University of Nebraska Press

Strawberries

t's been nearly one hundred years since Pampille wrote about the seasonal glories of French fruits  and vegetables. Her description makes me long nostalgically for a time that probably never was quite that magical. Food in early twentieth-century France and America was more local and seasonal and the more anticipated and appreciated for those qualities. "From the end of February, you notice in the greengrocer's shop windows--which begin to resemble the windows of jewelry shops--strawberries lying on beds of cotton in little wooden boxes. They are beautiful, and huge, but still a little pale. They are a marvel, but they are never good to eat so early."

We, too, notice the strawberries--huge and bright red in their little green plastic baskets in our grocery stores in March. How is it that the pointy ends of these giants never turn ripe and stay hard as stones? They too are never good to eat. Bred for dipping in bad melted chocolate and for posing in food porn photographs, they come from the promised land of California. 

"Soon the good ones will appear, mostly large ones from market gardens; entire long trainloads of them will cross Paris, leaving in their wake the odor of fruit instead of smoke." My equivalent is the strawberry bed in my neighbor's garden. If I stand in just the right spot on a sunny late May or early June morning, I can catch that heady, sweet scent. Or I can visit the vaster fields at pick-your-own farms in mid morning when the sun has contributed its warmth and the mosquitoes have quit feeding. When the farmers market opens in late April it will be just a short few weeks before merchants sell excellent berries. These should not be dipped in chocolate but should be eaten fresh, perhaps with a little sugar and cream or crème fraîche or yogurt. They become a perfect topping for shortcake, and by shortcake I mean real biscuit shortcake, not the cellophane wrapped individual sponge cakes misnamed “shortcake” in the grocery stores. For gourmets, gourmands, or foodies--all terms I’ve come to dislike intensely--strawberries can be gussied up with balsamic vinegar or dusted with fresh ground black pepper. Strawberry rhubarb pie is a good use of berries and making preserves is another option when berries become abundant and less costly.

Sadly, I never see Pampille's wild strawberries here, "tiny strawberries in small baskets, so delicate they must have been picked by elves. These berries taste of leaves and the dawn." The fraises des bois I ordered from a nursery and planted with so much hope are beautiful plants as the catalog promises ("fine edging plants because they do not throw runners") with tiny, tiny fruits, smaller than the end of my little finger. ("Of a dozen or so species of Strawberries, none has the panache of the woodland varieties known in France as fraises des bois. Their small, pointed fruits have an intense flavor that is positively addictive, and nothing compares with a handful of them popped directly from the plant into the mouth.") Mine taste absolutely awful but the birds love them.

I do not know if Pampille was a gardener, but she is a wonderful garden muse in these first exhilarating days of spring. Her attention to the seasonal march of produce reflects a gardener’s sensibilities. We long to know more of Pampille. We learn from Shirley King’s afterword that she was born Marthe Allard in 1878 and she received her writing name from a friend for her fine-featured beauty. She was the second wife of Leon Daudet, son of writer Alphonse Daudet whose writings extolling his beloved Provence are still read avidly in France today. Filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, whose Fanny trilogy inspired Alice Waters, adapted Alphonse’s Lettres de Mon Moulinfor film in 1954. Proust knew the Daudet family well; his Guermantes Way is dedicated to Leon and Pampille is cited in Within a Budding Grove and Guermantes Way. Pampille was “a model mother, housekeeper, and hostess, and was known to be calm, cultivated, and energetic.” We don’t know a lot more.

I didn’t cook from Pampille’s Table this week but I thought about her as I puttered about my awakening garden. Maybe the mysteries of Pampille’s life echo the mysteries of each new spring.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

ight.  So I had promised you the C.S. Lewis, but you see I never read just one book at a time and I finished this one first and my mother came from Chicago to visit me so I haven't been reading much this week, and, well, sorry.  This should teach me not to state what I intend to write about for next week.

Pretty much, if you are into sf and fantasy at all, you have at least heard of Ursula K. Le Guin.  She is well known for A Wizard of Earthsea which started the Earthsea series, and The Left Hand of Darkness which won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards.  The Lathe of Heaven isn't as well known, though I think A&E did a tv version of it a few years back that completely messed up the plot.  The novel follows a young man named George Orr whose dreams come true.  Not his hopes and aspirations, mind you.  What he dreams while asleep, he wakes up and finds they have come true.

