I’ve just finished reading British linguist David Crystal’s autobiography.  Often hilarious, sometimes poignant, it’s a sheer delight.  The author’s curiosity and zest for everything linguistic (and beyond) is infectious.  John Lawler’s review of this book says of the first chapter, “Being a Linguist,” that “every linguist in the world will go yessing through this chapter.”  I would add that many a faculty member these days will nod vigorously through a later chapter’s description of academic life during the financial cutbacks of the Thatcher years!  This book will interest anyone who enjoys language, whether or not they are professionals in this field.  Sorayya Carr, UPB

Eating wisdom from a Berkeley sage in bite-sized morsels we can enjoy every day. May save our lives, or at least make them better.  William McClung, UPB

A delightful set of meditations and lists (along with striking images of their heavily laden shelves and a gem of an essay by Walter Benjamin: “Unpacking My Library”) by several renowned contemporary architects who view their vocations and their passionate relations with printed volumes as bound up with a kindred aesthetic obsession, and for whom form, function and content (and contentment) are most happily wedded in the experience of their beloved beautiful books.  Peter Johnstone, UPB Frontman

Hillman’s lyric experimentalism, as displayed in Practical Water, her eighth collection of poetry and third installment in a proposed tetralogy on the elements, offers an unlikely mediation between aesthetic and political concerns. Interested in engaging both traditions, Hillman rejects any partitioning that would disallow her political or aesthetical concerns from being hashed out simultaneously in the measure of a poem. With Practical Water, the State of the Union and State of Being are addressed with equal parts sensitivity and acuity. Hillman’s poems ask a reader to share in the activity of observation and contemplation regarding the complexities of everyday life as a citizen of the political and aesthetic. Here, the poem offers one an opportunity to retry one’s own philosophical and political opinions in a circuitry devised by an exquisite hand. While the conscience is at work mulling over one’s role in geo-political atrocity the heart endures the abstract shudder of pleasure that only poetry can afford. 10.29.09  Pablo Lopez

Brenda Hillman Reading at UPB in September

Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham presents the theory that a shift from raw to cooked foods during hominid evolution had profound physical and social effects that led to the development of modern humans.  I approached this book with some skepticism, being disinclined to accept single-cause explanations, and I couldn’t read the chapter title “How Cooking Frees Men” without a jaundiced eye.  But Wrangham amasses quite a bit of information in support of his theory, and he provides a balanced view of the tradeoffs involved, especially for women, in the move toward dependence on cooked foods. Whether or not one accepts cooking as the single most crucial innovation in human evolution, this book is worth including among the readings in a human evolution course. Sorayya Carr, UPB partner, anthropologist.

Yet another excellent book in the California Natural History Guide series edited by the admirable Phyllis Faber. I read it over the weekend before the author joined us for a UPB Conversation — an unusually rambunctious one as the subject of energy generates plenty of passion.  This is an introduction by a skilled writer who brings together the history, geology, innovations, disasters, problems, and variety of future opportunities for energy in our amazing state. William McClung, UPB partner.

We surely have all had the experience of driving with a passenger, riding with a driver, or being stuck in traffic behind someone with a very different driving philosophy.  And we all have opinions on the traffic calming measures that are popular in Bay Area cities, as well as various CalTrans decisions about highways.  Tom Vanderbilt drove, rode with local drivers, and interviewed psychologists and traffic engineers all over the world.  The resulting book is full of insights, many of them counterintuitive.  It gives the reader a greater appreciation for the complexities of traffic engineering and for other drivers’ differing viewpoints. It might even make us all safer drivers.  As for me, I’d still rather take public transit, where I can just sit and read.  Sorayya Carr, UPB partner.

This book has sold 73 copies at UPB since publication. Talk about a mind on fire! Kat Anderson has written a white-hot study on the land use practices of California Indians after decades of deep research at Berkeley and among indigenous people around the state.  The familiar history of dispossession, genocide, and assimilation is told in new detail and horror. More important is the remarkable range of examples and perspective Anderson presents on the ways California Indians managed and lived in our landscapes. They harvested and used many of the plants we value in the Berkeley Hills today — willow, elderberry, oaks, hazelnut, soaproot, yampah, miner’s lettuce, mugwort, bunch grasses, etc. – and they understood what kinds of disturbances help rather than hurt these beneficial plants. Yes, they burned frequently, but often very specifically.  And their methods of irrigating, pruning and coppicing, sowing, tilling, transplanting, and weeding add up to a land-use sophistication far beyond our modern understandings of how to preserve and to protect our wild lands. William McClung, UPB, East Bay Hills land steward.