Blind Spot by Teju Cole

Hardcover, 352 pages Expected publication: June 13th 2017 by Random House ISBN13: 9780399591075

This book of photographs paired with short essays is due out in the next two weeks. I want to give you ample time to order one for delivery on publication. Teju Cole’s art is exceptional at the same time it is accessible. In my experience, the confluence of these two things happens only rarely, which is how Cole has come to occupy an exalted place in my pantheon of artists. If I say his photography can stop us in our tracks, it says nothing of his writing, which always adds something to my understanding. Today I discovered his website has soundtracks which open doors. And there it is, his specialness: Cole’s observations enlarge our conversation.

This may be the most excellent travel book I have read in recent years, the result of years of near-constant travel by the author. Scrolling through the Table of Contents is a tease, each destination intriguing, irresistible, stoking our curiosity. Each entry is accompanied by a photograph, or is it the other way around?

“I want to make the kinds of pictures editors of the travel section will dislike or find unusable. I want to see the things the people who live there see, or at least what they would see after all the performance of tourism has been stripped away.”

Yes, this is my favored way of travel, for “the shock of familiarity, the impossibility of exact repetition.” It is the reason most photographs of locales seemed unable to capture even a piece of my experience. But Cole manages it. In the entry for “Palm Beach,” his picture is of a construction site, a pile of substratum—in this case, sand—piled high before an elaborate pinkish villa. His written entry is one of his shortest, only three sentences, one of them the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego, washing the scene with knowledge of what we are viewing, and what is to come.

Cole calls this work a lyric essay, a “singing line” connecting the places. There is some of that. What connects all these places for me are Cole’s eyes…and his teacherly quality of showing us what he is thinking. It is remarkable, and totally engrossing.

“Human experience varies greatly in its externals, but on the emotional and psychological level, we have a great deal of similarity with one another.”

Yes, this insight, so obvious written down, is something I have been struggling with for such a long time, going back and forth over the idea that we are the same, we are different. Cole tells us that this book stands alone, or can be seen as fourth in a quartet addressing his “concern with the limits of vision.” I want to sink into that thought, in the context of what he has given us, because outside the frame of a photograph, outside of our observation, outside of us, is everything else.

My favorite among the essays, if we can call them such, filled as much with what Cole did not say as with what he did, is the piece called “Black River.” Cole evokes the open sea, Derek Walcott, crocodiles, and white egrets. A tropical coastal swamp filled with crocodiles also had white egrets decorating the bushy green of overhanging mangroves, the large white splashes almost equidistant from one another, the closest they can be for maximum happiness, I like to think, t hough it could also be minimum happiness, I guess. Any closer and there will be discord, like the rest of us live.

The arrival in bookstores of a book by Teju Cole is an event. His pictures makes us look, and his words are like the egrets, spaced for maximum pleasure. Whether or not you read this as a series or alone, make sure you pick it up, just to gaze. You need have no agenda. His magic does not make much of itself. He takes us along for the ride. Bravo!



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Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way it Does by Philip Ball

This is a gorgeous-looking book. Since this topic has been one I have been promising myself to examine for some time, I picked up this striking volume from a face-out display in my public library which has, I was surprised to learn later, a large collection of Philip Ball's books, but not yet his latest, called The Water Kingdom, about China and its relationship with water. It sounds fascinating.

This book about patterns found in nature has very little discussion within. One must make do with the magnificent photography that includes some of the very best pictures I have seen of a certain weather phenomenon, say, or a geologic feature. Many of the microscopic subjects (viruses, insect eyes, closeups of sea creatures) are artificially colored so that the features stand in stark contrast. It is definitely coffee-table quality.

For creatives and artists, this work is positively inspirational. Scientists may use it to demonstrate some observable phenomenon, but although the photos are labelled, the text sometimes proved insufficient to adequately explain the complicated reasons for why such patterns appear. Some of the less complex subjects and accompanying text were sufficient to pique further investigation elsewhere.

