Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge
By Gordon Edgar.
  - Chelsea Green, $17.95

Many of us here at Modern Times have been waiting for this book for a long time. Gordon is our beloved 'rade, everybody's favorite cuddly and cranky cheesemonger  at Rainbow Grocery, the biggest worker-owned grocery store in North America. He's also a freaking great writer. With wry, punk rock wit, Cheesemonger takes you into the secret worlds of goat farms, Rainbow job interviews and The Fancy Food Show, exploring the weirdness and awesomeness of foodie culture, small farm culture, worker-owned joyful surliness and most of all, Edgar's love affair with cheese. Cheesemonger is an awesome memoir of a punk rock anarchist food worker exploring capitalism, animal rights, business ethics and cheese with weird stuff in it. 

Save the date for Modern Times' launch of Cheesemonger Saturday, March 13th, 6:30-8:30 PM, at Amnesia Bar, 853 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA. There'll be a reading and book signing, loud music, alcohol and free artisanal cheese!

Reviewed by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha


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My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities
Edited by Jennifer Silverman, Sarah Talbot and  Yantra Bertelli
  - PM Press. $20.00.

As a prospective parent who has a disability, I ate up this amazing new collection of stories by parents parenting kids with a wide spectrum of dis/abilities, chronic illnesses and different. There's no angelic parents or telethon kids here- just true-life stories of real, complicated, alternative parents and kids dealing with the nitty-gritty everyday of disability, struggling against ableism and fighting for difference to be accepted, respected and accommodated. Ariel Gore said it's "the most important book she's read in years" and she's right.

Reviewed by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha


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Almond Blossoms and Beyond
Mahmoud Darwish (translated by Mohammad Shaheen)
  - Interlink, July 2009, $25.00, hardcover

I squealed like a little girl and snatched this off the top of the new books pile when I saw its stark white cover dripping with blushing pink almond blossoms. "If that's not a special order, it's mine!" I said to Annie. Soon it was tucked next to me in the passenger seat of my '92 Accord station wagon, like a treasured guest, to be cooed over by my other brown poet friends as I picked us up to go to sliding scale acupuncture. Billed as "one of Mahmoud Darwish's last books of poetry" (which hopefully means there'll be more), this is the first
book by the beloved Palestinian poet laureate since his death on April 9, 2008. Considered one of the preeminent voices of the Palestinian diaspora, Darwish's work sang lyrically of Palestinian resistance through the persistence of memory and life. This new work does not dissapiont, gathering some of Darwish's last work on longing, exile, men, women and home- which, if its possible, reach even higher levels of poetic mastery than his earlier work.Don't miss this.

Reviewed by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha


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Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America
Louis Adamic
  - AK Press, April 2009, $19.95, paper

"All over the country unemployment grew by leaps and bounds and the wages of those retaining their jobs went down like a rock...On top of unemployment came thousands of bank failures..."

The above is just to get that perfunctory matter of whether Louis Adamic's Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America is a timely read despite having been published nearly 80 years ago. Perhaps history is always timely but it certainly isn't always as readable as this recent AK Press reissue.

'They don't write 'em like they used to' rings unequivocally true in this instance. None of those pesky footnotes cluttering up these pages! No academic double speak or tiresome refutations of the methodology of other historians! (At the time this book was written there was very little published Labor History to refute.)

The premise of the book is simple—the overwhelming majority of class violence in the U.S. has been visited upon working and unemployed people at the hands of, or due to the influence of, employers; the use of violence by worker's organizations has been much more sporadic but has peaked in periods of desperation and by the author's estimation, been the reason such organizations have survived periods of extreme crisis. It is a simple premise and Adamic writes in a straightforward manner.

The typical milestones of Labor History (capital L, capital H) are not Adamic's focus and even the familiar terrain that Adamic covers does not rehash the familiar versions of events. Although race and gender issues are not treated to the extent needed, Dynamite still proves an accessible and compelling read for both those who are unfamiliar with the history of worker's movements in the U.S. and connoisseurs of Labor History.

