Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World

I was, admittedly, way more excited about this book than I should have been. You see, I rather love the Tsukiji Fish Market. It might be my favorite place in Japan - every variety of plant or animal found in the seven seas spills forth from styrofoam boxes (who am I kidding - the Japanese are far too orderly for that - it only feels as if it were spilling forth); it is a veritable labyrinth crammed with generations-old stalls and dozens of little sushi shops are piled on top of one another throughout the labyrinth. And if you don't believe that you can get anything from the sea there, take a careful look at the last picture: whale bacon. (The other other white meat??) But enough about the market.

Sushi, and seafood generally, is tremendously important to Japan's economy and, as Theodore Bestor notes early on, the value of what passes through Tsukiji in a single year is valued in the billions. And here is where my interests differ from those of Bestor. I am interested in Tsukiji as an economic engine. Bestor is interested in the anthropological aspects of the market. What makes the sellers tick? How are the various stakeholders connected to one another? What are the origins of some of the traditions at the market? How would moving the market affect the people, the relationships, their sense of self and place and time? These are fine questions, they are, but honestly the answers bored me after a couple hundred pages. Then I began skimming. In earnest.

In the early chapters, Bestor does a fine job making the market come alive, but as the page count rises, the anthropological analysis becomes increasingly academic (read: dull). The most salient - and interesting - points are conveniently available in an article Bestor wrote summarizing his findings. For those wanting more, though, particularly from an economic perspective, I strongly recommend The Sushi Economy, which examines the entire phenomenon of sushi in Japan and around the world. Bon appetit. You may want to pass on the whale bacon.

I would not tell a lie: you are looking at whale bacon.

To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West

Perhaps I should be embarrassed to admit this, but I was only vaguely family with Billy the Kid, and I'd never heard of Pat Garrett before I read this book - which I picked up at the library entirely because of the title. That I quickly discovered it was set in New Mexico, which I've come to believe is one of the most beautiful, yet underrated, parts of this country, was the icing on the cake. (I've included a couple of pictures below in an attempt to show you what I mean.)

As in Dick Kreck's Hell on Wheels - hell, it seems, being a very common theme in books about the American West of yesteryear - Mark Lee Gardner draws his reader into a time and place that has entirely vanished, except in the collective imagination. Outlaws were common then, every man - and not too few women - packed at least one weapon at all times and gambling, liquor, and errant (to say nothing of well-aimed) shots were entirely commonplace. Cattle rustling was rather an accepted risk, and Billy the Kid and his friends might have continued merrily along, stealing a horse here and a heifer there, if it weren't for the fact that two of the men who died at their hands were Sheriff William Brady and his deputy, William Hindman. (As Gardner notes, no one, including the US District Attorney, appeared to be upset by the outcome of a previous murder trial for the death of one Andrew Roberts, which resulted in the entire case being dismissed.)

Even if they'd wanted to put an end to the Kid's antics, no one had been able to arrest him for years, not until Pat Garrett accepted the challenge to become one of the first bounty hunters. It was Garrett who made possible the trial - both for Roberts and for Brady/Hindman - and whatever flaws he may have had personally (he himself having killed not too few men and being an inveterate gambler who once told Teddy Roosevelt, when asked about his gambling, "I know the difference between a straight and a flush, Mr. President, and in my section of the country, a man who doesn't know this doesn't know to keep the flies off in fly season.") - he was also deeply committed to justice.

To Hell on a Fast Horse is full of outsize characters and improbable events. Yet, Gardner both brings them alive and brings them all down to size with pithy language that is worthy of the people and events he describes. When writing of a posse hunting for one of Billy's outlaw friends, Gardner writes that he could not be caught: "Folliard's horse was damn fast; outlaws generally try to steal the best horses," and of the Kid himself, he "was not an early riser - long nights of women, dancing, and gambling will do that."

To Hell on a Fast Horse should be required reading for anyone with even a hint of interest in the American West. And, of course, you should all try to visit New Mexico.

