review by mary abshire, bookpeople staff

For a fresh taste in inquiry, read the dialogues recorded by Christopher Phillips, the “Johnny Appleseed of Philosophy.” Phillips’ mission in the field of philosophy is to visit various venues-from schools to prisons to diners to bookstores-for the purpose of opening a “Socrates Café” for a night and a dialogue with seekers of all kinds.

The beauty of the Socrates Café is that it simply exists for minds to gather and engage on a variety of topics and life’s big questions, like “what does it mean to be alone?” or “what is belief?” A Socrates Café can also take place at any venue and in all company.

Phillips’ dialogues (in the spirit of Socrates) tend to create a kind of “church for heretics.” The business of answering life’s questions is a complicated matter, but philosphers of all ilk and ages have come from every corner to engage in some serious questioning and seeking. Their thoughts and queries are recorded in this book, with Phillips acting (as he does in the event of an actual Socrates café) as a moderator and a facilitator who learns most from the searching of minds.

Phillips makes a point of explaining that he has learned more from the participants of the Socrates Café than from any other source. He records the dialogues he has witnessed and faithfully reinforces many of the points made by linking them to similar words of great philosophers of the past. Thus, new ways of learning and new points of view are spread by an ancient but reliable method. 232 pp. 2001. hardback. $23.95

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Most people will pass at least one garden in the course of the day. Odds are these people will not take notice of them. They will not think of the process the gardener went through in choosing the flowers and vegetables found there. They will not picture the gardener looking in a seed catalog to find the prettiest flowers, or juiciest tomatoes. They certainly will not stop to think about how each of these plants try to play off our desires in order to continue their species. Michael Pollan has.

In "The Botany of Desire," Pollan describes how the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato have coevolved with humans to satisfy our desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control, respectively. Pollan outlines the history of each plant, describing how they have evolved to our liking and placed themselves in the human consciousness (more often, subconscious).

The apple. The apple evokes special feelings for Americans: John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed spreading them across the frontier, the hard cider of prohibition, and of course, the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden. Naturally wild and unpredictable, apples signified the rugged American individual. Yet these apples are so bitter they are only suitable for applejack. The rare sweet apples were prized. Through man's continual grafting and cloning of these sweeter apples, our desires were fulfilled in spite of the termination of the evolutionary process. Apple trees today could never possibly live without our constant pesticide use.
The tulip. The beauty of a tulip is so great we cannot control our desire for it. The most spectacular tulips conta

in patterns caused by a virus, these only survive by enticing humans to care for them. Their pull is so great they have destroyed nations, causing the economic crash of Holland in 1637 and emptying the treasury of the circa-1700 Ottoman Empire.

Marijuana. For a civilization which is becoming more and more muddled in the past, only one plant allows us to experience the present. Marijuana gratifies our desire to slow down and think in an entirely different fashion from our sober selves. Marijuana has used this ability to spread throughout the world, in places it could never grow. In anonymous basements around the world, we give these plant more light, water and food then they could recieve from mother nature, and they happily give us their flowers each season. Pollan also cites the many cultural changes marijuana has facilitated in the world, from romanticism to jazz, from beat poetry to the theories of Carl Sagan.

The potato. The potato is content to grow where the grains we are so dependent upon refuse, with their most notable history in Ireland. The potato blight which led to the death of over a million Irish and the forced migration of millions of others, has led us to desire control. The Mansanto company can control the genes of the potato, to the point that it contains its own insecticide.

After reading "The Botany of Desire," the reader will no longer think of plants as only the object of sentences, such as "I chose this plant for my garden," an example Pollan uses. According to Pollan we could fairly change the sentence to "This plant convinced me to buy it." Be aware, any small, green, lifeform may be plotting to use you! 2001. hardcover. 271 pp. $24.95.

Open the first page of “Winter Range,” by Claire Davis and find yourself in an eastern Montana cattle town in drought near the end of a bleak winter. Then, if your image of the American west is a place where strong pioneers tame the land and forge through close-knit community--an idealistic version of the American Dream--hang onto your saddle-bags and get ready for some surprises. Davis's story reveals the dark underside of that Dream, where hard-edged characters are formed in the relationship to a hard-edged landscape, and the sins of the father are visited not only on the son but on the whole community.

Chas Stubblefield, the son of an abusive, bitter, perhaps mentally disturbed father, wreaks revenge on his community by starving his cattle over a rainless season. But when the town sheriff, Ike Parsons, tries to intervene in order to save Stubblefield and the community from embarassment, the western code of private property raises issues for Stubblefield, Parsons and his wife, and the entire town. Davis gives us a thorough examination inside each of her main characters as they examine their motivations, in what is a satisfying, realistic look at small town eastern Montana life at the edge of the 21st century. Here, the romantic west is as broken as the world outside it.

Davis's descriptions of this high-prairie ranchland town and its surrounding landscape are poetic and realistic at the same time; if you've ever visited one of these remote villages off the interstate, this book will take you there. Her characters inhabit the pages with believable personality, from the brooding, rebellious teenager Joe Mattick, to Purvis the vet, whose understanding of his fellow man is as broad as his talent for fixing animal ailments. Put an extra blanket on the bed when the ice storm hits; you'll need it. The merging and blending of characters and place in Winter Range provides an insightful, fascinating look into a world that once dominated but is rapidly becoming a subculture of America. Examining it, we see the effects of isolation, self-absorption, and confusion, not only in today's west but also on American society as a whole. 2000. hardcover. 262 pp. $23.00. paperback due in october 2001.

