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Mundane Journeys: Field Guide to Color Kate Pocrass ( , $5.00) Perhaps you are the kind of person that notices how the color of a Laundromat reflects the decade in which it was designed. Or maybe at Mitchell’s Ice Cream you match the delicate purple of your Ube ice cream to something similarly delicate and purple in the neighborhood. Maybe still you are the kind of person that sees the wider picture; either way Kate Pocrass’ new volume of Mundane Journeys will force you to engage with your surroundings in a way that you may have not considered before. Since 2001, Pocrass has been compiling aesthetically minded guided tours of San Francisco which are available either by calling a phone number and listening to a weekly voicemail message, taking a guided bus tour, or by purchasing this second volume of Mundane Journeys. These colorful micro-adventures are cheap, charming, and provide an idiosyncratic and whimsical way to discover San Francisco. - ADD TO CART	After Dark Haruki Murakami ( Knopf, $22.95) A nineteen-year old late-night loner girl named Mari; a scrawny smart mouthed trombonist; a strongarm love hotel manager; a Chinese prostitute and her one-eared motorcycle pimp; a brutal and secretive Japanese businessman – these are just some of the colorful nighttime characters you will meet in one evening between the hours of 11:56pm and 6:52am in Murakami’s latest novel. Part portrait of urban Japan’s seedy and nocturnal underbelly, part metaphysical exploration, After Dark winds together a handful of bizarre and often comical subplots. The narration is more cinematic than literary, and fans of J.D. Salinger will find the first chapter (as well as much of the dialogue scenes between Murakami’s younger characters) eerily familiar and perhaps a little derivative, yet always well-crafted and interesting. Although the story is heavily layered for a novel clocking in slightly over novella length, After Dark is largely a character-driven piece, which along with Murakami’s characteristic attention to mystery, makes it a fun and noteworthy page-turner. - ADD TO CART
Apples Are From Kazakhstan Christopher Robbins ( Atlas & Co., $24.00) Nursultan Nazarbayev had served as First Secretary of the Kazah Communist Party before becoming Kazakhstanâ€™s first post-Soviet president. By the time author Christopher Robbins breaks bread (actually, boiled sheepâ€™s head) and flies in the presidential entourage with him, Nazarbayev has privatized the economy; cut multi-billion oil deals with Exxon and Chevron; and built a new capital city 600 hundred miles away from the old one. Robbins perhaps isnâ€™t critical enough about the presidentâ€™s authoritarian tendencies, but the word on the street is that Nazarbayev has changed the country for the better. Bar hopping with the beautiful people of Almaty or hanging out with oilmen in the wild West, Robbins is visiting Kazakhstan in the era of globalization. Beyond the people he meets and the beauty of the landscape, Robbins is fascinated with Kazakhâ€™s role in history as Russiaâ€™s place of exile and deportation. Dostoyevsky and Trotsky both spent time exiled here. The Chechnyans, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and Korean-Russians were all deported here by Stalin. Robbins is erudite without being stuffy. His year in the country affords us much more than fleeting impressions of the country. - ADD TO CART	Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World Peter Chapman ( Canongate, $24.00) Of the more than 300 varieties of bananas, the Cavendish variety is the one constant on supermarket shelves. Large and thick skinned, it was the banana of choice on the United Fruit Company's plantations throughout Central America. Unlike salt or cod, subjects covered by Mark Kurlansky, banana distribution and consumption is very much the story of modern global capitalism and empire. Beginning in Costa Rica, the United Fruit Company built the railroads, bribed the politicians and acquired the lands that gave it control over the banana market in the 20th century. Author Peter Chapman's book shows how the banana, once enjoyed only by America's elite, became the world's most popular fruit. He follows the many tentacles of the company in this brutal history. Its native and imported labor from China, Italy and the West Indies was paid in scrip, redeemable at company stores. It encouraged the coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala and participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. It did business with Somoza and the powerful families of El Salvador. Now known as Chiquita Brands International, the Company was most recently in the news for successfully at the World Trade Organization the European Union over protectionism. The book's title in England, Jungle Capitalists is a fitting description of the bare-knuckled story of the once notorious company. - ADD TO CART
