Seventy-five years ago, a St. Louis widow named Irma Rombauer took her life savings and self-published a book called The Joy of Cooking. Her daughter Marion tested recipes and made the illustrations, and they sold their mother-daughter project from Irma’s apartment.
Today, nine revisions later, the Joy of Cooking — selected by The New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important and influential books of the twentieth century — has taught tens of millions of people to cook, helped feed and delight millions beyond that, answered countless kitchen and food questions, and averted many a cooking crisis. Julia Child cosigned it as well, proclaimed it “number one on my list…the one book of all cookbooks in English that I would have on my shelf—if I could have but one.”
![Tim Parks’s books on Italy have been hailed as “so vivid, so packed with delectable details, [they] serve as a more than decent substitute for the real thing” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he delivers a charming and funny portrait of Italian ways by riding its trains from Verona to Milan, Rome to Palermo, and right down to the heel of Italy. Parks begins as any traveler might: “A train is a train is a train, isn’t it?” But soon he turns his novelist’s eye to the details, and as he journeys through majestic Milano Centrale station or on the newest high-speed rail line, he delivers a uniquely insightful portrait of Italy. Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians—conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants—Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive: an obsession with speed but an acceptance of slower, older ways; a blind eye toward brutal architecture amid grand monuments; and an undying love of a good argument and the perfect cappuccino. Italian Ways also explores how trains helped build Italy and how their development reflects Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond. Most of all, Italian Ways is an entertaining attempt to capture the essence of modern Italy. As Parks writes, “To see the country by train is to consider the crux of the essential Italian dilemma: Is Italy part of the modern world, or not?”
Italian Ways by Tim Parks](http://25.media.tumblr.com/23b5f11ea77456d934078d0b3509aea5/tumblr_mogx5fgLdk1qzu6nxo1_500.jpg)
Tim Parks’s books on Italy have been hailed as “so vivid, so packed with delectable details, [they] serve as a more than decent substitute for the real thing” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he delivers a charming and funny portrait of Italian ways by riding its trains from Verona to Milan, Rome to Palermo, and right down to the heel of Italy. Parks begins as any traveler might: “A train is a train is a train, isn’t it?” But soon he turns his novelist’s eye to the details, and as he journeys through majestic Milano Centrale station or on the newest high-speed rail line, he delivers a uniquely insightful portrait of Italy. Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians—conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants—Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive: an obsession with speed but an acceptance of slower, older ways; a blind eye toward brutal architecture amid grand monuments; and an undying love of a good argument and the perfect cappuccino. Italian Ways also explores how trains helped build Italy and how their development reflects Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond. Most of all, Italian Ways is an entertaining attempt to capture the essence of modern Italy. As Parks writes, “To see the country by train is to consider the crux of the essential Italian dilemma: Is Italy part of the modern world, or not?”
The success of Murakami as an author, as has been repeated ad nauseum, is his ability to locate the strangeness in the mundane, ferreting out holes in the fabric of perceived reality and picking at them, enlarging them until they’ve opened onto new vantage points. Many odd things happen in Murakami novels, but their protagonists generally absorb these strange turns with unfazed acceptance or mild curiosity. Looking back now on the apparent simplicity of Norwegian Wood, produced before the codification of the Murakami brand feels instructive. The massively ambitious, wantonly bizarre 1Q84, by its author’s own admission, was an attempt at summation: his Brothers Karamazov. His editors should have talked him down (even Dostoevsky’s shorter masterpiece Demons could have benefited from some judicious snipping in its first section); the book’s bloat gradually overwhelms the flashes of pleasing strangeness that made Murakami an international novelist in the first place. When one arrives at the conclusion to find that 950 pages of words were expended on an attempt to merge Norwegian Wood’s puppy love-with-complications and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s this-is-Japan statement-making, it’s hard not to feel let down. (via Reverse Shot)
“Straight Flush” concerns the rise and fall of the company AbsolutePoker, from an idea that six Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers lifted from a site called ParadisePoker, to an online empire on the verge of a 10-figure IPO, to its flameout soon after April 15, 2011. That’s when the Justice Department seized its domain name, along with those of two larger sites, PokerStars and FullTilt, freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in the accounts of American players. One AbsolutePoker executive pleaded guilty to bank fraud and is currently in prison. The former CEO remains at large in Antigua with what are presumed to be millions of dollars, many allegedly “won” by cheating: namely, spying, or allowing friends to spy, on customers’ hole cards.
Usefulness in Small Things provides delightful insights to the various mass-produced objects that comprise our daily lives. Sam Hecht personally collected the items from small local shops from his travels to countries including the USA, Japan, Jordan and Thailand, and are part of his Under a Fiver Collection edited from the last twenty years. Common items such as nails, plugs, toothbrushes, soap, and gloves have a function and a regional purpose, with some succeeding and others failing to fulfil their own promise.
