Books

Big ups to my buddy Andy Raskin, whose memoir The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life has just been released. I attended a reading of his at Booksmith last night in the Lower Haight. But don’t worry, he’s on tour in SF and points beyond this month and throughout the summer. Check his site for details. Andy wrote and produced one of my all-time favorite pieces of radio — on the subject…

My Columbia classmate and pal Jaimal Yogis’ first book, Saltwater Buddha is out today. It’s been met with great reviews thus far. He’s been hit by the Monterey Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and San Francisco magazine. Congrats, Jaimal!

Last night I watched Crossing the Line, an amazing documentary about Joe Dresnok, the last American defector to North Korea. After putzing around the Internet, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that one of Dresnok’s fellow defectors, Charles Robert Jenkins, who has since left North Korea for Japan, is about to come out with a book. His book previous had only been published in Japanese and Korean, and is finally scheduled for release early next month in English, published…

Pico Iyer on Orhan Pamuk: Pamuk has two enduring loves: books and Istanbul. Often they converge as his journeys through his hometown come to resemble excursions through memory itself. Like Proust, Pamuk has spent decades of his life — 15,300 days, he calculates — in the same room in his beloved birthplace, alone with his books and thoughts. Yet his window is always open to catch the sound of the sandwich vendors in the street, the men in the teahouse,…

Masood Farivar, a current Dow Jones reporter and former Harvard student and mujahedeen has a book deal about his Afghanistan days: “Confessions of a Mullah Warrior.” He’s the only person I’ve ever met online or in person that has the same family name as me, but who isn’t directly related to me. Congratulations, Masood!

So after trying Monica’s favorite burrito place in the East Bay, Chavez Market in Hayward this weekend, I still haven’t found any burrito superior to the ones from El Ojo de Agua in Fruitvale. I just found a January 2006 piece from the Chronicle talking about how awesome the taco truck and blue-collar Mexican food scene is on International Blvd. “Ojo de Agua (on Fruitvale Avenue at E. 12th Street). Legendary for its al pastor tacos, but they can be…

Slate: Scratch a KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski enthusiast and he’ll insist that everybody who reads the master’s books understands from context that not everything in them is to be taken literally. This is a bold claim, as KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s work draws its power from the fantastic and presumably true stories he collects from places few of us will ever visit and few news organization have the resources to re-report and confirm. If KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski regularly mashes up the observed (journalism) with the imagined (fiction), how…

BBC: Poland’s most celebrated journalist and non-fiction writer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, has died in Warsaw, aged 74, after a heart operation. I first discovered Kapuscinski after being given a copy of The Shadow of the Sun by my good friends Alan Wiig and Brynna Jacobson shortly before I embarked on my first voyage to Senegal in 2002. His depictions of West Africa resonated with me and my experience 50 years after he wrote them. While I’m hardly an expert on Africa,…

This book was originally published in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1983. From the preface: “New innovations and wonders which are being made every day in the press, the growing up of real men or genuine writers, and emotional legends of love for people are unthinkable from the wise guidance and utmost care of the dear Comrade Kim Jong Il, a great leader and a benevolent teacher. “He is always among journalists and teaches them every detailed problem…