Something I may have encountered before but do not recall ever seeing in quite the same way were pictures of Chladni figures, or fine grains on a flat surface subjected to sound waves. The grains formed intricate patterns. The figure I use an example here is not from Ball's book. His was so glamorous it sent me spinning to find more information.

The other single coolest thing I have ever seen was a photo of Fingal's Cave on the Isle of Staffa in Scotland. Again, this is not the photo that Ball included in his book, but hopefully will give you some idea why it was so thrilling to me. Cracks have formed six-sided posts of basalt.


Something similar can be found at a place in California called Devil's Postpile: columnar cracks in the side of a hill. Unbelievably cool.



There is much, much more in this book. While I did not find answers to all my questions, the book contains gorgeous examples of patterns you will wish to research further, having seen them in such brilliant detail.

Hardcover, 288 pages Published April 5th 2016 by University Of Chicago Press ISBN 022633242X (ISBN13: 9780226332420)



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Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole

This book of essays by Teju Cole aren’t always essays: they might be scraps of thought, well-digested and to an immediate point. They are fiercely intelligent, opinionated, meaningful in a way that allow us to get to the heart of how another thinks. And does he think! Let’s be frank: many of us don’t do enough thinking, and Cole shows us the way it can be done in a way that educates, informs, and excites us.

The work in this volume are nonfiction pieces published in a wide variety of outlets and that he chose from an eight-year period of travel and almost constant writing. The emphasis in these pieces, he tells us in the Preface, is on “epiphany.” We can enjoy kernels of ideas that may have had a long gestation, but have finally burst onto the scene with a few sentences but little heavy-handedness or any of the weight of “pronouncements.” This reads like a bared heart in the midst of negotiating life, as James Baldwin says in The Fire Next Time, “as nobly as possible, for the sake of those coming after us.”

Cole references Baldwin in all these pieces in his unapologetic gaze, but he does so explicitly in several pieces, notably “Black Body” in which he tells of visiting the small town in Switzerland, Leukerbad (or Loèche-les-Bains), where Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain found its final form. Cole expands on his time in Switzerland in “Far Away From Here,” which might be my favorite of these essays. Cole tells how he was given six months to work and write in Zurich and though he did precious little writing, he was totally absorbed every day, gazing at the landscape, walking the mountains, photographing the crags, trails, and lakes, thinking, unfettered. This is someone who carries all he needs in his head, and I loved that freedom as much as he.

But how can I choose a favorite from among these pieces when each spoke of ways to approach a subject with which we have struggled—or haven’t yet…About race and class: “how little sense of shame [Americans] seemed to have,” he writes, looking at America from his upbringing in Lagos. Cole echoes Baldwin again in “Bad Laws” about Israel and its laws concerning the rights of Palestinians:

”The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor…Israel uses an extremely complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus to dispossess Palestinians of their land, hoping perhaps to forestall accusations of a brutal land grab.”

Earlier Baldwin reminded us that “…few liberals have any notion of how long, how costly, and how heartbreaking a task it is to gather the evidence that one can carry into court [to prove malfeasance, official or not], or how long such court battles take.” Americans looking at Israel and Palestine should be able to discern some outline of our own justifications and methods, and vice versa.

Photography is one of Cole’s special interests and he is eloquent in Section Two "Seeing Things" in discussing what makes great photography as opposed to the “dispiriting stream of empty images [that the] Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia.” And then he discusses “Death in the Browser Tab,” wherein he tells us what he sees and what he knows after retracing the steps caught by the phone footage recording Walter Scott being shot in the back by eight bullets from a .45-caliber Glock 21.

Politics is what humans do, though “the sheer quantity of impacted bullshit in politics” is clearly not something Cole relishes. In "The Reprint" Cole admits he did not vote until sixteen years after he was eligible, and when he did vote finally, for Obama, “like a mutation that happens quietly on a genetic level and later completely alters the body’s function, I could feel my relationship to other Americans changing. I had a sense—dubious to me for so long, and therefore avoided—of common cause.” He notes that Obama was “not an angry black man, the son of slaves” but a biracial outsider who invisibly worked his way to the center of the political establishment piggybacking the experience of American blacks by hiding in plain sight. The night Obama won, Cole was in Harlem.

