The Thin Place
A Novel
by Kathryn Davis (Little, Brown & Co)
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
A thin place, according to the daring and delightful novelist Kathryn Davis, is “a place where the membrane between the physical world and the spiritual world” is thin enough to “allow leakage between the two.” The town of Varennes, near the Canadian border, is such a place, and 12-year-old Mees Kipp serves as the conduit between the vaporous layers barely dividing plants and rocks, human and animals, earth, sky, and heaven above. When she and two friends stumble upon a dead neighbor, Mees inexplicably brings him back to life. She does it by tuning into the “slumberous hidden vitality deep inside” the man and willing it back into the land of French bread, mosquitoes, and fabric softener. She does it by carving a hole where the divine can come in and convince a wavering soul to return to the place where everything and everybody is related. And she goes on to do it with dogs and chickens and other living things, working quietly under the radar while everyone else in town goes about their own business, teaching school, binding books, running nursing homes. Davis writes with a magical edge, but it’s the realism of the town that stands out: its church services and drug deals, its neighbors and vagrants, its husbands and wives and teenagers and dogs. This is a profound and at times disturbing novel about the ways in which we are connected, even as we hurt each other and ourselves and the very world that sustains us. But the magic—of the language and the ideas, of Mees untangling the “chain of stars” inside a dead creature and dragging it “like strings of shadow” back into daylight—creates a startling, stunning reading experience. ¤
From Body+Soul
Doctors, Drugs, & Money
Selling Sickness: How the Worlds Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients (Nation Books) by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels and Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide for Activists, Skeptics, and the Very Perplexed (Nation Books) by Pete Shanks
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
By now we should be suspicious of anything that promises a quick and easy fix, especially if it has its own television commercial. But, oh, how we love the pill–any pill. We’ve become a drive-while-eating-and-phoning society that defines beauty as youth and time as productivity. Given a choice between a pill or a change in diet and habits, the easy-to-swallow tablet almost always wins. We don’t want to examine our aches, pains, and unpleasant emotions; we want pills to make them disappear. We also want pills to make us grow hair, lose weight, do well in school, stop frowning, and live unnaturally long lives without ever aging. We want the impossible, and we want it in capsule form.
Drug companies are only too happy to comply. Pharmaceuticals are now a $500-billion industry that last year spent upwards of $4 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising (DCTA) of prescription drugs. Perhaps, as
some argue, the DCTA trend educates consumers and encourages them to participate in their own health care. But two new books—Selling Sickness: How the Worlds Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients (Nation Books) by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, and Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide for Activists, Skeptics, and the Very Perplexed (Nation Books) by Pete Shanks—demonstrate how the focus on pills can be detrimental to our health. The debates over the research, regulation, and marketing of medicine are just heating up, and these books provide relevant information to help consumers enter the debate.
In each of its ten chapters, Selling Sickness examines a modern illness, deconstructing the marketing campaigns that put the condition—and its prescription treatment—on the map. From osteoporosis to menopause to social anxiety disorder, journalist Moynihan and science writer Cassels demonstrate how “the industry’s promotional machinery is turning too much ordinary life into medical illness, in order to expand markets for medications.” Take the case of premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD—not to be confused with PMS—which many experts believe is indistinguishable from the normal problems that can accompany menstruation. Lilly, the company that makes Prozac, has been instrumental in convincing the Food and Drug Administration to categorize PMDD as a medical condition and—surprise!—approve of Prozac to treat it.
Lilly’s role in the PMDD decisions is only one strand in a tangled web of conflicts of interest connecting researchers, doctors, federal regulators, and drug manufacturers. “The extent of the pharmaceutical industry’s influence over the health system is simply Orwellian,” say Moynihan and Cassels, with drug companies funding public-awareness campaigns, scientific conferences, patient-advocacy groups, and celebrity spokespersons. What gets lost in this web is not just the trust of the consumer, but also the basic tenets of health and healing as holistic processes. When we try to reduce ailments to simple biochemical interactions and treat them with the next new pill, we ignore the ways mind and body depend on each other, the ways that lifestyle and emotions and what we eat and breathe and do for a living can all affect our health. As activist and author Shanks says in Human Genetic Engineering, “Medicine, and science, in general, require that we consider the whole and its surroundings and interrelationships, as well as the sum of its obvious parts.”
Though Shanks’s book is really a layperson’s primer on cloning, stemcell research, and other genetic experimentation, he comes at these issues with a sharp skepticism that would likely have him nodding in agreement with Moynihan. Surveys published in his book indicate that most people are wary of human genetic engineering, but that when it is associated with the possibility of discovering new drugs, it becomes less controversial. As Shanks explains, however, the leap from genetic experiments to actual, useful, and safe medicines can be a very large one indeed. In the meantime, he believes, some scientists and biotech companies are encouraging the confusion surrounding these topics in order to avoid the institution of national policies to regulate their field. And like Moynihan and Cassels, he believes that the emphasis in drug research is not necessarily on treating the most debilitating diseases so much as making fairly healthy people "better than well."
Are we really so gullible as to believe that we can eat junk food, work 60-hour weeks, and then just pop a pill to reduce heartburn or cholesterol? Medication is an essential part of treating illness and promoting wellness; there is nothing intrinsically wrong with it. But when medicine is developed, regulated, marketed, and sold as if it were toothpaste or shampoo, then we need to ask questions about its safety and efficacy. Selling Sickness and Human Genetic Engineering can help us to form those questions. ¤
From Body+Soul
The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
Sudden death, even for a master storyteller like Didion, defies narrative. Hard as she tries, she can't make a plot out of the events that happened to her in the winter of 2003. So she keeps going back to the facts: "You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." On this night, five days after Christmas, Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, had just returned from a hospital visit with their only daughter, Quintana, who was in a coma and on life support. At the dinner table, Dunne collapses, and dies, from a coronary attack. Quintana recovers, then has emergency brain surgery less than two months later. How? Why? Didion wants to know.
The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed ideas I ever had about death, about illness...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." Her attempt – fierce, valiant, eloquent – is, in a way, a failure, for one cannot make sense of the senseless. But the book, a kinetic sense-memory adventure that circles backward and forward in time like a film, is a brilliant success. The stages of grief work like wildfire on Didion, sparking recollections both glamorous and mundane of her life and career with Dunne in Hollywood, New York, and Hawaii. The result is as much a memoir of a very full life, as an illumination of the intricate range of emotions that come with unexplainable illness and sudden death. Intense, yes, but also enthralling. ¤
From Body+Soul
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel
by Lisa See
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
This achingly beautiful novel follows the fate of two girls growing up in a remote province of China during the 19th century, when females were valued solely as vehicles for producing sons. Girls had their feet bound by age six, were not allowed outside the home until they married, and had to obey first their fathers, then their husbands, and finally their sons. but even the tightest reins cannot keep love and beauty from flourishing. As girls, Lily and Snow Flower learn nu shu, a secret women's language handed down through the generations, so that they can send messages to each other even as they are "married out" and then restricted to the women's chambers of their husband's homes. Not until they are both mothers to their own children does Lily realize the real power of this language in allowing them "to write the truth of our lives" and maintain a bond much stronger than any they would have with their husbands, mothers, or siblings. "Our nu shu was a means for our bound feet to carry us to each other, for our thoughts to fly across the fields," Lily says. Too often, historians approach the past with a panoramic lens, focusing on war and work, politics and trade, and other elements of what Lily would call the outer, or men's, realm. In Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, author See uses a telephoto lens to give us an intimate view of festivals and famine, of customs and superstitions, all through the details of the "inner realm" of women. The cultural insights are fascinating, but in the end this is a love story, with all the passion, betrayal, and regret that comes with the territory. ¤
Ace of Spades
A Memoir by David Matthews
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
Growing up in Baltimore's low-rent neighborhoods in the 1970s and '80s, David Matthews got called white boy, n -- and Jew. The light-skinned son of a Jewish mother and an African American father, he answered to all three names. But the story – and the identity issues – get even more complicated. Matthews' mother, who had psychological problems, abandoned him as an infant, disappearing from his life forever. His father, a journalist in the African American press who once consorted with Miles and Malcolm, dated only white women, including an evil stepmother type who abused his son. The young Matthews usually passed for white, but that label was as mutable and recalcitrant as the others he sometimes wore. As "a living contradiction of elements that shouldn't have been," he found himself morphing back and forth, either "white by inference or black by implication," depending on who and where he was hanging around.