Reviewed by Erin Stalnaker


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10,000 Dresses
Marcus Ewert (illustrated by Rex Ray)
  - Seven Stories Press, November 2008, $14.95, hardcover

Am I allowed to write 'OMG' in a staff book review? Because Oh, my god, what a shining example of how to do a kid's book about queer issues—and how to do it right! I actually teared up at the end. The publisher blurb says: "This gorgeous picture book tells a modern fairy tale of a young girl, who dreams about magical dresses, and how she becomes the girl she always dreamed she'd be." What it doesn't say, much like the book itself, is that the little girl in the story is a little transgender girl. What blew me away about the story (beautifully illustrated by local artist Rex Ray) was how respectul the story was in its framing of this young person's struggle to be seen. Respectul of the main character, of the subject matter, and of the audience's intellect. 10,000 Dresses is a deeply important step beyond the extremely-valuable-but-overly-demonstrative world of Heather Has Two Mommies. I sincerely hope it is a harbinger of things to come.

Reviewed by Annie Danger


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Disquiet
Julia Leigh
  - Penguin Books, November 2008, $13.00, paperback

From the inside cover: "When Olivia arrives at her mother's chateau in rural france with her two young children in tow, it is the first time she has come home in more than a decade. Soon the family is joined by Olivia's brother Marcus and his wife Sophie—but this reunion is far from joyful. After years of desperately wanting a baby, Sophie has just given birth to a stillborn child, and she is struggling to overcome her devastation. Meanwhile, Olivia wrestles with her own secrets about the cruel and violent man she married many years before. Disquiet is a darkly beautiful and atmospheric story that will linger in the mind long after the final page is turned."

Staff Picked by Peta Pottinger


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All About Lulu
Alan Weisman
  - Soft Skull Press, July 2008, $14.95, paperback

So, the title pretty much gives it away: Will, our runty, brooding, vegetarian protagonist, is hopelessly obsessed with Lulu. Too bad she's his stepsister. C'est la vie. The character development throughout the novel is stellar, from Will's lovable, meat crazed, bodybuilding dad, to his knucklehead twin brothers, to Will's assortment of friends, or, if I'm permitted a trashy magazine moment, frienemies. And don't be surprised if in the course of reading, you find yourself obsessing over Lulu. And why not, everyone else is. A book for anyone who's ever pined/lost their mind in pursuit of an unattainable other.

Reviewed by Dia Vergados


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The World Without Us
Alan Weisman
  - Thomas Dunne Books, July 2007, $24.95, hardcover

Shall I start by saying that, at least cumulatively, about one third of this book was pornography? Yes. Yes I shall.

"Pornography," you say? Yes. Porn in the same way that, when a greywater-loving friend and I went to see the second X-Men movie we were screaming and falling out of our seats in ecstasy during the extended dam disaster sequence. What can we say? We have studied some ills of modern civilization and watching footage of the inevitable outcomes of certain human technological experiments is a little fever-inducing. In the good way. Rivers seeping up and taking their place among the hills. Miles and miles of concrete artifice in the form of cities and highways crumbling from the simple onslaught of small plants and freezing water. The simple, lustrous thought that someday we might not cause dead zones that last through geologic time for the sake of cheap electricity now. In the day we work to bring dams down safely and responsibly and we know how hard they will be to move. What a hot fantasy to watch it go so quickly...

That said, there's other thirds to this book, as well! One sentence description: A cut above the rest of recent, pop-science books and a thinly-veiled critique of the monumental environmental impact of our modern civilization.

The premise of the book this question: What if people disappeared tomorrow? Just up and went—no nuclear war, no asteroid. More like a rapture. Not even time to shut things down properly. What would happen? What would be left in five, ten, two thousand years?

Moving from there, Weisman hops around the globe and across environmental genres (nuclear reactors, concrete cities, farm houses, foresting practices, et cetera) to weave a rich tapestry depicting, piece-by-piece, the devestation we are causing now. There are exquisite, time-lapse descriptions of what happens to all the major parts of first-world infrastructure when nature gains even the smallest of footholds.

Did you know that without electricity and constant supervision, New York City's subway system would be overrun with water within two days? The factoids abound amidst Weisman's pretty scientific, mostly straightforward, occasionally offensive speculations. Despite some sticky points where his worldview and mine seemed at odds (the realm of "feminism," for instance), I found this book delightful and informative. I call it "pop-science" because it's not a thorough examination of much, but that’s also an asset. Like Blink and The Tipping Point, both by Malcolm Gladwell, The World Without Us hops across a sea of science like a skipping stone, releasing a thin-but-thoroughly-entertaining effervescence of anecdotes. I wish there were more critical thinking—more about the links between environmental degradation and other aspects of the devestating impact our cultures are having on our lives. I suppose that in that sense, World remains usefully neutral(..ish) and hopefully more accessible for it. You won't come out a genius or a well-informed radical, but you will end up with a much more detailed picture of the tenuous and ill-planned-out pacts levied upon our earth by first-world civilizations.

