Dersu the Trapper

Instead of Huxley, I turned to an old friend, V. K. Arseniev's Dersu the Trapper, and then watched Akira Kurosawa's adaptation Dersu Uzala when I should have been working this afternoon. A nonguilty birthday treat, to be sure, but also one of the best portraits I know of cultures in collision while individuals within those cultures are doing everything they can to shield each other from the shock.

Yuri Rytkheu's A Dream in Polar Fog, to be released on April 15 by Archipelago Books, is a very fine modern rejoinder by an interesting new press. I'm giving it an honored place in my overcrowded shelf of books devoted to polar exploration, inaugurated when my grandfather gave me a copy of Richard Byrd's Alone. (Apparently he'd met the good admiral back in the day.)

I wonder what our contemporaries are reading at the McMurdo Antarctic Research Station? According to the National Science Foundation, "The library in Building 155 contains a collection of polar books, some technical books, and a great number of hard-bound and paper-back books." For no truly good reason, I'd be curious to know just what's in that great number--and whether the station's video collection contains John Carpenter's director's cut of The Thing . . .

Sic transit . . .

It being my birthday, I'm put to mind of mortality and immortality. On the first point, there's Tom Kirkwood's Time of Our Lives: The Science of Human Aging, which, though not as enthralling as Jonathan Weiner's broader-ranging Time, Love, Memory, has much good information on what happens as we get older. On the second--well, I don't quite share Ray Kurzweil's techno-optimism and sure don't share his taste in beverages, but he's got some interesting ideas.

I may just have to spend the evening rereading (after decades) Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Long life!

Traveling in Italy

My friend and colleague Gary Wockner writes to ask about any secret knowledge I might have of Italy, a country I've visited many times and lived in for several too-short spells of a few months apiece. His query makes a good occasion to list some of the best information sources I know about Italy.

For general travel, I first turn to Travel Intelligence, a London-based syndicate for which I'm a correspondent. There are more than a hundred other correspondents, and they offer astonishing secrets of their own.

You can't do much better, I think, than the Lonely Planet guides, and the one for Italy is no exception. It's one of the only guidebooks I don't mind being seen carrying, and it's pointed me to some places I might not otherwise have visited--Orvieto, for one, which is now among my favorite places. Another top-flight and unembarrassing guidebook, to which I contributed a few pages, is City Secrets: Florence, Venice, and the Towns of Italy, which reveals quite a few off-the-beaten-track venues. Its companion volume, City Secrets: Rome, is indispensable for visitors to that city, as is Georgina Masson and John Fort's Companion Guide to Rome.

For a general sense of Italian culture, Luigi Barzini's The Italians is somewhat dated but still useful and entertaining. So, too, are Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped in Eboli and Words Are Stones, about Basilicata (on the far southern mainland) and Sicily, respectively. For the north--specifically, Verona--Tim Parks's Italian Neighbors is quite good. And if you don't feel overwhelmed by the Anglicization of Tuscany, Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun is an instructive treat. (It's okay to cheat and watch the film, with the always wonderful Diane Lane.)

More to come. But for the moment, one final recommendation for airplane reading that doesn't get much better: Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars, a kind of Godfather for the second century, with plenty of useful lessons for us all.

Coming soon . . .

InfoStacks is a site devoted to the best books and other sources of information in any given field: what to read in order to know, for instance, how to build a fence, maintain a Web site, take a photograph, write an essay, care for a pet, keep a business alive, and cultivate awareness.

The site will be slow in the building, but, I hope, pleasing for all involved.