1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War

Charles Emmerson has set out to find the world as it was 100 years ago, before the Guns of August [1914] and the theretofore unimaginable carnage unleashed by the first World War. Emmerson's world is one of empires, and it is these building blocks that he uses to construct 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War.

Chapter-by-chapter, the reader is taken on a tour of each empire and outpost: the British, of course, and the American, the Austro-Hungarian, French, Ottoman, Russian, and even the beginnings of the Japanese empire. By examining life, politics, and the zeitgeist in leading cities from London, Washington, Paris, and Vienna, and stopping by Jerusalem, Mexico City, Durban, and Beijing, Emmerson provides an intricate birds-eye view look at the world as it was. (In total he covers 23 cities on all six inhabited continents, an impressive feat.) This is actually the second book on pre-WWI empires that I've set out to read this year and, whether it was the organization or Emmerson's tone and style, I much preferred 1913 to The Age of Empire.

Personally, I found the chapter on the Austro-Hungarian Empire to be the most interesting, followed closely by those chapters that chronicled the last days of the Ottoman Empire, likely because I knew the least about these two empires and, therefore, felt I learned the most. For 1913 is an excellent sampler, something to whet the appetite before digging in deeper to anyone of these empires. As Emmerson notes in his closing paragraphs, this book seeks to capture, "a world bathed in the last rays of the dying sun, a world of order and security, a world unknowingly on the brink of the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century" (p. 456). Of this, he has done an admiral job. For the reader seeking more, though, wanting to understand the full story - and consequences - for any one of these empires, that reader may want to consider any of the following in lieu of or in addition to 1913.

• For more on the American empire: The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War

• For more on the Japanese empire: Flyboys

• For more on the consequences of empire in the Middle East:  Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia or Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell (Lawrence and Bell are both British, so there is also quite a bit about the British Empire, but each offers an excellent look at the Middle East before - and after - World War I).

• For more on the British empire: The Perfect Summer, England 1911: Just Before the Storm (Sorry, I read this before I started the blog, but Juliet Nicolson's look at Britain just a couple of years earlier than Emmerson's is really outstanding.)

• And, of course, I would be remiss not to add The Beauty and the Sorrow to this list, as it remains, for me, the most in-depth and moving look at World War I imaginable. As a POW remarks, “the great lords have quarreled, and we must pay for it with our blood, our wives and children” (p. 18-19). Emmerson's book ends on the brink of the quarrel.

The Distancers: An American Memoir

One of my favorite memoirs is Edmund Love's The Situation in Flushing, followed closely by his recounting of college days in Hanging On, Or How to Get Through a Depression and Enjoy Life (the title of which refers to an economic breakdown, as opposed to a mental one). I had hoped that Lee Sandlin's The Distancers, which is also about the (nearly) forgotten ways of life in (nearly) forgotten Midwestern farm towns, would be similar. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed.

The fact of the matter is there is too little memory in the memoir for my liking. The Distancers ceases to be a memoir fairly early; it is the history of the Sehnert family from its arrive from Germany in the decades before the Civil War up through the latter decades of the twentieth century. It's not that their story is disinteresting or that there aren't enough quirky characters to engage the reader. There is plenty of interest and not a few true characters. Squished into 180-odd pages, though, The Distancers compresses the generations together, a few years in the life of this one, a few in the life of that one, until it is impossible to remember the grandfather from the great-grandfather from the great-great-grandfather without thumbing back dozens of pages to recall the particulars.

What Sandlin does best is paint a portrait of a way of life long since past. The desire to reach into the past and pull it forward, to bring it to the reader in all its glory (and occasionally, all its grit) is palpable, and in this way The Distancers is quite similar to The Situation in Flushing. Where Sandlin does this best is, rather naturally, in the decades he can personally recall, which is the middle of the twentieth century. Earlier than that, the desire is still there, but the result is fuzzier; he is, after all, stitching together a past that is nearly forgotten. Perhaps if The Distancers had been longer, I would have felt it more complete, or perhaps I am just too picky. While I'm not sorry I read Sandlin's memoir, I still prefer those of Edmund Love.