Of course, one cannot just go around saying this without eventually being told to find some psychological help, which is what happens to Mr. Orr.  He winds up in the office of Dr. William Haber.  Dr. Haber soon realizes that his young patient isn't cracked and what he is dreaming really is coming true.  So he gets the bright idea that he can use George's dreams to make the world a better place by getting rid of such things as war and racism and overpopulation.  Of course, if you've read any science fiction at all, you already know that this is a BAD IDEA.  Because anytime you encounter someone trying to "play God" and make the world better, there are bound to be disasterous results.  Or else there wouldn't be a story.

So Dr. Haber builds a machine to intensify and help control George's dreams.  George both submits to this treatment and tries to stop it.  Dr. Haber gets too big for his britches.  And there is a woman.  Of course there is a love interest.  A lawyer George seeks out to try to get out of continuing to go to Dr. Haber named Heather Lelache.  By the end of the book she has changed jobs and personalities through the number of dreams George has and winds up a legal secretary.

It is a short, little novel and a fast read.  A good introduction to Le Guin's sf--Left Hand of Darkness, as I remember it, was much more dense.  It has a good moral and decent social commentary and if it takes itself just a little too seriously, well, most books that have things like morals and commentary and an agenda are prone to do that.  And Le Guin is always a good writer.  Read this when you need to remind yourself that maybe the world wouldn't be better if you had the ability to fix it.

A Peach Basket Case

es, it’s time to turn those clocks ahead, drown that lost hour of sleep in an extra cup of coffee, and welcome the official start of spring.

Opening Day in major league baseball is a pretty good indicator that the seasons are finally changing, since the game does depend on decent weather and cannot be played well in sleet or sub-freezing temperatures. And although there is so much to discuss, from steroid scandals to Big Unit Randy Johnson’s “love child” (dubbed “Little Unit” by the media), we must give other sports their due.

Spring sports really do mimic the weather, when you get a little of everything thrown at you...NBA playoffs, NCAA Final Four, NHL playoffs, arena football, NASCAR, and golf, which doesn’t seem to have a season, or tennis, and a lot of other sports I don’t have the time or space to mention but mean something to someone out there. Although I will quibble with NASCAR, or any auto racing pursuit claiming to be a sport. I do not deny racing’s tremendous physical demands, but to be a true sport it seems there should be some element of physical competition beyond hand-eye coordination and the ability to sit behind or in front of an engine approaching meltdown temperatures. Perhaps the drivers should be required to do the first lap on foot. It would make for some interesting starts, as well as some exciting and perilous interplay between man and machine sharing the same track.

And arena football? Should we care? Can we care? It seems a little silly to me, but if you really think about it, all sports are pretty silly. Take basketball, for example; grown men and women struggling to pass a ball through a representational peach basket of steel and nylon mesh, and some announcer screaming about how important it all is, even historic...well, this is why you see the words “madness” and “mania” so often in basketball marketing. But, oddly, many of us do care, even those of us who claim we don’t...Yeah, that was me, sneaking a peak at the standings the other day, secretly hoping a certain team would succeed based on a twisted historicism that eats at my brain...

Anyway. I’d like to give a nod to the hockey season before I get too caught up in baseball. To that end I have called upon the finest hockey mind in town, Paul Demers, an anthropologist by profession and therefore perfectly qualified to study the more primal aspects of that fine game. And did I mention he’s Canadian? Anyway, Professor Demers offers these “few random thoughts” on an “interesting” NHL season (note his excellent analysis of the hapless U.S. Olympic hockey team):

“The new anti-obstruction rules have led to more goals and action. Yet, goaltenders are now more at risk since players cannot be cleared from the front of the net. Players can also crash the net without reprisals from goalies - slashes are no longer tolerated. Sometimes the result is a bewildering bevy of inconsistent calls. On some occasions, it would seem merely blinking in another player's direction nets you 2 minutes in the sin-bin. The automatic suspensions for fighting in the last 5 minutes have cut down on the nearly inevitable "get-even" donnybrooks when there were lopsided scores. The rules to free-up play have also allowed more rookies to shine. They are no longer subject to the kind of clutch-and-grab tactics that would take several years to learn and many months in the gym to gain the strength to resist. The Olympic results - sans Canada and the US from the medal round - was a vindication of European hockey. The larger ice surface favored the skaters, and the Euros have also learned how to hit and punish a la North America. One would have thought so many players joining European leagues during the lockout year would have opened a few managerial eyes. Not so, as we in NA are still the old gray mare of international play. The salary caps have introduced some parity, and unlike MLB, the rest of the league is no longer the farm team of a few rich clubs. Ironically, shedding several high priced free agents has actually helped several of these clubs, most notably the NY Rangers. This new structure has threatened the marketability of many high priced free agents and in an unintended consequence, threatened the longevity of the franchise player rewarded for years of loyal service to the club. As Gary Bettman incessantly micromanages and tinkers with the rules, the unintended consequences pile up, requiring further tinkering...”

