APLG titles. All blurbs are New York Times Book Review, except as noted. Suggestions welcome.
Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan
(Dec 2009) by Greg Mortenson , 420pp.
As “Stones Into Schools” explains, the institute has accomplished its innovative educational work without any government money. That point is crucial, since it has allowed the Montana-based institute to reach across borders with remarkable impunity. While “Three Cups of Tea” describes how Mr. Mortenson stumbled into his life’s work, which began as the building of schools for girls in remote parts of Pakistan, “Stones Into Schools” takes him into hazier geographical realms. The new book is about his organization’s expansion into Afghanistan — and into one region so inaccessible that one Afghan official isn’t sure that it doesn’t belong to neighboring Tajikistan or China instead.
Fast Food Nation (2001) by Eric Schlosser, 356 pp.
In the opening pages of ''Fast Food Nation,'' Eric Schlosser makes a series of observations about McDonald's. The company operates about 28,000 restaurants around the world. It's the nation's biggest buyer of beef, pork and potatoes, and the world's biggest owner of retail property. The company is one of the country's top toy distributors and its largest private operator of playgrounds. Ninety-six percent of American schoolchildren can identify Ronald McDonald. Roughly one of every eight workers in the United States has done time at the chain. The McDonald's brand is the most famous, and the most heavily promoted, on the planet. ''The Golden Arches,'' Schlosser says, ''are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.'' Of course, McDonald's isn't alone. ''The whole experience of buying fast food,'' he writes, ''has become so routine, so thoroughly unexceptional and mundane, that it is now taken for granted, like brushing your teeth or stopping for a red light.''
WHAT THE DOG SAW And Other Adventures (Nov 2009) by Malcolm Gladwell, 410 pp.
Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cézanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Have you hungered for the story behind the Veg-O-Matic, star of the frenetic late-night TV ads? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got the riff in “Whole Lotta Love”? Neither had I, until I began this collection by the indefatigably curious journalist Malcolm Gladwell.
An Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) by Michael Pollan, 450 pp.
Life is confusing atop the food chain. For most animals, eating is a simple matter of biological imperative: if you're a koala, you seek out eucalyptus leaves; if you're a prairie vole, you munch on bluegrass and clover. But Homo sapiens, encumbered by a big brain and such inventions as agriculture and industry, faces a bewildering array of choices, from scrambled eggs to Chicken McNuggets, from a bowl of fresh strawberries to the petrochemically complex yellow log of sweet, spongy food product known as the Twinkie. "When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer," Michael Pollan writes in his thoughtful, engrossing new book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," "deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety."
The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq (2005) by John Crawford, 219pp.
As a deluge of memoirs begin to address the war in Iraq, certain constants emerge. First of all, these could wind up being the most readily chronicled military experiences in history: no other war has made blogging or photography so accessible. Never before has it been so feasible for soldiers to phone home after a tough day in-country. It's also new for them to get stuck leaving voice-mail messages for loved ones who aren't around to take their calls.
The Tipping Point (2000) by Malcolm Gladwell, 279pp.
''The Tipping Point,'' by Malcolm Gladwell, is a lively, timely and engaging study of fads. Some of those he writes about fit snugly into the long tradition of crowd behavior: out-of-fashion Hush Puppies resurged into popularity in 1994 and '95; teenagers, despite repeated health warnings, continue to smoke and in the past few years have been doing so in increasing numbers; and in 1998 a book called ''Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood'' reached a sales mark of two and a half million copies. Some of the other phenomena analyzed by Gladwell are a bit more unusual, including the decline in crime in New York City that began under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. But all of them can be taken as examples of how unpredictable people can be when they find themselves in the throes of doing what everyone else is doing at the same time.
Outliers (2008) by Malcolm Gladwell, 309pp.
Gladwell’s latest book, “Outliers,” is a passionate argument for taking the second version of the story more seriously than we now do. “It is not the brightest who succeed,” Gladwell writes. “Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
He doesn’t actually tell his own life story in the book. (But he lurks offstage, since he does describe the arc of his mother’s Jamaican family.) Instead, he tells other success stories, often using the device of back-to-back narratives. He starts with a tale of individual greatness, about the Beatles or the titans of Silicon Valley or the enormously successful generation of New York Jews born in the early 20th century. Then he adds details that undercut that tale.
Superfreakonomics by (Oct 2009) by Levitt and Stephen Dubner, 288 pp.
“A book with mind-blowing ideas, innovative research and quality investigative journalism, it’s also a story about creativity and what it takes to get the mindset to turn conventional concepts upside down. The authors have found their stride with “SuperFreakonomics.” As good as the first “Freakonomics” was, I found this read much more enjoyable and interesting” (Wall Street Journal), and “A reasonably quick reader could finish it on a coast-to-coast flight, with time left to watch a movie. But the feeling at the end is about the same as the one after reading a Dan Brown novel or eating a bag of Cheetos. You finished the whole thing but didn't walk away feeling particularly proud of yourself. Levitt and Dubner take Gladwellism to its logical extreme: "Superfreakonomics" doesn't really have a broader argument. The authors acknowledge in the opening pages that their book has no unifying theme, beyond the banality that "people respond to incentives." So instead of offering up a bunch of quirky stories of questionable reliability to make an argument that feels coherent, they offer up contrarianism for its own sake. (Washington Post).
