1. Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography, by Georgi Derluguian. How did the Soviet Union come to be, come to collapse, and was the ethnic trouble in the Caucasus brought on by globalization? This book has a unique narrative style, while the content draws upon Wallerstein, Tilly, Randall Collins, and others. There is wisdom and analysis on virtually every page.
2. Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, by Bruce Clark. The sad story of how murder and population exchanges have made the nations of the modern Mediterranean more monocultural; someone needs to write on Egypt as well.
3. Good Bread is Back, by Steven Kaplan; the subtitle says it all: A Contemporary History of French bread, the way it is made, and the people who make it. Here is Alex’s earlier post on French bread.
4. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan. This short novel is about young British newlyweds trying to have/trying to not have sex in 1962. Critics are calling it a return to form, but it feels slightly overwrought to me. Can the British really be like that? If so, do I have to read about it? I did find the last ten pages strikingly beautiful. I got my copy early on Amazon.co.uk, the American edition is out in June.
Re bread: the way to ensure a continuous supply of the good stuff (and as
much variety as you want) is to make it yourself. In his NYTimes column
last fall, Mark Bittman revealed a fantastic, and fantastically easy, way
to do this, by making a very slack dough, giving it a very long first rise
and a short second rise, and baking it in a covered cast-iron pot (to give
it enough humidity to produce a good crust).
New McEwan! Yay!
A hypothesis about the bread issue:
After stopping at the Whole Foods for a pain au chocolat one morning and contemplating why it wasn’t like the Parisian ones, one possible answer came to mind:
SIZE.
The crossaints and whatnot, baguettes too, here in America are absolutely enormous. Less flaky and more mushy since there’s more inside relative to crust. Less surface area relative to volume. They’ll go stale less quickly but there’s less yummy, yummy crust. They’re also more difficult to eat.
Someone here should try an experiment at home, baking two baguettes, one thick and the other thin. I’ll bring the wine (white from France or red from the US or Italy) and brie. Or that Munster that smells like feet.
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