In his memoir, Ace of Spades, Matthews writes with candor, anger and humor about what it means to be all mixed up. Like the best of this genre, Matthews' memoir balances introspection with cultural commentary, using vivid scenes from his life to illustrate the themes of the times. The story of race and class in all its fine, often crisscrossing, lines is in large part the story of America. Matthews, who stands at the intersections of many of these lines, offers up some important insights about black, white and those myriad gray shades in between.
An astute writer with a sharp wit and tongue, Matthews does not shy away from the touchy subjects. Take, for instance, the internalized racism that made a 12-year-old Matthews call his own father a n -- and attempt to burn a Klu Klux Klan-style cross in a neighbor's yard – a slapstick adventure almost as comical as it is heartbreaking. Or the sexual politics of black men and white women, and how men can manipulate white guilt into physical pleasure (though the author may not be quite as self-aware on this issue as he thinks he is). Proving that there's still something to be said on the subject of cool – which he describes as almost Victorian in its restraint, a kind of effortless control while everything around you is chaos – Matthews adds his own incisive riffs. But he also worries about how displays of intelligence get equated with uncool, and how, in his first year at a mostly black college, he tried to appear dumber in order to seem blacker.
Then there's the volatile tangle of black-Jewish relations, an arena in which Matthews is especially shrewd. As a teenager, he realized that claiming his Jewishness could help explain his swarthy coloring and keep him in with the right crowd. Figuring that "Israeli seemed like Jew squared," he talks up the one thing he knows about his absent mother – that she moved to Israel – in an attempt to gain cachet. But eventually this boy with two histories of persecutions starts to wonder, "What was it about Jews and their people that superseded their general alliance with the whole of humanity? Their holocaust, to be frank, paled in comparison to the ongoing deaths – physical, economic, and psychic – suffered by my other people."
In examining his own convoluted story, Matthews is really exploring that one question upon which the American psyche is fixated: "What are you?" As he found out on his first day at school, when the whole student body pestered him for a response, no one can get situated and nothing can get started until that question is answered, the issue of race resolved. In a sense, Matthews didn't choose white; it chose him. But, eventually, he got past both his ability and his desire to pass, and realized the irony that "I had chosen my mother (her whiteness), though she had abandoned me, and ignored my father (his blackness), though he had not."
Ace of Spades makes for a good story, full of profound and painful truths, but it wouldn't necessarily be a good book if Matthews weren't such a talented writer. His likable persona – angry young wimp – and his willingness to reveal his own most shameful moments, allows him to deliver caustic goods. The writing flows between showing and telling, between precise details of the urban landscape and grand pronouncements on the races. And the language is a playful, poetic mix of highbrow and lowbrow that creates a Spanglish-esque blend of black-and-white vernacular. One minute he's addressing the "dear reader" with descriptions of "the susurrus of corduroy trousers," "empyrean aplomb" and "oppidian scandals and minatory apocalypses." Then, just when you're ready to call him an old-fashioned blowhard, he'll drop in a line about "the bucolic suburbs of wherever" or how "times done changed." The one clear thing about Matthews is that he is a man on whom no label will stick.
This article appeared on page E-2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
by Rebecca Solnit
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
The latest book by this much-lauded cultural critic is a collection of essays examining the many ways we can lose and be lost, and some of the ways we can recover and be found as well. We can, for instance, lose track of time, or lose ourselves in love or activity, as a kind of "chosen surrender." We can also get lost unwillingly in places we don't know or, in the days before everything was mapped, in terra incognita, the places that nobody knows. The world is losing plants and animals even as we discover, or find, new species. And then we can slip into sleep and conjure up lost toys and homes and relatives for, as Solnit remarks, "in dreams, nothing is lost." If this sounds a bit etheral, it is. Solnit is an intellectual writer in the Susan Sontag vein who likes to leap between a personal memory and a statement on the symbolism of the color blue in Renaissance paintings, gluing them together with references to brilliant and obscure figures from history. But just when you think she's too esoteric, she'll throw in a description so precise and astonishing – such as how "heartbreak is a little like falling in love" – it makes you shudder. A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a rewarding, if challenging, read. ¤
The Tricky Part
by Martin Moran
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
One of the tragedies of child abuse is that it seems to have a half-life of infinity: its effects just go on and on, so the child who, if he is lucky, grows up to become an adult, never quite figures out who or what he would have been without the abuse. In this wise and heartbreaking book, Moran, who was molested by a church-camp counselor from ages 12 to 15, dares to look at all the complexities of the devasting yet defining moments of his childhood. What's tricky is that the counselor, Bob, who stole his innocence and sexuality, was in some ways a friend, a lover, and a mentor to the young Moran, teaching him about rivers and deer and tractors in the Colorado Rockies. Moran eventually discovers his own homosexuality and then wonders whether he should be angry at Bob for making him that way or grateful for helping him find his true self.
This is an astonishing balancing act of a book, and actor/writer Moran, who won a 2004 Obie (off-Broadway theater award) for his one-man play of the same name, writes with nuance, power, and a graceful precision. The Tricky Part stumbles a bit in its final section, when Moran gets a tad explain-y about the 12 Steps, therapy, and other keys to his recovery. But most of the book is filled with vivid descriptions of his Denver Catholic boyhood, scenes so potent they tell the story of one, and every, abuse. ¤
The Ends of the Earth
by W.S. Merwin
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
Just how, exactly, does one critique the latest book by someone routinely referred to as "one of the world's greatest living poets," who has published more than 30 books of poems, prose and translations and won every arts award imaginable, starting with the 1952 Yale Series of Younger Poets (selected by none other than W.H. Auden) and including the Pulitzer Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship? Might as well just give him an A+ on his new essay collection, "The Ends of the Earth," and call it a day.
But W.S. Merwin deserves and demands a closer look. And not just for his connection to history and his dedication to language, his careful articulation of the archaic and the arcane, or for the insights into nature and humanity that can only come from an elder poet. Yes, the essays in "The Ends of the Earth" often seem like homework: They are not easy, sometimes not even entertaining. But they are good for you nonetheless.
At first glance, the topics of the eight essays have little in common. A description of the annual monarch butterfly migration to Mexico stands alongside a long, slow meditation on the Orthodox monasticism of the Holy Mountain of Athos.
A prodding profile of a New England publisher that is better left unread is followed by a piece on the loss of native species in Oahu. Merwin devotes several fascinating chapters to European explorers – people who were indeed reaching for the ends of the Earth – such as French seaman Jean-Francoise Galaup de La Perouse, who sailed to Hawaii in the 18th century, and Sydney Parkinson, the artist/naturalist on board Capt. James Cook's Endeavor.