Plus, there's still all them buildings falling down and rivers usurping streets and such.

Reviewed by Annie Danger


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Persepolis and Persepolis 2
Marjane Satrapi
  - Pantheon Books, June 2004 and August 2004, $12.95, paperback

I don't know why I have such a strong aversion to graphic novels, but the combination of image and text make me feel really attention deficient. So, the first time someone told me to read Persepolis, I acknowledged that I valued said critic's opinion and I'd love to borrow their copy some other time. And I never borrowed it, but a few years later found it was the only reading material I could scavenge in the Manhattan apartment I was vacationing in (nice life), and I was desperate for some reading material.

And I'm so sorry for the cliché: I couldn't put it down! When I got back to work I snatched up Persepolis 2 and read it in a couple hours before bed. That isn't such an incredible feat considering most of the pages are images, but in years past I couldn't concentrate on a graphic novel long enough to get through a page.

For the seven or so people who don't know: Persepolis and Persepolis 2 tell the story of Satrapi's childhood in pre & post-revolution Iran, her 'coming-of-age' in Europe, and subsequent return to a very changed childhood home. In part, the wealth of historical information is what drew me into her story—when I was learning world history for that one year in high school, I think Iran was skipped over, or called Persia. Satrapi's spartan narrative and imagery held me in the story. Even when her experiences seem the most incredible, Persepolis never feels fictionalized, superlativized, hyperbolized. It feels like that choking feeling in your throat that comes from holding in a good cry.

But I don't suggest reading Persepolis so you can have a good cry a lá Steel Magnolias. We live in a world where, as Audre Lorde wrote, for the majority of people, in order to survive, you've got to repress the violent reality of your day-to-day life. You read this and other stories about other people's lives to get back what you repress, to find affirmation that shit really does hurt that much sometimes. But, whatever shit there is, that isn't all. Sometimes there are sweet grandmas and good belly laughs. So, to summarize, the word is: visceral. Or, whatever, that's what I got out of it.

Reviewed by Dia Vergados


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Borderlands/La Frontera
Gloria Anzaldua
  - Aunt Lute Books, June 2007, $16.95, paperback

As the State steps up its attacks on immigrant and queer communities, and our movements remain constantly on the defensive, many of us are hungry for new political frameworks and vision. The twentieth anniversary edition of Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera reminds us of the leadership we need to prioritize in our struggles for social justice. It envisions a politics that centers the experiences of all who live on the borders of race, nation, gender, and culture.

Three years after her death, many freedom fighters have found power and truth in her words: "What I want is an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture."

Note: This twentieth-anniversary edition features new commentaries from prominent activists, artists, and teachers on the legacy of Gloria Anzaldua's visionary work.

Reviewed by Becca Tumposky


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The Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler
  - Aspect (Warner Books), January 2000, $13.99, paper

Okay, so after nearly fifteen years I have broken my mental block against science fiction. A couple of months ago I broke through and read The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Thankful for the pressing good taste of my friends and loved-ones, I came out not only unscathed but much, much better off for the experience. Now I have a lot lot lot of catching up to do. Next stop: The Parable of the Sower, by the absolutely brilliant Ms. Octavia E. Butler. Wow. I guess things become modern classics for a reason. It makes the world feel a lot lonelier without Octavia.

Butler is simply gripping. She weaves a narrative with such force and keen observation that all you can do is buckle up and careen through Parable with glee and appallation. The story follows teenager Lauren Olamina through the harsh and utterly real/possible world of 2024 California and a series of traumas and trials as she and her loved ones fight for survival. This is a damn fine example of the cunning and intelligent power of speculative fiction. At once a warning, an allegory, and a powerful work of fiction, Parable is not to be missed. It brought me great feelings of value for my survivalist friends and for my scarcity issues. If you haven't read this, you really ought too—you'll finish it tomorrow, anyway. It's too hard to put down.

Reviewed by Annie Danger


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