Get Lost Books

Mundane Journeys: Field Guide to Color Kate Pocrass ( , $5.00) Perhaps you are the kind of person that notices how the color of a Laundromat reflects the decade in which it was designed. Or maybe at Mitchell’s Ice Cream you match the delicate purple of your Ube ice cream to something similarly delicate and purple in the neighborhood. Maybe still you are the kind of person that sees the wider picture; either way Kate Pocrass’ new volume of Mundane Journeys will force you to engage with your surroundings in a way that you may have not considered before. Since 2001, Pocrass has been compiling aesthetically minded guided tours of San Francisco which are available either by calling a phone number and listening to a weekly voicemail message, taking a guided bus tour, or by purchasing this second volume of Mundane Journeys. These colorful micro-adventures are cheap, charming, and provide an idiosyncratic and whimsical way to discover San Francisco. - ADD TO CART	Apples Are From Kazakhstan Christopher Robbins ( Atlas & Co., $24.00) Nursultan Nazarbayev had served as First Secretary of the Kazah Communist Party before becoming Kazakhstan's first post-Soviet president. By the time author Christopher Robbins breaks bread (actually, boiled sheep's head) and flies in the presidential entourage with him, Nazarbayev has privatized the economy; cut multi-billion oil deals with Exxon and Chevron; and built a new capital city 600 hundred miles away from the old one. Robbins perhaps isn't critical enough about the president's authoritarian tendencies, but the word on the street is that Nazarbayev has changed the country for the better. Bar hopping with the beautiful people of Almaty or hanging out with oilmen in the wild West, Robbins is visiting Kazakhstan in the era of globalization. Beyond the people he meets and the beauty of the landscape, Robbins is fascinated with Kazakh's role in history as Russia's place of exile and deportation. Dostoyevsky and Trotsky both spent time exiled here. The Chechnyans, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and Korean-Russians were all deported here by Stalin. Robbins is erudite without being stuffy. His year in the country affords us much more than fleeting impressions of the country. - ADD TO CART
Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World Peter Chapman ( Canongate, $24.00) Of the more than 300 varieties of bananas, the Cavendish variety is the one constant on supermarket shelves. Large and thick skinned, it was the banana of choice on the United Fruit Company's plantations throughout Central America. Unlike salt or cod, subjects covered by Mark Kurlansky, banana distribution and consumption is very much the story of modern global capitalism and empire. Beginning in Costa Rica, the United Fruit Company built the railroads, bribed the politicians and acquired the lands that gave it control over the banana market in the 20th century. Author Peter Chapman's book shows how the banana, once enjoyed only by America's elite, became the world's most popular fruit. He follows the many tentacles of the company in this brutal history. Its native and imported labor from China, Italy and the West Indies was paid in scrip, redeemable at company stores. It encouraged the coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala and participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. It did business with Somoza and the powerful families of El Salvador. Now known as Chiquita Brands International, the Company was most recently in the news for successfully at the World Trade Organization the European Union over protectionism. The book's title in England, Jungle Capitalists is a fitting description of the bare-knuckled story of the once notorious company. - ADD TO CART	Basrayatha: The Story of a City Muhammad Khudayyir ( Verson, $15.95) For many of us, Basra is a city we think about only when the fighting breaks into our headlines. Muhammad Khudayyir, who was born in Basra and has spent his entire life there, bestows on us an altogether different city in this enthralling work, written in 1996 and newly translated. His Basra is a dreamscape, an inner geography: a compound of memoir, folktale, philosophical speculation and literary allusion. He draws on classic Arabic poetry, as well as modern literary urbanists such as Calvino, Cavafy and (to my astonishment) Foucault, in an effort to convey the city not only as it is, but as it has lived in the imagination of Iraqis for centuries. Of all the hundreds of books published on Iraq in recent years, this may be the only one that emerges from the culture of the country and the artistic life of its people. Khudayyir's intensely allusive and ornamented style, redolent of Arab literary traditions, may at first seem strange to the western reader; but isn't it time we learned to take the rest of the world (and especially Iraq) and its own terms, rather than ours? - ADD TO CART
Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers Xialou Guo ( Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.95) While not an erotic reference text, this beguiling novel still lives up to the promise of its title. It resembles the recent spate of travel memoirs by British or American women about finding love in distant climes; but reversing the direction of the gaze makes all the difference. A young Chinese woman, spending a year in London to study English, struggles to grasp the strange folkways she encounters, as well as the intricacies of the language. Both sets of difficulties come into play when she has her first love affair, and must come to terms with concepts like intimacy, privacy, possessiveness, romance. In the process we see a new London through her eyes, and learn something about what it’s like to be young and Chinese in this time of wild transition. Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange: isn’t that what travel (like the best fiction) is all about? - ADD TO CART	Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City Billy Sothern ( University of California Press, $21.95) New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina titles have carved out a big space on the shelves of bookstores in New Orleans. Some titles that came out just before the storm, like Rob Walker's Letters from New Orleans and the first four books of the Neighborhood Storybook Project are still relevant by showing aspects of the city that are now gone forever. In Down in New Orleans, Billy Sothern starts a tale of his own evacuation to Mississippi, before adding layer after layer of (hi)stories. Between accounts of his exile and return to a damaged home, Sothern tells us about a local hero who rescued trapped residents in his boat before being arrested as a terrorism suspect and held by police for over a month; the journey of residents trying to escape the rising waters by walking across the Crescent City Connection bridge into neighboring Jefferson Parish only to be turned back at gunpoint by local police; and the fate of the cities most vulnerable populations, including prison inmates abandoned in flooded cells by fleeing police. Underpinning these stories are the workings of history, race, and poverty in the city that made the breeches and the resulting crises not just visible, but inevitable. - ADD TO CART
Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism Mike Davis, Daniel Bertrand Monk, editors ( The New Press, paperback, $18.95) The “evil paradises” depicted in this anthology are free market utopias built on the unspoken reality of slave labor and robber baron slash-and-burn capitalism. In Davis’ hellish vision of Dubai the divide between the Haves and the Have-Nots seems almost medieval in its brutality and immorality. Huge cartoonish buildings and man-made mega islands built with oil money and the aforementioned slave labor shield the ultra rich from the indignities of having to pay taxes or in some cases serve time in the countries from which they came. Rebecca Shoenkopf’s Orange County is a little less feudal, and makes for a much lighter read though she still, albeit mockingly, covers the disparities between the inland barrios of Santa Ana and the coastal gated communities of Laguna Canyon. The Gated McMansion-residing ladies buy their over-saturated offspring Mercedes convertibles to stave off their baby-bird-like insatiable hunger and empty rage; It reads like an even more soulless Less Than Zero. There are other chapters about faux California-style gated communities in Hong Kong and Cairo and even in Iran’s desert, so perhaps that will be America’s legacy rather than Bush’s promised democracy in the Middle East. - ADD TO CART	God's Middle Finger:Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre Richard Grant ( Free Press, $15.00) Richard Grant had long been fascinated by the Sierra Madre, a vast land of extremes that lies over much of western Mexico. It is a range marked by barrancas, steep-sided ravines where one can stand on snowy peaks and look down onto the backs of tropical birds flying over rainforest canopy. This forbidding geography provides refuge for outlaws and narcotraficantes as well as bored, drunk rednecks. Grant encounters all of these in his journey, and his fate often depends on their whims. The book opens with the author literally being hunted for sport. Later he finds himself forced to snort cocaine with crooked cops in a dirty cantina. He takes his brushes with danger in stride, turning nerve-wracking experiences into enlightening anecdotes. - ADD TO CART
