Issues > November/December 2003 (#99) > Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading

The Green Guide staffers have picked favorite reads for the new year, which we highly recommend for destressing or setting out on new paths. And all books purchased here help support The Green Guide through our affiliation with Powell's Books.

From Iowa to India

A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, by John Murray (HarperCollins, $24.95)
To purchase this book, visit our books page here.

India and its diaspora, along with butterflies, figure largely in John Murray's tales. In the title story, Maya, a part-Indian doctor in her mid-thirties, is devastated by a miscarriage but attempts to hide it from the unnamed narrator, her much older husband, who has never shared her desire for a child. The husband reflects upon his own past: His grandfather ranged the world collecting butterfly specimens and eventually lost his mind to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of "mad cow"; his father took the narrator and his sister to the Jersey shore to watch Monarch butterflies migrate and one day invites a creepy friend, a "plump man" in a "baggy linen suit stained yellow under the armpits," with tragic consequences.

Though Murray lives in Iowa, most of the stories in this remarkable debut collection are set in developing countries. He isn't afraid to take on the broad themes of globalism, culture clash, harm to innocents, poverty and disease and make them personal through the experiences of sympathetic characters who are well-meaning, if at times less courageous than they would like. He writes about facing the truth about oneself and others, however belatedly, and learning to accept it.

In "The Hill Station," Elizabeth, an American doctor whose Indian parents "had gone to English schools where they read Walter Scott and Conrad...," visits Bombay for the first time to give a series of lectures. She sees her first cases of cholera, seeing "a river of salt run out of their bodies like dirty bathwater until they died of shock." Elizabeth gives toys to a little boy who spurns them after his mother dies of the disease, and realizes how lonely she is. "You are terrified of anything that could be permanent with a man," her married boyfriend recently told her, and she remembers coming home early from school and surprising her mother with a lover on the couch. A bus trip interrupted by a fatal accident results in her meeting a young man who suddenly offers himself to her as a husband, and Murray shows his skill as a writer by delicately balancing the beauty and absurdity of this turn of fate.

In "White Flour," the son of an Indian immigrant mother goes searching for his American father, who has left the family and started a health clinic in India—the sort of idealist for whom charity exists everywhere but at home. When father and son make their peace, "the kiss is as inexplicable as a moth, a soft winged creature, striking his cheek on a dark night." The theme of immigrants seeking to redefine their identities comes to the fore in "Acts of Memory, Wisdom of Man," where a father from India, eager to be a patriotic American, angrily pushes his teenage son to join the Army and fight in Vietnam upon discovering the boy's ill-advised love affair. The consequences spiral all out of proportion to events, and a proud young man of deep moral convictions makes the ultimate sacrifice.

Other stories attempt to come to grips with the tragedies of Rwanda, Congo and Liberia. At the opening of "All the Rivers in the World," fat Vitek Kerolak, a hardware salesman from a Maine fishing family, has lost his two older brothers in a storm at sea. He drives to Florida to confront his father, who, guilt-ridden, ran away after the tragedy. Sixty-three-year-old Dad has taken up with 30-year-old Chika Portinai, a nurse from Brooklyn who has worked in an unnamed African country with "displaced people who were being hunted by bands of militia with knives and guns." A moment of cowardice has been weighing on Chika—she ran from a church where fellow medical workers and villages were being held hostage and did not go for help. She confides this to Vitek. "It is remarkable...that your whole life can come down to just a few key moments. Everything else is just biding your time for when you're needed." After listening sympathetically to Chika's harrowing story, Vitek also gains some understanding of his father, and, while out to sea on Dad's new boat, is able to master his terror of the ocean.

In these stories, Murray, who trained as a medical doctor and is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, shows how much conscience and responsibility matter. While the stories can read as topically grim as the newspapers, they are saved by humor, affection, surprise and moments of grace. The author holds out a hope of redemption through respect of others and oneself. Individuals can make a difference by coming to others' aid, both at home and far away; without explicitly taking up the metaphor of William James's famous butterfly wing, Murray observes the connections between us, near and far.

Back to the Land

Drop City, by T.C. Boyle, Viking $25.95
To purchase this book, visit our books page here.