So there you have it. If none of this makes sense to you, then I encourage you to read All Roads Lead to Hockey, available from the NU Press. It’s a book that looks at the game’s roots as well as its diverse and widespread appeal in North America. These “origin” books are great reads, and remind us of why we play these games in the first place, and that they aren’t really silly at all, but develop out of the necessity of a cultural moment.

But I’m still not sure about arena football, or that new kind of two-on-two basketball they play on trampolines. But who am I to say?

We will talk baseball next time, and about the Merkle controversy as I had earlier promised, and on the ancient origins of the game as expressed in the most excellent read, Baseball Before We Knew It, also available from the NU Press.

A Conviction for an Algerian Jihidist in Paris by James D. Le Sueur

s Dominque de Villepin continues to argue that the French government will succumb to being blackmailed by the French streets, Nicolas Sarkozy has already asked de Villepin to withdraw his labor law designed to make the workplace more flexible and modernize the overwhelmed state.  Read: Libération

This clash between two men with presidential aspirations has overshadowed another important event from today’s headlines. 

It was over ten years ago that the Algerian jihadist by the name of Rachid Ramada orchestrated the 1995 deadly attacks on the Paris metro , which killed 8 people and wounded over 200 others.  It took ten years to work through the extradition process, as Ramada fled from France to England where he was granted political asylum.  Ironically, it took the 7/7 bombings in London to convince British authorities that something was amiss in this process. 

Read the London Times article.

Well, at least one major institution in France seems to have been at work today, and for the victims of the 1995 bombings in Paris, it was a good day in France -- despite the mess that the streets, the prime minister, and the interior minister seem to have created this spring.

Friends of the Press Spring 06 Newsletter Now Available Online

The Friends of the Press Spring 2006 Newsletter is now available online. Read it here:

http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/press/UNP_nwslttr2.pdf

Cooking with Sara, Part Deux

    


ulia Child was a born and bred American.

     No Joke.

                         She grew up in--wait for it--Pasadena.  On the wrong side of the tracks, no less.

     This little nugget of information has pretty much thrown for a loop my confidence in all of my childhood memories.  Until last week, a few truths formed the basis of my youthful understanding of the world.  1.  Jaws is the best movie of all time.  (Still true, parenthetically.)  2.  My grandmother's rum pudding with berry sauce is so good it seems the angels themselves had a hand in the mixing bowl.  And, 3.  Julia Child is a hilarious, drunken French woman with a voice like a talking poodle.  FALSE.

     After I got over my initial shock, I eased back into Masters of American  Cookery, by Betty Fussell.  (For those of you who are silently judging me for spending a second week on the same book, let me just note that I celebrated my birthday last week, all week long, and the endless champagne cocktails and serenades from singing telegrams cut into my reading time.  Ahem.)

     Fussell begins with mini-bios of her four masters: chef and TV personality Child, food writer M.F.K. Fisher, culinary boy wonder James Beard, and renegade of the American kitchen Craig Claiborne.  These people know from food, and Fussel's brief sketches illuminate just how innovative and integral each was in advancing the notion of American cuisine.  (In your face, French people!)

In her book The Gastronomical Me, Fisher wrote, "I ate with a rapt, voluptuous concentration which had little to do with bodily hunger, but seemed to nourish some other part of me.  Sometimes I would go to the best restaurant I knew about, and order dishes and good wines as if I were a guest of myself, to be treated with infinite courtesy."  My kind of woman.

     Beard is the folk hero, "the Paul Bunyan of the kitchen."  When asked by a student how much garlic to add to a recipe, he famously replied, "An acre of garlic."  He is over the top in every way.  At age three, he crawled into a pantry barrel and ate an entire onion, skin and all.  He spent a lifetime creating recipes with endless lists of ingredients, meant to be served in giant bowls with baby pitchforks to hearty and appreciative diners.  Claiborne was more subtle, the culinary equivalent of a straight man.  Creator of the hamburger with truffles, he served for years as food critic of the New York Times, where he developed a highly sophisticated palate and a passport full of stamps.  He introduced American readers and diners to Thai, Vietnamese and Szechuan delights.  He believed that dining was an event that should be orchestrated as elaborately as an opera performance.  Not a serious man, he believed in the seriousness of good food.

