What I'm Reading Now

The contention between the "new" atheists and the devout is causing a resurgence in agnostic studies. Krasny (Off Mike) is a public radio host and a self-declared agnostic, maintaining a position that "stands open to verification of either side of the God question." Deftly balancing biography and literary scholarship, the book is both a personal examination of agnosticism and a balanced voice in the complex debate over faith's role in society. Krasny grew up a strong believer in his Jewish faith, until adolescent questioning led him to declare he just wasn't sure. Despite a lost connection with God, the young Krasny continued to seek a divine presence, even admitting to feelings of envy toward those possessing "the consolation of faith." In this book, agnosticism is a tool to philosophically engage with various manifestations of faith including organized religion, spiritual-but-not-religious sentiments, and even paranormal theories. Readers expecting a late chapter conversion will be disappointed; Krasny remains agnostic to the end, even while declaring his respect for the benefits religion can bring to believers.


You can access Krasny's NPR interview here.

What I Just Finished

If you've ever wondered why you just can't stop eating certain foods, even when you have admirable self discipline in other areas, this book is for you.

From Publishers Weekly:

Conditioned hypereating is a biological challenge, not a character flaw, says Kessler, former FDA commissioner under presidents Bush and Clinton). Here Kessler (A Question of Intent) describes how, since the 1980s, the food industry, in collusion with the advertising industry, and lifestyle changes have short-circuited the body's self-regulating mechanisms, leaving many at the mercy of reward-driven eating. Through the evidence of research, personal stories (including candid accounts of his own struggles) and examinations of specific foods produced by giant food corporations and restaurant chains, Kessler explains how the desire to eat—as distinct from eating itself—is stimulated in the brain by an almost infinite variety of diabolical combinations of salt, fat and sugar. Although not everyone succumbs, more people of all ages are being set up for a lifetime of food obsession due to the ever-present availability of foods laden with salt, fat and sugar. A gentle though urgent plea for reform, Kessler's book provides a simple food rehab program to fight back against the industry's relentless quest for profits while an entire country of people gain weight and get sick. According to Kessler, persistence is all that is needed to make the perceptual shifts and find new sources of rewards to regain control.

What I'm Reading Now

'"The honest truth is that it's sad to be over sixty," concludes Nora Ephron in her sparkling new book about aging. With 15 essays in 160 pages, this collection is short, a thoughtful concession to pre- and post-menopausal women (who else is there?), like herself, who "can't read a word on the pill bottle," follow a thought to a conclusion, or remember the thought after not being able to read the pill bottle. Ephron drives the truth home like a nail in your soon-to-be-bought coffin: "Plus, you can't wear a bikini." But just as despair sets in, she admits to using "quite a lot of bath oil... I'm as smooth as silk." Yes, she is. This is aging lite—but that might be the answer. Besides, there's always Philip Roth for aging heavy.Ephron, in fact, offers a brief anecdote about Roth, in a chapter on cooking, concerning her friend Jane, who had a one-night stand, long ago, with the then "up-and-coming" writer. He gave Jane a copy of his latest book. "Take one on your way out," he said. Conveniently, there was a box of them by the front door. Ephron refuses to analyze—one of her most refreshing qualities—and quickly moves on to Jane's céleri remoulade.Aging, according to Ephron, is one big descent—and who would argue? (Well, okay—but they'd lose the argument if they all got naked.) There it is, the steady spiraling down of everything: body and mind, breasts and balls, dragging one's self-respect behind them. Ephron's witty riffs on these distractions are a delightful antidote to the prevailing belief that everything can be held up with surgical scaffolding and the drugs of denial. Nothing, in the end, prevents the descent. While signs of mortality proliferate, Ephron offers a rebuttal of consequence: an intelligent, alert, entertaining perspective that does not take itself too seriously. (If you can't laugh, after all, you are already, technically speaking, dead.) She does, however, concede that hair maintenance—styling, dyeing, highlighting, blow-drying—is a serious matter, not to mention the expense. "Once I picked up a copy of Vogue while having my hair done, and it cost me twenty thousand dollars. But you should see my teeth." Digging deeper, she discovers that your filthy, bulging purse containing numerous things you don't need—and couldn't find if you did—is, "in some absolutely horrible way, you." Ephron doesn't shy away from the truth about sex either, and confesses, though with an appropriate amount of shame, that despite having been a White House intern in 1961, she did not have an affair with JFK. May Ephron, and her purse, endure so she can continue to tell us how it goes. Or, at least, where it went.'

What I'm Reading Now

I know this one's been around for a while, but better late than never.