“There was as exuberant and unscripted an outpouring of joy as I ever expect to see anywhere… Black presidents are no novelty for to me. About half my life, the half I lived in Nigeria, had been spent under their rule, and, in my mind, the color of the president was neither here nor there. But this is America. Race mattered.”

Cole will speak out in "A Reader's War" against Obama’s “clandestine brand of justice” and his “ominous, discomfiting, illegal, and immoral use of weaponized drones against defenseless strangers…done for our sakes.” He admits that Obama believes he is trying “to keep us safe,” and writes “I am not naive…and I know our enemies are not all imaginary…I am grateful to those whose bravery keeps us safe.” It is one of the most difficult questions about political and military power that we face today and Cole wrestles the issue heroically. Not any of us have yet answered this question well, and until we do, the disconnect between justice and drone strikes will continue to plague us. We have unleashed a terrible swift sword on far away lands while we continue to suffer the brutality of a thousand cuts from our own citizens. Cosmic justice?

When Cole talks about literature I experience a frisson. There is nothing quite like someone very clever and well-spoken addressing something about which one cares deeply. His insights add to my pleasure, and detract nothing. His description of the poetry of Derek Walcott remind me of the first time I encountered Walcott’s work: “This is poetry with a painterly hand, stroke by patient stroke.” I have forever thought of Walcott in this way, in color and in motion: turquoise and pale yellow, cool beige and hibiscus pink, the palest gray and an ethereal green I am not sure is water, air, or sea grass. The ocean creates tides through his work, and it seems so fresh.

When Cole writes of his visit to V.S. Naipaul in “Natives on the Boat," we sense how Cole’s initial reserve is eventually won over by Naipaul’s deeply curious and wide-ranging questions. In the very next essay, “Housing Mr. Biswas,” Cole writes an ecstatic celebration of Naipaul’s accomplishment in creating the “smart and funny, but also often petulant, mean, and unsympathetic” Mr. Biswas in Trinidad,

“an important island in the Caribbean but not a particularly influential one on the world stage…the times and places—the farms, the roads, the villages, the thrumming energy of the city, the mornings, afternoon, dusks, and nights—are described with profound and vigilant affection…it brings to startling fruition in twentieth century Trinidad the promise of the nineteenth century European novel.”

He’s right of course. Naipaul is a beloved writer of a type of novel no longer written, and perhaps now not often read.

Reading all these essays in one big gulp was a lot to digest so I am going to recommend a slower savoring. This is a book one must own and keep handy for those small moments when one wants a short, sharp shock of something wonderful. By all means read it all at once so you know where to go back to when you can dig up copies of some of the photos he talks about or want to recall how Cole manages in so few words to convey so much meaning. His is a voice thoughtful in expressing what he sees and yet so vulnerable and human I want to say—read this—this man is what’s been missing from your lives.


These collected essays will be published August 9, 2016. I read the e-galley provided to me by Netgalley and Random House. I note that some of the essays about art or photography that were initially published in newspapers sometimes were accompanied by examples of the work he discusses. In a perfect world, these would be included in the final book, but truthfully, his writing is clear and compelling enough to not make that nicety strictly necessary. Apologies to the publisher for quoting from a galley: my excuse is that the work is previously published and therefore no surprise.


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The Face: Cartography of the Void and Other Works by Chris Abani

ebook, First Edition, 59 pages Published September 23rd 2014 by Restless Books

The work of Chris Abani crosses national boundaries. He calls himself a “global Igbo,” referring to his lineage, and to the fact that he has so many foreign influences on his experience as a Nigerian. Brought up privileged in an educated middle-class household with a white British mother and an Oxford-educated Igbo father, Abani had access to western music, American novels, Bollywood films, Indian mysticism as a youth. He was a precocious fourth son, starting to write in his early teens.