Basrayatha: The Story of a City Muhammad Khudayyir ( Verson, $15.95) For many of us, Basra is a city we think about only when the fighting breaks into our headlines. Muhammad Khudayyir, who was born in Basra and has spent his entire life there, bestows on us an altogether different city in this enthralling work, written in 1996 and newly translated. His Basra is a dreamscape, an inner geography: a compound of memoir, folktale, philosophical speculation and literary allusion. He draws on classic Arabic poetry, as well as modern literary urbanists such as Calvino, Cavafy and (to my astonishment) Foucault, in an effort to convey the city not only as it is, but as it has lived in the imagination of Iraqis for centuries. Of all the hundreds of books published on Iraq in recent years, this may be the only one that emerges from the culture of the country and the artistic life of its people. Khudayyirâ€™s intensely allusive and ornamented style, redolent of Arab literary traditions, may at first seem strange to the western reader; but isnâ€™t it time we learned to take the rest of the world (and especially Iraq) and its own terms, rather than ours? - ADD TO CART	Black Gold of the Sun, Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond Ekow Eshun ( Vintage Paperback, $13.95) Combined travelogue/memoirs dealing with identity and the eternal search for a sense of home would seem to be a bit of a publishing cliché at this point in time. However, Black Gold of the Sun easily and elegantly transcended any low expectations I may have had. Ekow Eshun was born in London to Ghanaian parents, and grew up not fitting in with either the predominantly West Indian black culture, nor the thinly veiled racism of the 1980s Thatcherite white working classes. He travels to Ghana in search of his family’s roots, and maps his journey from the cosmopolitan capital of Accra to the slave forts of Elmina and the historic warrior kingdom of Asante. He intersects his travels, memories and family history with other voyages across the same land by Malcolm X, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and the millions of slaves shipped to the West from the Ghanaian coast. Eshun used to be the editor of the style magazine The Face, and is currently the director of the ICA in London, and his writing also reflects this interest in contemporary culture; he is able to analyse the significance of Tupac, Bob Marley and Osama Bin Ladin as icons of youth subcultural rebellion in a ‘third world’ subjugated by Western economics. The result is a map of the emotional and historical connections between the West and Africa. Moving from slavery to liberation, hip-hop to Hegel and love to loss, Ekow Eshun has crafted an insightful, powerful yet entertaining meditation on cultural identity, race and displacement, which questions the very idea of belonging being tied to uncovering the mysteries of one’s ‘roots’ - ADD TO CART
Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers Xialou Guo ( Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.95) While not an erotic reference text, this beguiling novel still lives up to the promise of its title. It resembles the recent spate of travel memoirs by British or American women about finding love in distant climes; but reversing the direction of the gaze makes all the difference. A young Chinese woman, spending a year in London to study English, struggles to grasp the strange folkways she encounters, as well as the intricacies of the language. Both sets of difficulties come into play when she has her first love affair, and must come to terms with concepts like intimacy, privacy, possessiveness, romance. In the process we see a new London through her eyes, and learn something about what it’s like to be young and Chinese in this time of wild transition. Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange: isn’t that what travel (like the best fiction) is all about? - ADD TO CART	Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City Billy Sothern ( University of California Press, $21.95) New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina titles have carved out a big space on the shelves of bookstores in New Orleans. Some titles that came out just before the storm, like Rob Walker's Letters from New Orleans and the first four books of the Neighborhood Storybook Project are still relevant by showing aspects of the city that are now gone forever. In Down in New Orleans, Billy Sothern starts a tale of his own evacuation to Mississippi, before adding layer after layer of (hi)stories. Between accounts of his exile and return to a damaged home, Sothern tells us about a local hero who rescued trapped residents in his boat before being arrested as a terrorism suspect and held by police for over a month; the journey of residents trying to escape the rising waters by walking across the Crescent City Connection bridge into neighboring Jefferson Parish only to be turned back at gunpoint by local police; and the fate of the cities most vulnerable populations, including prison inmates abandoned in flooded cells by fleeing police. Underpinning these stories are the workings of history, race, and poverty in the city that made the breeches and the resulting crises not just visible, but inevitable. - ADD TO CART
Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism Mike Davis, Daniel Bertrand Monk, editors ( The New Press, hardback, $26.95) The “evil paradises” depicted in this anthology are free market utopias built on the unspoken reality of slave labor and robber baron slash-and-burn capitalism. In Davis’ hellish vision of Dubai the divide between the Haves and the Have-Nots seems almost medieval in its brutality and immorality. Huge cartoonish buildings and man-made mega islands built with oil money and the aforementioned slave labor shield the ultra rich from the indignities of having to pay taxes or in some cases serve time in the countries from which they came. Rebecca Shoenkopf’s Orange County is a little less feudal, and makes for a much lighter read though she still, albeit mockingly, covers the disparities between the inland barrios of Santa Ana and the coastal gated communities of Laguna Canyon. The Gated McMansion-residing ladies buy their over-saturated offspring Mercedes convertibles to stave off their baby-bird-like insatiable hunger and empty rage; It reads like an even more soulless Less Than Zero. There are other chapters about faux California-style gated communities in Hong Kong and Cairo and even in Iran’s desert, so perhaps that will be America’s legacy rather than Bush’s promised democracy in the Middle East. - ADD TO CART	God's Middle Finger:Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre Richard Grant ( Free Press, $15.00) Richard Grant had long been fascinated by the Sierra Madre, a vast land of extremes that lies over much of western Mexico. It is a range marked by barrancas, steep-sided ravines where one can stand on snowy peaks and look down onto the backs of tropical birds flying over rainforest canopy. This forbidding geography provides refuge for outlaws and narcotraficantes as well as bored, drunk rednecks. Grant encounters all of these in his journey, and his fate often depends on their whims. The book opens with the author literally being hunted for sport. Later he finds himself forced to snort cocaine with crooked cops in a dirty cantina. He takes his brushes with danger in stride, turning nerve-wracking experiences into enlightening anecdotes. - ADD TO CART
Goodbye Madame Butterfly Sumie Kawakami ( Chin Music Press Inc., $20.00) In Goodbye Madame Butterfly, author Kawakami dispels the notion that in Japan all one’s sexual fantasies can come true. She sites for example a Durex condom survey based on interviews in 41 countries where Japan ranked last in amount of sexual activity. That may be hard to believe, considering there are many legal “entertainment and amusement” services that substitute for prostitution, which is illegal in Japan. Goodbye Madame Butterfly is a series of essays taken from interviews of mostly Japanese women, ranging from sexless and sex-seeking housewives and downtown professionals, to a single mom having an affair with her boss, to the wife of a Shinto priest, to a male sex volunteer who helps women achieve orgasms. But make no mistake, this is definitely a book about Japanese women and their roles, or lack thereof, in a seemingly lax sexual culture. - ADD TO CART	Hamburger Eyes: Inside Burgerworld Ray Potes ( Powerhouse, $35.00) Hamburger Eyes started life as a photo zine put together by the Potes brothers and their friends out of their Mission apartment. Now they have this book and their own photo development complex and art gallery, still in the Mission district and still serving as a document of underground street culture and art. The Hamburger Eyes aesthetic is a distinctly deadpan, black humor laden take on photo realism; some of the images remind me of classic war photography, the stark brutality and ideas of â€˜truthâ€™ transposed to 3am on Market Street, juxtaposed with an image of a kid inventing a hula hoop out of toilet paper. - ADD TO CART
Invisible-5 Amy Balkan, Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice, and others ( Collaboration, $15.00) In California, Interstate 5 is straight as an arrow and runs through the center of the state. A commuter sees undeveloped desert, the aqueducts, fields of almond trees and cattle in massive pens. What they don’t see, or at least, don’t recognize, are the hazardous waste incinerators, nuclear facilities, power plants, polluted water tables and the people that live around these sites. Invisible 5, a project by artist Amy Balkin and collaborators, explores the geopolitics of this once sparsely populated area that has suffered most of California’s environmental degradation and the attendant health problems on its local population. The 2 CD set, meant to be played along the route from San Francisco to Los Angeles or vice versa, features local activists and historians discussing local environmental issues and the community responses. You quickly realize how little you have heard about these stories and how important they are to these communities. The CDs come with directions, map, audio cues and more information on each site. All sales benefit Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice. - ADD TO CART	Italy for the Gourmet Traveler Fred Plotkin ( Kyle Books, $24.95) Fred Plotkin’s updated Italy for the Gourmet Traveler is long overdue. I don’t know how he does it, but Plotkin manages to find consistently good food in every region of Italy. On my last trip to Italy, his book was responsible for some of the best pastries, coffees and meals I have ever had. His chapters start off by listing the various specialties of the region before recommending the cafés and restaurants to find them in. Town by town he lists walks that take in amazing bakeries, cafés, confectioners, farmers’ markets and restaurants. This is the sort of book that will have you taking detours to try something that sounds too good to pass up. - ADD TO CART