But lean in a little closer and the connections between these chapters start to emerge. First, there is Merwin's poetic sensitivity: his remarkable eyes, ears, nose and mouth as he conjures up the sight of a monastery ("a rambling mass of architecture, like a child's cardboard palace that has been left in the rain"); the sound of 35 million butterflies like "A breeze echoing. An exhalation without an end," the feel of the Greek sun in October when "the locals still sit under the vines of the one open cafe, the half-inch of retsina in their glasses glowing with the long light off the sea." Then there is his ambling pace, meticulous, noticing everything, no matter how long it takes. These essays come off like extended poems, lacking in plot but laden with wisdom and rich, evocative images.
Known as much for his environmentalism as for his intellectualism, Merwin becomes here the consummate natural historian. Whether he is describing the co- evolution of the milkweed plant and the Danainae family of butterflies that feeds on it or the experience of an airport Marriott, "where I seemed to enter a framed picture of a hotel lobby anywhere," Merwin logs his observations with a detailed and almost detached scientific tone.
Like Parkinson, who methodically drew and painted more than 1,000 portraits of plants and animals that the Endeavor's naturalists "discovered" in the New World, Merwin seems to be recording his impressions for posterity.
He is also conveying his concern, and his work here reads as a chronicle of the fragility and decay of the world. In chapter after chapter, the author tries to preserve dying cultures and traditions, religions and paintings, whole ecosystems and ways of life.
Most captivating are "The Tree on One Tree Hill" and "Name in the Sand," which profile, respectively, the explorers Parkinson and La Perouse, born with "that craving for somewhere far away." While Merwin celebrates their passionate and well-intentioned curiosity, he also examines the corruption of that craving by the imperialism that funded it. From naming and classifying new species, to colonizing native lands, to trampling sensitive habitats through tourism, that curiosity has often led to disaster.
In the final essay, on the Neanderthal skeleton excavated in the Bouffia Bonneval caves in France, he imagines the death of this early man. "[T]he voices of every human he had known would fall silent, one by one, and then the language in which they had spoken to each other would be forgotten. ... After many thousands of winters the last descendants of the people he had known would stop breathing, just as he had done, and the last of the animals they had hunted would be gone, and his entire way of recognizing the world would no longer be known." In "The Ends of the Earth," Merwin seems to be documenting his language, his understanding of history and the world, before all links to them are gone. Whole species and even human races have died out before, he suggests, and so the ends of the Earth are not necessarily so far away.
Frances Lefkowitz is the books editor for Body & Soul magazine and has a short story in the current issue of Glimmer Train.
This article appeared on page M - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
The Book of Trouble: A Romance
by Ann Marlowe
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
Ann Marlowe's trouble with love has been that she does it with her brain. "For most of my life I've intellectualized love, deciding who was worthy or good for me rather than following my heart," she writes in her new memoir/cultural critique, "The Book of Trouble."
For someone so cerebral, she's also spent a lot of nights taking pleasure in the physical. With more than her share of bed partners over the years, she's long argued that "sex was everything." Then, at 44, the hip New Yorker falls in love with a highly improbable mate – an Afghan Princeton man 10 years her junior – who promptly breaks her heart. Suddenly she realizes what she's been missing all these years: the emotional connection. Not that she gives up on sex – she and her lover spend most of their time together naked – she just comes to the conclusion "that the reason it [sex] was everything was the emotion it called forth." This brief affair and its ragged aftermath awaken her to the value of feelings and the difference between a relationship and a romance: "Relationships take root in the mind, love in the body," she declares.
The trouble with "The Book of Trouble" is that it purports to be about the discovery of true love, but everything we hear about the affair – and we hear it all in this play-by-play, including analysis and color commentary, cell-phone calls, voice mails and full disclosure on what exactly she e-mailed him and just how long it took him to e-mail back – makes it sound like your average fling, albeit an intense one.
Marlowe, a cultural critic in the Salon.com mode, is a smart writer with a clever, interesting mind and a talent for making broad, provocative statements that make sense as well as create sensation. Her first memoir was an unsentimental look at her years as a heroin user; she fell somewhere between addict and recreational user and was able to give it up without cold sweats. In her new book, she tries to drop the cool detachment and get vulnerable instead. "I'm ashamed of how lightly I used to take love and angry that it's the norm in my culture," she confides.
Too bad the object of her affection comes off as such a cad, and the affair as just another short-lived dysfunctional relationship between a man who doesn't want to commit himself and a woman who doesn't want to ask him to do so.
Her lover, Amir, has issues with drinking, intimacy and rudeness; he alternates between telling Marlowe how much he loves her and telling her how much he'd like to go to bed with her tall, hot friends, then reminding her that he plans to follow the Afghan custom of arranged marriage to a virgin, preferably one who is also a cousin. Marlowe's behavior is not much better: She says she's tired of the manipulation that passes for affection, but then calculates her every move. The worst part is watching Marlowe pick at the relationship like a scab: necessary for her, not so compelling for us. The relentless on and off of the on-again, off-again romance gives it a banality that is clearly the opposite of Marlowe's experience.
Perhaps Marlowe shouldn't denigrate herself for being such an intellectual. The most fascinating passages in the book are the ones that take a personal experience, put it in cultural context, extrapolate on it and then offer up a new insight into how, say, arranged marriage is not as foreign a practice as we like to think it is or how Western courtship is a "ritual in which a man feigns submission in order, ultimately, to dominate." In one scene, she has trying-to-forget-Amir sex with a Turk who tells her that too much talking can ruin a marriage. Mulling it over later, Marlowe remembers the line from Rumi she uses to practice her Persian calligraphy – Be silent that the lord who gave you speech may talk – and comes to the conclusion that "the deepest and finest parts of our nature may not be in our speaking but in our listening, not in our intellect but in our feeling."
Marlowe is at her strongest dissecting the cross-cultural vagaries of love, intimacy, gender roles, family and marriage (though she's got a bit of an obsession with that cousin marriage thing). Her ideas are informed by her travels to places that most of us will never get to, except through her vivid descriptions: an Afghan family compound during the Ramadan holiday, the world of the international press corps in Baghdad, New York dinner parties with Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi. A Jewish woman who feels more at home in Muslim Afghanistan than in Israel, Marlowe comes to some fascinating conclusions about the differences and commonalities among Jews, Arabs and other Semites.
Though she has trouble with love – and with summarizing her love troubles – she has a gift for riffing back and forth between the personal and the global, and landing on some fascinating insights about the way we live.
Frances Lefkowitz is at work on her own memoir/cultural critique, "How to Have Not," about growing up poor, white and female in San Francisco.
This article appeared on page M - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Accidentally on Purpose
by Mary F. Pols
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
Mary, a smart, single, successful woman teetering on the edge of 40, meets Matt, a cute younger guy, in a bar. They have a few drinks, then go back to his place, a disheveled room he rents in a house that's "more of a boardinghouse than an apartment," and spend a passionate night together. A month later she discovers she's pregnant, and to her own - and everyone else's - surprise, she decides to keep the baby. When she tracks down her one-time lover, to break the news that he's now a father-to-be, Matt - in another surprise - says he wants to be a part of the pregnancy, birth and upbringing. He just doesn't want to be anything more than friends with Mary. If this were a movie (like last summer's lightweight comedy "Knocked Up"), mother and father would fall in love as they got to know each other, and baby would make three.