Good-bye Yoshihiro Tatsumi ( Drawn and Quarterly, $19.95) As the first generation of manga reading children grew up in the sixties and seventies, they wanted something written for an adult audience. Tatsumi coined the term gekiga (Japanese for “dramatic pictures”) to refer to the more adult-oriented work that he and others were creating. He helped to define the genre, but is now largely forgotten in Japan. He is enjoying renewed popularity in America, though, thanks largely to Drawn and Quarterly’s annual publications of his work. Good-bye encompasses stories from 1970-71. In “Hell”, an amateur photographer captures the shadow of a son massaging his mother’s shoulders that was seared onto a wall when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. After the image has gained world fame as an icon of peace, the photographer discovers it is not the image of a devoted son after all, but of a man strangling a woman from behind. Most of the stories are not as heavy on plot, but are succinct vignettes of the mundane struggles and frustrated passions of ordinary people. There are no innocents in these stories. Although we may be disgusted by the behavior of his characters, they are pitiful and evoke sympathy. - ADD TO CART	Goodbye Madame Butterfly Sumie Kawakami ( Chin Music Press Inc., $20.00) In Goodbye Madame Butterfly, author Kawakami dispels the notion that in Japan all one’s sexual fantasies can come true. She sites for example a Durex condom survey based on interviews in 41 countries where Japan ranked last in amount of sexual activity. That may be hard to believe, considering there are many legal “entertainment and amusement” services that substitute for prostitution, which is illegal in Japan. Goodbye Madame Butterfly is a series of essays taken from interviews of mostly Japanese women, ranging from sexless and sex-seeking housewives and downtown professionals, to a single mom having an affair with her boss, to the wife of a Shinto priest, to a male sex volunteer who helps women achieve orgasms. But make no mistake, this is definitely a book about Japanese women and their roles, or lack thereof, in a seemingly lax sexual culture. - ADD TO CART
Hamburger Eyes: Inside Burgerworld Ray Potes ( Powerhouse, $35.00) Hamburger Eyes started life as a photo zine put together by the Potes brothers and their friends out of their Mission apartment. Now they have this book and their own photo development complex and art gallery, still in the Mission district and still serving as a document of underground street culture and art. The Hamburger Eyes aesthetic is a distinctly deadpan, black humor laden take on photo realism; some of the images remind me of classic war photography, the stark brutality and ideas of â€˜truthâ€™ transposed to 3am on Market Street, juxtaposed with an image of a kid inventing a hula hoop out of toilet paper. - ADD TO CART	Invisible-5 Amy Balkan, Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice, and others ( Collaboration, $15.00) In California, Interstate 5 is straight as an arrow and runs through the center of the state. A commuter sees undeveloped desert, the aqueducts, fields of almond trees and cattle in massive pens. What they don’t see, or at least, don’t recognize, are the hazardous waste incinerators, nuclear facilities, power plants, polluted water tables and the people that live around these sites. Invisible 5, a project by artist Amy Balkin and collaborators, explores the geopolitics of this once sparsely populated area that has suffered most of California’s environmental degradation and the attendant health problems on its local population. The 2 CD set, meant to be played along the route from San Francisco to Los Angeles or vice versa, features local activists and historians discussing local environmental issues and the community responses. You quickly realize how little you have heard about these stories and how important they are to these communities. The CDs come with directions, map, audio cues and more information on each site. All sales benefit Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice. - ADD TO CART
Literature from the 'Axis of Evil': Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and other Enemy Nations A Words Without Borders Anthology ( The New Press, $16.95) The absurdity of labeling an entire culture or nation of people ï¿½evilï¿½ not only makes those who said it look foolish, but brings about the need to put a human face on those internationally misunderstood and marginalized cultures. Words Without Borders does just that, presenting a special selection of some of the best writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and Cuba. For those of us with little knowledge about these places, this collection gives us a glimpse into human realities that our government wants us to fear and/or hate. When we look, listen, and learn we find familiar themes: family, adolescence, ideas of beauty, loneliness, kindness -- a wonderful breath of fresh air. - ADD TO CART	Lust In Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee Pamela Druckerman ( Penguin Books, $15.00) This is a fun, light-hearted book on what in what many cultures passes for a fun, light-hearted topic: adultery. As the title suggests, Druckerman examines varying cultural attitudes towards infidelity. While she is the first to admit that her study is none too scientific and somewhat subjective, she does make insightful and surprising observations. The main conclusion she draws is that Americans freak out about cheating way more than the rest of the planet. The book is full of fun little observations about the sexual mores of other nations, like, for example, that the Japanese don’t consider it cheating if you pay for it. Most interesting, however, is the outsider’s perspective of our own moral code, and what many cultures would consider to be an extremist hard-line attitude towards cheating (even though we seem to be doing it as much as the rest of the globe). - ADD TO CART