How To Think More (But Not Better): Alain de Botton’s School of Life 
By: Lisa Levy
Los Angeles Review of Books, May 11, 2013
IS THE VERY IDEA of an intelligent self-help book a paradox? It is certainly trying to serve two demanding masters: philosophical speculation and practical action. After all, readers don’t pick up self-help books just to ruminate on life’s dilemmas, but to be guided to solutions. The new series of self-help books published by the London-based School of Life, co-founded by the Swiss-born popular philosopher Alain de Botton, echoes the school’s lofty approach to problems, claiming to be “intelligent, rigorous, well-written new guides to everyday living.” Yet to peruse the School of Life’s calendar of classes is to fall into a vortex of jargon pitched somewhere between the banal banter of daytime talk shows and the schedule for a nightmarish New Age retreat: “How to Have Better Conversations,” “How to Realise Your Potential,” “Developing a Compassionate Mind: One Day Intensive,” “Philosophy Slam,” “Learning How to Say No,” “Getting Better at Online Dating,” “Resilience: One Day Workshop.” Before long, I was ready to sign up for “How to Stay Calm.”
De Botton himself is a divisive, if not easily dismissed, public intellectual. The author of bestselling books about many of the broad topics the School of Life curriculum covers — love, work, religion, happiness, and philosophy itself — de Botton is often accused of being a purveyor of Philosophy Lite (see, for example, Victoria Beale’s January 3, 2013, attack on him in The New Republic, “How to Be a Pseudo-Intellectual”). His works are securely aimed at the insecure middlebrow reader, the kind of person who knows that Proust can change her life but maybe would rather read about how Proust can change her life than slog through seven life-changing volumes. Indeed, there is something ersatz, if not quite fraudulent, about de Botton’s entire intellectual enterprise: he often seems like a grad student who shows up to seminar having done just enough of the reading to participate by jumping on other people’s comments, but who never makes an original observation of his own. He is constantly quoting and alluding to great figures — Jane Austen, John Stuart Mill, Stendhal, and Freud, among others, all get name-dropped in his self-help book, How To Think More About Sex (about which more below) — but he tends to meander and summarize after a quotation rather than using it to drive his own argument forward.
De Botton has, however, up until recently, been a great champion of philosophy as a way to work through life’s conundrums. His The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) is a charming and, in its own way, useful book that dissects the lives and ideas of major philosophers like Socrates and Nietzsche and applies them to everyday problems like “unpopularity” and “difficulties.” De Botton claims in Consolations that it is possible to “take on a task at once both profound and laughable: to become wise through philosophy.” In this he has positioned himself in a long line of thinkers about the care and maintenance of the self, such that the editing and writing of “intelligent self-help books” would not seem like such a stretch.
Yet the real issue with de Botton’s new book, and the others in the How To series, is not simply a lack of depth but one of purpose: they are certainly shallow in their philosophy, but they are not particularly useful either. The books are combination platters of soft science, anecdotal case studies (some real, some fictional), and exercises or suggestions about steps the reader could take to further his or her goal. Along with de Botton’s volume purporting to inspire more (but not deeper, note) thought about sex, the School of Life series includes How to Stay Sane, by Philippa Perry; How to Change the World, by John-Paul Flintoff; and How to Find Fulfilling Work, by Roman Krznaric. Krznaric’s volume is by far the most successful, perhaps because he is the only one of the authors who does not seem embarrassed by either his topic or the means of treating it. Perry, a psychotherapist, and Flintoff, a journalist, retain a tone like they should be doing their work by more highfalutin means. And de Botton’s book makes an enraging little study (all the books clock in at around 200 pages) of contemporary assumptions about sex, marriage, and relationships, regarded strictly from the point of view of a bored, married, middle-aged man who maybe dabbles in philosophy and fancies himself an intellectual. It’s like being hit on by a paunchy, balding European guy at an office party who tries to seduce you with, well, quotes from Jane Austen and Stendhal, and empty proclamations about the place of sex, marriage, and relationships in contemporary society.
Tokyo Lucky Hole provides a rare insight into the undocumented world of the wild Shinjuku sex trade during the 1980’s. The photographs depict sexual acts, bondage and nude studies from locations such as pole dancing clubs, seedy hotel bedrooms and the “Lucky Hole” after which the book was titled. At the time of the books publication it was considered highly controversial and this the first edition has had areas censored with black lines to cover clients and sex workers private parts.
ko-25 Araki, Tokyo Lucky Hole by Araki