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) by Melvin Konner, 339pp.
If tragedy is a conflict of two goods, if it entails the unfolding of deep human tendencies in a cultural context that makes the outcome seem inevitable, if it moves us more than melodrama, then this fine book recounts a poignant tragedy. It is the tale of an immigrant child whose family went in one generation from traditional tribal life in the war-torn mountains of Laos to a bustling existence in the town of Merced in the fertile San Joaquin Valley of California. This was a historic transition, and this child's story is in many ways her people's tale in microcosm -- and taken to an extreme. It is a tale of culture clashes, fear and grief in the face of change, parental love, her doctors' sense of duty, and misperceptions compounded daily until they became colossal misunderstandings. It has no heroes or villains, but it has an abundance of innocent suffering, and it most certainly does have a moral.
Into Thin Air (1997) by Jon Krakauer, 207 pps.
With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,'' observed Rob Hall, the leader of a commercial expedition, on his eighth tour of Mount Everest. ''The trick is to get back down alive.''
The particular descent ahead of those on the ''hill'' on May 10, 1996, resulted in the greatest loss of life in the history of mountaineering on Everest. As news spread of the nine deaths (including that of Hall, who spoke to his wife in New Zealand by radiophone as he lay stranded in a snowstorm on the summit ridge), a barrage of questions resounded: What went wrong? Why was the approaching storm ignored? And, most emphatically, why are ''tourists'' with more money than expertise being taken up Everest in the first place? Jon Krakauer was one of the survivors, and in ''Into Thin Air'' he relives the storm and its aftermath, trying to answer those questions.
In the Heart of the Sea (2001) by Nathaniel Philbrick, 320pp.
The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the twentieth. In 1819, the Essex left Nantucket for the South Pacific with twenty crew members aboard. In the middle of the South Pacific the ship was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale. The crew drifted for more than ninety days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, disease, and ultimately turning to drastic measures in the fight for survival. Nathaniel Philbrick uses little-known documents-including a long-lost account written by the ship's cabin boy-and penetrating details about whaling and the Nantucket community to reveal the chilling events surrounding this epic maritime disaster. An intense and mesmerizing read, In the Heart of the Sea is a monumental work of history forever placing the Essex tragedy in the American historical canon.
The Glass Castle (2005) by Francine Prose 288pp.
How fitting, then, that the title of Jeannette Walls's chilling memoir, ''The Glass Castle,'' should evoke the architecture of fantasy and magic. The transparent palace that Walls's father often promised to build for his children functions as a metaphor for another fanciful construct, the carefree facade with which two people who were (to say the least) unsuited to raise children camouflaged their struggle to survive in a world for which they were likewise ill equipped.
Churchill (Nov 2009) by Paul Johnson, 192 pp.
In this enthusiastic yet first-rate biography, veteran British historian Johnson (Modern Times) asserts that Winston Churchill (1874–1965) was the 20th century's most valuable figure: No man did more to preserve freedom and democracy.... An ambitious, world-traveling soldier and bestselling author, Churchill was already famous on entering Parliament in 1899 and within a decade was working with Lloyd George to pass the great reforms of 1908–1911. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he performed brilliantly in preparing the navy for WWI, but blame—undeserved according to Johnson—for the catastrophic 1915 Dardanelles invasion drove him from office. Within two years, he was back at the top, where he remained until the Depression. Johnson delivers an adulatory account of Churchill's prescient denunciations of Hitler and heroics during the early days of WWII, and views later missteps less critically than other historians. He concludes that Churchill was a thoroughly likable great man with many irritating flaws but no nasty ones: he lacked malice, avoided grudges, vendettas and blame shifting, and quickly replaced enmity with friendship. Biographers in love with their subjects usually produce mediocre history, but Johnson, always self-assured as well as scholarly, has written another highly opinionated, entertaining work. B&w photos. (Nov.)
John Adams (2001) by David McCullough, 751 pp.
In fact, Mr. McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is campaigning for a memorial to Adams. Until one is built, he has contributed a monument of his own, a biography, ''John Adams'' (Simon & Schuster), which has been No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for three weeks.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (2006) by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, 300pp.
Regardless of how the war ends, Iraq is not Vietnam. This is true not just militarily and politically but also in the reporting about the two conflicts. For many journalists who covered Vietnam and subsequently wrote books about the war, the experience could be understood only as a hallucinogenic nightmare, and they described it in gonzo prose to match. The reality of Iraq is much more frightening than a bad acid trip, but the writing about this continuing fiasco has been cleareyed and sober, and all the more powerful for it. Rajiv Chandrasekaran's ''Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone'' is a fine example.