Nazi LIterature in the Americas Roberto Bolaño ( New Directions, $23.95) The masterpieces by the late Chilean/Mexican writer keep rolling off the presses as quickly as the translators can render them. As with everything Bolaño produced, this is one-of-a kind; an imaginary, “value-neutral” reference work, complete with bibliography and scholarly notes. The entries do in fact constitute a kind of encyclopedia: a compendium of the ways in which the literary imagination negotiates with, rationalizes, or embraces evil; but the really scary part is the passionate and pure devotion to literature they all share, along with their repugnant politics. This survey of the Nazi literary canon that never actually existed somehow manages to be simultaneously playfully funny and deeply disturbing. - ADD TO CART	New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg Marshall Berman, ed. ( Reaktion, $25.00) Put together by the Marxist scholar Berman, this collection of essays focuses on New York City as a memory, working as a tribute to a lost city and its poets, immigrants, deadbeats, criminals, punks, and B-boys. It contains pieces from renowned writers like Luc Sante, Richard Meltzer and Tom Robbins but (perhaps reflecting New York’s pre-Giulliani democratic essence) gives the same weight to downtown low-lifes: There is the former graffiti writer who reflects on his and the city’s past during his morning commute on the now impossible-to-tag subway system. While the book mourns the loss of the seedy underbelly that gave New York of the 70s and 80s its creative power whilst keeping the yuppies at bay, it is not all doom and gloom. Manhattan’s pre-gentrified soul has now moved to the outer boroughs, and there are great pieces celebrating this revival. - ADD TO CART
NOWTOPIA; How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today! Chris Carlsson ( AK Press, $18.95) There’s a current in the eco movement that shopping ‘green’ will somehow preserve the earth, as if just shifting how we consume is going to be enough. As one of the founders of Critical Mass, Carlsson is a long time local community activist who believes that true change will only emerge when people shift their behavior away from eco-consumption or market based lifestyle choices. Nowtopia embodies a movement of people looking to create new ways of existing outside of the confines of the market. The practices outlined embody a real challenge to the accepted realities of modern life, reshaping our assumptions about science, technology, and human potential. In ways as diverse as urban permaculture, biofuels, open source coding, even the Burning Man festival, people are taking back their time and technological know-how from the market. Nowtopia outlines an ecologically driven and community based idea of politics propelled by the people who are farming vacant-lots in West Oakland or running community bike kitchens in Los Angeles. - ADD TO CART	Palestine:The Special Edition Joe Sacco ( Fantagraphics, hardback, $29.95) In the mid-1990’s, Joe Sacco’s Palestine set a precedent for graphic journalism, earning him an American Book Award in 1996 and more importantly by blowing the minds of readers everywhere. With the intent to interview as many Palestinians and Israeli Jews as possible, Sacco often found himself in over his head. The stories are all there, from soldiers, refugees, prisoners, displaced farmers, and wounded and half-murdered families. The characters leap from the page and their personal accounts are unforgettable. Despite the harsh realities of a brutalized people, Sacco’s work is not without wit and humorous insight, even at times making fun of his own “comic book effort.” But make no mistake; this is a work of nonfiction, a 285+ page monumental feat of reporting, writing, and illustrating. As the interdependent conflicts in the Middle East grow increasingly complex, Sacco’s colossus graphic novel proves more relevant and important than ever. Available for the first time as a beautiful hard cover, and loaded with extras comparable to a Criterion Collection film, this Special Edition not only deserves a re-visit for those who know it but also stands as one of the most entertaining “required reading” selections for those unfamiliar with it. Recommended for those naïve or expert to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestine also will convince the skeptics to the serious place in literature of graphic novels. - ADD TO CART
