Book Review: The Story of Stuff (Chapter Four)

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

Chapter One || Chapter Two || Chapter Three

If you've seen the Story of Stuff video and have heard about any of Colin Beavan's adventures as No Impact Man, not much in Chapter Four: Consumption will surprise you. Annie makes her standard points about how Americans are driven to an overconsumptive lifestyle by our public policy that protects corporate interests and trade at all costs, ubiquitous advertising designed to make us feel bad about ourselves (to the point of clinical depression) if we aren't contributing to the economy as purchasers, and through the planned obsolescence that requires products to be thrown away as quickly as possible to keep production and sales high.

She also makes what I know to be a common point (but which is likely still uncommon knowledge): that a clear tipping point exists where consuming more Stuff than we need actually makes us unhappier. (Before you leap down my throat, understand that "need" is a loose term here; rather than smacking of a Marxian philosophy (which isn't all bad, but that isn't the point), "need" incorporates luxuries and treats and experiences designed purely for human pleasure, while eschewing the excess of consumption-for-consumption's sake.) Annie's stories indicate that our existing social order of materialism undermines the American well-being, bringing us pain that ranges "from low life satisfaction and happiness to depression and anxiety, to physical problems such as headaches and to personality disorders, narcissism, and antisocial behavior (151)." It's not that having nice things can't actually bring us happiness - it most definitely can. It's that the costs of all of that Stuff within our American society of thoughtless consumption (with massive credit card debt, high cost burdens for education and healthcare, and a constant war to keep up with the Joneses) brings an abundance of misery that cancels out and then diminishes the original happiness.

That specific point about "misery" makes me think of Colin Beavan, and an experience he related on his blog several years ago. While riding his bicycle in New York City, cycling with the traffic (as thousands of New Yorkers do every day), Colin was nearly sideswiped and run off the road by a driver who didn't see him. To avoid being crushed between the ton of metal and rubber and fuel of the car and a cement wall, Colin pounded on the rear window and screamed, "I'm here, look out!" The driver's response was to roll down the window and furiously tell Colin off for having the audacity to touch his precious automobile. You can read the rest of the story at the No Impact Blog, but the important point is that the driver was so harried and stressed out that his immediate reaction in the situation was rage over potential injury to his own Stuff rather than horror over the potential death of another human being through his own lack of attention. That "stress" sure sounds like misery to me.

As in the other parts of The Story of Stuff, Annie also lays out her plan for improving this system - and the solution is actually remarkably simple, considering the complexity of the problem. The solution?

Activate your inner citizen (175). Because:

1. Participating in strong, vibrant communities makes us happier and healthier - and being socially isolated is the most common denominator among those who perish in natural disasters.
2. A vibrant community lifestyle, as opposed to a strong individualist lifestyle, lessens our toll on the planet -- because sharing and collaborating takes a lot less energy.
3. Reinvigorating that citizen muscle will rebuild public participation in politics and generate real collective solutions to the considerable problems we're facing on this planet. If we're going to succeed in changing the largest man-made system on the planet in order to improve life, liberty and happiness for all, we desperately need collective brain power. Show Up.

Chapters One, Two, and Three were awe-striking, overwhelming, and to some degree paralyzing. I find that Chapter Four is filled with hope. We can change this system that allows the thievery of the world's natural resources and the destruction of precious people, with leadership and creativity from ordinary citizens who demand something better.

All we have to do is be brave and show up. Because of Chapter Four, I recommend The Story of Stuff to everyone who can read.

First published at expetesso.com

Book Review: The Story of Stuff (Chapter Three)

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

 Chapter One || Chapter Two

I confess; at 108 pages in, I'm overwhelmed. The chapter on Production sent me running to the Internet and my library at work to verify Annie's science and health claims. (Those I've tested all seem to be true according to independent sources I trust.)  I've been surfing the web for the last two hours, trying to determine why "corporate activism" isn't the primary mission of the most trusted organizations (including my own) who are committed to the defense and improvement of Public Health.  My mind is spinning with the list of chemical horrors present in my home and backpack, in my girlfriend's refrigerator, in my nephews' toddler toys, and in the scrubbed-clean hospital ward where my mother works every day -- trying to keep straight the difference between PVC and phthalates and 200 other toxins I'm mixing up and mispronouncing.