From Publishers Weekly

Schlosser's incisive history of the development of American fast food indicts the industry for some shocking crimes against humanity, including systematically destroying the American diet and landscape, and undermining our values and our economy. The first part of the book details the postwar ascendance of fast food from Southern California, assessing the impact on people in the West in general. The second half looks at the product itself: where it is manufactured (in a handful of enormous factories), what goes into it (chemicals, feces) and who is responsible (monopolistic corporate executives). In harrowing detail, the book explains the process of beef slaughter and confirms almost every urban myth about what in fact "lurks between those sesame seed buns." Given the estimate that the typical American eats three hamburgers and four orders of french fries each week, and one in eight will work for McDonald's in the course of their lives, few are exempt from the insidious impact of fast food. Throughout, Schlosser fires these and a dozen other hair-raising statistical bullets into the heart of the matter. While cataloguing assorted evils with the tenacity and sharp eye of the best investigative journalist, he uncovers a cynical, dismissive attitude to food safety in the fast food industry and widespread circumvention of the government's efforts at regulation enacted after Upton Sinclair's similarly scathing novel exposed the meat-packing industry 100 years ago. By systematically dismantling the industry's various aspects, Schlosser establishes a seminal argument for true wrongs at the core of modern America. (Jan.) Forecast: This book will find a healthy, young audience; it's notable that the Rolling Stone article on which this book was based generated more reader mail than any other piece the magazine ran in the 1990s.

What I'm Reading Now

"'It hurts to be beautiful' has been a cliche for centuries. What has been far less appreciated is how much it hurts not to be beautiful. The Beauty Bias explores our cultural preoccupation with attractiveness, the costs it imposes, and the responses it demands.

Beauty may be only skin deep, but the damages associated with its absence go much deeper. Unattractive individuals are less likely to be hired and promoted, and are assumed less likely to have desirable traits, such as goodness, kindness, and honesty. Three quarters of women consider appearance important to their self image and over a third rank it as the most important factor.

Although appearance can be a significant source of pleasure, its price can also be excessive, not only in time and money, but also in physical and psychological health. Our annual global investment in appearance totals close to $200 billion. Many individuals experience stigma, discrimination, and related difficulties, such as eating disorders, depression, and risky dieting and cosmetic procedures. Women bear a vastly disproportionate share of these costs, in part because they face standards more exacting than those for men, and pay greater penalties for falling short.

The Beauty Bias explores the social, biological, market, and media forces that have contributed to appearance-related problems, as well as feminism's difficulties in confronting them. The book also reviews why it matters. Appearance-related bias infringes fundamental rights, compromises merit principles, reinforces debilitating stereotypes, and compounds the disadvantages of race, class, and gender. Yet only one state and a half dozen localities explicitly prohibit such discrimination. The Beauty Bias provides the first systematic survey of how appearance laws work in practice, and a compelling argument for extending their reach. The book offers case histories of invidious discrimination and a plausible legal and political strategy for addressing them. Our prejudices run deep, but we can do far more to promote realistic and healthy images of attractiveness, and to reduce the price of their pursuit."

Beauty Bias

In this week's edition of Newsweek, columnist Dahlia Lithwick discusses the "massive social problem" of "appearance bias." Her column begins:

"If you are anything like me, you left the theater after Sex and the City 2 and thought, there ought to be a law against a looks-based culture in which the only way for 40-year-old actresses to be compensated like 40-year-old actors is to have them look and dress like the teenage daughters of 40-year-old actors. You can't even look at Sarah Jessica Parker without longing to feed her croissants."

Well, I've never longed to feed SJP anything, but I'm on board for the rest of her claim. Ageism is alive and well at the movies. When Catherine Zeta Jones plays the love interest of an almost 70-year-old Sean Connery or Maggie Gyllenhall is paired with an aging Jeff Bridges, no one blinks an eye. But switch it around to an older woman/younger man scenario, and she's disparagingly referred to as a "cougar," and the relationship becomes the stuff of comedy.

But it's not simply ageism. My dissertation dealt with beauty theory, and I find it fascinating. There's no denying that humans (all ages, both genders) are drawn to beauty. I remember watching a segment of some news show in which they'd trained two kindergarten teachers--one very pretty, one not-so-attractive--to teach the same lesson in exactly the same way. After the two teachers taught, the reporter asked the children, "Which teacher is the best teacher?" The answer? You guessed it--the pretty one won out, every time. Psychologist Nancy Etcoff argues that beauty preference is biological--we can't help it. It represents health, the survival of our species,and even the survival of our own genes.

However, feminists like Naomi Wolf argue that it's more than a natural preference for facial symmetry, the proper layout of features, good proportion, and a straight profile. She sees beauty expectations as coercive, sexist power-plays, and historian Arthur Marwick warns that any beauty theory that leaves out the power of sexual desire is incomplete.

In Lithwick's Newsweek article, she talks about a new book by Deborah Rhode, a professor of law at Stanford, called The Beauty Bias, in which she "proposes a legal regime in which discrimination on the basis of looks is as serious as discrimination based on gender or race." Very interesting. But is that even possible? I've already ordered the book, so I'll give you an update on it after it comes in and I've read it. I'm pretty sure it'll move to the top of my to-read list.

