Recently in Books Category

It seems that every day, the news from Burma becomes more and more devastating. Today's New York Times reports that one of the boats carrying some of the first aid to survivors, hit a submerged tree in the river, and sank. The government continues to deny visas and entry to foreign workers and to confiscate the aid that does make it into the country.

I traveled in Burma last November, visiting a friend who was working with the medical non-profit Merlin. (Check out their Web site to learn more about the country, the disaster, and what people are doing to try to help.) I've posted a few pictures here from town on the banks of the Irrawaddy. Twante is largely known as home to a thriving pottery industry. More impressively, however as any local will proudly tell you, the bodhi tree inside Shwesandaw Paya blooms every year--a feat not even duplicated in the capital city's spectacular Schwedagon Paya. It is that spirit--of survival and of strength--that I try to keep in mind when reading the morning news.

Approaching the dock at Twante.

in the pick-up truck on our way into town.

Blooms on Twante's bodhi tree.

For more pictures, you can visit my flickr page here.

 

To read about the country in the words of Aun San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader who has been held under house arrest, check out Letters from Burma.

After months of waiting, and untold journeys to Sweet Melissa Patisserie for sugar fixes, The Sweet Melissa Baking Book hit my kitchen the other week. I immediately cracked the spine at the index to search for my favorite  treat ... and there it was: "madeleines, chestnut honey, 62-63." If you have never had a Sweet Melissa madeleine, then you need to get up immediately, scrounge $1.25 in change, and proceed straight to the bakery. Forget Proust, from  henceforth when you think of madeleines, the name you'll murmur will be Melissa.

Madeleines are cookies that are also cake. This should be an adequate explanation for the necessity of their existence and of the dire urgency for eating one at the absolute earliest. Could pages 62-63 do justice to these sublime little shells of baked goodness? With my boyfriend's birthday just coming up, I decided to forego the cupcakes (so 2007) and try out her recipe.

After a $30 stop at A Cook's Companion for madeleine molds, a ten minute wait at Sahadi's for hazelnuts (also called filberts, FYI), a tense deconstruction of 6 eggs (ok, actually 8 but that is only because I am terrible at separating egg whites), and two hours of refrigeration, the madeleines were ready to bake. Fifteen minutes later 24 perfect chestnut honey madeleines lay cooling on the kitchen counter. Moist, sweet, and perfect for dusting with sugar. Though my version was not quite as good as the one Melissa makes in her bakery, I place the blame squarely on my shoulders. Her recipe was clear and easy, and the cookie/cakes were believably baked by a pro.

To get your own copy of the book (and maybe one or two madeleines) swing by her book party at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, 2 April at the Park Slope location.

Ah yes, how much do Brooklynites like to eat. Probably just as much as they like to talk about how much they like to eat. This Tuesday, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., drop by DUMBO's Powerhouse Arena to hear from local food/drink authors Kara Zuaro ("I Like Food, Food Tastes Good"), Phoebe Damrosch ("Service Included") and David Wondrich (writer, mixed drink expert). The talk will be led by Gabrielle Langholtz of Edible Brooklyn. The event is $15 and proceeds benefit P.S. 107. Buy tix here.

BeatsMe, here. Haven't posted since I moved to Willamsburg last year. But the kind folks of ABL have welcomed me back for occasional dispatches from the new nabe, and, funny enough, my first one actually concerns what I miss most about the old neighborhood. BookCourt was pretty much a once a week stop for me. I had such fond feelings for it, even mediocre purchases would magically acquire some extra luster.

At my new home near Graham Avenue stop, the closest bookstore is all the way over on Bedford--I might as well jump on the G. So I was pretty stoked when I stumbled upon my local library just a few block away. And though it looked liked a pretty sizable building, once inside, my heart sank. There were more desks than bookshelves, with just a few rows dedicated to fiction. Half the place seemed to be coloring books. But the funny thing is, I was able to find books three books I wanted to read within about 15 minutes--Bee Season, The Year of Endless Sorrows and The Woman and the Ape. While it's never going to be BookCourt, it got me thinking about how sometimes less choice can be a good thing. Yeah, that's what I'll keep telling myself.