Jonathan Franzen has created a story out of the suffocating qualities of life in a complicated midwest family and tells it with unexplainable gentleness and omniscience. the novel is the story of two generations of Lamberts. While each of the three children have chosen paths that aim them as far from their parents as possible, a perverse kind of destiny brings their phobias and apathy into a full circle as they are faced with the prospect of the last Lambert Christmas.

As their adult children face the challenges of their own, the elder Lamberts are fighting the onset of Alzheimers in the patriarch of the family, formerly a distant, cold and demanding man. Meanwhile, Enid, the mother of the children, has accidentally discovered an unapproved drug as the cure to her depression, which stems from the realization that her marriage was a mistake she has only just detected.

Franzen tells many, many stories within the fabric of the Lambert family. It is a dissection of American culture that relies on familial propagation of guilt, moments of fleeting happiness, but largely the reuniting of lives within a single family. Corrections is an entertaining and compelling story. due september 2001. hardcover. 565 pp. $25.00

What It Felt Like (Living In the American Century), a new book by Henry Allen brings to the reader the sneaky joy and curiosity of peeking into someone’s journal. The pages are dated, just like a journal, so you can follow every juicy detail and roller coaster ride. The smatterings of dialogue and introspective insight keep the book firmly in the hands and the eyes moving at a hungry pace. Before you know it you have read it all and guilt begins to sink in with the realization of what you have just indulged in. But fear not, because this journal is actually your journal.

What It Felt Like is the short, sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking companion to the crazy century we just left behind. But don’t be taken off by the thought of just another history book, What it Felt Like deals with the emotions, experiences, passions and failures of 20th century America. Henry Allen breaks it down by decade and devotes no more than 15 pages to each. The read is painless but the insight is rich, emotionally evocative and precise. Allen succeeds in capturing the essence of each decade in his thoughtful journeys into nostalgia land. His mosaic style winds us for a paragraph or two into the mind of a man in the heart of the great depression followed by the sound of a husband and wife arguing over current affairs and then on to a detached yet lucid bout of social and historical commentary. You hear the cooing of a hippie and his lightheaded epiphanies while halfway down the page, people are talking about which riot was cooler and if they made it to Woodstock or not. 1990’s youth slang epitomizes the decade and is demonstrated by a dialogue between a father and daughter. We read on to see the corporate reality of the economy and the lackluster attempts at heroic and glorious war with America’s bombings of small countries.

Each chapter is a decade to be treasured (or garbage to throw out) and it can’t be denied that What It Felt Like does justice to them all. Henry Allen has given the reader the 20th century in one small handful. He has done it with the brevity and sharpness of the Billy Joel song “we didn’t start the fire” but with the poetry of something akin to NPR’s “this American life.” Open this journal guilt free. Like your own personal journal tend to do, you’ll be amazed to see where you’re coming from. 2000. Hardcover. 159 p. $20.00

“The Baffler” is necessary. Simply put. In the pages of this irregularly printed journal one is allowed the inroad to filling the mind with social responsibility, resistance to what ills us as a nation and species as well as a healthy smattering of underground “pop-culture.” What could be more delightful?

The pages pulsate with article upon article of economic, cultural and political criticism. Done in such an honest and well researched way, the words and sentences are sweet protection from the blinding lights of corporate interests and evils. In addition, various works of progressive story telling and dabs of poetry here and there make these volumes a tool for the informed and enriched. This isn’t light stuff, but “The Baffler” is something to revel in. It’s refreshing to know some people still care.

This periodical is for the rabid addict of new fiction, non-fiction, poetry and writers. “Tin House” is the quickest way to get your fix of the new, the fresh, the interesting, as well as revisiting some familiar ground with time-tested voices in the literature scene.

“Tin House” is published quarterly and welcomes manuscripts. The journal features interviews with writers, book reviews, short fiction from new authors, and always a crossword or acrostic puzzle tucked away in the back; these puzzles always prove to be fueled by the most academically elite trivia I have ever encountered.

If you’re looking for something fresh, “Tin House” is the inevitable pick for a literary fiend’s entertainment on some long-houred afternoon. “Tin House” seems to have a staff of editors and writers that are so into the scene, you have to wonder if they’re the ones making the rules.

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2. audiobooks

Read a book while cleaning the house, gardening or traveling!

BookPeople has a wide variety of audiobooks both for sale and rent. Titles come from every genre, with cassettes ranging from William Burroughs to Norman Vincent Peale. A few of our favorites are “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver, “Black and Blue” by Anna Quindlen and Seamus Heaney reading his translation of “Beowulf.” For the younger listeners we have the “Dragons of Blueland” by Ruth Stiles Gannett and “Henry Huggins” by Beverly Cleary. Tapes rent at 1/3 retail price.

Used tapes sell at 2/3 retail price.

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3. bookpeople services

bookpeople services. espresso bar. fresh-baked goods. local art. gift items. video rentals. audio rentals. magazines. books for children, young and old. any-book-in-print ordering. out of print/rare/used book ordering. the most eclectic calendars on the palouse. ticket sales for local events. poetry readings. concerts. new york times vendor. seattle times vendor. frequent buyer book club.

subscriptions to the new york times are available through bookpeople. pick-up points are bookpeople, ui administration building and johnson towers at wsu. the price for a fall semester subscription (monday-friday) is 34 dollars. subscriptions run from august 27 to december 21.

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