Telescopes of surpassing power revealed to her the unrevealed depths of the cosmos on polished mirrors of floating mercury. The dead worlds of Sirius, the half-formed worlds of Arcturus, the rich but lifeless worlds whirling around vast Antares and Betelgeuse -- these she studied, without avail.

-- Polton Cross, "Wings Across the Cosmos", 1938

"Blind Lake" is an almost fable-like contemplation about First Contact. One of the basic attributes we give to sentient beings is the need for communication, and in "Blind Lake" the universe itself conspires to provide communication between far-flung sentient beings who otherwise could only passively observe each other.

The "Blind Lake" of the title is an observation station: where scientists of various types observe another sentient race many light years away. The telescopes we use to observe other stars become powerful enough to resolve high levels of detail on a planet light years away. However, there are uncomfortable questions about the technology that makes this happen. The computers that were initially programmed to improve the signal to noise ratio from the massive telescope array in space, seem to be creating data out of thin air: data that has an impossibly higher resolution than should be possible. Some question whether the data is real: but most accept that the complexity of what they are observing has to be real, since it would be unthinkable for the software to be dreaming all this up. But there are skeptics ...

Each section of the novel begins with a quote from a Golden Age (1920s-1930s) science-fiction author (e.g. the one above by John Russell Fearn, under the pseudonym of Polton Cross) that identifies with this concern of being able to observe other sentient beings without any means of communicating with them. The only quote not from a Golden Age author is from Lucian of Samosata (from Icaromenippus c. 150 AD, often cited as being arguably the first science-fiction story) which is similarly a story that is concerned about a journey for the purpose of understanding.

In parts of the novel, through the voice of one of the scientists at Blind Lake, RCW makes an impassioned argument: that science-fiction could be relevant to the way that scientists think about their work, that trying to understand and identify with the viewpoint of what they are studying is not always a case of unwanted anthopomorphism, but could lead to insights and discoveries otherwise closed off to the conservative viewpoint: the view that only a clinical observation of the facts should be used to inform any scientific theory. RCW hopes that a connection is possible, however tenuous, between any two groups of sentient beings, and he sets up a deus-ex-machina that enables this connection to whoever is willing to pay the price. In this novel it becomes clear that some species made the choice and have vanished, while others have largely ignored this conduit of connection and continue their lives as before. It is not clear which choice humanity will take.

%T Blind Lake
%A Robert Charles Wilson
%I Tor
%D 2003
%G ISBN: 0-765-34160-3 (pb)
%P 399
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2006/9/26

The first major battles with rockets that involved Europeans occurred during a revolt against the British which began in 1781 in the Mysore region of southwest India and lasted through 1799. The Indians fired crude but effective rockets against British regulars during battles at Seringapatam in 1792 and 1799. "No hall could be thicker," a young English officer named Bayly lamented in his diary. "Every illumination of blue lights was accompanied by a shower of rockets, some of which entered the head of the column, passing through to the rear, causing death, wounds, and dreadful lacerations from the long bamboos of twenty or thirty feet, which are invariably attached to them."

The Royal Laboratory at Woolwich Arsenal was therefore ordered to design and develop a dependable war rocket that could be produced in large quantities as standard equipment for the artillery. This was done by William Congreve, a Cambridge-educated socialite who was an intimate of the Royal Family and whose father was commandant of the Royal Artillery and Woolwich's comptroller. Congreve had studied law and run a newspaper. As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, and in the aftermath of the battles in India (and in anticipation of others with France), he responded by turning his keen intellect and imagination to inventing a better rocket.

After at least three years of experiments, Congreve published A Concise Account of the Origin and Progress of the Rocket System, in November 1807. Even then there were those who fretted about national security and the danger of leaks, and since Congreve was one of them, he happily "sanitized" his report. "In the following pages I have cautiously avoided any disclosure which might lead to a discovery of the interior structure and combination of the rocket, on which all powers depend, this rule I have observed for obvious reasons," the inventor wrote with evident pride.