But this is real life, and Mary F. Pols' story, told in her new memoir, "Accidentally on Purpose," is a bit messier than the Hollywood version. For one thing, there's her convoluted relationship with 29-year-old Matt, an unemployed and decidedly unambitious boy-man compared with Pols' Type A personality. Though he makes his position clear from the get-go - friends for the baby's sake - he and Pols often end up in bed together in a kind of friends-with-benefits arrangement, and then arguing over the ambiguities in their relationship as if they've been married for years. After much back-and-forth, they finally settle into their roles as co-parents, though things still get strange, especially as they start to date other people. Then there are all those real-life logistics, like maternity leave, infant day care and flextime work schedules, all made so much more difficult when there's only one official parent. And of course there's the awkward explaining the pregnant Pols has to do to with friends, strangers, colleagues and family - including her Catholic father and baby-to-be's other grandparents. Come to think of it, maybe this is a movie plot after all.
Pols, who was a film critic by trade, tells her story with the kind of brazen honesty that will make some readers cringe and others nod their heads in empathy. Sharp, witty and slightly self-deprecating, she alternates clever, camera-ready one-liners with intense self-revelations about parents, children, love and family. To save money for a deposit on a new kid-friendly apartment, Pols decides to move temporarily into an Airstream parked in a friend's backyard, an experience she describes as "the ultimate lesson in humility: pregnant by a man I'd met in a bar and about to move into a trailer." But the deeper she gets into motherhood - the book takes us from pregnancy through toddlerhood - the less flippant she becomes. On her 40th birthday, she holds her 5-week-old son and realizes that "I'd beaten the biological clock, the thing that had been tormenting me, but I didn't feel like gloating. I'd imagined besting that clock might be like finishing a marathon, high on adrenaline and ready to mount the podium and pump your fists in the air. Instead I felt something so much softer, something I couldn't quite define."
Soft is indeed something that's difficult to write about, and readers may tire of Pols' long passages on her sweet Maine upbringing, the boyfriends who broke her heart and the cute things her baby does in the car seat. Divulging Too Much Information is the occupational hazard of a memoirist, who ideally will be able to select the details that carry not just personal significance, but cultural relevance as well. Though Pols' honesty is admirable, it is sometimes tedious.
Underneath the softness, however, lies a story that is quite relevant. For all those women nearing 40, desiring children, and struggling to find a mate, the question of "Why don't I just do it by myself?" eventually surfaces. New books about choosing single motherhood offer nuts-and-bolts advice on sperm banks, custody and costs. But what is it really like to have a baby without a partner? And is it the better alternative to marrying someone you don't really love, just to have a baby? Or is choosing to be a single parent much like deciding to "climb Everest without an oxygen tank," as Pols wonders? "Accidentally On Purpose" addresses these questions with firsthand candor, humor and insight, as the author comes to realize that despite the complications, having a child on her own was "the single most empowering act I could undertake." {sbox}
This article appeared on page M - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle. Frances Lefkowitz has just been nominated for her second Pushcart Prize.
Japanland: A year in Search of Wa
by Karin Muller
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
Wherever you go, there you are; or, in Zen-free English, you can’t escape yourself no matter how far you travel. But by immersing yourself in foreign territory you can discover things about yourself, and the world, that you never would have seen at home. Karin Muller, a filmmaker, writer, and judo student, goes to Japan to find wa, an elusive sense of harmony and focus, and in Japanland A Year in Search of Wa (Rodale) tells her entertaining and enlightening tale of hunting it down and losing it over and over again.
After casually asking her Japanese host family about traditional festivals, Muller finds herself squeezed alongside dozens of local residents carrying an enormous—and weighty—Shinto shrine through the rainy streets of Asakusa. She’s cold, wet, hungry, sore, and not quite sure how she’s going to make it, when she suddenly notices that “everyone is moving in absolute synchronization, like a centipede – even me.” It is her first moment of wa, and also an opportunity for a new insight into a central tenet of Japanese culture, the sacrificing of personal desire and comfort for the sake of the greater good. As Muller puts it, “I’m gradually starting to realize that being born Japanese is not unlike signing up for a lifelong stint in the military: good benefits, great job security, but not a lot of room for renegades.” A renegade herself, she carries along this same delight, curiosity, and sense of humor as she washes in traditional bathhouses, meets with revered sword makers, treks alongside pilgrims in the ancient cult of Yamabushi (a group of ascetic mountain monks), goes crabbing with a village fishing family, and tries (unsuccessfully) to avoid stepping on the toes of her host mother.
Messy, independent, and talkative, Muller has a hard time shoehorning her boisterous personality into a country full of quiet nuance. But her loss in social graces is our gain as readers. The scenes she describes are not only funny, they are also perfect illustrations of the layered idiosyncrasies of Japanese codes of conduct. Plus, Muller is not nearly the oafish American she makes herself out to be; she’s actually a sensitive observer with a great wit and a talent for deciphering a country and decoding behavior. The night after the arduous shrine-carrying festival, for instance, Muller sits at a table with her host sister and five Hershey’s Kisses between them. Though they are both famished, neither woman wants to be the first to reach for the chocolate. What’s at stake is iki, a demonstration of knowledge, grace, and good breeding. “Like wa, iki is something I haven’t got but want,” says Muller, and “even I recognize the first iki-hurdle between me and the blessed taste of chocolate on my tongue.... I’ll be damned if I’m going to take the first Hershey’s Kiss and prove myself a worthless barbarian.” With just the right mix of quirky personal reflection and astute cultural observations, Japanland turns out to be a splendid guide to the land of wa. (Muller’s documentary about her time in Japan, also called, Japanland, will air on public television this fall.) ¤
From Body+Soul
Mothers of Invention
Memoirs of survival, shame, and other family secrets by Sandra Scofield and Beth Harpaz. Plus, renegades on religion in Books In Brief.
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
HISTORY IS NOT JUST BIG NAMES AND BIG EVENTS, not just Washington and Lincoln, wars, elections, and economic recessions. It is also what happens every day, how these big events trickle down to the little people. When written with grace and perspective, personal memoirs can provide precisely this kind of history of the rest of us. Finding Annie Farrell (St. Martin's Press) by Beth J. Harpaz and Occasions of Sin (Norton) by Sandra Scofield are both splendid examples of the personal merging with the political, social, and economic. "Everybody has stories and most of them don't count for much," writes Scofield. But these memoirs of survival and shame and other family secrets show just how much these stories do count.
When Harpaz and her sister cleaned out their mother's room after her death in 1983, they discovered a birth certificate that revealed that their mother had changed her name. She was born Lena Farrell into a large, destitute family in Maine in 1922. But by the time she came to New York City as a young woman, she had become "Annie." Harpaz, an AP reporter whose The Girls in the Van covered Hillary Clinton's senatorial campaign, decided to turn her professional sleuthing on her mother. "At first she seemed invisible, an ordinary woman who left behind no exploits for the history books, no fortunes to be tracked," writes Harpaz. "But once I started looking, I found her anyway, in the sisters who survived her, in the letters that she left behind, in the rural life she fled, in the generation she belonged to. I found her in the vanished world of a poor family in a small town in Maine in the 1930s, a world that was more like the 19th century than the 21st ...in hand-written census sheets, in typed-up reports about neglected children and the old-fashioned laws that shaped their destinies, and in newspaper clippings about fires and floods."
