READIN' ON  THE RIVER

THE BOTANY OF DESIRE
      Michael Pollan

      Pollan takes the question..."What if plants have evolved to gratify certain human desires so that humans will help them multiply?", and give the reader an interest reverse perspective on mutual beneficiality.  The author takes the apple, the tulip, the potato and the marijuana to a talks about their relationship to humans, from the plants perspective.
     Pollan does a credible job.  The human tastes for sweetness (the apple), beauty (the tulip), intoxication (marijuana) and control over nature (the genetically modified potato).
     The section on the apple  was my favorite.

INVENTING A NATION
  Washington, Adams, Jefferson
     Gore Vidal

     Me?  I like Gore Vidal.  I like the way he uses the English language.  I like the way his mind works.  I like his sense of humor.
     The three foci of this book were immense in their personal power and in the shaping of a new nation... and just as immense in their differences and opinions of each other.
      They make the governmental figures of today pale terribly in their light. 

THE DaVINCI CODE
     Dan Brown

    This years summer and fall page turner.  Lots of history wound around  ancient secret religious societies and present day intrigue.  It's like, open the first page and wait for the whooshing sound as you get sucked inexorably in for the page-turning ride.

Back to Contents

IMPERIAL SAN FRANCISCO
    Urban Power, Earthly Ruin
     Gray A. Brechin

     Most folks love spending time in San Francisco, it's my favorite city.  This book could change your mind. 
     It's as much really about California and the West, because so much of California and the West was stripped to support it's growth.
     A sidelight is the glimpse of how and why all that heavy mining equipment ended up here on the Klamath and Salmon Rivers, is revealing.

THE DOGS OF WINTER
     Kem Nunn

     Surf-noir... No jive.  True blue (and not the skin color of a surfer when he/she leaves the water) northcoast surfing novel in the tradition of James M. Cain.  The book's settings include the cafe in Orleans (frying pans and all), ceremonies at the mouth of the Salmon River, Hoopa and the ocean coves along the trackless north coast.
     Nunn writes surfing madness disturbingly well.

THE KING OF CALIFORNIA
  J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret
                                            American Empire
     Mark Arax and Rick Wartman

     Water.  The biggest world issue of the new millennium.  This is a big book about the most fertile, productive land in the world... and how one family controls most of it.  "It is the biography of a forbidding landscape tamed by the vision of one man."  A farming miracle... at what cost?
  Good companion to Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert.

KRAKATOA  
The Day The World Exploded,
August 27,1888
     Simon Winchester

     Winchester is a wonderful writer (The Professor and the Mad Man) with a knowledge of history and geology that he combines to tell the story of the varied  catastrophic events surrounding the eruption of the island volcano of Krakatoa and subsequent devastation felt world-wide.