By the time I got to the chapter on Distribution -- the intensely cross-webbed pattern of how Stuff moves from one site to another to become available for people to buy it -- and the rules and laws and mandates ensuring that Free Trade between nations trumps all, I was mentally and emotionally wrung out. If I were reading more slowly, perhaps this might not be so, but at the moment I can't actually wrap my brain around the pernicious evil against human rights Annie describes as enacted by the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and USAID. Instead, some quotes.

On the decimation of local booksellers by the mammoth Amazon.com:

I'm a fan of the following model: Local bookstores that I can walk or ride my bike to, with a friendly face behind the counter who can personally recommend titles to me. Once I'm finished with a book I lend it to everyone I know, if I can recommend it; otherwise I Freecycle it.. so it finds a second life with someone else.... And then there are libraries -- in every place I've lived, the library has been one of my favorite places to find books as well as to meet neighbors, attend public seminars, weigh in on community issues, and sometimes even hear live music. Amazon may be easy and fast and impressive in its scale, but it just doesn't provide those quality of life extras (120).

(The inability to lend books is the real reason I can't bear to own an eReader.)
On the sustainability claims recently made by Wal-Mart: 

I mean really: consider Wal-Mart's boasting that 'by reducing the packaging on one of our patio sets we were able to use four hundred fewer shipping containers to deliver them.' How many shipping containers must be required to ship the patio furniture around the world if there was an excess of four hundred containers just from tightening up some of the packaging (124)?

On the development of multinational Superstores, and their role in global society:

There are those who compare today's huge multinational corporations to colonizers. Just like colonial powers, the corporation's central aim is not to foster local economic development, happiness, and prosperity but to enrich itself. In Africa, for example, colonizers built the railroads not so they would connect local African towns with one another, but as tracks that ran in single lines from the interior to the ports on the coast, so that resources and slaves could be extracted as efficiently as possible. And that's exactly what the major chains, with the help of international trade policies, have done: they've built tracks for the wealth of local communities (whether that wealth comes from natural resources in Africa, toxic goods produced by exploited workers in China, or the sweat of underpaid retail employees in America) to flow in one direction -- into their pockets (127).

And lastly, a story about an international aid agency led by Americans, and the horrors it created in Haiti:

The one [Haitian] farmer I remember most clearly lowered his voice at one point and explained that Miami rice [white rice imported to Haiti from America] and the cancellation of the Haitian government's subsidies for farmers was all part of a plan by the World Bank and its ally, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to drive Haitians off their land and into the city to sew clothes for rich Americans. Fewer farmers. More garment workers. The destruction of farming as a livelihood, he explained, was necessary to push people to the city, so people would be desperate enough to work all day in miserable sweatshops. When he spoke of it, he whispered and his eyes grew extra intense and I wondered if he was jumping to conclusions too fast, perhaps entertaining a conspiracy theory. I mean, really, how could agencies devoted to alleviating poverty want to have Haitians sewing [Disney] princess nightgowns instead of growing food for their communities?

...The next day, I went to USAID, a government organization that describes itself as "the principal U.S. Agency to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms." I didn't know much about international development agencies back then, and I eagerly anticipated learning about strategies to restore the rural environment and get those farms back in working order again, to allow those who wanted to farm to be able to earn a sustainable, dignified living while producing food locally. It seemed crazy to me that a once-lush, tropical island was abandoning farming and importing food. Local food means less packaging, less transportation, more local jobs, and fresher, healthier food. How could anyone not want that?

...The USAID representative began explaining his agency's vision for "developing" Haiti. To my utter amazement, he laid out the same plan as the whispering farmer had. But he wasn't saying it while leaning closer, in hushed tones, with wild eyes. He sat up straight and tall and announced that USAID did not feel it was "efficient" for Haitians to produce food. Instead, he felt, they should participate in the global economy, leveraging their best resources, which apparently meant many thousands of people so near starvation that they would be willing to sew Sleeping Beauty pajamas from morning to night, endure physical and sexual threats, live in slums, only to be able to feed their kids half a meal a day.

He flat out proclaimed that local food self-sufficiency was not desirable or needed.  He explained that a better concept is "food security," which means that a population didn't need to grow its own food but should instead import food, in this case from the United States. Since U.S. farmers (heavily subsidized, I'd like to point out) can grow rice more "efficiently" than can small Haitian farmers, USAID preferred that the rice from the United States be sent to Haiti and Haitians leave their farms to work in the garment factories -- a job that, he felt, was less suited to the U.S. population.