Noting that the Indian rockets had had a range of less than a thousand yards, Congreve designed one that traveled twice as far. It was an iron cylinder stuffed with seven pounds of compressed powder, and it weighed thirty-two pounds. The breakthroughs were using metal "carcasses" instead of paperboard; refining the powder through granulation machines to give more predictable results; and using pile driver presses to compact the powder so it was a denser and therefore more even-burning charge. He also incorporated noses into his design--warheads, in today's jargon--that could carry a variety of munitions, including incendiary, shrapnel, explosive, or shot. Other models would follow in relatively quick succession.

Congreve realized early that rockets were particularly suited to naval warfare because, unlike cannons, they did not recoil and destabilize the ship. He therefore suggested that his 2,000-yard model be used as part of a plan, soon accepted, "for the annoyance of Boulogne" by the Royal Navy. Ten boats were fitted with incendiary rockets for an attack on the French port city on November 21, 1805, but a fierce storm prevented the attack. A second attempt, on October 8, 1806, was successful. "In about half an hour above 2,000 rockets were discharged," Congreve reported with evident relish. "The dismay and astonishment of the enemy were complete--not a shot was returned--and in less than ten minutes after the first discharge, the town was discovered to be on fire." The rockets were used with even greater success to shell Copenhagen in 1807 and then other European cities. And Congreve was at least indirectly responsible for the national anthem of the United States. On the night of September 13-14, 1814, his ubiquitous rockets were used to shell Baltimore's Fort McHenry, causing the "red glare" that inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Previously posted: a review of This New Ocean.

An illusion has three stages.

First there is the setup, in which the nature of what might be attempted is hinted at, or suggested, or explained. The apparatus is seen. Volunteers from the audience sometimes participate in the preparation. As the trick is being set up, the magician will make every possible use of misdirection.

The performance is where the magicians's lifetime of practice, and his innate skill as a performer, conjoin to produce the magical display.

The third stage is sometimes called the effect, or the prestige, and this is the product of magic. If a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the rabbit which apparently did not exist before the trick was performed, can be said to be the prestige of that trick.

This novel is about magic, English magic in particular, or at least is portrayed as such for most of its length. American science makes an appearance, but by then the misdirection has already worked. It does not matter that you know this before reading this novel, the trick will work just the same. The book's main character is Andrew Westley, born Nicholas Borden, whose name changed after being adopted as a young boy. Andrew is convinced of a psychic link between him and a twin brother who cannot possibly exist, but whose possible existence has haunted Andrew. As the novel begins, he is confronted with the memoirs of his ancestor, Alfred Borden, a Victorian era magician who was famous in England at the time for his remarkable magic trick: `The New Transported Man', in which he appears to transport himself across a stage instantaneously. Alfred Borden's life, however, intertwines with another magician, Rupert Angier, with whom he begins a life-long feud and professional competition. Most of the novel is epistolary in nature (all the better to introduce unreliable narrators!) with the memoirs of Alfred Borden and the diary of Rupert Angier making up most of the novel's length.

So what is the result? The prestige in this case is an entertaining novel which would have made a great graphic novel (it is rather to be a Hollywood movie it seems). In his more recent novels, Priest has moved towards fiction that looks at British history, but with the traditional Priest science-fiction touches. My own personal preference is still for his science-fiction work from the 1970s, like "The Inverted World".

%T The Prestige
%A Christopher Priest
%I Simon and Schuster, hardcover, 1995; Gollancz, paperback, 2004
%D 1995
%G ISBN: 0-575-07580-5 (pb)
%P 360
%K science-fiction, historical-fiction

Review written: 2006/8/24

Spin has many old science-fiction ideas contained within it, but all of them are carefully re-considered within a storyline that is already compelling: a coming-of-age story of the main character, Tyler Dupree. But this story is set within a grand and far more painful coming-of-age for humanity itself.

