beans.

In 2002, the protocol was adopted by Big Chocolate worldwide, becoming the International Cocoa Initiative. Simultaneously, an industry-funded investigation found that while there was no slavery, 284000 children worked in hazardous conditions on cocoa farms in West Africa, two-thirds of these in the Ivory Coast. The International Labor Rights Fund rejected the protocol and filed suit using a 1930 US law that prohibits the import of goods made by slaves.

Big Chocolate did not make the 2005 deadline - not even close. They are now setting up a small pilot project in Ghana, now the biggest producer of cocoa along with Indonesia. The International Labor Rights Fund filed a class action suit against Nestle, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland for trafficking, torture and forced labor on behalf of former child slaves.

Smaller chocolate producers took the lead in "slave free" or socially-conscious chocolate, later integrated into the Fair Trade system. Green & Blacks became the first Fair Trade chocolate in 1994, its signature product being the Maya Gold chocolate bar. High school enrollment for farming families supplying Green & Black have gone from 10% to 70%. If farmers are paid, they normally get around 25 cents/lb., whereas in the Fair Trade system they are guaranteed a minimum of 89 cents/lb. plus premiums.

Fair Trade started in The Netherlands in 1988 with the Max Havelaar brand. Fair Trade is a system in which:
-Trading partnerships are based on reciprocal benefits and mutual respect
-A fair price is guaranteed to small farmers and producers for their products
-Prices paid to producers reflect the work they do
-Workers have the right to organize
-National health, safety, and wage laws are enforced
-Products are environmentally sustainable and conserve natural resources

Easter marks one of the biggest shopping days of the year when it comes to chocolate. By purchasing organic and Fair Trade chocolate, your money will no longer be going towards toxic pesticides, child slavery, and farm worker exploitation. For Easter, buy something made with hope and love, and help small farmers in the Third World break out of the cycle of poverty.

Source: Bitter Chocolate by Carolyn Off  

Reading Matthew Reilly is Like Drinking Cheap Beer with a Bad Movie - So Bad Its Good

In college, we used to go out and get the cheapest beer possible. This was often Rolling Rock or Tuborg in reusable bottles (a novelty in the US), the more scratched up the better. These beers, and the movie we usually rented with them, were so bad, they were good. Reading a Matthew Reilly thriller is about the same, with the same sense of satisfaction and escape as a case of cheap cold beer and a bad movie. So bad, its good. I started with Ice Station, then moved on to Contest, Temple and the Seven Ancient Wonders before I just finished The Six Sacred Stones this week. The books run around 600 pages each and are non-stop thrillers with one last second escape following another. I can attest to their value as a great escape, having read the last one in a single day. Then the son of a bitch left it as a cliffhanger. Many of his ideas seem to originate in the realm of what I will call "new archaeology," represented by the likes of Graham Hancock, and Baigent/Leigh/Lincoln's Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I have not read Hancock's The Sign and the Seal about the Ark of the Covenant, but I saw his fascinating show about it on the Discovery Channel a few years ago. His research claims that the Ark worked as a giant capacitor, and can be found in Ethiopia.

Climate Change: Picture This. A Guardian correspondent uses effective imagery to warn of climate change. Paul Brown's 'Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change'

Paul Brown, The Guardian's environment correspondent until 2005, has compiled a book full of stunning photographs, alarming data and passionate quotes to illustrate the global warming crisis. The book's publication is timely: according to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, EU countries are committed to reducing their carbon emissions by 5-8 percent by next year! With Europe experiencing record temperatures, violent storms, floods and wildfires, it's getting easier to win over climate change sceptics; but, it should be noted, increased petrol taxes and graphic warnings on cigarette packages haven't persuaded that many individuals to give up driving or smoking.

Brown's book presents beautiful and dramatic photos illustrating the problems of climate change, and images of the rapid retreat of glaciers on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the immediate danger confronting small island nations from rising sea levels are particularly poignant. But it's also significant that the publication also introduces and describes possible solutions.

Current solution attempts, such as carbon credit trading, are really just license to pollute elsewhere. Nor is nuclear energy a carbon-friendly solution if one takes into account its entire life cycle; moreover, this option simply trades long-term environmental disaster for short-term global catastrophe. For the cost of an atomic plant, thousands of safe micro-hydro, solar, wind and insulation projects could be completed for a fraction of the cost. Consider also that standby lights on televisions in the United States - just TVs, just in the US - use up as much energy as one nuclear power plant produces in one year! Add to this video and DVD players, stereos and the rest of the world, and it's clear that simply turning off standby lights can make an immediate, significant short-term difference.

Instead of new sports stadiums or monuments to the past, governments should be investing in renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency and insulation. What use will a monument be if it's underwater? Or a sports stadium that's too hot to enjoy? Denmark, for example, now gets 20 percent of its energy from renewable resources. Germany has committed to bringing all its housing up to modern energy efficiency standards within 20 years. Mandatory procurement and new building standards can also make new technologies 'normal' and less expensive; Spain passed legislation in 2005 requiring all new buildings to incorporate solar water heating systems.

Ultimately, we cannot depend on governments or corporations to do the right thing. They're too busy spinning and 'green washing' themselves, and there's no dry cycle. We can, however, make easy and inexpensive contributions to slowing climate change. Unplug appliances not in use, or use an extension cord with a master switch; buy appliances with an A/A+ energy rating; use energy-efficient light bulbs, which last up to 10-times longer than other bulbs and save 80 percent of your energy; use public transport, cycle or walk and avoid cars and planes; insulate your home; get a free energy audit from a local NGO or project like Energy Brigades; buy organic and local; and vote! Organisations like the US-based League of Conservation Voters <www.lcv.org> track politicians on their environmental records and issue report cards.

Brown's 'Global Warning' is nothing revolutionary from an information point view, but the effective use of comparative photographs should inspire some individuals to take action. Most of the world has known about the grave nature of climate change for nearly two decades. We have no excuse to ignore it further.

republished from my article in the REC Bulletin, November 2007