I blurted out that "efficiency" was not the only criteria. A farmer's relationship to the land, healthy and dignified work, a parent's ability to spend time with his or her kids after school, a community staying intact generation after generation -- all these things had value, and a real development plan would prioritize them. "Well," he said, "if a Haitian really wants to farm, there is room for a handful of them to grow things like organic mangoes for the high-end export market." I almost fell off my chair. I realized that the ideas that the Haitian farmer had shared were no conspiracy theory. A conspiracy requires some attempt at secrecy. But here was USAID just laying out its grand plan for the people of Haiti -- not as self-determinate people, but as a market for our surplus rice and a supplier of cheap seamstresses, with an occasional organic mango for sale at Dean & DeLuca. It wasn't a secret plan; it was a plan they openly admitted and justified (137-9)."

The last is what I find most devastating. Because the small, independent farmers of Haiti were "developed" off of their land, the island nation is still unable to provide enough food to feed itself -- according to a U.S. State Department memo from January 10, 2011, which lays out a plan to build a stable, decentralized Haitian food supply of "mango and cacao for export ... and rice and horticulture crops for domestic consumption". One year after the most devastating earthquake we've seen, the people who have survived can't feed themselves -- because 15 years ago the United States decimated the Haitian farmland on behalf of Walt Disney.

This is the story of our Stuff. Can we truly consider it to be worth so very little?

First published at expetesso.com

Book Review: The Story of Stuff (Chapter Two)

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

Start with my review of Chapter One

Picking up where I left off yesterday, it's important to remember that Annie's point isn't to frighten us, but to share the information that we lack about where our Stuff comes from.

How many times have I stood in a department store and asked myself, or overheard others asking, "How can this item cost so little? Surely the materials alone are more expensive than the item; can XYZ Company really afford to sell it at this price?". More than I can easily count up on my fingers and toes. It's true, the materials and the process of production *is* more expensive than the price tag in a middle class department store indicates. What Annie relates in this chapter is the catch: neither the company producing the goods nor the people buying them have to pay the real costs associated with making our Stuff. "Who does?" is the point of Chapter Two: Production.

First, we go back to Extraction for one important point: because natural resources are so often considered "free for the taking" in non-First-World countries, whoever gets to them first with the biggest guns can lay claim and pay only the costs associated with collecting the resources.

Second, Annie looks at the actual Production costs.

• There's the transportation of resources between the point of collection and the places where they are refined into products - cotton fiber becomes cloth, trees become paper, copper and gold become computer microchips, etc. Multinational corporations almost always have free trade agreements with the nations where their factories are located, so they don't have to pay taxes or tariffs on the respurces being moved.  Considering the massive volume of Stuff that can fit onto a transport ship, and the fact that fuel to operate the ships are one of the "natural resources" Extracted from places that don't require fair payment, moving the resources around is a teeny, tiny cost -- less than pennies per finished product.
• Then there's the refining process that actually turns raw materials into finished goods.  (Annie details the complete production cycle of five different items: a T-shirt, a Book, a Computer, an Aluminum Can, and PVC - the cheapest, most ubiquitous form of plastic.)  In each process, hundreds or thousands of chemical compounds are added to the raw materials to make it into the right Stuff for use in our finished products.  The more dangerous the production stage, the less willing able-bodied, educated people with bargaining leverage are to do the work, therefore the most toxic stages of production are handled in the poorest of places -- in factories without safe working conditions for the men, women, and children (yes, children!) who are forced to work there -- for pennies a day, at most.
• Once the raw materials are turned into usable materials (cotton bolls into cloth, for example), it's shipped to a different place where the finished product (a T-shirt) is assembled.  Again, this is a point where labor is impossibly cheap and inequality is rampant; people who have other options to feed their families won't work in a sweatshop, but if that's the only work available, they'll sew 60 T-shirts every day and hope that they get paid their fifteen cents for twelve hours in hell. Yes, that's actually 15 cents of labor for 60 finished shirts, or .0025 cents per T-shirt.  

That is how the things we pay for have such low price tags -- because even with the Extraction costs, and the Production costs of transportation, refinement, and finishing labor, a $4.99 T-shirt costs a massive company operating without scruples less than 10 cents to produce.