Tyler, ever since he was a young child, has been close friends with twins: Diane and Jason Lawton. The class distinctions that produce a simultaneous envy, fear and affection between Tyler and the rich and powerful Lawton family is wonderfully rendered. If nothing else fantastic happened in this novel, that story would be reason enough to read it. However, fantastic things do happen: while adolescents, Tyler and the Lawton twins witness first hand the creation of a planet-spanning shield around the Earth, presumably by aliens, which blocks out the universe. Experiments quickly show that time passes slowly inside the Spin, so while 30 years pass on Earth, 300 billion years pass outside the shield. Humanity does what it can, taking advantage of the temporal difference to first terraform and then colonize Mars. There is a fateful meeting of the human-descended Martians with the Earthbound variety in the third act, which literally transforms humanity: one human at a time. Together the two groups get closer to piecing together the nature of the puzzle: why does the Spin exist? What is its ultimate purpose? Is it benign or punitive?

Lomax quoted a poem by a nineteenth-century Russian poet named F. I. Tiutchev, who couldn't have imagined the Spin but wrote as if he had:

Gone like a vision is the external world
and Man, a homeless orphan, has to face
helpless, naked and alone,
the blackness of immeasurable space.
All life and brightness seem an ancient dream,
while in the substance of the night,
unraveled, alien, he now perceives
a fateful something that is his by right

Then Lomax departed the stage, and after the prosaic business of backward counting, the first of the rockets rode its column of fire into the unraveling cosmos behind the sky. A fateful something. Ours by right.

Wun knew (or had been coached to understand) how unlikely this event seemed to the average Earthling. ... So he thanked us all for our hospitality in his best mid-Atlantic accent and talked wistfully about his home and why he had left it to come here. He painted Mars as a foreign but entirely human place, the kind of place you might like to visit, where the people were friendly and the scenery was interesting, although the winters, he admitted, were often harsh.

("Sounds like Canada," Carol said.)

If you like Spin, other science-fiction novels written by Robert Charles Wilson are: The Chronoliths and Bios.

Update (Sep 10, 2006): I removed the comment about RCW being underrated. Spin won the Hugo for best novel of 2006. Links to the World Science Fiction Convention: WSFS page and the 64th WSFS Convention.

%T Spin
%A Robert Charles Wilson
%I Tor
%D 2005
%G ISBN: 0-765-34825-X (pb)
%P 454
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2006/2/19

The East India Company viewed trade with Tibet both as desirable for itself, particularly with respect to Tibetan exports of gold and silver, and also as a back door to the lucrative markets of China proper, bypassing the officially sanctioned entry point of Canton.

Unfortunately, this interest on the part of the East India Company coincided with the closing of many of Tibet's doors to the outside world. This occurred partly as a result of the increasing imposition of the Chinese authority and partly because of the overthrow, by 1769, of the traditional Newar rulers by the Gurkhas and the establishment of a Hindu kingdom in Nepal. Racial and religious bonds between Nepal and Tibet were broken, and the traditional trade routes through the Nepalese passes between India and Tibet were largely closed. In addition, the Gurkhas did not look kindly on the British, who had rendered military assistance to the Newars. As a result, the East India Company began to look for alternative routes through Bhutan or Assam which could open Tibet to trade and which did not pass through Nepal.

...