Literature from the 'Axis of Evil': Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and other Enemy Nations A Words Without Borders Anthology ( The New Press, $16.95) The absurdity of labeling an entire culture or nation of people ï¿½evilï¿½ not only makes those who said it look foolish, but brings about the need to put a human face on those internationally misunderstood and marginalized cultures. Words Without Borders does just that, presenting a special selection of some of the best writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and Cuba. For those of us with little knowledge about these places, this collection gives us a glimpse into human realities that our government wants us to fear and/or hate. When we look, listen, and learn we find familiar themes: family, adolescence, ideas of beauty, loneliness, kindness -- a wonderful breath of fresh air. - ADD TO CART	Lust In Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee Pamela Druckerman ( Penguin Books, $15.00) This is a fun, light-hearted book on what in what many cultures passes for a fun, light-hearted topic: adultery. As the title suggests, Druckerman examines varying cultural attitudes towards infidelity. While she is the first to admit that her study is none too scientific and somewhat subjective, she does make insightful and surprising observations. The main conclusion she draws is that Americans freak out about cheating way more than the rest of the planet. The book is full of fun little observations about the sexual mores of other nations, like, for example, that the Japanese don’t consider it cheating if you pay for it. Most interesting, however, is the outsider’s perspective of our own moral code, and what many cultures would consider to be an extremist hard-line attitude towards cheating (even though we seem to be doing it as much as the rest of the globe). - ADD TO CART
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer Peter Turchi ( Trinity University Press, $22.95) Start with a metaphor: mapmaking is like writing, a way of working out where you’re going, where you’ve been, and where you stand in relation to the world around you. Carry that metaphor as far as it can possibly go and you get a sense of what Peter Turchi has accomplished in this unique gem of a book. His treatment of maps as works of imagination, and literature as cartography of experience, yields a flow of brilliant insights about maps, literature, and the human project. Not least of its delights are the illustrations: where else will you find trail maps of the walks taken by cows in a field, a map by a 12th century monk showing the geographical relation between Europe and the Garden of Eden, or on a more sober note, General Sherman’s chart of places to destroy in Georgia? Open any page and wander in; you will get gloriously lost. - ADD TO CART	Nazi LIterature in the Americas Roberto Bolaño ( New Directions, $23.95) The masterpieces by the late Chilean/Mexican writer keep rolling off the presses as quickly as the translators can render them. As with everything Bolaño produced, this is one-of-a kind; an imaginary, “value-neutral” reference work, complete with bibliography and scholarly notes. The entries do in fact constitute a kind of encyclopedia: a compendium of the ways in which the literary imagination negotiates with, rationalizes, or embraces evil; but the really scary part is the passionate and pure devotion to literature they all share, along with their repugnant politics. This survey of the Nazi literary canon that never actually existed somehow manages to be simultaneously playfully funny and deeply disturbing. - ADD TO CART