T. C. Boyle's delightfully dark tale about the age of Aquarius opens in 1970 in a rural California hippie commune, founded by a bearded idealist who welcomes one and all. The settings and characters are highly reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and, like Wolfe, Boyle the satirist quickly cuts through all the marijuana smoke, beads, feathers and brother-and-sisterhood to the stupidity and cruelty that often lurked beneath. Instead of the now-historic figures of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, made celebrities by Wolfe's book, Boyle's novel chronicles the anonymous casualties of the time and should nudge readers young, middle-aged and old into reflecting upon what the lasting legacy of the Sixties might really be. In a sense, Boyle seems to be saying, what we make of the past and the world depends on us.

The story is told in multiple points of view, including those of East Coast transplants Ronnie (aka Pan), Star and Marco, who's on the lam from the draft and likes to build treehouses. The theory of Drop City's founder, Norm, as with Kesey, is that everyone will love one another and that drugs, as well as love, will be free. In actuality, however, it's the women who milk the goats, tend the garden, cook the stews and are often coerced into sex by the men's high-minded, self-serving talk, or—if that doesn't work—assaulted. Early on, Ronnie observes, "there was a new girl there—a chick—and she couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen. A runaway...They probably got twenty a week just like her, and none of them stayed more than a night or two, as if this whole thing...was no more than a kind of extended slumber party." Invited to a party in the "back house," the girl is gang-raped, and witnessing her screams of protest Ronnie feels badly but does nothing to rescue her.

Things go sour, and the Drop City group hits the road to find more pristine pastures, heading all the way to Alaska, where they find themselves in conflict with a group of homesteaders in the wilderness. They also find themselves having to struggle to survive and come to grips with a Nature that wasn't as benevolent as they assumed while growing up in material prosperity. It's a quandary Americans are facing again, coming off the boom years of the late nineties with our thirst for petroleum unassuaged and the Alaskan tundras continually under development pressure.

Boyle takes us back to a time when the young formed a movement devoted to stopping war and racism and rejecting the advertising-fostered materialism of a burgeoning consumer, throwaway culture. Drop City focuses on the point where the Sixties decade of civil rights, peace and love and acid rock transitioned into the Seventies, when environmentalism—and, alas, disco— were born. While Boyle, a specialist in self-deceiving, greedy and desperate individuals, skewers his characters' pretensions and exploitations of others, he also treats the victims and idealists with some tenderness and understanding. What shines through is their belief that they could change the world; when it wasn't self-indulgent, it carried a message of hope and commitment that we could use now.

 

People and Food With a Face

All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki (Viking, $24.95)
To purchase this book, visit our books page here.

It's one thing to write a novel of ideas—bioengineered food, in this case—and quite another to have it zing to life, as Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation does. The charm that enlivens this novel about food politics is its believable, down-to-earth people.

The central characters are two childhood girlfriends and Idaho farm neighbors, Yumi and Cass. Half-Japanese and pretty, Yumi stars as a Native American in the school Thanksgiving play, while dumpy Cass plays a potato. Later, their high school teacher, who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, assumes a self-congratulatory voice of conscience ("It was genocide—we stole their land") while seducing teenage Yumi. When her stern father, Lloyd, finds out and gives her "lickings," Yumi runs away for twenty years, finally settling on the Big Island of Hawaii, where, like many so real estate agents, she sells home lots in the path of lava flows. She also has three children by different fathers. This last is a sore point for Cass, a breast-cancer survivor who has been unable to produce a child with her husband, Will, and suspects these problems may stem from the Agent Orange that Will was exposed to in Vietnam, and the pesticides they use on their industrialized potato farm. But they seem not to be able to stop, as "banks don't lend money to farmers who don't use inputs."

Lloyd maintains, "I have no daughter," while Yumi's mother, Momoko, who has advancing Alzheimer's, pines for her only child, cultivates a garden full of heirloom varieties and sells the seeds. Lacking a younger generation to work the farm, they sell their vast potato acreage to Cass and her husband, and Cass winds up caring for the old couple in their deteriorating farm house. When Lloyd gets sick, though, Cass tracks down Yumi and insists she come home. Meanwhile, the ex-teacher, Elliott, resurfaces as well, sent on a mission by Cynaco, the manufacturer of NuLife bioengineered potatoes, where he works as a public relations officer. In order to understand the opposition, Elliott reads Michael Pollan's now-famous article, "Playing God in the Garden," from a New York Times magazine whose cover featured Mr. Potato Head.