Nepal invaded Tibet in 1788 in search of the treasure housed by wealthy monastaries. Unable to oppose them, the Tibetans sued for peace and promised to pay an indemnity. The Gurkhas then withdrew, but not before Tashilhunpo had appealed for help from Lord Cornwallis, who had replaced Hastings as governor-general in 1785. Cornwallis declined, promising only that he would not assist the Gurkhas. The Gurkhas invaded again in 1791, on the grounds that Tibet had not fulfilled the agreement over the indemnity. Shigatse was captured and Tashilhunpo was sacked. A strong Chinese army then entered Tibet and defeated the troops withdrawing to Nepal. Now it was the turn of the Gurkhas to request aid from the British. Cornwallis again refused, though he offered to provide mediation, which aroused the suspicions of the Tibetans and angered the Gurkhas. Cornwallis had succeeded only in alienating all three parties -- Tibetan, Chinese, and Gurkha. A large Chinese army now occupied the most populous part of Tibet, and Britain was not to regain its influence there until the twentieth century. The Chinese Emperor Qian Long closed the frontiers of Tibet to the outside world, thus imposing on Tibet an exclusionary policy similar to that already enforced for China proper, one which kept nearly all foreigners away by restricting trade only to the port of Canton.

...

The closing of the borders stimulated British interest in Tibet. As the nineteenth century progressed, curiousity increased with the occupation of territory along the Tibetan border, acquired as a result of the deteriorating relations with Nepal. With the Chinese firmly in control of Tibet and closing its borders to Bengal, the East India Company looked initially to revive the trade routes to Tibet through Nepal. This was despite the failure of the mission of Captain William Kirkpatrick, who had been sent to mediate between the Gurkhas and the Tibetans in 1792. A second mission under Captain Knox was dispatched in 1801. Knox became the first British Resident in Kathmandu and, on behalf of Britain, signed a treaty with Nepal shortly after arrival. However, as a result of internal political developments in Nepal, Knox withdrew in 1803, and the treaty was dissolved. The continued forays by the Gurkhas into areas of British interest and protection ultimately lead to the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814-1816. The British were victorious and, by the treaty of Segauli, were given possession of territory to the west of Nepal in Kumaon and Garwhal, thus giving British India a common frontier with Tibet for the first time. Relations between Britain and Nepal, however, remained cool until a change of regime in Kathmandu in 1846. Treaties in 1817 and 1861 with Sikkim, another Himalayan state on the frontier of Tibet, gave Britain influence in that area. Sikkim was also a major trading route from Bengal to Lhasa. Further to the east, Britain acquired the province of Assam, after victory in the first Anglo-Burmese War in 1826. This opened up the possibility of alternative routes to Lhasa and southwest China. In the extreme western part of Tibet, British interest in pashm, used to make fine cashmere wool, led to the construction of the Hindustan-Tibet road between 1850 and 1858. Designed primarily to improve trade, the road went from the plains of India through Simla, the summer capital, before passing through Bashahr and terminating at Shipki on the Tibetan border.

Read my review of Trespassers on the roof of the world by Peter Hopkirk for more on China, Britain and Tibet in the early part of the 20th century.

At the time of the establishment of the Qing (or Manchu) dynasty in China in 1644, Lhasa was ruled by Mongols from the Koko Nor area. They built up the Dalai Lama as a religious power, and it was the Dalai Lama who also began to assume secular authority following the death of the Mongol leader in 1655. His policies were generally in accordance with those of the Qing, particularly the policy of keeping a rein on the hostile Dzungarian Mongols of the Ili region. But with the demise of the Dalai Lama in 1682, a complex dispute arose around the question of his successor, intertwined with the possibility of a Mongol reunification under Tibetan auspices threatening the power of the Qing emperor. In 1717, the Dzungarian Mongols invaded Tibet. At first welcoming the invaders, the population soon turned against them and sought assistance from the Chinese in expelling them. The Emperor Kangxi was only too happy to oblige and sent an army to Tibet, which was roundly defeated by the Mongols in 1718. A second, larger Chinese force was more successful and occupied Lhasa in 1720. The Chinese army was warmly received as the savior from the Mongols and the restorer of the new Dalai Lama to his rightful position. The foundation of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet had been laid in a masterful manner, and with the cooperation of the Tibetans themselves.

Read my review of Trespassers on the roof of the world by Peter Hopkirk for more on China, Britain and Tibet in the early part of the 20th century.