His face, which he talks about in his memoir, The Face: Cartography of the Void, has a kind of universality so that people often mistake him for Lebanese, Arab, Indian, Dominican, Cuban, Hawaiian, or Maori. When his Korean manicurist in L.A. called his face “comfortable,” Abani writes

"Comfortable face. I liked it. Made me think of a well-worn armchair that I’d like to collapse into after a rough day. A face made for sitting in. Where one could sip a sweet spicy ginger tea and talk about love and books and karaoke. A face worn in by living, worn in by suffering, by pain, by loss, but also by laughter and joy and the gifts of love and friendship, of family, of travel, of generations of DNA blending to make a true mix of human. I think of all the stress and relief of razors scraping hair from my face. Of extreme weather. Of rain. Of sun. I think of all the people who have touched my face, slapped it, punched it, kissed it, washed it, shaved it. All of that human contact must leave some trace, some of the need and anger that motivated that touch. This face is softened by it all. Made supple by all the wonder it has beheld, all the kindness, all the generosity of life.
Comfortable face."

It is not just the face of Chris Abani that is comfortable. He makes us comfortable about ourselves, about the world, about our fears and aspirations. Abani’s fiction reveals the insides of characters who are often different in some way, their very differentness expressing their underlying and universal humanity. We are all different from one another. It is our differentness that makes us the same.

At the same time, Abani makes us uncomfortable. In an essay he wrote for Witness magazine entitled, “Ethics and Narrative: the Human and Other,” he writes

"In making my art, and sometimes when I teach, I am like a crazed, spirit-filled, snake-handling, speaking-in-tongues, spell-casting, Babylon-chanting-down, new-age, evangelical preacher wildly kicking the crutches away from my characters, forcing them into their pain and potential transformation. Alas, or maybe not, I also kick the crutches away from my readers. And many have fled from the revival tents of my art, screaming in terror."

When we go to dark places in ourselves, Abani suggests, we can come back, better. “When you are at your worst, you can see yourself most clearly.” At your worst, you can see your choices most clearly, and choose goodness, compassion. This is a man who has seen the darkness in humans and who still [mostly] likes us, who can laugh, make jokes, love others deeply. We feel safe with him, and if he can’t save us when something bad happens, at least we shared something real with another for awhile. Abani writes fiction and poetry—how real and important can that be? Quite real enough to reveal both the dark heart and warm center that most humans harbor.

“Language actually makes the world in which we live.”

Language, and literature, at its best, can be transformative. We can create our world anew by what we say, what we think, what we read, what we write. But we therefore have an obligation to use words [and actions] that do not harsh the environment, but gentle it, that explain and improve the world.

Abani is a black man, but his writing has few markers for what passes for “black” in America. In a 2014 interview with Rumpus Magazine Abani tells Rumpus interviewer Peter Orner that having grown up in a black-majority country, he was not defined by his race until he left Nigeria and went to Britain and the United States.

Though he has lived in the United States for some ten years or more, Abani does not write in the style of white or black America, though he clarifies in an NPR interview, “Africa could never have the literature it does without the influence of black Americans.” African literature makes no attempt to fit into the Western canon: African writers are having this conversation over here, and if you want to join in you must make accommodation. Interestingly, Abani finds writing in America freeing, partly because of the language, which is constantly influenced by our immigrant population, and because of the vitality and variety of experience and geography.

Abani’s students, and we readers, often “forget he is black” because he assumes the right to speak with his own voice and deals with universal themes. But Abani observes and occasionally writes of the oppression of black people in this country: "Slavery [in America] is not really over". In this memoir he mentions that when he is stopped while driving, the cops seem surprised and almost “offended by his [British] accent.” He recognizes that as an educated middle-class African, he has a privileged position in American society. “Race in America has more to do with social position than it has to do with biological race.”