As I dipped into Life Studies last week, looking for words to share in this space, I realized that Vreeland's collection does not lend itself to excerpting. (though the phrase, "how Mimi's fingers, like little white minnows, grasped its handle," seems to have stayed with me.) However, it was her exploration ("Uncommon Clay") of a daughter and a mother navigating the tangled prions and negative spaces of memory loss for which I am the most grateful.

It is unabashedly emotional, to be sure, of both Vreeland and of myself. The subject taps a reserve of longing and misunderstanding as I watch my own mother dart in and out of her mother's life--a life clouded by time, her desires blunted to absorb only the daily presence, really, of my grandfather and the sweets that preface each meal.
I wonder how these two women, such pillars of my life, maneuver through the silences, through the words that now gape, unspoken, in my mother's mind and that no longer find tread in the spongy recesses of my grandmother's skull. What landscapes have they found to transverse across together? Or, more likely, does my mother still search for some safe pathway?
I wonder if, as Vreeland supposes, my grandmother feels that "the world may be spinning around her, mountains, people whirling in and out of rooms, but she is at center, knowing those are her hands at the end of those arms, that that is her breath moving in and out of the dark centers of her being." And I wonder, if that is the peace which exists, how three people, two generations removed, come to find that peace together.

To extrapolate from the epigraph (below) chosen for Life Studies, this collection of short stories intends to explore the questions, "What is art?" and "To whom does it belong?" Four stories in, I have yet to find the answers here.
The lives that Susan Vreeland portrays are those that circle the periphery of Western art's great masters--Renoir, Manet, Monet, among others. And despite the characters' often dire circumstances, at least the first few of the collection are perhaps too awash in imagined awe and rarefied nostalgia to allow the reader to answer those questions in truth. Yet moments of beauty do glimmer on the page and, like a moment captured in paint and canvas, live on in the memory. Favorite quotes to come all week.

"The real question is: To whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong? To those who can apply it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialists?" --John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1977.

Hanke Cakoni
Age: 38
Children: 4
Occupation: Homemaker
Religion: Islam
Favorite subject in school: Russian
Monthly family income: 5,800 lek (U.S. $64)

"And in those moments, it seems to me that the most human thing I can do is to dedicate my whole life to this one child."




from the book Women in the Material World
by Faith D'Alusio and Peter Menzel

Last night, under the influence of champagne and chocolate, it occurred to those of us at abrooklynlife's New Year's party that 2008 rhymes with ... great ... yeah, so some would consider that a rough night. Others, perhaps, would consider that an indicator of New Year's Eve success. Regardless, in the spirit of eminent future greatness, Subway Reads emerges from the glitter and spangle to greet the cold light of the new year with spectacles and keyboard in hand.
Less ambitiously this year, instead of chronicling the ins and outs of the F train, I'll be exploring the much more modest confines of my bookshelf, though hopefully a few observations from underground will make its way onto the screen as well.

Today, we begin with the one book I received for Christmas:

Women in the Material World

by Faith D'Allusio and Peter Menzel

Arranged alphabetically, Women in the Material World explores the lives of women in countries from Albania, Brazil, and Cuba to Russia, Thailand, the United States, and fourteen other countries all over the globe. This book follows on the heels of the authors' previous project, which documented thirty statistically average families around the world. You can check out their portraits here.

But D'Allusio and Menzel discovered that the stories they had told were predominately male stories, and so revisited many of the profiled families to take a look from the female point of view. This new book is full of life--through conversations, observation, statistics, and of course, photography.

I'll include excerpts from these women's stories here each day of the week.

As Naomi Wolf writes in the foreword, "the beauty on the page is a tribute to the inherent beauty of the subject: the female love, passion, and toil that invisibly undergird human societies everywhere."

Just got an email that neighborhoodie Peter Miller has bought Columbia Street's Freebird Books and he's celebrating at a publication party for Pierre Bayard and his book, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, this Sunday (November 18) from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Refreshing to see a much loved store fall into more loving hands instead of simply closing.