Recently I stumbled upon what I consider to be a prime example of a Mondegreen in a Korean song. In the song "Little Baby" by 노 브레인 (No Brain) from the album "안녕, Mary Poppins" (Hello, Mary Poppins) is a line that I always hear as:

오징어만을 사랑해
ojing-oe-man-eul sarang-hae
I love only squid

I mean, come on, who doesn't ... love squid, I mean. But the original lyrics are:

오직 너만을 사랑해
ojik noe-man-eul sarang-hae
I love only you

The Mondeviridity is enhanced quite spectularly by the assimilation of the kieuk in 오직 ojik in the context of the following nieun in 너 noe making it sound like ojing which makes it a perfect match.

The only thing consipiring against it is that 사랑 love in Korean seems to have a strong selectional preference for +human, the verb usually used to express the proposition of loving squid happens to be 좋다 to like. But for me, the love of devouring squid knows no such bounds. I think I need to get me some 오징어 볶음 ojing-oe bokk-eum right away.

PS: the romanization is my illiterate effort at following the official Revised Romanization.

Update 5/30/2006: Balaji has a post about Mondegreens in Tamil songs.

Though Princeton's population is well accustomed to eccentricity, trained not to look askance at rumpled speciments staring vacantly (or seeminly vacantly) off into space-time, Kurt Gödel struck almost everyone as seriously strange, presenting a formidable challenge to conversational exchange. A reticent person, Gödel, when he did speak, was more than likely to say something to which no possible response seemed forthcoming:

John Bahcall was a promising young astrophysicist when he was introduced to Gödel at a small Institute dinner. He identified himself as a physicist, to which Gödel's curt response was `I don't believe in natural science.'

The philosopher Thomas Nagel recalled also being seated next to Gödel at a small gathering for dinner at the Institute and discussing the mind-body problem with him, a philosophical chestnut that both men had tried to crack. Nagel pointed out to Gödel that Gödel's extreme dualist view (according to which souls and bodies have quite separate existences, linking up with one another at birth to conjoin in a sort of partnership that is severed upon death) seems hard to reconcile with the theory of evolution. Gödel professed himself a nonbeliever in evolution and topped this off by pointing out, as if this were additional corroboration for his own rejection of Darwinism: `You know Stalin didn't believe in evolution either, and he was a very intelligent man.'

`After that,' Nagel told me with a small laugh, `I just gave up.'

The linguist Noam Chomsky, too, reported being stopped dead in his linguistic tracks by the logician. Chomsky asked him what he was currently working on, and received an answer that probably nobody since the seventeenth-century's Leibniz had given: `I am trying to prove that the laws of nature are a priori.'

Three magnificent minds, as at home in the world of pure ideas as anyone on this planet, yet they (and there are more) reported hitting an insurmountable impasse in discussing ideas with Gödel.

All of his thinking is governed by an `interesting axiom,' as Ernst Gabor Straus, Einstein's assistant from 1944 to 1947, once characterized it. For every fact, there exists an explanation as to why that fact is a fact; why it has to be a fact. This conviction amounts to the assertion that there is no brute contingency in this world, no givens that need not have been given. In other words, the world will never, not even once, speak to us in the way that an exasperated parent will speak to her fractious adolescent: `Why, I'll tell you why. Because I said so!' The world always has an explanation for itself, or as (Gödel) puts it, Die Welt ist vernünftig, the world is intelligible.

About Gödel's comments on natural selection, I find it hard to say anything remotely reasonable. Rebecca Goldstein cites an explanation about Gödel's intuitions about Darwinism by Steven Pinker, which essentially states that being a logician, Gödel disliked the non-determinism inherent in the Darwinian explanation. It comes across more as an apology than an explanation. But we do not need any explanation, of course. There is little doubt about Gödel's accomplishments, but like Einstein, the public, and even other scientists, expected these geniuses to provide deep insights (purely intuitive or a priori, by their very nature) on topics outside their expertise. The fault is not with them, but with us in taking everything they said all too seriously.

