The Social Customer

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You Are Not So Smart.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

"You read a book for the story, for each of its words," Gordy said, "and you draw your cartoons for the story, for each of the words and images. And, yeah, you need to take that seriously, but you should also read and draw because really good books and cartoons give you a boner."

I was shocked:

Did you just say books should give me a boner?"

Yes, I did."

Are you serious?"

Yeah... don't you get excited about books?"

I don't think that you're supposed to get THAT excited about books."

You should get a boner! You have to get a boner!" Gordy shouted. "Come on!"

We ran into the Reardan High School Library.

Look at all these books," he said.

There aren't that many," I said. It was a small library in a small high school in a small town.

There are three thousand four hundred and twelve books here," Gordy said. "I know that because I counted them."

Okay, now you're officially a freak," I said.

Yes, it's a small library. It's a tiny one. But if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish."

What's your point?"

The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know."

Wow. That was a huge idea.

Any town, even one as small as Reardan, was a place of mystery. And that meant Wellpinit, the smaller, Indian town, was also a place of mystery.

Okay, so it's like each of these books is a mystery. Every book is a mystery. And if you read all of the books ever written, it's like you've read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you keep on learning so much more you need to learn."

Yes, yes, yes, yes," Gordy said. "Now doesn't that give you a boner?"

I am rock hard," I said."

 

Dead Letters

'Dead Letters' -- new book collects the most dazzling examples of Grateful Dead-inspired fan art.

Dead Letters is the fully authorized portrayal of the Grateful Dead according to the world's most devoted fan base: Deadheads. Beginning in their earliest days, the Grateful Dead saved tens of thousands of letters sent to them by Deadheads reflecting on the spectacular concerts they'd attended and requesting tickets. These letters are inspirational and hugely insightful, but more significantly, the envelopes in which they arrived are brilliantly illustrated and unique within the world of rock. This book collects hundreds of those envelopes, as well as a selection of letters, all presented in thematic chapters. Also included for further historical context are rare historical photos and special reminiscences creating a trip, as it were, down memory lane.


Paul Grushkin's Grateful Dead: The Official Book of the Deadheads (1983) is the most successful book about the Grateful Dead to date and one of the longest in-print rock music histories (24 years, 16 U.S. printings). He lives in Pinole, California.

Dead Letters: The Very Best Grateful Dead Fan Mail by Paul Grushkin and Bill Walton (Hardcover - Oct 22, 2011)

"I Travelled To India, Got Bitten By A Dog, Went Back Home and Got A Bunch of Rabies Shots, Then Flew Back To India and Ate The Country".

“It is a hard place. Watch out. Careful. It is Bombay, my love.”

Bombay dance bars have been memorably chronicled before, in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and in an award-winning Hindi film, Chandini Bar (2001) by Madhur Bhandarkar. Beautiful Thing is the first book-length treatment of the subject and it successfully explores the struggles faced by thousands of women like Leela living in the lower depths of Bombay, without turning them into passive victims.

Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing also available on Amazon

'The Triple Agent' is a page turner.

The al-Qaeda Mole who Infiltrated the CIA by Joby Warrick

Praise for The Triple Agent                                                        BUY

"The Triple Agent is a spy thriller like no other. Never has such a giant intelligence debacle been chronicled this vividly, this intimately. Riveting and harrowing, laden with deception and duplicity, it is a remarkable, behind-the-curtain account of the CIA’s darkest day in Afghanistan." —Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City


“Absolutely first-rate, breakthrough reporting.” —Bob Woodward, author of Obama’s Wars:


 “The Triple Agent is a superlative piece of reporting and writing. Joby Warrick manages to take the reader inside the CIA, Jordanian intelligence, and al-Qaeda. His intimate portraits of intelligence officers and the terrorists they stalk are unforgettable.