These Are the Best

The New Yorker just published its list of The Best Books of 2009. Here it is:

NONFICTION
Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press; $32.95). Central bankers and the disaster of the gold standard.
Somewhere Towards the End, by Diana Athill (Norton; $24.95). Reflections on life as a nonagenarian.
Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, by Louis Begley (Yale; $ 24). A compact treatment of a complex case.
Germany 1945, by Richard Bessel (Harper; $28.99). A powerful picture of a nation in defeat.
Hiding Man, by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin’s; $35). The life and work of Donald Barthelme.
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s; $24). Caught between Hurricane Katrina and the war on terror.
My Paper Chase, by Harold Evans (Little, Brown; $27.99). Memories of the newspaper trade.
Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer (Little, Brown; $25.99). A playful yet serious vegetarian manifesto.
Flannery, by Brad Gooch (Little, Brown; $30). The quiet life behind Flannery O’Connor’s fantastic fiction.
Dorothea Lange, by Linda Gordon (Norton; $35). From society photographer to photographer of society.
Fordlandia, by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan; $27.50). Henry Ford’s Amazonian folly.
Go Down Together, by Jeff Guinn (Simon & Schuster; $27). Behind the myth of Bonnie and Clyde.
Beg, Borrow, Steal, by Michael Greenberg (Other Press; $19.95). Notes on a freelancing life.
A Strange Eventful History, by Michael Holroyd (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $40). The linked lives of two nineteenth-century stage stars.
Marx’s General, by Tristram Hunt (Metropolitan; $32). Friedrich Engels, the industrialist who bankrolled “Das Kapital.”
Lit, by Mary Karr (Harper; $25.99). The author of “The Liars’ Club” finds God.
The Magician’s Book, by Laura Miller (Little, Brown; $25.99). Reading C. S. Lewis as a child and as an adult.
Trotsky, by Robert Service (Harvard; $35). Stalin’s rival is not to be romanticized.
A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit (Viking; $27.95). Natural disasters and the power of community.
The First Tycoon, by T. J. Stiles (Knopf; $37.50). Cornelius Vanderbilt’s grand gambles.
The Death of Conservatism, by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House; $17). A movement’s maladies.
The Yankee Years, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci (Doubleday; $26.95). A view from the bench.
The Parents We Mean to Be, by Richard Weissbourd (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $25). Why we should beware of overpraising our children.
The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright (Little, Brown; $ 25.99). The development of religion from the Stone Age to now.

FICTION AND POETRY

The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday; $26.95). Revisiting the post-apocalyptic world of “Oryx and Crake.”
The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker (Simon & Schuster; $25). A crafty bagatelle on poetic themes.
The Way Through Doors, by Jesse Ball (Vintage; $13.95). A dizzyingly circuitous inversion of the Scheherazade legend.
The Collected Poems & Unfinished Poems, by C. P. Cavafy, translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn (Knopf; $35 & $30). Modern Greek’s great master.
The Immortals, by Amit Chaudhuri (Knopf; $25.95). Tradition and modernity in Bombay.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis , (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30). Small but perfectly formed fictions.
Sonata Mulattica, by Rita Dove (Norton; $24.95). A verse sequence about a biracial violinist who played with Beethoven.
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon; $24). A diptych of cosmopolitan emptiness and spiritual seeking.
Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (Melville House; $27). A neglected classic about a couple’s resistance to the Nazis.
Wanting, by Richard Flanagan (Atlantic Monthly; $24). From Tasmania to the Arctic with Sir John Franklin.
Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn (Shaye Areheart; $24). A sinister thriller about a girl who survives her family’s murder.
The Magicians, by Lev Grossman (Viking; $26.95). An artfully self-reflective fantasy novel.
Tinkers, by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press; $14.95). The death of a patriarch in nineteenth-century Maine.
The Believers, by Zoë Heller (Harper; $25.99). Family secrets and rivalries in the aftermath of 9/11.
Censoring an Iranian Love Story, by Shahriar Mandanipour, translated from the Farsi by Sara Khalili (Knopf; $25). Passion and repression in the Islamic Republic.
The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li (Random House; $25). A novel of political upheaval in China.
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt; $27). Tudor intrigue.
Upgraded to Serious, by Heather McHugh (Copper Canyon; $22). Poems of compassion and verbal intricacy.
Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger (Scribner; $ 26.99). A gothic yarn around a London cemetery.
Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín (Scribner; $25). Emigration, love, and homesickness.
Love and Summer, by William Trevor (Viking; $25.95). Irish provincial life in the nineteen-fifties.
Lowboy, by John Wray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25). A schizophrenic rides the subway.

Fiction Withdrawal

All my reading lately has been nonfiction, and I’m going through fiction withdrawal.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love nonfiction. But it’s like a diet of all vegetables. They taste great and they’re good for you. But sometimes you just want dessert.

The reason I’ve limited myself lately to nonfiction is that, with this genre, I have much more self control. I can close the covers, put it down, and not feel quite as compelled to read when I should be doing something else. Like working on a dissertation.

But, man. I stare at the unread novels on my nightstand like a dieter longingly eyes the pastries in the bakery shop window.

Really. I do.