This portion of the Production chapter, the longest in the book by far, is fascinating and horrifying, but isn't yet the best part.  Annie uses the word "carcinogen" in every other paragraph when talking about the chemicals used in refining raw materials -- both those that are added to the material, and those that are created as byproducts of the reaction process.  "Carcinogen" is a fancy word meaning any substance that is directly involved in causing cancer. I work for the American Cancer Society, and have dedicated the majority of my energy and effort toward eradicating the barrel of diseases we call cancer; my ears perk right up whenever anything that might be related is mentioned.

I latched most firmly onto her points around super-toxin dioxins. "Dioxin" in this case refers to a variety of pollutant compounds containing the absolute chemical dioxin, which are classified as "likely human carcinogens" by the Environmental Protection Agency (tasked with protecting human health and the environment in the United States) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (a branch of the World Health Organization responsible for coordinating and conducting research on the causes of human cancer and the mechanisms of carcinogenesis, as well as develoing scientific strategies for cancer prevention and control). A search on the American Cancer Society's website for "dioxin" returns 21 immediate results, ranging from papers identifying exposure to dioxin as a likely cause of soft-tissue cancers to warnings about using tampons because they are often bleached with dioxins.

What Annie's twenty years of research and observation around the production process have shown is that carcinogenic toxins are released into the soil, water, and air at every stage of Production and beyond. PVC, the most common and cheapest form of plastic that is used to create everything from the nipples on baby bottles to vinyl shower curtains, releases mass quantities of dioxins when first created (in those third-world factories where healthy, educated white people refuse to work) and even more dioxins when it is disposed of (do you live near a dump where trash is burned? Better hope your neighbor didn't toss a baby bottle into their GLAD bag on pick-up day...).

I was completely overwhelmed reading this section.  (That's pretty clear if you read my review of Chapter One from yesterday, when I was alternately writing about chapter one and reading chapter two.) But when you make it through to the last few pages, really understanding the inequalities and brokenness of this system of Production -- a system that is trashing our planet and making all of us sick -- you're rewarded with Annie's ideas about how to fix it. She doesn't claim that it will be easy -- just the opposite in fact, but with all of her knowledge and research about this system, I am convinced that the plan she lays out is possible, if ordinary people like us start raising a ruckus about the need for sustainable design, more efficient extraction of only the materials we actually need, real sharing of both the costs and benefits associated with making our Stuff, and a society-wide consciousness about what Stuff we actually consider worth buying.

And, this is just my opinion, but when our national leaders talk about the need for America to step it up with Green jobs, educational systems that allow for creative problem solving and engineering that can change our society to one that is better for all people, they're talking about a new way of thinking and living and working that can fall in line with Annie's thoughts about a solution.  There is hope for a better, healthier, happier future for all of us.

Chapter Three on Thursday...
First published at expetesso.com

Book Review: The Story of Stuff (Chapter One)

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

If you've read my blog for a while, you might recognize my love for The Story of Stuff from this post, back in 2007.

I'm not against stuff. In fact, I'm pro-Stuff! I want us to value our Stuff more, to care for it, to give it the respect it deserves. I want us to recognize that each thing we buy involved all sorts of resources and labor. Someone mined the earth for the metals in your cell phone, someone unloaded the bales from the cotton gin for your T-shirt. Someone in a factory assembled that pair of sunglasses and they might have been exposed to carcinogens or forced to work over-time. Someone drove or flew this bouquet around the country or the world to get it to you. We need to understand the true value of our Stuff, far beyond the price tag and far beyond the social status of ownership. Stuff should be long-lasting, made with the pride of an artisan and cared for accordingly. (Introduction, xxx)

Thus ends Annie Leonard's introduction to The Story of Stuff, a book that picks up where her video left off, describing in consummate detail the unsustainable, careening-off-kilter system that is our materials economy. Many people skip or skim introductions to non-fiction, particularly lengthy introductions that include charts, graphs and a variety of definitions for words that are almost-but-not-quite familiar -- myself included. But this is one instance where I'm terribly, terribly glad to have familiarized myself with the intent of the author prior to reading her work.

Annie is not a minimalist. She isn't one of the "give away all of one's possessions and live in a hut on the flats of a mud plain to become closer to nature" environmentalists. (I know some of those folks; they're good-hearted, kind people, but this book isn't about them.) Annie likes her home and her books and her creature-comforts as much as the next person; and she might appreciate them more than the average American, because she's done the work to understand how her stuff is made, and what affects that process has on the people and the environment of our world. With The Story of Stuff, she sets out to share that experience with us, to teach us about the true value -- and thus the true costs -- of the Stuff we bring into our lives.