 The Triple Agent is one of the best true-life spy stories I have ever read.”—David Ignatius, columnist for the Washington Post and author of Bloodmoney:


 “A startling and memorable account of daring, treachery, and catastrophe in the CIA’s war against al-Qaeda. The deadly buzz of unmanned drones, the fanatical drive of a suicide bomber, and the desperate hopes of the intelligence agents at outpost Khost are drawn together in a powerful and fast-paced story of our time.”
—David E. Hoffman, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Dead Hand:

 “The Triple Agent is by turns harrowing and heartbreaking, fascinating and frightening. Joby Warrick takes the reader deep inside the CIA’s biggest disaster since September 11, a monumental blunder that allowed an al-Qaeda mole, carrying a thirty-pound bomb, into the agency’s highly secret, frontline outpost along the Afghan border with Pakistan. The blast left seven agency employees dead and many questions unanswered, questions that Warrick skillfully answers in a tale that reads like a thriller and stretches from the dusty back alleys of Waziristan to the plush executive floor at Langley.”
—James Bamford, author of the bestselling The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory

Six Books for July

50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)

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Summer Reading - Cookbooks

Cookbooks aren’t really about cooking, and haven’t been since the advent of color photography and food stylists. They’re mostly lifestyle catalogs, aspirational instruction manuals for lives we’d like to live. Prose used to have to do the heavy lifting in this regard. No more. Now images implore us to cook, and it can take a toll on the reading.


AT ELIZABETH DAVID’S TABLE: Classic Recipes and Timeless Kitchen Wisdom

A collection of dozens and dozens of David’s simple, beautiful and bullet-proof recipes, tied together with a few essays and top-notes, it was compiled by Jill Norman and photographed by David Loftus.
Anyone who has spent time thumbing through the thin, smudged pages of a paperback edition of one of David’s books, looking for instruction and finding joy, will be shocked by the result. Absent are the spare pages gone yellow with age, the words ticking by beneath covers showing only a watercolor image, solid advice from this sensible, writerly woman, who died in 1992 at the age of 78.

River Cottage Every Day

This book is more reader-friendly and useful than some of Fearnley-­Whittingstall’s past River Cottage offerings, and the food is ace. Start with the chicken and mushroom casserole with cider for dinner, or a celery root Waldorf salad for lunch. There aren’t many days that can’t be served by the rest.

A reissue of Richard Olney’s 1970 classic, THE FRENCH MENU COOKBOOK is emphatically not for everyday use, as its Dickensian subtitle may attest: “The Food and Wine of France — Season by Delicious Season — in Beautifully Composed Menus for American Dining and Entertaining by an American Living in Paris and Provence.” But there are some excellent recipes in here all the same, for poached eggs and beef stew, stuffed artichoke bottoms and roast saddle of lamb, saffron rice with tomatoes, a pure and simple sauce ivoire. From the simple (peaches in red wine!) to the complex business of stuffing calves’ ears for service with béarnaise sauce, this is a project book, best for cooks seeking intermediate badges or ju=nior-pilot wings.

More accessible for the new cook and the exhausted, overworked experienced one alike is FRENCH CLASSICS MADE EASY by Richard Grausman. Also a reissue, from a 1988 original, it combines smart advice for streamlined versions of timeless French dishes with a simple, reader-friendly and ­Workman-specific layout and type style that will be familiar to anyone who has cooked from the Silver Palate cookbooks. Here’s a top-notch blanquette de veau darkened (to the good!) with morels, as well as fine instruction on making a truffled roast chicken, fast soufflés, all the great French egg-yolk sauces, an onion tart and crêpes suzette. For those interested in, if slightly intimidated by, the intricacies of French cuisine, this book will be a balm.

Other books include Jonathan Waxman’s ITALIAN, MY WAY, THE FOOD OF SPAIN by Claudia Roden, Gwyneth Paltrow's MY FATHER’S DAUGHTER: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family and Togetherness, Ryan D' Agostino's EAT LIKE A MAN: The Only Cookbook a Man Will Ever Need