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Sounds interesting. I'm reading Lies My Teacher Told Me and I'll be curious to see if some of the same material is covered.

Hey, Mellow, never worry about me wasting time with books. I still adhere to my 50 page rule so Alice had me in some way. I never considered giving upon it.

I did, however, read Phil's comments on an early Rechy book being banned while in the midst of Alice, and the issues of banning (which I am against) and pornography kept coming to mind. I mention that because I'd call Alice porno, stylistically written porno but still porno. BTW, what does a book have to do today to be considered porno? Have a naked woman, a donkey and a whip on the cover?

Mellow, again, labeling Alice as porno is pure classification, not a moral judgment. Even so classed IMHO I still wouldn't consider time with it wasted.

NWP, you've convinced me to give Audicity of Hope a try. Mellow, I'll be looking into the Japanese one, and Phil the historical mystery sounds good.

When my son was taking honors English in 6th grade, he had a reading list of books from which to choose. I was struck by one of the selections: any book by Dick Francis.

At the time I had not read a book by Mr. Francis and thought he was "just another writer of pop fiction." Now that I have read all of his books including the last "Dead Heat" I understand the reason my son's teacher, a lover of books, gave the students the chance to read a Dick Francis book.

I think I feel as fond of Francis' books as Martha does McBain's.

This neat little book is the story of Max Moreton, a culinary star, who gets caught up in a web of international portions.

Martha has me dog-earing passages:

from page 49: "..it appeared to me because there was nothing nw to report and they had to fill the time somehow...Middle East experts were wheeled in to the studio to make endless, meaningless comments about a speculative theory about which they had no facts or evidence.....

from page 51: "Karl Marx stated in 1844 that religion was the opium of the people, but nowadays sport in general, and soccer in particular, had taken over that mantle."

from page 75: "Ideally main courses should be ready ten minutes after the starters have been cleared from the table, or, if no starters are ordered, within twenty-eight minutes of the order arriving in the kitchen. ...if a customer was kept waiting for longer than he or she thought reasonable, it didn't matter how good the food tasted when it arrived, only the wait would be remembered and not the flavors."

from page 107: "on a regular basis, (patrons) need to be comfortable rather than challenged, and they want their food predictable rather an experimental."

from page 134: "Isn't music described as food for the soul? ...The quote is actually about passion. There's sure no passion in the human soul, but finds its food in music....I can't remember who said it or even what it means, but it was carved on a wooden plaque in the hallway at my music school."

TO BE CONTINUED....I JUST REALIZED HOW VERY HUNGRY I AM

As I reported, I finished "A Thousand Splendid Suns" while in Orlando last week. I am anxious now to start "The Kite Runner."

Martha has me dog earing pages.

This from "TSS" page 26: "You think you're a daughter to him? That he's going to take you in Let me tell you something. A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing, Mariam. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed, it won't stretch to make room for you......When I'm gone you'll have nothing. You'll have nothing. You are nothing."

Respectfully,

Kathy Albers

Another quote from "A Thousand Splendid Suns." This one about the unrest in Afghanistan

from page 155: "Insults were hurled. Fingers pointed. Accusations flew.....The Mujahideen, armed to the teeth but now lacking a common enemy, had found the enemy in each other."

Profound huh?

Kathy Albers

I'm not sure I agree. I wish I remembered specifically where, but I have muttered to friends after a long restaurant wait, "Damn! This better be unbelievably good." And it was, enabling me to eat both the food and my words.

I just finished reading "The Ghost Map" by Steven Johnson.
It is a non-fiction book about an apparently dry topic... The scourge of Cholera in 1850's London.

In talking about his subject, the author brings in quite a lot of other interesting material. Among other things, it gives a person quite a lot of perspective about period dramas that show people going around London, Sometimes they do try to portray the Dickensian poverty. Bit there is no way to adequately conceive the filth and stanch of cities before there were systems of public sanitation.

In covering all of this, the author also makes the point of the importance of cities in promoting what we consider to be "progress"... And also he indirectly shows the results of today's presumed nirvana of having the smallest possible government with mostly only individual responsibility. When the government had no role in "waste" collection, people literally filled their basements with excrement, or threw it out the window. In a city of 2 million people, this got to be a very stinky situation.

Another fascinating detail was that people of the time were convinced that disease came from foul air. And they continued to believe this despite various logical reasons why it was unlikely... ie there were people who worked in sewers and carting away filth who were generally extremely healthy.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book. I probably would not have gone out of my way to get this book on this topic, but my wife got it through a recommendation of a valued friend. And after she finished I picked it up. And it really is a fantastic book.

Ardy, Martha and I can share a community story about the subject of the book you just read. In early Huntsville, the water for the community was drawn from a big spring downtown. It was also the local exchange of produce and materials. The townspeople would hitch their horses up and horses would do what they needed to do, polluting the water supply. People would get sick.

Above the town was a plateau. A hotel was built there and the sick would go up on the hill and surprisingly get better. It was such a source of revival that it was named Monte Sano (loosely translated from Mountain of Health). It was not the fresh air but the lack of drinking contaminated water that brought about revived health.

Did the book talk about the use of the Thames as a giant flushing machine for the Tower of London? That I have also heard discussed and how disguisting that river was.

Kathy

It did not specifically talk about the Tower of London. The focus was on a specific district that was ravaged by a specific epidemic and the people who figured out the causality based upon the fact that most of the deaths clustered around a single pump. And surprisingly, despite that fact, most experts were still convinced that it was a case of bad air. Even to the extent that there was a case where water from the pump was sent to a person outside the city who then died... and people suggested that perhaps the bad air had some how affected the water.

Anyway, at the time in London there were numerous private water companies. Most of them took water from the Thames river. A couple, took their water from the lower Thames... which is AFTER various sewers dumped huge amounts of human waste into the river upstream. It is just amazing that there were not even MORE health problems given the abysmal level of sanitation.

And in all of the above, it is amazing to consider the every day sorts of risks that people lived with on a daily basis. If cholera took hold in a city, you could have 10,000 deaths in a few weeks. No one knew what was going on, or how to stop it. You might have your spouse catch the disease, and then after he/she dies, it would be your turn as the children watched.

Another startling thing is that cholera primarily kills by dehydration. You get very watery stools and quickly lose all you fluid. But people did not figure out the apparently obvious remedy to just give people lots of fluids... even bad water.

Ardy,
The Ghost Map just went on my B&N.com wish list. And since I'm almost down to only half a shelf of unreads, I can order soon.

I know this first hand because my son almost died at the age of two from extreme diahreah (sp). He had something called milk anemia. He was drinking milk and not eating. We learned that about 70% of all fluid goes through the bowels. Andrew had to be hospitalized and on IVs but nothing by mouth for a week.