September 2008 | Art & Soul
Reviews
BOOKS
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
by Raj Patel (Melville House Publishing)
Worldwide, more people than ever are starving — about 800 million. At the same time, more than ever are unhealthily obese — roughly 1 billion. Though it seems paradoxical, these grim facts point to the same problem: a global food crisis whose weight and severity Raj Patel manages to wade through with grace, clarity and yes, even a bit of humor. Focusing on a disparate array of food stories from around the globe — stories of unusually high suicide rates among farmers; the conception, birth and boom of the modern super-mega-hyper market; the dirt on Frankenfoods, the ubiquity of soy in the average American diet — Patel unveils a vast web of coercive, unjust and sickening (literally) practices that contribute to the extremes wrought on regular people throughout the world. While Stuffed and Starved contains more than enough to outrage most readers and almost enough to make some panic, Patel balances the book with healthy helpings of people and communities doing the kind of difficult, responsible, inspiring work that we’ll all need to turn things around.
— Eric Larson
Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium
by Dick Meyer (Crown)
I used to walk the world ashamed to express my irritation — nay, outrage — when confronted with yet another cell phone-as-boombox blaring on the city bus. Instead, I would chance a gruff glance toward the offender and disappear back into the music piped in privately and at a respectable volume from my iPod earbuds. No longer. Thanks to Dick Meyer, an online columnist for CBS News, and Why We Hate Us, his provocative polemic about the sorry state of our adolescent republic, I can feel justified openly expressing my... issues. Not only does Meyer share a long list of grievances just like mine, he affirms that we all seem to have them. He also points out that each of us has habits that would appear on other people’s lists, making us both perpetrators and victims of loathsome public and private behavior. Meyer is not content to laugh these off as inevitable microquirks in a zany modern world, as so many of us do. Rather, he argues, they are symptomatic of a culture full of self-hatred, irony, and political/cultural/emotional fakery; starved for sincerity, authenticity and manners; and in need of some good old-fashioned self-restraint. In the end, Meyers provides guidance for how to increase our self-esteem; but, like any self-help prescription, the hardest part is not in understanding it, but in executing it, day after day after day.
— E.L.
Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators
by William Stolzenburg (Bloomsbury USA)
In Where the Wild Things Were, William Stolzenburg has given himself the admirable task of explaining why ecosystems the world over are experiencing unprecedented explosions in the populations of certain species — ants in Venezuela, elk in Yellowstone. The short answer, it turns out, is that predators, the big bullies at the top of the food chain — the cats, the owls, the eagles, the sharks — are in decline, due to none other than poaching, hunting, building, polluting humans, of course. While the history behind the plummeting numbers of the world’s most feared flesh-eaters would make Stolzenburg’s book well worth its weight in pages, his vivid and animated portraits of the evolutionary biologists whose passion and meticulous scholarship drives the book are even more captivating.
— E.L.
FILM
Frozen River
Written and directed by Courtney Hunt
frozenriverthemovie.com
Frozen River won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it’s easy to see why. Writer-director Courtney Hunt’s feature debut is strong, earnest and unadorned, much like her heroine, first time actress Melissa Leo who gives an award-worthy performance as Ray Eddy, a minimum-wage mom, desperate to provide for her kids after her gambling-addicted husband has, literally, bet the house (the double-wide, that is).
In order to salvage the down payment and save Christmas, Leo teams up with a half-blind, hair-raising Mohawk, Lila (Misty Upham), who smuggles immigrants cross the U.S.-Canadian border to support her own estranged offspring. The women collaborate out of necessity, not kinship — Ray’s “whiteness” serving as camouflage (reverse racial-profiling?) for their illegal operation. Gradually, the relationship between Ray and Lila thaws as does the titular Frozen River, offering cause for small hope and great concern, respectively. Will sacrifice overcome centuries of self-interest? Will trust trump prejudice? Will the ice hold? Frozen River plays like a Barbara Ehrenreich fever dream, a fictional reminder that Americans are being nickel-and-dimed to death even in pursuit of the most meager happiness.
— Warren Etheredge
MUSIC
Jayme Stone and Mansa Sissoko
Africa to Appalachia
jaymestone.com
Collaborating with 21-string kora player Mansa Sissoko, banjo-picking, guitar-strumming Jayme Stone takes his beloved Americana into the heart of West African storytelling tradition, and vice-versa. It’s a gorgeous record through and through, with the strings of both traditions melding and dancing for 13 songs. Stone wanted to bring out the inherent folkloric aspect of music sharing, given that Sissoko comes from the long griot tradition, a (mostly) inherited bloodline of approved storytellers of African mythology. Hence “Ninki Nanka,” the tale of a dragon-like snake that bestows good fortune; their instrumental retelling of the tale, dressed up by sonorous violins and ample percussion, is brilliant. On the tracks that Sissoko sings — such as the beautiful “Bibi” and spacious “Bamaneyake” — a further testament of his enduring talent presents itself.
— Derek Beres
Calexico
Carried to Dust
(Quarterstick Records)
Very few bands point to Cormac McCarthy as influential, yet anyone who has ever heard Calexico understands the connection. The sweeping, majestic and pensively sad melodies of its records prove eerily similar to the patient and at times unnerving stroke of the writer’s pen. The band’s Americana stretches to and beyond Mexico, sonically and philosophically; the group’s socio-political stance appears on tracks like “House of Valparaiso,” which topically aligns with predicaments in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Beginning as a duo — Joey Burns and John Convertino — and expanding and contracting as needed, the members of Calexico are minimalist masters, knowing that a single harmonica or a tasteful horn solo can fill speakers with as much power as orchestras. Carried to Dust recalls an old America, one detailed by deserts and dark, starry nights, the stuff of mythology. Their appreciation and dexterity for Latin rhythms and phrasings — the playful “Inspiracion” and “El Gatillo (Trigger Revisited)” — uses musical sorcery to connect a continent that has been divided in so many ways.
— D.B.
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