New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg Marshall Berman, ed. ( Reaktion, $25.00) Put together by the Marxist scholar Berman, this collection of essays focuses on New York City as a memory, working as a tribute to a lost city and its poets, immigrants, deadbeats, criminals, punks, and B-boys. It contains pieces from renowned writers like Luc Sante, Richard Meltzer and Tom Robbins but (perhaps reflecting New York’s pre-Giulliani democratic essence) gives the same weight to downtown low-lifes: There is the former graffiti writer who reflects on his and the city’s past during his morning commute on the now impossible-to-tag subway system. While the book mourns the loss of the seedy underbelly that gave New York of the 70s and 80s its creative power whilst keeping the yuppies at bay, it is not all doom and gloom. Manhattan’s pre-gentrified soul has now moved to the outer boroughs, and there are great pieces celebrating this revival. - ADD TO CART	NOWTOPIA; How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today! Chris Carlsson ( AK Press, $18.95) There’s a current in the eco movement that shopping ‘green’ will somehow preserve the earth, as if just shifting how we consume is going to be enough. As one of the founders of Critical Mass, Carlsson is a long time local community activist who believes that true change will only emerge when people shift their behavior away from eco-consumption or market based lifestyle choices. Nowtopia embodies a movement of people looking to create new ways of existing outside of the confines of the market. The practices outlined embody a real challenge to the accepted realities of modern life, reshaping our assumptions about science, technology, and human potential. In ways as diverse as urban permaculture, biofuels, open source coding, even the Burning Man festival, people are taking back their time and technological know-how from the market. Nowtopia outlines an ecologically driven and community based idea of politics propelled by the people who are farming vacant-lots in West Oakland or running community bike kitchens in Los Angeles. - ADD TO CART
Osterie & Locande D'Italia: A Guide to Traditional Places to Eat and Stay in Italy Slow Food Editore ( Slow Food Editore srl, $29.95) Expect to spend time with the locals. The Osterie & Locande Dï¿½Italia guide relies on the advice of 100s of Italian contributors who are all part of the Slow Food movement. By all appearances, this guide is laid out like the Michelin Red Guides. The Michelin guides are all about quality and service. This guide, on the other hand, finds inns, farms and kitchens that best exemplify local traditions and character, as well as quality. This is the first English version of this excellent guide. - ADD TO CART	Palestine:The Special Edition Joe Sacco ( Fantagraphics, hardback, $29.95) In the mid-1990’s, Joe Sacco’s Palestine set a precedent for graphic journalism, earning him an American Book Award in 1996 and more importantly by blowing the minds of readers everywhere. With the intent to interview as many Palestinians and Israeli Jews as possible, Sacco often found himself in over his head. The stories are all there, from soldiers, refugees, prisoners, displaced farmers, and wounded and half-murdered families. The characters leap from the page and their personal accounts are unforgettable. Despite the harsh realities of a brutalized people, Sacco’s work is not without wit and humorous insight, even at times making fun of his own “comic book effort.” But make no mistake; this is a work of nonfiction, a 285+ page monumental feat of reporting, writing, and illustrating. As the interdependent conflicts in the Middle East grow increasingly complex, Sacco’s colossus graphic novel proves more relevant and important than ever. Available for the first time as a beautiful hard cover, and loaded with extras comparable to a Criterion Collection film, this Special Edition not only deserves a re-visit for those who know it but also stands as one of the most entertaining “required reading” selections for those unfamiliar with it. Recommended for those naïve or expert to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestine also will convince the skeptics to the serious place in literature of graphic novels. - ADD TO CART
Reykjavik 64.08N 21.54W Ami Sioux ( Scintilla Ltd, paperback, $43.00) Every major city contains (at least) two wholly distinct cities – the city that emerges from the guidebooks, and the city that people actually live in. So how can you convey the latter between the covers of a book? Artist Ami Sioux offers a brilliant solution, which, like most brilliant ideas, is utterly simple. Sioux asked 50 residents of Reykjavik to sketch maps leading to their favorite places. Facing these maps are color photos of the sites. Most of the sketches contain enough details to allow us to plot them against a standard map and find the sites, though it might still feel like following a pirate map to buried treasure. And in a sense they are buried treasures since the sites might appear nondescript (“my home when I was four years old,” a fish store with “really good homemade fishcakes,” an old graveyard, a biker bar); but each one is guaranteed to be special,because, by definition, each one is special to somebody who lives there. Sioux’s photos seem to be probing to reveal the personal values hidden in each site. If I were visiting Reykjavik, I would definitely let this book lead me into neighborhoods I might otherwise never know existed, and which no guide book would deign to notice. I would love to see something like this for every great city in the world. Series editors: take note! - ADD TO CART	Riding Toward Everywhere William T. Vollman ( Ecco Press, $26.95) America is a myth. America is an imagined limitless space. America does not exist anymore. America only exists in writing and memories. Is it a masculine place? Authentic? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? "Hunkering down against officialdom, we passed through the yard at increasing speed, and off we sped, accompanied by fog, mountains and waterlined fields, with the dim dusk scrolling by, the train shuddering and groaning, the wood groaning." Turns out America is an illicit ride through a train yard hidden in a box car, or maybe it's actually a ride through the canyonlands nestled beneath shifting lumber headed towards anywhere. Riding Toward Everywhere tackles the myth of America as an 'authentic' free and free-ing place, put together by man/boys like Huck Finn, Kerouac, Bukowski, or Hemingway. Written in a forcibly iconoclastic yet deconstructive style which mirrors the Hobo lifestyle he is writing about, an aimless meandering way of life which has become a part of the myth of the American anti-hero, now used to sell cars and computers to college kids. Vollman hops trains in search of freedom, the freedom of hiding from railway bulls and cops, of figuring out who is harmless and who is murderous, of waiting for ten hours under an overpass for something to happen; a train, a cop? - ADD TO CART
Sacred Games Vikram Chandra ( Harper Perennial, $16.95) This Bombay cops-and-robbers novel intertwines the stories of two men, police inspector Sartaj Singh and gang lord Ganesh Gaitonde. Though they represent forces that are (at least in theory) diametrically opposed, Chandra's two antiheroes struggle alongside each other to escape the forces of corruption and greed on both sides of the law. His characters are rendered with such compassion that you find yourself rooting for cop and criminal with equal fervor. The supporting cast of fast-talking Bombay lowlifes includes a gangster-cum-film producer and a Bollywood film star-cum-gangster. The central star of the story, however, is the city itself. Chandra's depiction of Bombay is so engrossing that after finishing Sacred Games you will find yourself homesick for the crowds and chaos of the city, the stink of garbage and the taste of fresh bhelpuri even if you've never experienced it firsthand. - ADD TO CART	Secrets of Rome: Love & Death in the Eternal City Corrado Augias ( Rizzoli Ex Libris, hardback, $26.95) In a city as old as Rome (1700 years older than Paris, according to author Augias), history is first experienced through its buildings and art. But the layers of history are opaque to the outsider. Why is Michelangelo's Moses sitting in San Pietro in Vincoli instead of on the tomb of Pope Julius II? What does the little chapel on Via della Caffarella have to do with England's King Henry VIII's attempted assassination of an English Cardinal? Which apartment house on via Tasso was a notorious Nazi prison? Sure, your guidebook, if it's any good, will fill in some of the stories. Corrado Augias' The Secrets of Rome is a rare sort of travel book: You want to hold its hand and walk alongside you around the city. (As opposed to a mediocre guidebook that simply wants to take you by the hand.) Augias' effortlessly combines art, literature and historical gossip into an easygoing exploration of Rome. The sites become touchstones for Augias to write at length about the history and context of the different eras. The chapter about the Italian Resistance and the Nazi reprisals, for example, is an eye-opener for someone whose familiarity about the era comes from Rosselini's Open City. The beautifully bound, hardback edition just adds to the pleasure of Augias' book. - ADD TO CART
Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals Dervla Murphy ( John Murray Publishers, $15.95) Dervla Murphy is on the road again. In Silverland, Murphy travels on the BAM train (a trans-Siberian route begun under Stalin and completed in the 1990s) east across Siberia. Now in her 70s and still with her signature bicycle and rucksack, she is the consummate traveler who takes sub-zero temperatures and bureaucratic bungling (she is thrown off the train in Belarus for visa irregularities) in stride. That is what I like about Dervla Murphy. Her misfortunes are asides, part of the price of travel, and not the basis for her stories. In unadorned language, conversations are recounted and opinions are freely shared. She completely sympathizes with the nostalgia for the Soviet Union’s free medical care, free schooling and adequate pensions. On this return trip to Siberia, her friends and contacts are living in a time of rapid change. The forests are threatened with logging; the WTO is demanding that Russia stop subsidizing home heating oil; locals are buying cars and other previously unobtainable consumer goods on credit. But the warmth and hospitality of the Siberians, particularly the non-Russian native peoples, (in sharp contrast to the Russians she meets on the western side of the Ural mountains) is what impresses Murphy most. – Lee Azus - ADD TO CART	Stairway Walks in San Francisco 6th Ed Adah Bakalinsky ( Wilderness Press, $16.95) Over 350 stairways traverse San Francisco's 42 hills, linking diverse neighborhoods and offering inspiring vistas. Absorb the sights, scents, and sounds of San Francisco on 27 stairway walks. In this sixth edition of Stairway Walks in San Francisco, you'll find up-to-date architectural, historical, and horticultural information for each walk. Easy-to-follow maps correspond to lucid directions, including public transportation. - ADD TO CART