This is a vitally important point, because much of what Annie says in the first chapter is pretty frightening -- and becomes more so as she continues. Without the knowledge that her intention is to educate and open our eyes to what relatively few Americans have ever seen, it would be easy to be overwhelmed by fear and dismiss the greater point. That would be a terrible loss.

Chapter One: Extraction is about the process of gathering the ingredients necessary to create our Stuff from the world around us. Whether we're gathering wood because we need a table, mining the gold and diamonds for an engagement ring, or collecting the water to make soda, we're pulling raw materials out of the earth -- or creating synthetic varieties in a laboratory. The process of extracting raw materials (or creating new ones) requires many, many, many other resources; on page one Annie presents the example of paper: "making one ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various other resources." In context, a single ream of the stuff we buy from Staples to stock our copy machines for $7.19 demands 98 times that volume of other Stuff that gets destroyed along the way.

And that's the real point about Extraction -- it's not about what we actually wind up with, it's about what we wreck in order to get the Stuff we want. When we need paper, we don't walk through a forest and cut down the dead trees, the ones that are no longer useful for removing carbon dioxide from the air and replacing it with the oxygen we so desperately crave. Instead, we clear cut an entire forest -- chopping trees down and yanking out the stumps and root systems (or leaving them to wither and die).

I knew that this happened, but always thought that the trees I bought from organizations like the Arbor Foundation for replanting went into those forests, to rebuild them slowly, over time. It turns out that this isn't the case at all. Instead, tree plantations are created by planting acres upon acres of a fast-growing substitute for traditional hardwoods, plants engineered to have shallow root systems that are easy to harvest quickly and replant for faster and faster regrowth and continuous harvesting. This doesn't sound so bad until Annie tells what happens next: without deep root systems to anchor soil in place and create homes for woodland wildlife, heavy rains wash all of the loam -- the healthy topsoil that we pay a premium for at the nursery for adding to our gardens and flower beds -- downhill. When an entire forest has been destroyed, and the topsoil that was anchoring all of that life moves, a few heavy rains can turn the remaining soil layers into a volume of mud that can wipe out entire communities, like those that threatened Haiti immediately after last year's devastating Hurricanes.

Another piece of the Extraction equation, though, is the details of *who* is doing the extraction. Who is responsible for the labor, who reaps the reward for collecting the raw materials, who bears the burden of living with what remains, and who benefits from the Stuff that is ultimately created? In general, those who bear the burden don't reap any of the rewards, and those who benefit from the Stuff don't ever see the full costs.  This is what Annie calls Imbalanced Benefits. In places where "there's an abundance of valuable natural resources... the local people get the short end of the deal, environmentally and economically" (35-37).  When governments can rely on the resources to provide income rather than a tax base of citizens, there's a distinct imbalance of power that leaves those who have to live with the consequences of Extraction without any bargaining levers. (Think about the recent revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in this context!)

The forest/paper example is just one aspect of the Extraction phase of our materials economy. Annie details dozens of specific stories from her own experience, observations made on her travels to Bangledash, India, and Sierra Leone (among other countries) about "trees, rocks, and water" (1), in order to relate stories of impending wars over the rights to clean, potable water and rare ore (blood diamonds are just one strain), and the effects those particular issues are creating around the world.  But she has a point -- we don't have to do it this way.  In essence,

...we need to extract less and ensure that the extraction processes we do use support environmental, community, and worker well-being. We need to utilize what we extract more efficiently, more wisely, and more reverently. And we need a much more equal distribution of both the harms and the benefits generated by resource extraction (40).

This isn't easy, but it's possible -- and it seems infinitely more possible after reading the next chapter, on Production.  We'll do that tomorrow.

First published at expetesso.com

Book Review: Candor

Candor by Pam Bachorz

While I found Pam's Drought to have a few drawbacks, I have no such compunctions about her first novel, Candor. In fact, I've already passed my three-week-old copy to the first person on my rec list, with the promise to let it make the rounds as soon as she's done.