The subplot, which has been compared to Edward Abbey's 1987 The Monkey Wrench Gang about ecoterrorists, involves Frank, sixteen years old, a foster child and janitor at McDonald's, who falls in with the Seeds of Resistance, a gang of anti-genetic-engineering activists who run their Winnebago on used french-fry oil and conduct teach-in demonstrations at supermarkets and fast food chains. As Yumi reflects, "I have witnessed firsthand the demise of the American family farm. I have seen how large corporations hold the American farmers in thrall, prisoners to their chemical tyranny and their buyouts of politicians and judges." As in her first novel, My Year of Meats, which was set in Japan, Ozeki lays bare the dirty underside of the industrial food systems in "developed" nations.

All Over Creation is not without its minor flaws: Children being raised in Hawaii do not call an old man Tutu, the word for grandmother; and, perhaps more seriously, it owes an unacknowledged debt to Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. Still, Ozeki's novel is ultimately less formulaic (unsaddled, for one thing, by the King Lear template) and has, along with a true social conscience, a greater capacity to surprise. All Over Creation lives on in the reader's mind, continuing to tantalize.

 

The knitters on your list will adore organic or greenspun (no petrochemicals in processing) wool from Vermont's Green Mountain Spinnery (www.spinnery.com). For original patterns and the story of how land was conserved for traditional sheep farms, give The Green Mountain Spinnery Knitting Book by Margaret Klein Wilson (2003, The Countryman Press). To purchase this book, visit our books page here.

 

Enjoy Your Food, Get a Life

Slow Food: The Case For Taste by Carlo Petrini (Columbia University Press, $24.95)
The Slow Food Guide To New York City Restaurants, Markets, Bars edited by Patrick Martins and Ben Watson (Chelsea Green, $20 )
To purchase these books, visit our books page here.

"A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of the Fast Life."
The Slow Food Manifesto

For those who feel that eating, especially during the holidays, is all too much about rushed, indiscriminate consuming, here are two new books to whet the appetite for a slower-paced life with time to enjoy traditional, regional foods. Each has been written and edited by members of Slow Food, a non-profit organization that grew out of a 1989 protest against the siting of a McDonald's at the Spanish Steps in Rome. To counter fast food's golden arches, Slow Foodies adopted the logo of an elegant red snail.

This year, founder Carlo Petrini has authored Slow Food: The Case For Taste, a digestible if professorial digression on the movement's philosophy in a small, beautiful volume that feels good in the hand. From its birthplace, the humble Piedmontese village of Bra, near the famous wine and truffle region of Barolo, Slow Food has gone globally local, as it were, with 75,000 members worldwide and 10,000 in the U.S. All celebrate the unique foods of their locales while learning, through the organization's magazines, about foods worldwide. As Alice Waters writes in her prologue, "When we understand the connection between the food on our table and the fields where it grows, our everyday foods can link us to nature and the place where we live." Not to mention, as Petrini adds, that "the vampire of advertising will lose its power over you."

In Italy, the centerpiece of collection of essays, foods in danger of extinction include "Asiago Stravecchio, a cheese produced only from milk obtained during summer pasturing in the mountains...Ventricina del Vastese,...a traditional cured meat from the Abruzzi...Casizolu, a spun-curd cheese made with the milk of Sardo-Modicana cattle, a native breed raised wild in the pasturelands of Montiferru," and so on. The soil and territory, raw materials, processes and outlets, including markets and restaurants, are all part of the slow picture. No locale is too humble to preserve—after all, every home has its recipes and traditions including osteria, simple and welcoming family restaurants "where you can enjoy the dishes and wines of the territory you are in without being bled dry by overpricing or imprisoned in improbable fantasy settings." Appendices include a catalogue of regional Italian specialties as well as a list of international artisanal foods from Argentina to the UK. There's also a roster of honorees, including biologists, herdspeople, fishermen, farmers and beekeepers who have worked to preserve unique agricultural species and production processes around the world. The goal is to protect the environment and human and animal welfare, as well as good taste.

Tourist as well as local dollars can provide integral support, and for those who visit or live in New York, The Slow Food Guide To New York City Restaurants, Markets, Bars, edited by Patrick Martins, director of Slow Food U.S.A. and Ben Watson, can fit in a deep coat pocket, serving as an indispensable ally in the quest for sustainable delights. "Of the more than 18,000 food establishments in the metropolitan area, only our favorite 600 or so appear in this guide," the editors say. One of the book's main strengths is its organization, which makes establishments easy to find.