Abani now teaches writing at Northwestern University in Chicago. Daria Tunca of the University of Liège in Belgium has compiled a wonderfully complete bibliography of Abani’s work (and short biography) which includes links to interviews, readings, and Abani’s website. I share my favorite links below because I feel his work is essential reading/listening. Somehow the issues we face in the world are pointed to by this big man with the small voice and small toes. And he gives us some answers: You reflect my humanity back at me. Ubuntu.


A few links to important talks, essays, writings:

NPR Illinois Radio Interview (2006)

Kate Durbin Interviews Chris Abani (2007)

TED talk on the Stories of Africa (2007)

TED talk “On Humanity” (2008)

Witness essay, “Ethics and Narrative” (2009)

Chris Abani with Walter Mosley in Conversation (2010)

The Rumpus Interview with Peter Orner (2014)


• Becoming Abigail (2006)

• Hands Washing Water (2006)

• Virgin of Flames (2007)

• Song for Night (2007)

• There Are No Names for Red (2010)

• Sanctificum (2010)

• The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014)


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I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan translated by Eliza Griswold, Photographs by Seamus Murphy

Landays, Afghan two-line poems, some centuries old, have an ephemeral quality, like a scrap of smoke in the air, or a remembered scent, hardly there. They are sung, or recited accompanied by a drum to keep time. Landays began among nomads and farmers and were sung around a campfire, though now both men and women use them in their daily life, as humor, as riposte, as an expression of grief or protest.

Eliza Griswold travelled to Afghanistan with the photographer Seamus Murphy when they’d heard a young woman was persecuted, and died, for writing poems. Her name was Zarmina. Zarmina also recited ancient landays, perhaps changing a word or two to reflect her own life. Griswold began to collect landays and with the collection she has shared with us, we are allowed deep into the national psyche.

Griswold explains her translation process, for which she won the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. First the translation would be literal and then she would work with academics, writers, journalists to achieve something in English approaching the power of the poem in Pashto. By every measure, she has succeeded.

It is extremely rare for a journalist to manage to portray with such depth, honesty, clarity, and humanity a culture foreign to readers. Griswold manages it in a slim book of poetry. On two facing pages she has placed one of Seamus Murphy’s photographs, and a two line poem. On the overleaf she explains the context of the poem and its meaning. Griswold’s restraint highlights the power of the landays.

A favorite photograph among the collection that are reprinted in this book I share with you here:

Some landays are just about the length of a tweet:

Your eyes aren’t eyes. They’re bees.
I can find no cure for their sting.

Some landays recited or sung at celebrations are recorded and shared with relatives or friends. Landays are commonly heard on the radio, or are shared now via Facebook or texted on a phone. What was a form of entertainment around a fire during a celebration has lingered in the national consciousness and become a coveted means of self-expression.

What makes this book so precious is the fact that it could have been nothing--a failure. It must have felt that way many times during the time Griswold and Murphy were working on the collecting, translating, polishing of the landays they present to us. But they really did something here: we get a sense of popular culture, and of the centuries-old richness of Afghan ancient culture. We see, finally, the rich internal life under the burqa.

The final landay and story in the book is extremely affecting: a fifteen-year-old calling herself “the new Zarmina” agrees to meet the author in a market town teeming with militants. She is unwilling to have her landays recorded or translated into the “language of the enemy,” though she has several written in a thin notebook with an apple tree on its cover. She instead recites an ancient landay:

Separation, you set fire
In the heart and home of every lover.

Griswold herself is a poet and a journalist. Some years ago I reviewed her account of the area in Africa where the clash of religions seems to originate, called The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. The concept of that book also showed Griswold’s instinct to finger the pulse of a hotspot and take a reading. Griswold is more experienced now and she has gotten very good indeed at finding life where many others cannot. Congratulations to Griswold, Murphy, and the publisher Farrar, Strauss & Giroux for taking such a chance on a risky endeavor.



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The Illuminations by Andrew O'Hagan

Andrew O’Hagan, I only just discovered, has been nominated for a number of prestigious awards, including the Booker Prize (1999), the Man Booker Prize (2006) and was voted one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists for 2003. He is editor-at-large for the London Review of Books. In September of 2014, O’Hagan interviewed Karl Ove Knausgård for the London Review of Books at St. George’s Church in Bloomsbury. At that time, Books 1-3 of Knausgård's six-volume novel/memoir, Min Kamp (My Struggle), had been translated into English.