Annie Farrell's mother died during childbirth; her father, an alcoholic, was unable to support his family in the midst of the Great Depression; and the children were split up and sent off to foster homes and reform schools. Of all the Farrell children who survived, Annie seemed to achieve the most success. She had jobs and love affairs, took up flying and moved to New York, then married and mothered two girls of her own. But in the end she was taken down by depression, alcoholism, and cancer while her sisters back in Maine managed to persevere. It's not fair to reduce a life to an example, but it is precisely Annie Ferrell's embodiment of the limitations of her time, place, class, and gender that makes her story so poignant and so important. Finding Annie Farrell is a fascinating portrait of survival and succumbing told with the thoroughness that one would expect from a reporter like Harpaz. The flaws in the book come when Harpaz tries to write like a memoirist rather than a journalist and shifts the focus away from her mother and onto herself, her sister, and her father (who deserves his own book) instead.
Sandra Scofield, a longtime novelist, brings a literary lushness and a more distanced perspective to her memoir, Occasions of Sin. Her mother, Edith, had a hardscrabble youth in and around Texas in the 1930s and 1940s, converted to Catholicism, and spent much of her life trying to balance her natural exuberance, her desired piety and the chronic health problems that eventually killed her when Scofield was in high school. Married and later separated, Edith had a volatile relationship with her own mother, Frieda, moving in and out of her home as pride and circumstance dictated. The young Sandra was often boarded at Catholic school while her family moved from state to state. In an era when women were not supposed to want anything for themselves, both Sandra and Edith tried to reconcile their fears and desires and to understand how religion fits into the real world, where occasions of sin seemed to be hovering around every corner.
Like Annie Farrell, Edith left mysteries behind when she died, including the identity of Sandra's father. When Scofield, in a scene she describes as "the most ordinary of tales," is raped by three drunk boys in college, she intuits a new connection to her mother, who is no longer alive to comfort her nor confirm her intuition. "It came to me that I was my mother," she writes. "Something like this had happened to her all those years ago, something she could never tell anyone, not even her own mother, because it was too shameful to be so vulnerable and so stupid. Somebody had hurt her when she was younger than I was, and from that, came me."
This revelation overwhelms, in part, because Scofield's rape is indeed a very common story. And it is this mixture of the ordinary and extraordinary that makes the stories of both Edith and Annie worth writing down and worth reading. In the hands of their daughters, their lives take on mythic qualities—not in the sense of fiction or grandeur, but in the sense of deep human resonance and unavoidable veracity.
Books in Brief
The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith by Irshad Manji (St. Martin's) Holy moly, this woman has got some spunk! Or, as the multi-hyphenated Irshad Manji, a Uganda-born, Canadian-bred Lesbian Muslim broadcast journalist and television personality puts it: "Yes, I'm blunt. You're just going to have to get used to it." In this bold and courageous open letter to fellow Muslims, she dares to ask the dangerous questions about her religion—questions like, Who is the real colonizer of Muslims, America or Arabia? Why are we squandering the talents of women, fully half of God's creation? And, Will we move past the superstition that we can't question the Koran? In an argument both passionate and rational, Manji offers up reinterpretations of Islam's past and present and a view of its future that includes equal rights for women and minorities and an end to terrorism and totalitarianism. Infused with the wit and pacing of a Chris Rock special, The Trouble With Islam is a highly readable analysis of history and current events that affect us all. "It might appear ridiculous that someone who's not a theologian, a politician, or a diplomat (in any sense of the word) has the chutzpah to comment on what could be done to reform Islam," writes Manji. But it is Manji's genuine concern for her religion and its glorious possibilities that give her comments such weight. A provocative, educational, and entertaining read that is bound to get its author in trouble.
Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet (Free Press) Yes, it has finally happened: the Bible has become hip. In this "heretic's" version, the clever and talented writer/editor team of Manseau and Sharlet rounded up a bunch of equally clever and talented writers, giving them each a Book and one rule: Anything goes. Needless to say, the Books vary tremendously, in style, substance, and adherence to the original. Francine Prose's Exodus is an essay explaining how the violence of the plagues remembered during Passover has caused her to forgo the celebration of this important Jewish holiday. In Melvin Jules Bukiet's Ezekiel, the novelist recasts the prophet as the guy who runs the carousel in New York's Central Park. Rick Moody's fictional version of Jonah centers on a mild-mannered underachiever whose calling card says "Kosher Fag." In other words, this is not your mother's Bible. It is, however, at turns captivating and confusing, powerful and intriguing and tiresome, much like the real thing. The idea of rewriting the Bible is so audacious one wonders whether it will become a trend (Best American Bible Stories, anyone?). Yet Killing the Buddha is too earnest to be dismissed as merely trendy. The writers are working from the premise that the good book has enduring power and relevance in our modern lives. In Isaiah, for instance, essayist Charles Bowden explores the ramifications of exile, which seems to have cursed all of humankind with an incurable longing. "We have all lost our land to strangers and come to Babylon," he writes. "We've grown fat here, but the pang of loss remains. We are incomplete, especially around midnight." Hallelujah and amen.¤
From Body+Soul
James Beard Award for Food Writing finalist, 2004
From Body+Soul magazine
Savoring the Landscape
Eating, Drinking, and Homecoming in California’s Wine Country
By Frances Lefkowitz
THE CHINESE ORACLE KNOWN AS THE I CHING TOLD ME RECENTLY
that I am an absolute beginner when it comes to love. “You are able to competently handle just about every facet of your life except for this one,” said the ancient book of wisdom. Therefore, anything I say about matters of the heart should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, I believe that curiosity can be a form of love. To be fascinated by another, then strive to understand that other’s mysteries, not to dominate, but to appreciate—surely this is one way of loving. If so, I would like to declare my love, not for a person—I am, after all, only a beginner at this—but for a place, one with which I’ve had a long, often troubled relationship. That place is the landscape I think of as home: the area just north of San Francisco, where in between the flat, dry heat of the Central Valley and the raw, foggy beaches of the Pacific Ocean, the coastal mountain range breaks into the slender cracks and wider valleys of Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino counties. Botanist Luther Burbank called this area God’s Country because its mild climate and fertile soils can grow almost anything. But that abundance can be elusive—not everyone in the land of plenty is born with the finances or the attitude to take advantage of it—and my memories of the region are tinged with the melancholy of never quite having enough. In an attempt to shake off the past and satiate myself with the brisk and mellow beauty of this area, I recently traveled through here, touching and smelling and tasting, partaking in the bounty of food and wine and vistas that once seemed so out of my reach.
The French, of course, have a word for this kind of love that is landscape and flavor and understanding. Terroir, a term from French viticulture, is often translated as “microclimate,” though it refers to the whole confluence of natural elements—the depth of the bedrock and the chemical composition of the soil on a particular south-facing slope, for instance—that create particular growing regions. Terroir is the basis of the French appellation system, in which wines are known by their region (Bourgogne, or Burgundy, for instance) and not by their varietal (the Pinot Noir grape that grows so well there). But at the northern California outpost of a very French winery—Roederer, known especially for its champagnes—transplanted winemaker Michel Salgues, Ph.D., emphasizes another factor in the creation of terroir. “Yes, it is the natural conditions, the microconditions, of growth,” he told me on a recent tour. “But it is also the human intervention in those conditions.” It takes people—curious, hungry people—to learn the nuances of a growing region, to determine its unique capabilities and limitations, to figure out what grows best there and how best to grow it. The people in this part of California have come from all over (Italy, China, Mexico), carrying their native foods (artichoke, cilantro, jalapeno) and know-how and replanting them into this fertile ground.
Terroir, then, like all aspects of agriculture, represents the union of culture and nature. It is the understanding of a place expressed in wine, and in food as well, as farmers and bakers and cheese makers can also interpret the personality of a landscape. But talking to the winemakers of this region is the first step to learning the lush secrets of its terroir and how one goes about extracting the flavor of a place.