Street World; Urban Art from Five Continents Roger Gastmen, et. al. ( Abrams, $35.00) This fascinating compendium of images from international youth subcultures covers everything from punk in the Philippines to Russian biker gangs to ubiquitous NYC graffiti crews. The scope of this book is vast, though obviously it focuses on street art, which includes graffiti on all five continents as well as the vivid commercial signage for Jamaican music stands and Indian markets. There are images of kids united by soccer in a post war scarred Serbia, alongside the building of an illegal concrete skate park, girls who cover parking meter stands with knitted covers and guerilla gardeners who garden unkept urban areas by night. It is fascinating to see how the American idea of youth and rebellion changes and shifts as it is adopted by youth in different cultures and countries, each kid making their own idea of youth culture out of the ephemera of hair metal, James Dean, punk rock and hip hop. - ADD TO CART	The Cheap Bastard’s Guide to San Francisco: Secrets of Living the Good Life for Free! Karen Solomon ( The Globe Pequot Press, $14.95) Add this excellent addition to those San Francisco guidebooks intended for locals. The Cheap Bastard’s Guide to San Francisco is a wealth of information on getting by in this extremely expensive city. Get your hair cut in some of the best salons for $15.00. Find free dance classes, meditation groups, art galleries, tennis courts, and concerts. There is a chapter on cheap food and great happy hours. But it isn’t all about consumption. The book lists walks, street fairs and health services. Author Solomon never imagined so much generosity and kindness in the city. You’ll be surprised how much you can experience in the city on the cheap. - ADD TO CART
The Complete Persepolis Marjane Satrapi ( Pantheon, $24.95) This collection of both of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis graphic novels arrives just in time for the winter release of the Cannes award-winning animated movie, which will feature the voices of Catherine Deneuve, Gena Rowlands and Chiara Mastroianni. Persepolis is the coming of age memoir of an irrepressibly bright, hilarious and independent minded girl caught in the upheaval of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Persepolis transcends the typical cliches of genre: the comic book style is charming and evocative, opening up an Iran not usually apparent to Western outsiders. Satrapi blends personal moments of youthful rebellion against the confines of her liberal secular family, with the harsher realities of life as an outspoken precocious girl living under an oppressive regime. "This is a symbol of Western decadence!" two be-chadored Iranian matrons tell young Marjane, pointing at her Michael Jackson pin. "Not at all," Marjane protests, "It's Malcolm X!" - ADD TO CART	The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food Jennifer 8. Lee ( Twelve, $24.99) Most of the food served in Chinese restaurants was never cooked or eaten in Chinese kitchens. It is a unique cuisine that evolved entirely within the context of expanding restaurant industry in America. This artificial construct has spread as globally as McDonald’s; so we find “American fortune cookies” sweeping Hong Kong, and “American chop suey” as a food craze in India. The Chinese restaurant industry is one of the weirder flowerings of transculturalism. It began when Chinese immigrants in California, who could only find work in restaurants and laundries because cooking and cleaning were “women’s work,” tried to devise something that would overcome the white populaton’s antipathy to Chinese culture. Its expansion was partially fueled (in another twist of transcultural weirdness) when American Jews adopted Chinese restaurant-going as a weekly ritual. Jennifer 8. Lee doesn’t ignore the underside of the story (like the global trade in low-wage restaurant workers); but mostly she keeps her tone light, and uses tricky hooks (like tracking down the first restaurant to produce “General Tso’s chicken”) to move her story along. You might call it the lighter side of globalization; but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the subject is so fascinating and suggestive. - Michael Rosenthal - ADD TO CART