O’Hagan elicited something more from Knausgård than earlier interviewers had: his silence as an interlocutor was voracious. He raised questions citing Nietzsche, Camus, Saul Bellow, Emile Zola, Ibsen. He elevated the level of discourse, provoking revelatory statements from Knausgård about living an "authentic life," and the "lies" that we must tell in order to live with others. The question "Do individuals own their own life story?" is one question which O’Hagan posed to Knausgård and is also a central question of The Illuminations, O’Hagan’s fifth novel.

Luke Campbell, the grandson of Anne, finds himself rooting about in his grandmother’s history in an attempt to clarify his own life. Recently discharged from the 1st Royal Western Fusiliers serving in Afghanistan, Luke is suffering a crisis of conscience from events that took place before his departure from the war zone. Looking after the affairs of his aging grandmother began a journey of discovery for Luke, revealing long-held secrets and answering the question, "whose story is it?"

The title, The Illuminations, refers most directly to the city of Blackpool and the festival of lights it sponsors each year in September, streamers of bulbs illuminating the seaside promenade until the wee hours. But the title also refers to a young man viewing a firefight in Afghanistan, Anne emerging intermittently from the dark clouds of dementia, and Luke’s mother Alice experiencing flashes of insight: "It’s the hallucinations, as I call them…My mother always behaved as if the truth was the biggest thing. The photographs she took when she was young were all about that." Alice’s mother Anne, a once-famous documentary photographer, had stopped taking photographs long ago and no one knew why.

Luke Campbell had joined the Fusiliers to "look for his father" who had died patrolling Belfast during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Sean Campbell had been in the Western Fusiliers, the same regiment that Luke joined. Luke knew his father had died but he did not know the story of his grandfather who, it was said, had flown reconnaissance planes in WWII. Without consciously setting out to uncover the whole story, Luke offers himself as a means by which Anne could return to Blackpool and her past.

Luke is close with Anne, and though his grandmother "always made too much of the men" in her life, she "spoke [to him] as a person not only ready to invest in you but ready to bear the costs to the end." On the other hand, Luke's mother Alice was always taken up with practicalities and resentments for being "sacrificed" growing up. "I didn’t ever think it would be so hard. So hard to face it," Alice tells her doctor. "I didn’t get to ask about my father or get a grip on the past...I would love to spend half an hour with the woman who made those pictures." Alice faces the truth with no filters, and feels the cut.

O’Hagan is a spokesperson for The Scottish Trust and he takes seriously the responsibility for following in the footsteps of great literary figures: "some of what we understand to be literary values come from Scotland in the first place." O’Hagan points to Rudyard Kipling at least twice in this novel and the poem "If" almost charts Luke’s personal journey to manhood. Kim, Kipling’s book about the great power struggles in an India that included parts of Afghanistan, sits comfortably in parallel with a young soldier’s disillusionment: the military affair in which Luke was involved in Afghanistan illustrated for him the ways that men and nations can be crushed under the weight of their experiences.

This novel is not the seamless piece one associates with "great novels," but it is packed with the insights of a work three times its length. One might even say that the work is at the service of big ideas. O’Hagan, like his central character Luke, is "a bit of a thinker," and strives to touch on important themes that we face today in the world. I admit to wanting to look at whatever O’Hagan has written "and test it all against reality."


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It's What I Do by Lynsey Addario

Lynsey Addario has been a war photographer for at least the past two decades. She has won numerous awards and recognition, including the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Prize, for her work. In this memoir she talks of her development from taking photos to being a Photographer. The experience of reading this book left me so grateful….”grateful for your service,” I suppose. People willing and able to do this kind of work inspire me. It can be fulfilling and exciting but it is work that never really returns the effort spent, especially for a woman.