Seventeen years ago, when Roederer winemakers went scouting around here looking for a place to grow Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes, the traditional blend for champagne, they settled on the Anderson Valley in southern Mendocino County because its proximity to the coast provides it with a cooling fog that complements its heat and differentiates it from the more inland valleys. While the Chardonnay grape likes some cool weather, the less versatile Pinot more or less demands it. “It’s like a racehorse,” says the affable Salgues, “very temperamental.” Soon the growers discovered that the area had more than coastal fog to offer the grapes. A particularly narrow valley, its soils are strong on drainage and weaker on nutrients—conditions that boost the quality of the grapes. In addition, the cool nights increase their acidity and, as Wine Enthusiast stated recently, “As any sparkling-wine maker will attest, zesty acidity is the key to making eye-popping bubbly.” Or as Salgues puts it, “Suffering is good for the grape.” There is legitimate concern in the Anderson Valley, once known for its apples and hippies, that Sonoma and Mendocino counties are going the way of Napa, where wine grapes have uprooted the traditional food crops and wine people have reshaped the cultural landscape. But for better or worse, the terroir of the Anderson Valley is becoming famous for its Pinot Noirs.
Grow the best grapes you can and then try not to mess them up, goes the humble winemaker’s cliché. Like terroir, this winemaking concept applies equally as well to food. For wine makers like Robert Blue, of the organic Bonterra winery just inland from the Anderson Valley, the goal is getting “the true nature of the vineyard—its terroir” into every bottle of wine. “What is the best way to farm that piece of land, and what is the best way to pull the flavors out of that place?” he asks. Blue and his team, as well as an increasing number of growers and farmers and ranchers throughout the north coast, have decided that the answer to both these questions lies in the organic approach. Mendocino County has some 45 organic-grape growers, and more than 3,000 acres of organic crops of all sorts. Neighboring Sonoma County’s organic statistics are almost as impressive. Just as the quality of the wine depends upon the quality of the grapes, the quality of the grapes depends, in turn, upon the quality of the soil they are grown in, explains Bonterra adviser Alan York, an expert in a form of organic cultivation known as biodynamic farming. In the vineyard, York strives for a diverse, healthy closed system, in which the fragrant waste from the winemaking process goes back into the soil as fertilizer, and plantings of clover and wildflowers help prevent insect devastations. Grapes grown under these conditions, he believes, help to “express the individuality of a particular place.” In winemaking, estate wines, which are made on-site from grapes also grown on-site, are considered the purest expression of terroir. York believes that his closed loop approach, requiring few outside fertilizers, brings Bonterra wines one step closer to pure. In one small but premium corner of the Bonterra vineyard, a block of 35-year-old Petite Syrah vines are being dry-farmed (grown without irrigation), a method that produces fruit with exceptional flavor. In the rainless heat of California summers, this only works with the best grapes on the best plots of land. And if you are lucky—Bonterra’s Petite Syrah is not yet commercially available—you will one day have a glass of the rich, round red wine that comes from the grapes that come from this plot.
But drinking wine is not the only way to taste a place. Out on the coast, the Giacomini family has been raising dairy cattle for generations on the shallow grassy hills, green in winter and brown in summer, that overlook the long finger of Tomales Bay. Recently Robert Giacomini and his four daughters have begun turning some of that milk into cheese—a tangy, award-winning blue cheese—and the family is convinced that their location, often soaked in salty fog, can be tasted in each bite. “You can’t repeat our recipe even 30 miles away,’ says daughter number three, Lynn Giacomini Stray, explaining how their Holsteins—all bred, grazed and milked on-site—express the flavors of the land and sea that come together on this particular lull in the coastal range. “We don’t have to add as much salt to our cheese because it’s in the air, the grass,” Though the Giacominis’ Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company is not an organic dairy, the ranching and the cheese making both take place on the farm, making their blue a true farmstead cheese, the equivalent of an estate wine grown and bottled at the vineyard. And they are but one of a handful of artisanal cheese makers in these hills, many of whom are raising their own animals and working with the nuances of soil and slope and season to create food that is full of the flavor of the landscape. Pouring themselves into their terroirs, they are performing nothing less than a labor of love.
At the crossroads of Sonoma and Mendocino counties, the chefs at Geyserville’s Taverna Santi gleefully pluck from the region’s bounty, foraging for mushrooms and wild nettles in nearby creek beds, buying tomatoes from a guy down the street whose sign says “World’s Best Tomatoes” and serving up olive oil from olives grown and pressed just 40 miles away. “This is the best place in the world to be a chef,” says chef Thomas Oden, who co-owns Santi with chef Franco Dunn. “There are more microclimates in Sonoma County than in any other county in the U.S.,” he says, and most of them get represented at the Healdsburg farmers’ market, where he shops for fruits, vegetables, cheese and other ingredients from local farmers and food makers. Then he goes back to the kitchen, awaits a delivery of crusty hearth bread from Della Fattoria bakery in Petaluma and locally raised Peking ducks from Sonoma County Poultry and puts together a menu that is ripe with the flavors and textures of the surrounding country.
It doesn’t seem fair when food like this–made with passion and time, in step with the seasons—falls into the domain of the elite, relegating the rest of us to the bland food of chain supermarkets and chain restaurants. It has been said before, but there is nothing new about eating fresh food grown and made near where you live. This is how my ancestors—everyone’s ancestors—used to do it. Taverna Santi attracts a high-end clientele, but it also attracts the old Italian-American families who have lived in this area for generations, growing their plots of tomatoes and arugula and Zinfandel wine grapes. The dishes here–a sage-scented osso buco made with local veal, a young chicken, cooked, by tradition, under a brick and served with sautéed greens—are delicious and indulgent, but they are also honest and real, a kind of gourmet peasant cuisine that feels inviting, even to someone like me who has often felt more peasant than gourmet.
When I ate at Santi it was winter, fertile and wet; the food, harvest-colored in deep reds and golds, tasted of rain and earth. Freshly dug beets, roasted with blood oranges, were dusted with Bodega goat cheese brought in from the coast and served atop green shoots of arugula grown at nearby Balletto Ranch. The Torta di Polenta, a savory cornmeal torte, was saturated with local mushrooms—criminis, along with whatever wild ones the chef had foraged. Ravioli stuffed with sweet winter squash and pine nuts was topped with smoked ricotta cheese from the local Bellwether Farms dairy. And then, just before the rich, dark flavors could overwhelm, out came the fish, Trancia d’Ono, showered in a bright, raw salsa made of lemon, lime and orange segments with chopped green olives and fresh mint. With each bite, I felt the land open up to me, offering me a chance to enjoy her abundance, to taste her succulence, to maybe even fall in love. And the next day, as I drove through patches of fog and sunshine, past the redwoods reaching skyward and the oaks hovering down low against the wind, by the bright yellow of sourgrass and the pale buds of apple trees, I felt like I was being welcomed home. ¤
Three Days in the North Coast
DAY 1 POINT REYES AND SOUTHWEST SONOMA Start your terroir tour in Marin County, most famous for its hills and hot tubs overlooking the San Francisco Bay, but in its northwestern region known more for its rugged beaches and grassy hills that blend into the Sonoma, then the Mendocino, coastline. The town of Point Reyes Station, located at the tip of Tomales Bay, is the gateway to a national seashore area filled with scenic views of both ocean and bay. The surrounding hills are dotted with sheep, goats and cows. Ranched for generations by dairy farmers, many of them with Italian roots, this area is now a nexus of artisanal cheese making, including the Giacominis’ Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company (pointreyescheese.com; 800-591-6878). You can’t visit the Giacominis’ dairy, but you can visit-and watch the cheese making-at the Cowgirl Creamery (cowgirlcreamery.com; 415-663-9335), located right in the middle of town. The Cowgirl Creamery produces a variety of soft cheeses, including Mt. Tam, its signature Brie-like cheese, and Red Hawk, a pungent triple cream, all made from milk from the organic Straus dairy nearby. The Creamery is housed in the Tomales Bay Foods building, which also features an organic-produce stand, a gourmet take-out deli and a cheese shop that sells artisanal and farmstead cheeses from all over the world. Many of the local cheese makers do not have public facilities or retail outlets, so this is a great spot to taste these cheeses. Each one has a story, and the Creamery staff will gladly share it with you. Among the local choices: Cindy Callahan’s prizewinning Tuscan-style sheep’s milk cheeses from The Bellwether Farms (www.bellwethercheese.com) in Valley Ford; mild goat's milk cheeses that resemble ricotta, cream cheese and feta from Bodega Goat Cheese (www.bodegagoatcheese.com); and Humboldt Fog chevre, covered in the ash of burnt grapevines, made by the Cypress Grove Dairy (www.cypressgrovechevre.com) in Humboldt, just north of Mendocino.