The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature Jonathan Rosen ( Straus and Giroux, $24.00) We are all birdwatchers; some of us just go about it in a more conscious and systematic fashion. Rosen here does for birding what Rebecca Solnit did for walking in Wanderlust: following loosely associational paths through science, literature and cultural theory, he meditates on the broader philosophical implications of his favorite pastime. How do we engage the wild? How do we subsume it to our sense of order without destroying the wildness that attracts us in the first place? You don’t need to be a birder to find Rosen’s exploration of these questions relevant and enthralling. – Michael Rosenthal - ADD TO CART	The Oxford Companion to Italian Food Gillian Riley ( Oxford University Press, $35.00) Much like the Larousse Gastronomique for food from France, The Oxford Companion is an encyclopedia on Italian food. Organized alphabetically, it includes all things food related in Italy: ingredients, food writers and regions of the country. While “peanut” gets barely a 40 word description, 1000s of words define “Parmesan” cheese. Naturally, broccoli, offal, pig’s fat and the Veneto are covered. You don’t necessarily want to carry around a book this large. But, on a cold winter’s night, sit by an open stove, flip the pages of this book and sigh. - ADD TO CART
The Savage Detectives Roberto Bolano ( Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, paperback, $15.00) Roberto Bolano, who died in 2003, and whose major works are only now being translated, has been increasingly acclaimed as the most important and original voice to emerge from the generation of Latin American writers who came of age after the magical realist “boom.” Nothing could be further from the villages of magical realism than Bolano’s Mexico City of the mid 70’s, a dingy, jivey, ultra-urban place reproduced as lovingly as Joyce’s Dublin (a conscious model). And nothing could be further from florid rhetoric than Bolano’s combination of vernacular storytelling, pop slang and high theory. The Savage Detectives is an epic, sprawling over time (following two poets from an avant-garde splinter group from the 70’s through the 90’s) and over space (as they search for a legendary poet of an earlier generation across the Sonoran Desert.) Bolano’s imaginary world is a recognizable but somewhat alternate universe in which everybody is either a writer or wannabe writer (which is, come to think of it, not that different from San Francisco). This does not mean they live in a world of otherwordly refinement. Like all Latin Americans, they suffer through history. Violence befalls them accidentally and arbitrarily, and their worst enemies are time and the dying of their hopes. This guy is the real deal: a truly great writer. - ADD TO CART	The Spice Route John Keay ( University of California Press, $16.95) There was in fact no single spice route (just as there was no single “silk road”). Instead, there was a looping skein of itineraries, arcing through numerous ports-of-call throughout the ancient near and far east. The trade in spices was the major incentive for human voyages into the unknown for three millennia, enticing Indian merchants to Africa and Arab merchants to Indonesia, long before Europeans got into the game and took it over. All of this for substances whose only function are to give pleasure to the senses of taste and smell. (The myth of spices as preservatives or camouflage for bad meat was concocted by historians embarrassed that so much history could be driven by the desire for sensual pleasure). Using primary source materials like merchants’ accounts and mariners’ logs, Keay reconstructs the shifting routes of the spice trade, and reconfigures our mental map of the ancient world. - ADD TO CART
Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers Samantha Schnee, Alane Salierno Mason, and Dedi Felman, editors ( Anchor Books, $14.00) The flipside of American cultural dominance is our ignorance of the world’s peoples and cultures. For example, of all literary translations published worldwide, only 6% render other languages into English (as contrasted with 50% from English). This revelatory anthology begins to redress the imbalance. In Words Without Borders, 28 of the best known writers in world literature, including Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka, Jose Saramago, and Naguib Mafouz, introduce contemporary writers from their homelands, most of whom have never before appeared in English. There is so much to discover in these new voices about the taste and feel of life in countries including (among many others) Bosnia, Nigeria, Iraq, and Iran. - ADD TO CART	Yalo Elias Khoury ( Archipelago Books, $25.00) Khoury’s novel opens in the middle of the interrogation of Yalo, a Beiruti war criminal accused of rape, arms trafficking and planting bombs. As we read on, the story comes into focus through a series of forced confessions, as Yalo alternately denies and admits to the crimes. His story, like the city he inhabits, is repeatedly torn down and reinvented. As the pieces fill in, we get a better idea of Yalo’s and his country’s history, but any absolute truth remains elusive. The novel is at first somewhat confounding, but quickly becomes quite engaging as we assemble the pieces of Yalo’s story. Any clear-cut answers are not laid out for the reader however; whether Yalo is a violent criminal or a pitiful victim of the war and the abuses of his countrymen is left to the reader to ponder. - ADD TO CART