     At its heart, this is a cookbook.  Classic preparations of uniquely American dishes.  Buy it for the history lesson, keep it for the recipes.  I also highly recommend The Art of Eating and How to Cook a World by M.F.K. Fisher, and James Beard's American Cookery, another staple for the bookshelf of the advanced amateur chef.

     Signing off now.  Next week: War.  What is it good for?

Wistful France by James D. Le Sueur

iewers watching again as France confronts what seems to have become an endless flow of street protests might not be surprised to hear that French President Jacques Chirac stormed out of an EU economic summit Thursday evening in a fit of rage.  Chirac, clearly in a defensive mood, was outraged by the fact that one of his own countrymen, Ernest-Antoine Seillière, chose to speak in English rather than his native tongue during an important EU business summit. As The International Herald Tribune reported:  “‘It is not just national interest, it is in the interest of culture and the dialogue of cultures,’ he [Chirac] said Friday. ‘You cannot build the world of the future on just one language and, hence, one culture.’”

-- The Guardian Article

Of course, Chirac’s reaction this week takes place within an historical context in which France has tried to preserve the use and place of the French language within Europe’s key political and cultural institutions, including the UN, EU, and the Olympic movement.  This attempt to shore up support for French has meant that for over a decade France has also designed a protectionist policy at home meant to inoculate France from the from the linguistic imperialism of English. However, unrealistic as this has been, it’s certainly understandable, and it has yielded laws that have regulated the amount of French that must be spoken in particular settings, played over the radio, or even projected in cinemas. It’s an ongoing debate, and Chirac’s frustration no doubt comes from the fact that he seems to be fighting a losing battle.

Chirac has until next Tuesday to resolve the current crisis. Otherwise, a planned national strike by the students and the labor unions will be carried out with possibly debilitating effects on the country’s economy.  In many ways, these groups have behaved as Chirac did at the EU meeting, walking away insulted after hearing unpleasant news.  But the protesters also have a point, as the new law gives enormous power to employers to hire and fire employees as employers see fit – and without justification. 

However, the demonstrators this week, as in November, have also shown a propensity for street violence. In fact, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who became a familiar name in America after the November riots, has already counted hundreds of arrests and seems overwhelmed by the public’s opposition to the government.  Though Sarkozy, with his eyes on the French presidency, has already begun to distance himself from the law.  Meanwhile, de Villepin – who also has his sights set on becoming the next president – seems equally bedeviled by the situation.  Yet, de Villepin, unlike Sarkozy, isn’t giving into the protestors.

Read “No Agreement in Talks on French Labor Law” in The International Herald Tribune

Read "Concerns Over Violence Intensify in France" in The International Herald Tribune

Read “CPE : Villepin dit vouloir "répondre aux deux préoccupations majeures des jeunes"” in Le Monde

So, what's going on in France?

Historically, since 1789 France has possessed a unique propensity for street protests fueled by fierce identity crises that have flared up often and that have produced mixed results. The current government of the 5th Republic was itself brought into power in May 1958 by a coup d’état, after the army commanders then based in Algeria promised to take over (attack really) the French parliament itself if Charles de Gaulle was not returned to power.  (He was in retirement.) Distrusting the civilian authorities, the military commanders wanted the conservative de Gaulle in power, as they believed only this military man could keep Algeria French.  Hence, with the army literally on its way to attack the French institutions of power in Paris, the French government of the 4th Republic submitted, and Charles de Gaulle became the first president of the new (and may claimed illegitimate) 5th Republic.

Ultimately, the coup brought in a new government, but Algeria won its independence anyway.  Then, a few years later de Gaulle found himself surrounded by forces on the left, when students and labor movements united and called for change by taking over the streets.  Unable to control the May 1968 riots, de Gaulle again brought in the military to restore order.  The military came, but de Gaulle’s reputation was shredded in the process.  For its work, the military extracted a last important concession from de Gaulle, forcing him to grant amnesty to those who had mutinied against and plotted the assassination of the president himself during the French-Algerian War (1954-62). This amnesty permanently immunized war criminals (torturers and assassins specifically) from prosecution.  These surreal turn of events quite naturally became the stuff of fiction and works of history, with Ben Abro’s Assassination! July 14 and Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal picking up the pace.