The premise: Oscar Banks is a model citizen, or so he would have you believe. After learning that he (and every other child of Candor) is being brainwashed into his father's idea of the perfect child, he sets out to save himself and every other kid of parents with more money than morals. Make no mistake, though -- Oscar's no goody-goody; he charges a hefty price for his services, building a nest egg to fuel his own eventual departure from Candor. But his "perfect plan" develops a little hiccup in the form of a perfectly imperfect and independent girl who shows up and wins his heart without the slightest effort.

Candor is one layer of manipulation, thievery and misplaced trust woven into another, and then another, and then another. Oscar is both genuinely charming and a complete jerk; I found myself rooting for him to get what he wants as well as a smack upside the head at a half-dozen different points. He's clearly a real kid, with a real kid's foibles, and his oh-so-stealthy, almost Tom-Sawyer-like escapades are so obvious, you realize the only reason he wasn't caught out in his work to "beat the system" years before the novel takes place is because he's the only person in the town completely above reproach -- his father touts him to prospective-buyer-parents as the model of "what your child can be", and those who buy the brainwashing for their own offspring repeat the sale. The entire town is brainwashed -- literally -- to think he's the perfect child, and no one in a position of power ever questions his role or place in it. The perfect rat. Does the rat get the cheese or the trap?

Candor gets five stars. It's exceptionally well written, a page turner that holds up to a second read, and has the best ending I've read in any YA novel. Highly recommended.

First published at Goodreads: see all my reviews

Book Review: Drought

Drought by Pam Bachorz

Drought is a terrific story -- "the haunting story of one community's thirst for life, and the dangerous struggle of the only girl who can grant it."

The background: A rural, cultishly religious, capital-C Community was enslaved in 1812 after making a seemingly advantageous bargain with the leader of a local town for their continued protection and right to peaceably exist. For 200 years, the people have survived with little changing in their age, appearance, desires, dreams, beliefs, or their daily existence -- one of back-breaking labor, semi-starvation, and routine beatings from sadistic overseers.

The premise: The deliverance and salvation of the Community rests on the actions and generosity of a young girl born in 1812 and just now (200 years later) reaching adolescence. Ruby's loyalties are tested as she observes, questions, and begins to learn the grown-up truths about the people who have ensured her safety for as long as she can remember, and learns more about the world outside her enclave from Ford, the first outsider to ever show her kindness.

I adore Pam's story-telling voice; she's consistent and fresh, and is gloriously enmeshed in the heart and soul of her main character. She writes from the first-person POV -- a construction that I usually have to talk myself into coping with -- and at no time in Drought did I feel that she abandoned Ruby to tell the audience something we ought to have known.

The plot is full of twists and turns with deep consequences, both positive and negative, for the seemingly smallest of choices and actions. There's nothing predictable about the choices Ruby makes, perhaps because actually having the freedom to make a decision between two options is so novel for her. Like many teenagers coming into their own, she walks the line between accepting responsibility for her choices and painting someone else with the blame brush, and the chilling course leading up to the denouement is fabulously both of her own making and beyond her control.

The only fault I can find with the book is one of characterization. Ruby is very much an adolescent girl just coming into her own; she's alternately thoughtful and rash, impossibly generous and understandably selfish. Twenty-five pages into the story, I find it utterly implausible that she has been alive for 200 years, observing her surroundings with the cautious, hunted-deer skills required to survive in the Community, and is only now thinking to question what she has been taught. As an individual, she's too keen an observer and too critical a thinker for her awakening to be fully believable.

That said, it's quite a good book, and one that I recommend happily.

First published at Goodreads: see all my reviews

Corrin's Perfect Blueberry Muffins

I have been searching for "the perfect blueberry muffin recipe" for nearly a year, since I first started cooking for Corrin every weekend.  She's adores blueberries, but has a very particular set of criteria for proper appreciation. In a muffin, the crumb must be finely textured, richly flavored, not-too-sweet, and must "let the berries talk." The flavor of both the berries and the crumb should be off-set by a generous amount of lemon without becoming unpleasantly acidic.  And including rich dairy like milk, cream, or soft cheese is unacceptable for delicate stomachs. No pressure, right?

After attempting to tweak a half-dozen recipes over the last year, I finally screwed up the courage to mess with a bit of Smitten Kitchen perfection.  Deb is an extraordinary chef and baker; changing one of her recipes is like walking the cliff of inedibility. But when sour cream and yogurt are required ingredients of what she calls "perfect blueberry muffins", adaptation is required.