Update 5/29/2006: This update is meant to clarify one point that might be misunderstood. Unlike natural selection, Gödel's interests did in fact extend quite clearly into physics and even astrophysics. For a Festschrift in Einstein's honor, Gödel reluctantly published a paper that laid out a completely new model for the famous Einstein equations of General Relativity. In Gödel's interpretation so-called "Closed Timelike Curves" could exist, in which time can have cycles and you could revisit the past cyclically (perhaps this is also related to Gödel's interest in the existence of non-standard models in logic). For reasons not entirely clear to me, this interpretation has some link to observations of galaxies where if a significant number of them had a strong preference for spinning in one direction vs. another this would be a relevant finding. In a story that appears much later in Goldstein's book, some astrophysicists who were involved in such observations were asked to confer with Gödel and were taken aback at the sharp penetrating questions he had for them. `I wish we had talked to Gödel before doing our work.' was their comment after this conversation. It still does not explain to me his mysterious statement to John Bahcall above, but I suspect it does not mean what it appears to at first glance.

It's not so cool to explain a joke: but the title of this entry is supposed to be an antonym of Timur the Lame, who is certainly one of the other famous residents of Samarkand.

Update: Thanks to cosma for the new title (originally was "Vapnik the Able").

By now it is certainly obvious that my life was full of detours and compromises. Opportunities for success were afforded me in the United States, the land of freedom, land of work, land of civilization, to quote an old song of the famous Czech clowns Voskovec and Werich.

A honest to goodness Vancouver tradition that originated in Simon Fraser University. The annual celebration of Scottish and Chinese culture: Gung Haggis Fat Choy.

Taken from the official web site for Gung Haggis Fat Choy here's a slightly edited version of the history of this annual holiday celebration (only celebrated in Vancouver, as far as I can tell):

It was on Burnaby Mountain, at Simon Fraser University that mild-mannered psychology student and SFU tour guide, Todd Wong was asked to help out with the University's annual Robbie Burns celebrations. ... Wong was befuddled with the idea of a Chinese guy (him) wearing a Scottish kilt and having to show his bare knees out in the snow.

... the Chinese Lunar New Year fell on January 27th only two days away from Robbie Burns Day, which is always January 25th in celebration of the Scottish Bard's birthday. "Gung Haggis Fat Choy!" said Wong, "I can celebrate two cultures at the same time."

Flash forward to 1998, and Wong was putting together a Chinese New Year Dinner party for about 12 friends. Lo and Behold, the Lunar New Year again fell two days away from January 25th, Robbie Burns Day. Dinner plans were quickly made to incorporate both Chinese New Year and Robbie Burns Day traditions as Wong scurried off to the Vancouver Public Library to research Robbie Burns Day and discover Scottish songs for himself to play on his accordion.

A dinner of 16 in a friend's living room was the setting for the first Robbie Burns Chinese New Year dinner hosted by Toddish McWong, along with co-host Gloria Smyth. Todd cooked and organized most of the dishes. Gloria hired the bagpiper. They invited their friends. Fiona brought a haggis. Margot toasted the lads and lassies.

Now Le Guin has added a fifth full-length novel to the Earthsea setting (there have also been several short stories, also published in books). Ged and Tenar, protagonists from the earlier four novels, both appear and play key roles. In addition, Tehanu and her relationship with the dragon Kalessin forms a crucial part of this novel (which means you should probably read "Tehanu" before you read this novel).

A new character is introduced, Alder, a man who has unwittingly initiated a dangerous transformation that threatens all of Earthsea. Alder is a small-time sorceror, fixing broken pots with his magical skills. As the novel opens, he has lost his wife, Lily, and his grief seems to retain a link between them that should have been broken at death. He begins to dream of a field with a low stone wall that seems to separate the living from the dead. These dreams seem to be undoing not just his sanity but also seem to herald a transformation in the real world, in Earthsea. As the novel begins, he travels to meet the man who had been Archmage of Earthsea, Ged, to decode what is happening and why.