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape Raja Shehadeh ( Scribner, $15.00) Like many of us in the Bay Area, Raja Shehadeh loves to ramble in the hills and valleys that surround his home. Because he is Palestinian, and his home is the West Bank city of Ramallah, his walks are considerably more fraught with the weight of history than ours. This lovely, moving and original book is an account of six such walks, taken over the past quarter century, as the landscape of his childhood changed beyond recognition. An attentive and observant walker, he introduces us to the subtle variations of flora and fauna, of terraced hills and pastureland, in a landscape so often described by Western observers as barren wasteland. And he shows how that landscape is steadily transformed by Israeli settlements and the Israeli-only highways that lead to them, which are making that desert “bloom” with concrete and neon. Though it is suffused with dignified outrage, this is not at all a diatribe. Instead, Shehadeh gently leads us away from the abstractions and stereotypes that typify most discussions of this heart-rending land dispute and invites us to experience the land itself, the way it looks and smells, the way it feels under his hiking boots. If you think that everything that can be said about the topic has been said, you will find his book a revelation. - ADD TO CART	Riding Toward Everywhere William T. Vollman ( Ecco Press, $26.95) America is a myth. America is an imagined limitless space. America does not exist anymore. America only exists in writing and memories. Is it a masculine place? Authentic? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? "Hunkering down against officialdom, we passed through the yard at increasing speed, and off we sped, accompanied by fog, mountains and waterlined fields, with the dim dusk scrolling by, the train shuddering and groaning, the wood groaning." Turns out America is an illicit ride through a train yard hidden in a box car, or maybe it's actually a ride through the canyonlands nestled beneath shifting lumber headed towards anywhere. Riding Toward Everywhere tackles the myth of America as an 'authentic' free and free-ing place, put together by man/boys like Huck Finn, Kerouac, Bukowski, or Hemingway. Written in a forcibly iconoclastic yet deconstructive style which mirrors the Hobo lifestyle he is writing about, an aimless meandering way of life which has become a part of the myth of the American anti-hero, now used to sell cars and computers to college kids. Vollman hops trains in search of freedom, the freedom of hiding from railway bulls and cops, of figuring out who is harmless and who is murderous, of waiting for ten hours under an overpass for something to happen; a train, a cop? - ADD TO CART
Sacred Games Vikram Chandra ( Harper Perennial, $16.95) This Bombay cops-and-robbers novel intertwines the stories of two men, police inspector Sartaj Singh and gang lord Ganesh Gaitonde. Though they represent forces that are (at least in theory) diametrically opposed, Chandra's two antiheroes struggle alongside each other to escape the forces of corruption and greed on both sides of the law. His characters are rendered with such compassion that you find yourself rooting for cop and criminal with equal fervor. The supporting cast of fast-talking Bombay lowlifes includes a gangster-cum-film producer and a Bollywood film star-cum-gangster. The central star of the story, however, is the city itself. Chandra's depiction of Bombay is so engrossing that after finishing Sacred Games you will find yourself homesick for the crowds and chaos of the city, the stink of garbage and the taste of fresh bhelpuri even if you've never experienced it firsthand. - ADD TO CART	Serve the People! Yan Lianke ( Black Cat Press, $14.00) Serve the People! is a satire of life in China during the Cultural Revolution.It was banned in China by the Central Propaganda Bureau. Yan Lianke's novel centers around Wu Dawang, a dedicated sergeant in the army, who longs for promotion. Wu Dawang, who gains notice for being a model soldier and an excellent cook, is assigned to be the General Orderly for the Division Commander. His days are filled with the tireless duty of caring for the Division Commander's home and preparing the meals. His order is upset by Liu Lian, the Commander's young wife. When her husband is away on a lengthy assignment, she conspires to lead Wu Dawang into an affair. The affair starts as a twist on the Maoist Motto "Serve the People!" as Wu Dawang begins servicing Liu Lian. After one of their encounters, Wu Dawang accidentally breaks a plaster bust of Chairman Mao. Erotically charged by the accident, the couple then explores other acts of desecrating communist symbols, leading to consequences for everyone involved. - ADD TO CART
Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals Dervla Murphy ( John Murray Publishers, $15.95) Dervla Murphy is on the road again. In Silverland, Murphy travels on the BAM train (a trans-Siberian route begun under Stalin and completed in the 1990s) east across Siberia. Now in her 70s and still with her signature bicycle and rucksack, she is the consummate traveler who takes sub-zero temperatures and bureaucratic bungling (she is thrown off the train in Belarus for visa irregularities) in stride. That is what I like about Dervla Murphy. Her misfortunes are asides, part of the price of travel, and not the basis for her stories. In unadorned language, conversations are recounted and opinions are freely shared. She completely sympathizes with the nostalgia for the Soviet Union’s free medical care, free schooling and adequate pensions. On this return trip to Siberia, her friends and contacts are living in a time of rapid change. The forests are threatened with logging; the WTO is demanding that Russia stop subsidizing home heating oil; locals are buying cars and other previously unobtainable consumer goods on credit. But the warmth and hospitality of the Siberians, particularly the non-Russian native peoples, (in sharp contrast to the Russians she meets on the western side of the Ural mountains) is what impresses Murphy most. – Lee Azus - ADD TO CART	Stairway Walks in San Francisco 6th Ed Adah Bakalinsky ( Wilderness Press, $16.95) Over 350 stairways traverse San Francisco's 42 hills, linking diverse neighborhoods and offering inspiring vistas. Absorb the sights, scents, and sounds of San Francisco on 27 stairway walks. In this sixth edition of Stairway Walks in San Francisco, you'll find up-to-date architectural, historical, and horticultural information for each walk. Easy-to-follow maps correspond to lucid directions, including public transportation. - ADD TO CART
Street World; Urban Art from Five Continents Roger Gastmen, et. al. ( Abrams, $35.00) This fascinating compendium of images from international youth subcultures covers everything from punk in the Philippines to Russian biker gangs to ubiquitous NYC graffiti crews. The scope of this book is vast, though obviously it focuses on street art, which includes graffiti on all five continents as well as the vivid commercial signage for Jamaican music stands and Indian markets. There are images of kids united by soccer in a post war scarred Serbia, alongside the building of an illegal concrete skate park, girls who cover parking meter stands with knitted covers and guerilla gardeners who garden unkept urban areas by night. It is fascinating to see how the American idea of youth and rebellion changes and shifts as it is adopted by youth in different cultures and countries, each kid making their own idea of youth culture out of the ephemera of hair metal, James Dean, punk rock and hip hop. - ADD TO CART	The Complete Persepolis Marjane Satrapi ( Pantheon, $24.95) This collection of both of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis graphic novels arrives just in time for the winter release of the Cannes award-winning animated movie, which will feature the voices of Catherine Deneuve, Gena Rowlands and Chiara Mastroianni. Persepolis is the coming of age memoir of an irrepressibly bright, hilarious and independent minded girl caught in the upheaval of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Persepolis transcends the typical cliches of genre: the comic book style is charming and evocative, opening up an Iran not usually apparent to Western outsiders. Satrapi blends personal moments of youthful rebellion against the confines of her liberal secular family, with the harsher realities of life as an outspoken precocious girl living under an oppressive regime. "This is a symbol of Western decadence!" two be-chadored Iranian matrons tell young Marjane, pointing at her Michael Jackson pin. "Not at all," Marjane protests, "It's Malcolm X!" - ADD TO CART
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food Jennifer 8. Lee ( Twelve, $24.99) Most of the food served in Chinese restaurants was never cooked or eaten in Chinese kitchens. It is a unique cuisine that evolved entirely within the context of expanding restaurant industry in America. This artificial construct has spread as globally as McDonald’s; so we find “American fortune cookies” sweeping Hong Kong, and “American chop suey” as a food craze in India. The Chinese restaurant industry is one of the weirder flowerings of transculturalism. It began when Chinese immigrants in California, who could only find work in restaurants and laundries because cooking and cleaning were “women’s work,” tried to devise something that would overcome the white populaton’s antipathy to Chinese culture. Its expansion was partially fueled (in another twist of transcultural weirdness) when American Jews adopted Chinese restaurant-going as a weekly ritual. Jennifer 8. Lee doesn’t ignore the underside of the story (like the global trade in low-wage restaurant workers); but mostly she keeps her tone light, and uses tricky hooks (like tracking down the first restaurant to produce “General Tso’s chicken”) to move her story along. You might call it the lighter side of globalization; but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the subject is so fascinating and suggestive. - Michael Rosenthal - ADD TO CART	The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed Michael Meyer ( Walker & Co., $25.99) As China prepares for the Olympics, stories abound about the transformation of the Chinese capital into a modern, efficient city. High rises, shopping centers and eight lane boulevards are rising out of a fictive nowhere. In Michael