In the end, France’s luster faded for years, until Chirac spearheaded “Old Europe’s” rejection of the American assault on Iraq in 2003.

More recently, the October-November 2005 riots forced the French state to face the fact that it had a growing race problem.

 

 

The state, however, has continued to insist that race is not something France can or ought think about in its official mind, and de Villepin’s oblique efforts to address the ills of unemployment (and racism in the workplace) have run aground this week. Not surprisingly, the streets have again proved to be a decisive factor in French politics.

This past week, the student and labor protests have demonstrated that France’s time-honored tradition of street protest is alive and well. But the question remains: will these recent street protests lead to real socio-economic reform or to more conservative forces such as the extreme right coming into power?  This is a serious problem, one that concerns France and the EU.  It is also a problem because many previous street protests unwittingly cleared a path for the right wing to claim that, if anything, it alone could govern the ungovernable masses and their conflicting notions of French identity. There are plenty of historical examples of just this phenomenon happening in France (Napoleon, Napoleon III, de Gaulle). Will someone like the xenophobe Jean-Marie Le Pen be next?

Indeed, let’s not forget that Le Pen was the run-off candidate against Chirac for the French presidency in the last elections.  The chaos of the French streets might be just the recipe needed during the next elections for Le Pen and his followers to convince voters that the extreme right has the solution for France’s interminable identity crises and street-level politics.  It would be a foul meal, if this recipe’s really served up for real, but it wouldn’t be outside the logic of French history.

Science lover to science fiction lover

have attempted to write this "getting to know you" post about half a dozen times and am now determined to finally do this thing and get it over with.  There are two problems here.  The first is that someone who sits around reading books all the time, and then, in the off reading time, sits around tapping on a computer keyboard, isn't all that interesting.  The second is that I'm a writer, and I don't write memoir.  I write fiction.  Science fiction and fantasy to be exact.  And this whole writing about oneself thing tends to require actually telling the truth or else Oprah will say she hates you on her show.  I don't want Oprah to hate me, so I better just stick to writing fiction where everyone knows I'm lying.  So here is the beginning of my interest in speculative fiction, and it is all mostly true.

Like most boring stories, I can pin it all on my mom.  When I was four years old she decided she wanted to go to college.  So she and her best friend, Maruja (who is like a second mother to me), signed up at the local state university, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.  She decided to study microbiology.  Pretty soon quality time with Mom became dissecting rats at the dining room table and learning how soap killed bacteria.  She took a job at a fish lab and I got to visit a few times and see the test tubes and beakers.  She had periodic tables and textbooks with lots of pictures around.  I fell in love.

I became one of those kids with the rock collections and the sea monkeys.  I branched out into astronomy and geology.  I liked archeology and even went on a few digs with the Mississippi Valley Archeological Society.  And somehow it just became harder and harder to read The Babysitter's Club like most of the other girls when you go home and look at electron microscope pictures of E. Coli or read about the volcanic moons of Jupiter or learn about nuclear winter.  I needed fiction that reflected my interests.  Science fiction was a natural progression.  I was already a reader (most of my early memories of my parents include books or music, so it was natural).  I became a reader of science fiction.

And that is it.  The whole story.  Science fiction led to fantasy.  And both led to a life of exploring strange topics and stranger people.  And I like it.  I get to have my stories and my science too.  Thanks, Mom!

There.  It is done.  All the biographical crap you would want to know.  If you want more of my writing, go see my website, Spies & Secretaries.  Next week, I promise you a look at the first book of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy Out of the Silent Planet.  It will be much more interesting.  Bye.

Oh.  By the way, I have now witnessed a woman throw herself on a man while exclaiming, "Oh, Eric!"  My friend Sarah did this to her husband just this morning.  I had my own fit of emotion on watching this.  I laughed so hard I could barely stand, while Sarah watched to see if I was still able to breathe.  So I have now seen it actually happen.

Why Sports Matter

Welcome sports fans to the exciting and colorful world of the University of Nebraska Press Sports Blog. I’m looking forward to a lively discussion of anything related to sports, and I do mean anything, because the term "sports" means so many different things to different people, including those among us whose very identities are wrapped up in the fortunes of a particular team or player, or who mark seasons and life’s rhythms not by the changing winds but by opening days, all-star games, playoffs, and championships.