Another cheesery open to the public is just inland on the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road. The Marin French Cheese Company (marinfrenchcheese .com; 800-292-6001), which makes and sells dozens of cheeses, including Camembert and eight kinds of Brie, is the oldest continuously operated cheese maker in the nation, established in 1865. Look for the black-and-red sign in front of a picturesque pond; picnic supplies are sold in the shop. Further down the road is the McEvoy Ranch (open for tours by appointment only; www mcevoyranch .com 707-778-2307), a lush organic olive farm that will make you think you took a wrong turn and landed in Tuscany. For bread to dip into the oil, head back to the coast, then north along Tomales Bay, veering with Route 1 as the jagged coast forces it inland to the town of Tomales, then over the Sonoma County line, stopping at the bend in the road that is the town of Freestone. Here Jed Wallach of the Wildflower Bakery (707-874-2938) creates wonderful hearth breads using organic flours, wild yeasts and herbs from his adjacent garden. Next head inland to the larger town of Sebastopol, which holds a farmers' market on Sundays May to November, and is also the home of Redwood Hill Farm (redwoodhill.com; 707-823-8250), which invites you to meet more than 400 goats-all named-only on selected open farm days. This is apple country, and one farm to visit is the Twin Hill Ranch (twinhillranch.com; 707-823-2815) in Sebastopol, which grows 10 varieties and sells apple pies, breads and other foods at its country store.
DAY 2 INLAND FROM SONOMA INTO MENDOCINO Highway 101 is your typical traffic-laden California highway, but you can take the parallel Old Redwood Highway to get better views as well as access to some of the hundreds of wineries in Sonoma. The California Welcome Center (sonomawine .com; 800-939-7666) off the Golf Course Drive exit in Rohnert Park will help you decide which wineries to visit. The Welcome Center (open 9:00 A.m.-5 P.m. daily) is also home to regional food and agricultural groups (sonomagrown.com) with maps and other information on local farm trails, farmers' markets and artisan food makers. In the adjacent city of Santa Rosa, check out the huge year-round farmers' market held on Wednesdays and Saturdays (8:30 A.M.-noon) at the Santa Rosa Veterans Memorial Building parking lot, at the intersection of Highway 12 and Maple Street. Local food makers sell their cheese, bread and more alongside the farm-fresh fruits and vegetables. You can also buy a delicious, if simple, hard cheese called St. George at the Matos Cheese Factory (707-584-5283) on Llano Road. Since 1979, Joe and Mary Matos have been making and selling this one cheese named after the Azorean island off Portugal where it, and the Matos family, originates.
Continuing north from Santa Rosa, check out the newly upscale city of Healdsburg, on the Russian River. When I was growing up, Healdsburg was little more than a pit stop before more-attractive destinations in Lake County or Mendocino. But now it's a veritable wine-boom town with artisan bakeries, restaurants, art galleries, inns and hotels, all surrounded by the more than 60 wineries in the Dry Creek and Alexander valleys. Among the vineyards, Colleen McGlynn and Ridgely Evers run an olive grove where they grow Italian varietals for their pungent, peppery, unfiltered olive oil. Their farm is not open to the public, but their DaVero olive oil (davero.com) can be found at the Oakville Grocery (707-433-3200) and the Cheese Course (707-433-' 4998), two Healdsburg shops that sell a great variety of local foods. Another spot for local goods is the Jimtown Store (jimtown.com; 707-4331212), an updated country store located on the outskirts and featuring antiques, picnic supplies and more. Healdsburg's farmers' market is open Tuesdays (4:00-6:00 P.M.) June through October, and Saturdays (9:00 A.M.-noon) May through December. This is the market where the dedicated chefs at Taverna Santi (tavernasanti. com; 707-8571790) often shop. To try Santi for yourself, head eight miles north to Geyserville; look for the plain brick building on Geyserville Avenue with the unassuming neon sign that says simply "Taverna," and get ready to enjoy a rustic Italian-style meal featuring regional, seasonal ingredients.
Your next stop is just over the Mendocino line in Hopland, named after the hops that beermaking settlers planted here. In fact, this is the site of the Mendocino Brewing Company's Hopland Brewery (mendobrew com; 707-744-1361), one of the pioneers in the renaissance of American craft brewing. Bonterra organic wines can be tasted at the Fetzer vineyards visitor center, Valley Oaks (fetzer.com; 800-8468637), which also boasts a deli and a lush organic garden open to the public. If you like sleeping in highceilinged, wooden historical houses located within smelling distance of the grapevines, then Valley Oaks is also a wonderful place to spend the night.
DAY 3 THE ANDERSON VALLEY TO THE MENDOCINO COAST The Anderson Valley-take Route 128 through the length of it-is not that easy to get into and out of, so over the years it has developed a unique personality derived from its population of farmers, loggers, ranchers and back-to-the-landers. The valley actually has its own dialect, Boontling (named after the town of Boonville), which the locals created in the 19th century partly as away to confound newcomers. Boonville is the home of the Anderson Valley Brewing Company (avbc.com; 707-895-2337), which makes several acclaimed beers and offers tours of the brewery. This valley is also the home of a growing number of wineries, including Roederer (roederer -estate.com; 707-895-2288) in the town of Philo, which makes a sparkling wine. The Anderson Valley Winegrowers’Association (.avwines.com; 707-895-9463) sponsors a; Pinot Noir festival with wine tastings and winery open houses in May. Before grapes, this valley was known for its apples, and several farms are keeping that tradition alive. On Route 128 in Philo, look for the sign for the organic Apple Farm (707-895-2333), established on an abandoned apple orchard in 1984, which is doing its best to preserve heirloom species such as Sierra Beauty and Pink Pearl. The Apple Farm has an upscale country stand featuring gourmet jams, syrups, ciders, vinegars, chutneys and more; it also offers accommodations in its cottages located right in the orchards.