In an interview with PBS Newshour Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown Addario tells us "it's a man's world." That sent a shiver through me. My great aunt used to tell me that, but I never believed it. Let's hope Addario meant "war is a man's business." That strikes me as about right.

Addario focused mainly on women, noncombatants, and refugees in war zones, though she did go to the front line when that was called for. She comes up against sexism time and again in her work as a war photographer in the Middle East and South Asia, but she just plows back in again, not quite oblivious, but unwilling to let it stop her. This is another thing I admire so much. She admits to fear. It is not lack of fear that propels the greatest among us, but that fear does not stop them.

This memoir of her time as a war correspondent is as gripping and informative as her photographic work has ever been. We can feel the stress and uncertainty before her decisions to cover Forward Operating Bases in Afghanistan, or a village on the outskirts of major combat in Iraq or Libya. She is kidnapped twice, falls in love, has a child, all while holding fast to the notion that her work matters. She tells us how this is so, and we can understand, though many of us would have given it up long before. There is something to be said for those who persist.

I cannot recommend this book more highly. It is compulsively readable and completely unforgettable. Her writing is as beautiful and real and important as her photographs. She gives us hope, and a sort of strength and pride. Watch, witness, and never give up.


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the too many tomatoes cookbook by Brian Yarvin

"OK, 'rice and tomatoes'--it couldn't be simpler. But simple dishes are often the hardest, aren't they?"

We are not always so lucky to have a bumper crop of tomatoes (they used to be easier to grow when I was only harvesting :/) but if you love fresh tomatoes, you need this book. Farmstand aficionados, vegans, vegetarians, and meat-lovers will all find something here to favorite. Brian Yarvin gives simple, delicious, and diverse recipes using tomatoes for those days when our heat-addled or work-dead brains come to a halt at spaghetti.

I cook a lot. But even I have days when the juices are not flowing and I have used up the repertoire stored in my hard drive. I just need a little inspiration to make something wonderful and Yarvin’s book is so handy to remind me of things I love. He adds a little something I hadn’t thought to use, tells order of ingredients, and length of sauté (things I am sure I never knew), and I have come up with truly splendid cuisine from this small book. Besides, I love his stories, like the one of looking for canned tomatoes in Italy, or judging a chili cook-off in Texas.

I immediately discovered a new favorite, “Sicilian Vegetable Stew (Caponata)” served atop Parmesan Couscous, which is not the same as “French Vegetable Stew (Ratatouille)”, another classic. His vegetable lasagna won over hardened meat-eaters, and was a dream dish on my table. And he tells us how to make our own frozen pizzas for those days we simply will not spend another dime (more like ten dollars) or another minute eating out.

There are many delicious choices here for quick dinners, as well as dinners as aromatic and fragrant as an Italian don’s Spaghetti Sauce. They smell so good you don’t ever want the simmering to end. Yarvin doesn’t stop at the Mediterranean, however, but shares Central African, Romanian, Albanian, Chinese and Japanese (!) specialties featuring tomatoes as well as American favorites from all parts of the country. His stories interspersed among the recipes give one a chance to savor his particular brand of travel writing.

With heirloom tomatoes making a comeback and farmer’s markets getting up to speed for the season, you may want to pick up a copy of this cookbook which is sure to become one of your favorites. There are enough ways to vary your tomato dishes that you will never again say you have “too many tomatoes.”

Brian Yarvin is a travel writer, photographer, and cook. His recipes are simple to follow, and often might be one-dish meals.


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Burma: Rivers of Flavor by Naomi Duguid

This astonishing compendium of Burmese country foods is a travel guide as well as a cookbook. Duguid has long experience in South Asia, and has worked hard to translate foodstuffs and measurements into something Western cooks can create in their own homes. She tells stories, too, of where she gets the recipes and how she’s seen ingredients used. She tells of places she’s visited and people she’s met—after a couple hours with this gorgeously photographed book one feels as though one had spent a week away. It is positively transporting.