It is a pity that this novel has been saddled with a title that will inevitably provoke a few jokes about flatulence (perhaps an unlikely comparison with the movie "A Mighty Wind"). On the other hand, it is perhaps better not to take anything too seriously.

%T The Other Wind
%A Ursula K. Le Guin
%I Ace Books
%P 273
%D 2001
%G ISBN: 044100993X (pb)
%K science-fiction

'The Furies' is probably the best story here, with an exceptional krewe of flawed geniuses in search of the anti-hero fugitive. Sandor Sandor is the most interesting of the detectives, with a PhD from the University of Brill on the planet Dombeck, a genius in the geography of all the worlds in the inhabited galaxy and missing his legs and his right arm.

%T Four For Tomorrow
%A Roger Zelazny
%I Ace Books: New York
%P 216
%D 1967
%G ISBN: -- (pb)
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2003/01/02

The universe in which the plot unfolds is the main attraction. Karl Schroeder has clearly put in a lot of effort to make a plausible and consistent future history in the great traditions of early sf authors such as Arthur C. Clarke. The basic idea is embellished with many scientific details on the author's website (which is what induced me to read the novel in the first place). The discovery of multitudes of brown dwarf stars littered throughout the universe finally made the promise of the expansion of humanity into the void. While previously the distances between stars without the possibility of faster than light travel meant that there could not be any coherent contact between them to maintain any kind of society, the existence of previously unseen and substantial numbers of brown dwarf stars with their own planets orbiting them meant that such a society was now possible. "Permanence" begins with such a society already extant and threatened with extinction after the new discovery of faster than light travel possible only between large masses such as the lit stars.

%T Permanence
%A Karl Schroeder
%I Tor Books
%P 447
%D 2002
%G ISBN: 076530371X
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2003/01/06

Then came the success of "Kitchen Confidential" spurred on by an earlier New Yorker article which grew to become the book. This success meant that he could suggest to his publisher that he would travel the world for this next project in search of the `perfect' meal. In a Faustian bargain, the book was linked to a Food Network show of the same name, guaranteeing for him a new and larger captive audience and providing him with adequate guilt and angst to fuel his venting on the show against other easily ridiculed Food Network stars such as Emeril and Martha Stewart. Tony has no less than five installments of `Why you don't want to be on Television' distributed throughout his book bitching about filming the show.

Being the modern day equivalent of the travelling journalist (like a modern Peter Fleming, for example) can only work if the personality of the author is upto the challenge of eliciting a grand experience in the travels. To some extent, Tony tries to do this by pursuing the exotic meal: still beating heart of a snake and numerous types of offal, poisonous fish and bugs. But these are mostly visual and are more readily enjoyed on the TV show. The book provides a much more tangible sense of the no-bullshit personality of the author and the contexts into which he chooses to put himself. For example, discussing Iron Chef with a group of drunk salarymen in a Tokyo bar is something that cannot be planned out (for the record, Tony's favorite is Morimoto, while the popular favorite seems to be Sakai, and Tony ends up providing the American reaction to the disgraceful Bobby Flay cutting board incident during the first Flay/Morimoto face-off).

Of course, you don't need to travel very far to get the same kind of food that Tony talks about in his visits to South-East Asia: a good bowl of Pho, even durian fruit are readily available in any big city in North America. Tony knows this, of course, but does not actually express it in his book, but what he is after is the right context for a meal: perhaps in the middle of Khmer Rouge bandit territory, which makes the meal perfect. In the end, it's eating some beach resort ribs on vacation in the French West Indies with his wife after the tour is over is what seems to be as perfect as anything else to be found in a world tour.

%T A Cook's Tour
%T :in Search of the Perfect Meal
%A Anthony Bourdain
%I Raincoast Books, Vancouver
%P 274
%D 2001
%G ISBN: 1551924293
%K non-fiction

Review written: 2002/12/20