Rat Girl: a Memoir

#695
Title: Rat Girl: A Memoir
Author: Kristin Hersh
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2010
336 pages

A smart, engaging memoir that includes bipolar disorder, music, and much more. Smart writing and choice of details make this a literary memoir of greater interest than many reports of mental illness. Plus it's by Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses. Plus it's fun to revisit all those Rhode Island and Boston venues and think about what I was doing there while Kristin was doing what she was doing.

The Bagel: A Cultural History

#694
Title: The Bagel: A Cultural History
Author: Maria Balinska
Publisher: Yale University Press
Year: 2008
288 pages
Audiobook

Despite some mispronunciations by the reader, this is an engaging history of the bagel, though it's really a history of the bagel, Jews in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and the Jews and labor unions in the US. Really, there isn't a lot to say about the bagel itself, but the bagel as an organizing strategy for a social history works well.

In Papua New Guinea

#693
Title: In Papua New Guinea
Author: Christina Dodwell
Publisher: Picador
Year: 1983/1985
Country: Papua New Guinea
256 pages

Like Rita Golden Gelman,  the author of Tales of a Female Nomad, Christina Dodwell is some combination of adventurous, naive, lucky, and skillful. This narrative of her two years in Papua New Guinea provide evidence for all of these interpretations. I enjoyed Dodwell's descriptions and musings and have a much better on-the-ground sense of the country than I often have after reading travel memoirs. On the other hand, I was more consistently alarmed than usual. It might have helped to have a better sense of Dodwell's thoughts and emotions, but this is the least revealed aspect of the book.

The Man Who Ate Everything

#692
Title: The Man Who Ate Everything
Author: Jeffrey Steingarten
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1987/1988
528 pages

Steingarten's essays on food, more or less, from Vogue.

Steingarten has a great ear for detail and makes many clever asides. He's funny when you agree with him, annoying when you don't. He has strong opinions about food, nutrition, and diets, often expressed in extremes, sometimes inaccurate (e.g., the man can assert all he wants that lactose intolerance doesn't include cheese, but he's never had to sprint with me to the bathroom after a nice Quiche Lorraine consumed sans Lactaid). The tone is usually genial, at least some of his over the top assertions are clearly tongue in cheek, and one admires his willingness to devote himself utterly to a recipe or process for weeks at a time.

I admit to skimming some of his recipes, since I know I'll never make them and I'm not that interested in, say, the perfect apple pie.

Sho's Apple Pie
Remove one frozen pie crust from the package. Fill with thinly sliced apples. sprinkle with cinnamon and a little lemon juice. Cover the edges with foil if you like, but I hate crust, so I just break it off before eating. Bake at around 350F until the apples are cooked through and the crust is brown.

There, that was much easier than Steingarten's 10 page (I kid you not) apple pie recipe, which may be delicious but perhaps not in proportion to the effort required.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

#691
Title: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2007
381 pages
Audiobook

Perhaps my favorite Sacks so far, because of the sustained focus on one topic but from a variety of perspectives. (I note that the first Sacks I ever read was Migraine, another single-topic book.) The first several chapters used case studies only as illustration for broader neurological points. I found them more interesting than most of the later, extended case studies, though the chapter on Williams syndrome had me leaping up for  Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology, Ninth Edition. Yes, that's my idea of a good time. Either you're happy you're not married to me or you wish you were. There's very little in between.

Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories

#690
Title: Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories
Author: Ian Fleming
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2008
304 pages
Audiobook

A little pulp adventure genre cotton candy rendered even fluffier by the brevity of the pieces. While the literary Bond is a more interior fellow than his film avatar, there's still not a lot going on here. The stories aren't that salacious, though some make reference to more provocative literature, such as a novel Bond reads, the cover of which features a woman bound to a bed. It's always hilarious to see how movies diverge from the story; here, the short story "Octopussy" bears no resemblance to the film of that name, though there is a Fabergé egg elsewhere in the collection. 

Traditional Medicine of the Marshall Islands: The Women, the Plants, the Treatments

#689
Title: Traditional Medicine of the Marshall Islands: The Women, the Plants, the Treatments
Author: Irene J. Taafaki, Maria Kabua Fowler, & Randolph R. Thaman
Publisher: IPS Publications, University of the South Pacific
Year: 2006
Country: Marshall Islands
300 pages

Marshall Islands.

This is a surprisingly enjoyable and fascinating compendium centered on medicinal plants (though pumice and a couple of animal bits make brief cameos. The main portion of the book presents the plants with a color photo, genus and species, local name, and medicinal uses as described by one to several local practitioners. Other sections provide some focused history and explain how the data were collected. It's interesting to try to determine the mechanism of action of each specimen and preparation. Some can clearly be understood biochemically, some are symbolic, and some seem obscure and driven by the system of taboo rather than what westerners would think of as empirical outcomes. For the right reader, an engrossing volume published, like many, at ISP Publications at University of the South Pacific.