Meyer’s wonderful new book, this transformation by bureaucratic fiat has very real consequences on the residents of the old hutong (narrow lane) neighborhoods that are the traditional core of Beijing. Meyer, who lives in a crumbling hutong southwest of Tiananmen Square, is a witness to the encroaching destruction of his surrounding neighborhoods. Literally overnight, chai (“to be razed”) notices put up by a nameless/faceless system work their way through the old districts like an out of control oil spill. This is not a carefully planned Haussmannian makeover, but a hodge-podge scramble for development rights and quick profits. Meyer doesn’t romanticize the hutong housing; four pit toilets for over 1000 residents, no hot water and coal braziers for heating. Even the residents complain. It is the “…intangible social patterns” that make the hutong unique and so different from the high rise apartment blocks. “They did not…witness how even small fissures – a new road; the eviction of a few families – led to irreparable fractures.” By introducing us to his neighbors and daily encounters Meyer humanizes this enormous upheaval that has already displaced more than 500,000 people in Beijing. - ADD TO CART
The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature Jonathan Rosen ( Straus and Giroux, $24.00) We are all birdwatchers; some of us just go about it in a more conscious and systematic fashion. Rosen here does for birding what Rebecca Solnit did for walking in Wanderlust: following loosely associational paths through science, literature and cultural theory, he meditates on the broader philosophical implications of his favorite pastime. How do we engage the wild? How do we subsume it to our sense of order without destroying the wildness that attracts us in the first place? You don’t need to be a birder to find Rosen’s exploration of these questions relevant and enthralling. – Michael Rosenthal - ADD TO CART	The Savage Detectives Roberto Bolano ( Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, paperback, $15.00) Roberto Bolano, who died in 2003, and whose major works are only now being translated, has been increasingly acclaimed as the most important and original voice to emerge from the generation of Latin American writers who came of age after the magical realist “boom.” Nothing could be further from the villages of magical realism than Bolano’s Mexico City of the mid 70’s, a dingy, jivey, ultra-urban place reproduced as lovingly as Joyce’s Dublin (a conscious model). And nothing could be further from florid rhetoric than Bolano’s combination of vernacular storytelling, pop slang and high theory. The Savage Detectives is an epic, sprawling over time (following two poets from an avant-garde splinter group from the 70’s through the 90’s) and over space (as they search for a legendary poet of an earlier generation across the Sonoran Desert.) Bolano’s imaginary world is a recognizable but somewhat alternate universe in which everybody is either a writer or wannabe writer (which is, come to think of it, not that different from San Francisco). This does not mean they live in a world of otherwordly refinement. Like all Latin Americans, they suffer through history. Violence befalls them accidentally and arbitrarily, and their worst enemies are time and the dying of their hopes. This guy is the real deal: a truly great writer. - ADD TO CART
The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands Jeremy Salt ( University of California Press, $29.95) This elegantly written volume tackles the construction of the “west”- in fact the idea of civilization itself, and how both of these concepts have shaped, transformed and devastated what we know as the Middle East. The book is built around critical episodes in the modern history of the Middle East, starting with the borders imposed by the French and the British that marked both the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the disruption of the nomadic Arab routes; concluding with the quagmire of the Iraq, and possibly Iran. Salt’s writing is at once sharp and illuminating and he is able to communicate vast tracts of history and the complexities of regional politics and culture with clarity and insight. - ADD TO CART	Yalo Elias Khoury ( Archipelago Books, $25.00) Khoury’s novel opens in the middle of the interrogation of Yalo, a Beiruti war criminal accused of rape, arms trafficking and planting bombs. As we read on, the story comes into focus through a series of forced confessions, as Yalo alternately denies and admits to the crimes. His story, like the city he inhabits, is repeatedly torn down and reinvented. As the pieces fill in, we get a better idea of Yalo’s and his country’s history, but any absolute truth remains elusive. The novel is at first somewhat confounding, but quickly becomes quite engaging as we assemble the pieces of Yalo’s story. Any clear-cut answers are not laid out for the reader however; whether Yalo is a violent criminal or a pitiful victim of the war and the abuses of his countrymen is left to the reader to ponder. - ADD TO CART