Attempt number one involved a simple substitution of soy yogurt for the sour cream. The resulting muffinettes were "too bland" and "not blueberry enough."

Attempt number two involved a slight reduction in both butter and sugar, a substitution of blueberry silk for sour cream, and increasing the zest. The blueberry flavor was "over-powering", and the yogurt contained additional citric acid; the lemon and blueberry were vying for prominence.

Attempt number three, though -- with attempt number three I have achieved the pinnacle of Mount Muffin -- a crisp outside, a soft crumb with a glory of lemon flavor, and an explosion of blueberries.

Corrin's Perfect Blueberry Muffins
5-1/2 TBSP unsalted butter, softened to room temperature 
scant 1/2 cup cane sugar
1 large egg
3/4 cup Silk Live soy yogurt, plain
finely chopped zest of 1 lemon
1-1/2 cups of all purpose flour, sifted
1-1/2 tsp baking powder
scant 1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 pint blueberries, washed and dried

1. Using a smooth pastry blender or sturdy whisk, cream the butter in a large bowl until light and fluffy. Slowly incorporate the sugar into the butter and stir until the mixture no longer feels grainy when rubbed between thumb and fingers. Crack the egg into butter/sugar and stir until smooth. Repeat with the yogurt, and again with the lemon zest.
2. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Stir lightly with a fork until well-mixed. 
3. Add half of the flour mixture to the butter mixture, and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until all of the flour has been incorporated and the texture is smooth. Add the remaining flour and stir until just combined.
4. Fold in the blueberries gently, taking care not to bruise them.
5. Spoon the thick batter into prepared muffin cups, leaving a 1/4" of space at the top. Bake at 350° Fahrenheit for 28 to 30 minutes, until muffin tops are a glorious toasted gold color.

Makes 15 three-ounce (standard size) muffins that taste wonderful on their own, though I wouldn't be offended if you chose to spread a drop of butter or honey over the warm crumb.

First published at expetesso.com

Book Review: The Age of Orphans

The story that Laleh Khadivi tells with magically woven prose is devastating, brutal, and horrific. It should be required reading for everyone whose life is enjoyed at the cost of another person's suffering.

The boy who comes to be called Reza is a singular child: the only baby of a half-mad mother and a doting father in a culture that prizes large families, a running toddler who yearns for the flight of birds and perches on "the top spot that affords a glimpse of endless horizon, the fan of a more ardent wind" in order to see them, a child who wants the trappings of adulthood while recognizing that they are not quite worth the price exacted for them, a boy who strives to be brave while staring into the emptiness of an army, soldiers who are "intact, unfazed, already part man and part machine... trained in nothing but the aim and fire." Despite knowing what next happens in his story (from reading the book jacket), it is not possible to see in the soldiers, "perform[ing] with automatic efficiency: to aim and pull life out again and again", what will become of the bird boy, Reza. And yet, that is what he becomes.

Reza's story -- the only survivor of a bloody massacre, witness to his father's beheading -- "the Kurd orphan" consumed by the army, made pet and plaything of the soldiers, losing his memories in a mind-emptying search for love -- is, devastatingly, not so singular. With every page-turn from Book II onward, I realized that Reza's is this particular story, but he is far from alone. One soldier in the infinite army of Persia-turned-Iran, one spoil of tribal war conscripted to turn against what remains of his own people, one orphaned child keening for the love and comfort and honor of family while hiding in the body of a pristine adult -- Reza's is the story wiped away by war's victors, who rewrite history while basking in triumph.

Khadivi doesn't just tell this story; she forces her readers to live it along with her characters. She uses lyrical, expansive, poetic language to cloak a tale filled with cold, dark, and bitterness in an enveloping fog of sensation. She chooses sounds both beautiful and haunting to describe acts of depraved violence, a vandalism against the humanity in all of us, so that it's not until we've passed three sentences forward that the horror of described actions breaks through to the forefront of our brains. Later, she describes the passing of time and the effects of age and a failed quest, she weaves that cloak into a haze that surrounds and dulls the senses as the opium does to Reza himself. Tonal shifts between viewpoints of different characters are skillfully interwoven; though the voice may change, but the language spoken does not.

The Age of Orphans is a story so heartbreaking, and the telling of it so masterful. Khadivi is a force of talent and skill; I look forward to her next book, The Walking, to see what she delivers next.

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