Route 128 is slim and steep as it winds its way over the Navarro Ridge and then finally down to the coast, where the wide, open expanse of the Pacific awaits. Head north 15 miles along the coast road to the town of Mendocino, known for its art galleries as well as the foggy, rainy conditions that produce a bounty of wild and cultivated mushrooms. The Mendocino County Alliance (gomendo.com; 866-466-3636) organizes several food festivals, including a wonderful Wine and Mushroom Fest every November, which enlists the culinary talents of chefs in restaurants all over the county, and the Crab & Wine Days in late January-early February. Crab, abalone and a variety of fish are caught in these cold, salty waters and trucked inland or cooked up in local restaurants: One family, the Lewallens, harvests seaweeds from these waters as well and sells them locally and nationally under their Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company label (seaweed.net; 707-895-2996). The Lewallens offer occasional seaweed identification and harvesting seminars. The Ravens Restaurant at the Stanford Inn by the Sea (stanfordinn.com; 800-331-8884) serves a sophisticated menu of organic, vegetarian ingredients, including fresh seaweeds, mushrooms, and vegetables grown in the adjacent kitchen garden. You can also stay at the inn and swim in the greenhouse pool. Or you can dine at Cafe Beaujolais (cafebeaujolais .com; 707-937-5614), which has been artfully preparing organic and local foods since 1977. Or head south down the twisty coast-known in this stretch - as the Elk Coast-to the funky Pangea Cafe (pangeacafe.com; 707-8823001) in Point Arena, where chef-owners Rob and Jill Hunter cook up a world cuisine inspired as much by their travels as by the organic local ingredients. Moroccan lamb, coq au - vin and Thai curries have appeared on ; the menu alongside their home-baked hearth bread. Further south, in Gualala, Rosemary Campiformio cooks up her own North Coast cuisine at St. Orres (saintorres.com; 707884-3335), which also offers accommodations in its gorgeous oceanside lodge and cottages (707-884-3303 for lodging). The food here, emphasizing , 4 local, fresh ingredients including the unusual (sea urchins, huckleberries, wild boar), is pricey, inventive and as dramatic as the sea cliffs dropping into the Pacific. ¤
She's Got Next
by Melissa King
Reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
"It's funny how a game can take you to the truth of things sometimes," says Melissa King in her slam-dunk debut, a memoir of playing pickup basketball in Chicago, Los Angeles, her native Arkansas, and anywhere else she finds a hoop. Lovers of the game, any game, will groove on the way King breaks down the etiquette of street ball—how to hang around and get that nod that invites you into a game, how to play hard but fair and earn the respect to get asked to play the next game. But you don't have to know basketball to appreciate King's keen insights into life, love, work, men, women, and the truth of all sorts of things. "It's okay to enjoy your moments, but you don't want to take it too far, because after a while, people feel like you're rubbing their faces in it, and besides, it's just unseemly," she explains. "You're not that great of a player if you get too excited about a good game, or not that smart of a person if you let yourself believe a day's grace is permanent."
In She's Got Next: A Story of Getting In, Staying Open, and Taking a Shot (Mariner), King uses clean, lean prose to reveal her fierce passion for understanding, realness, and a good ball game. She observes "the fleeting intimacies the game makes possible" between strangers and even friends and the truths that emerge about the people who play the game. Like how one minute men "handle each other like they're pulling legs off bugs, the next minute they're tender as nurses," helping one another off the ground, patting heads and butts. Or how there are distinct types of players: some people are Ball Hogs, others are Trash Talkers, and some "are like fathers, the kind too few people have, the wise and cautious kind." And how behind the posturing and the trash talk is a whole society's worth of conflicts, between rich and poor, black and white, women and men, North and South. And how some court conversations get crude or angry, but at least they're genuine, better "than some polite conversation where everyone's just trying not to say anything wrong, so they don't say anything really."
Throughout her twenties, King wanders between boyfriends and cities and jobs, seeking out a game whenever one or the other lets her down. By her mid-thirties, when she starts to lose a step on the court and begins coaching fourth-grade girls, she understands what basketball has given her. The secret, she suggests in Zen-like fashion, may just lie in those fleeting seconds "when the game is good, when everyone is doing, not thinking, [and] it happens, little stillnesses in the moments when you see your open man and nothing else, or you feel your shot going into the hoop as soon as it leaves your hands, or you share a laugh with someone you've never spoken to." Happiness, she comes to realize, may just be "having something you don't want to leave when you have to," when, for instance, night has fallen, the body is exhausted, the score is forgotten, but still nobody wants to go home. ¤
From Body+Soul
Cravings: A Sensual Memoir
by Jyl Lynn Felman
reviewed by Frances Lefkowitz
If you can get past. The way that Jyl Lynn Felman punctuates her sentences. You might enjoy her searing wit. And insight. Into families. Jewish-American families in particular. In the 1960s. In Dayton, Ohio.
You may wish. That some one had introduced her to the comma. But the punctuation is probably Felman's way. Of translating the spoken. To the written. She is, after all, a performance artist. And a professor. And you can hear her voice pause. As she reaches into the tender places. Of memory and longing. To understand. And be understood. To love. And be loved by. Her family. A very complicated family. With a French mother (Edith Jeanne) and a Russian father (Marvin). And three daughters, Judy, Jan, and Jyl. What we would now call a dysfunctional family. As if there were any other kind.
Cravings is an earnest and funny and painful search. Into mothers and daughters. And fathers and daughters. And daughters and daughters. Felman, who is the youngest. And who keeps kosher, like her parents. But not like her sisters. Chronicles the pressures on an immigrant family. To do good in America. Because. As her grandfather used to say. "In America. We cannot afford a single mistake. Or they'll come after us. Again. And this time. We won't be so lucky. Technology is more advanced."
When the unspeakable (like the Holocaust) happens, there is often no alternative. But to not speak about it. In the Felman family, this silence extended to all problems. And so the daughters each developed their own way of dealing with pain. Like stealing designer clothes. And dating gentiles. And eating treif (non-Kosher food). And becoming anorexic, a condition that made the eldest daughter look like she lived in a concentration camp. Starving. Even though. After the Holocaust. As Felman says many times. "A Jew should never go hungry again."
Cravings is also a kind of love poem. And a grief poem. To Felman's mother. Who had style, and would not allow her girls "to wear white (or even ivory) a single minute before Memorial Day or an hour after Labor Day." And who died in 1993. Of Parkinson's. "A mother of mythic proportions who dies achieving true icon status." Leaving her daughters. With even more cravings than before.
In a memoir, self-indulgence comes with the territory. But sometimes the author goes so far. Into her feelings. That she loses us. Or she repeats them. Over and over. Until we wish that she would lose us. Other times she forces two ideas. That don't want to be together. To sit next to each other. As if they were sisters. But it's not cozy. It's convoluted.
For the most part, Felman's emotions are ones anyone who grew up in a family can relate to. Like yearning. And regret. If only she'd taken a bite of the McDonalds cheeseburger when her sister offered it to her. But she wanted to keep kosher. So she had a fishwich. Like her parents. If she had just tasted the treif. Then maybe the family allegiances would have been drawn along different lines. And her sisters would not have been on the other side from her. And the whole family would have been happy.
But then she wouldn't have written this memoir. And we wouldn't have found out about the Felman girls' problems, so complicated and so commonplace. Like the yearning for their mother. And her food. Which ended up going, in the form of recipes, to the eldest daughter. The one with bulimia. Over three hundred recipes. Hand written on color-coded index cards. Meat on pink cards; vegetable dishes on yellow; dairy on white; and desserts on green. Brisket with raisins. "Aunt" Betty's mandelbrot with chocolate chips. Sweet and sour Moroccan kofta. "In the margins. Of her collection. Edith writes her opinion of particular dishes," says Felman. "Terrific Rosh Hashanah appetizer (Aunt Marge's favorite)." "Add extra sugar if serving Marvin." These recipes, like the chapters in this book, compose a history. Of a person. And a family And a culture. Several cultures. Trying to survive. By remembering.¤
From Hope Magazine