I live in Lincoln, a writer by profession. I have a master’s degree in English and a bachelor’s in political science, so I’m well qualified for this. Seriously, just look at great literature, baseball classics such as Bang the Drum Slowly, The Celebrant, The Southpaw, The Summer Game (all available from the University Press, by the way). And politics? Say no more. Sports and politics occupy the same realm; both are proxy forums for societal issues marked by bellwether events that can define an age.

Of the two, sports are better indicators of the human condition. For one, politics can’t match sports when it comes to cult of celebrity, especially one equipped with such a finely tuned sounding board for personal and community grievances as well as for good old American greed, lust, pride and chutzpah, and, on rare occasion, humility and grace.

Show me a politician except for JFK who could hold on to our imaginations as long as Babe Ruth has. Among today’s politicians, only Bill Clinton seems to have that lasting appeal shared by top athletes. How long has this Barry Bonds steroids issue been going on? Or Pete Rose, who perennially rises up to deny his gambling past and claim his place in the Hall of Fame. People still care and debate about it, and they will for years to come. Politics can actually remove the celebrity spell. Look at Bill Bradley, the ex-NBA star. Politics turned him into just another also-ran, like Michael Dukakis. Which sport did Dukakis play you ask? Never mind.

Before I plug some books here, I need to get a couple of peeves out of the way. First, I generally don’t like comparing contemporary teams or players with those from the past. Let’s return to Barry Bonds for a moment. I read the other day that his Giants teammates are helping him focus on the upcoming season and on his pursuit of the Babe’s home run record (which has been broken anyway). But we need a huge asterisk here to note that A) The season was shorter in Ruth’s day, and B) Ruth was not on steroids. In fact, he managed his record on something like a quart of whiskey a day. Amazing.

Of course in Ruth’s day most ballplayers were still human beings who maybe earned a little more than the average guy but still did humbling things like ride buses and eat at roadside diners and share hotel rooms as well as a john down the hall.

What was my other peeve? I’ll save it for later. I’d like to hear from you, though. What gets to you? What about those lamebrain announcers? Let’s tear into that one sometime, shall we?

Okay, next time we’re going to talk a little baseball, namely the UNP book Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend, by Timothy Gay. Quite a fuss down in Texas about this book, or so I hear.

And while I’m on the subject of baseball, I may dabble in the 1944 World Series (See the new UNP title, The Boys Who Were Left Behind) and the UNP book The Unforgettable Season, where I’d like to exhume the Merkel controversy one more time. Yeah it was 98 years ago, but...

And we’ll talk about NFL wives if you’d like (see Shannon O’Toole’s Wedded to the Game), and I’ll try to get a hockey report from a known and respected expert in that field.

Good morning Lincolnites, Nebraskans, and citizens of this lovely state/country/world.  Wherever you are, I hope you are as excited as I am to be a part of the University of Nebraska Press blog project.  I actually keep a personal blog already, but it tends to be populated mainly with anecdotes about my bad first dates and bad haircuts, so I will endeavor to keep this one a bit more highbrow.

A bit about me... I'm a native Lincoln kid, and a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  While there, in an effort to diversify my cornfed pedigree, I spent some time studying in India and Southeast Asia.  After graduation I spent a year and a half in Thailand on a Fulbright fellowship, then moved to Washington, DC, the city of alpha dogs and politicos, and in my neighborhood, some really shocking looking prostitutes.  Life was never dull.  After spending a few years in nonprofit communications, I enrolled at George Mason University, where I earned my MFA in creative nonfiction writing.  My thesis was a collection of international travel essays called "Peripatecia" (a "travel disease" I made up, from the root word peripatetic.)  It was read by a hugely grateful and appreciative audience of... nine.  Including my parents.

My interests, which I think you'll see reflected in the books I choose to write about here, are literary nonfiction, travel, politics, sociology and cultural anthropology.  I also love pop culture, so the day that NU Press puts out a definitive Michael Jackson biography, I will be ALL over it.  I've started off my reading list with Masters of American Cookery by Betty Fussell and M.F.K. Fisher.  I read a lot of Fisher in grad school, because she really is the queen of food writing.  This month, I think I was drawn to this book because I'm on a horrible, self-imposed diet, and the idea of reading about sumptuous recipes was appealing.  I'm partway through the book, and while the prose is magnificent, not all of the recipes are.  Cod in mustard sauce?  You must be kidding me, Julia Child.  However, I am nothing if not tenacious, and before I write a more thorough critique of this book next week, I will audition a few of its recipes so that I can offer some mini-reviews to you, dear readers.  Stay tuned...