Any aspiring visitor to Burma should have a look at this to get a sense of what one will encounter. Duguid makes one comfortable with local greens, and discusses how, despite Burma’s long coastline, river fish are most prized. Contrary to the expectations of many, not all dishes contain red-hot chilies—often these are condiments that one can add to one’s dish after cooking, along with a series of herbs or pastes, so that one may moderate one’s intake.

Interestingly, Duguid explains that Burma may be a vegetarian haven, for many dishes are meatless or can be modified for meatless cooking, using a fermented soybean paste dried into a cracker “tua nao” for flavoring instead of fish sauce or shrimp paste. She introduced me to “Shan Tofu,” a chickpea-flour tofu that she calls “one of the great unsung treasures of Southeast Asia.” Besan, or chickpea flour, is whisked into salted water and heated on a stove until shiny and thick, then poured into a shallow dish to cool. It resembles a cooling polenta in texture, but holds together in soups or salads, and it can be sliced or cubed, eaten plain or fried. I made a brilliant vegan Ma-Po Tofu** with it and I’m going to try it “savory baked” as well.

Another intriguing dish I’d like to try immediately is a porridge made of jasmine rice and peanuts which resembles oatmeal but which is spiced with chili oil and blanched greens, fried shallots and crushed roasted peanuts. It is a blank canvas on which to riff one’s highly flavored specialties. Duguid suggests this sauce can be amended to become a sort of white pasta sauce to serve over rice noodles…adding ingredients until one has a meal-sized mixture of food held together with a spiced rice paste. Very intriguing.

Every library should have a copy of this book. It is a beautiful, recent introduction to life in Burma and it is indispensable for a traveler.

** from Vegan Eats World by Terry Hope Romero


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The Practice of Contemplative Photography by Andy Karr and Michael Wood

One doesn't have to have a special camera, nor be a professional photographer. One does have to see. The idea proposed here is that we look and not excite ourselves with the notion of capture, but be still enough to recognize what is ready to be captured. Laid out in a series of exercises, this book leads one through ways of seeing. An exercise is suggested, then the authors or their students present their photos as examples of the exercise completed. The author stresses that these photos not be modified or arranged or designed--that their freshness is dependent upon lack of contrivance.

A calm descends midway through the book, when we realize that there are an infinite number of perceptions to be captured. One just has to be still enough to see. The authors kindly guide us through the means by which we can make our equipment match our perception by our understanding the technical requirements of our camera. Most importantly we recognize that we all can see, if only we would.

The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, Fréderic Lemercier

Paperback, 288 pgs, Pub May 12th 2009 by First Second (first published 2003), Orig Title: Le Photographe, ISBN13: 9781596433755, Edition Language: English, Series: Le Photographe #1-3, Lit Awards: Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best U.S. Edition of International Material (2010)

This was such a suprising book. I found myself completely rapt to see how well the execution of the book worked--the interleaving actual photographs with graphic drawings of the travel and work of Doctors Without Borders in the northeast corner of Afghanistan. Didier Lefèvre, the photographer of the title, and his collaborators on this book, had personality enough to keep the tone moving constantly through interesting, awestruck, serious, funny, fearful. The reader is drawn into the photographs until one feels one has visited that place, was in that hospital, with those people. While the beauty of Afghanistan was constantly remarked upon, it was only at the end that I could see beauty there, in that stony and stark environment. There is something about the quality of the light and the air that is absolutely unique, and unforgettable. This book gives us something very special. It is a great gift shared.

Little People in the City by Slinkachu

This is a book of photographs of the street installations Slinkachu. I can't decide which set-piece I like the best, but fortunately there are lots to choose from. I think the cover art "They're not pets, Susan" might be best since it first drew me in. Though I could be convinced to vote for "Local amenities for children".

So, who is Slinkachu? Presumably Will Self, the London novelist, knows since he wrote the introduction to Little People.... Slinkachu is reputed to live in London, but his beat is all of Europe. The more relevant question may be where did he get that name? In any case, he makes city living interesting again, and forces us to see the world anew. See more of Slinkachu at http://www.slinkachu.com.