Restaurants are clustered by type of cuisine: African, American, Barbecue, Chinese, Indian, Malay & Indonesian, Middle Eastern, Vegetarian, and more—just about anything you might crave. A second section covers wine bars and pubs (some beers and wines also have slow provenance), delis, fish & seafood, pizza, steak and burgers. Part three includes food shops, markets and producers providing bagels, breads, chocolate, ice cream (the correspondent for this topic really covered some ground), organics and even street food vendors. Interspersed throughout are charming essays, writerly disquisitions on kid-friendly restaurants, future stars of French cuisine, a riff on tamales, a paean to dumplings, a note on the passing of the Fulton Fish Market, and analyses of New York's own egg cream, pretzel and hot dog. Over fifty contributors personally visited and reported on all the places mentioned.

There are a few weaknesses, which might be easily addressed in future volumes: The reviews are sometimes not specific enough about menus, and, among those that carry the emblem of the snail, we aren't told how they've earned it: Do they source from local greenmarkets or directly from farms, use organic or heirloom varieties of produce and meats, donate leftovers to the needy, recycle or compost? Or, do they cure their own meats according to some arcane art or make their own ice cream? Without adding to the book's length, a brief mention would add to the dining experience. In addition, there is some inconsistency to the length and depth of reviews, some establishments receiving greater attention than others. One last criticism points up a strength of this book and its concept: This writer visited one of the Indian places recommended in my Manhattan neighborhood and found it to be wholly without the originality and freshness described. But the editors welcome feedback from readers at a web address they provide, and it will be incorporated into their next volume. Slow Foods New York will come out annually, and Chelsea Green has books in the works for Chicago and Northern California, as well. Also worth a look is Slow Food (Chelsea Green, 2001), a compendium of lively stories about regional foods and their producers in the U.S. and elsewhere, edited by Carlo Petrini.

For those concerned about the corporate globalism that spreads a culture, diet and environment of utter sameness, from television shows to monoculture crops, factory animal farms, soft drinks and snack foods, Slow Food proposes a globalism of linked and networked local economies that respect one another's delicious differences. "And what better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, products?" the Manifesto says. By choosing artisanal foods, including unique livestock and crops, consumers help preserve genetic diversity and cultural traditions while supporting local farms and economies. "Here at the table lies the template for the preservation of human rights and the environment," Albert Sonnenfield writes in the introduction to Slow Food: The Case For Taste. As reminders that eating is a communal, economical and political act, these books are worth savoring.

While the responsibility for food contamination lies with the food industry, the burden is unfairly transferred to the consumer, writes Marion Nestle, Ph.D., in Safe Food: Bacteria, Biology, and Bioterrorism (University of California Press, 2003). Nestle shows how powerful food companies fight safety regulations while the understaffed, underfunded FDA and USDA are all too willing to let industry self-police according to voluntary standards. While industry insists that “cooking kills most food microbes” and therefore “government intervention in unnecessary,” Nestle has witnessed conditions at a meat-packing plant that favor listeria bacteria growth as meat cools after cooking. Noting that “most outbreaks derive from foods prepared outside the home,” Nestle calls for microbial testing for all foods, criticizes the inadequate testing of genetically engineered foods and examines the threat of bioterrorism to the food system.

The seasonal recipes in Joan Gussow’s This Organic Life; Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader (Chelsea Green 2001) have liberated us from the compulsion to eat salads in winter. A home gardener and advocate of buying local food from growers one knows, Gussow, among those least likely to succumb to food pathogens in imported produce, makes a witty and informative fireside companion.

 

A Democratic Axe?
P. W. McRandle

A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity by Wm. S. Coperthwaite (Chelsea Green, $35).
To purchase this book, visit our books page here.

Utopian at a time when radicals and moderates alike have landfilled the idea, Bill Coperthwaite unifies back-to-the-land and arts-and-crafts movements with community activism in what he calls "social design." Convinced of humanity's potential and that potential's being wasted through suffering and poverty, Coperthwaite hopes to encourage the despondent to build their own lives using the materials of folk culture. Whether he does or not may depend on your tolerance of Coperthwaite's Iron John manner, but his commitment to teaching Eskimo children and learning from indigenous peoples is genuine. The book is choc-a-bloc with recipes, plans, and building techniques for such items as a Tarahumara ball, a "democratic" chair, or your own axe. Throughout, Peter Forbes' lush color photographs adorn the pages with images of yurt building and Maine's gorgeous coast. Coperthwaite's own house, a pagoda set in New England wilderness, may be his single, best argument for this idiosyncratic but heart-felt vision of the good life.