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Netsurfer Recommendations

Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm
David Mas Masumoto
HarperSanFrancisco; ISBN: 0062510258

Remember the juiciest, sweetest peach you ever ate? Use that memory as your entrance to this book, the story of a California farmer and his family peach farm. David Masumoto is a third-generation peach and grape farmer in California's San Joaquin Valley, and this book tells of his struggle to grow and sell his sweet Sun Crest peaches. Masumoto's genuine joy at being a farmer, his keen appreciation of the hard work, and his joy and despair while growing his peaches and grapes come through the text. While most farmers sow and reap within a single year, Masumoto's family must put their faith in crops that will not be ready for harvest until as much as 20 years in the future. Despite the difficulties, this is not a gloomy book - far from it. Matsumoto is downright poetic as he describes his work and his family's farming history, and delights in telling us of the many details of peach biology and farming technology. He is clearly a man who loves what he does. He tells a beautiful story, and paints a fine portrait of a modern family farm - and it sure makes you want to eat a really good peach.

Strange Times, My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature
Nahid Mozaffari
Arcade Publishing; ISBN: 1559707658

Post-revolutionary Iranian cinema is far better known than post-revolutionary Iranian literature in the US. This may in part be due to Iran's restrictive censorship, which for whatever reason has fallen far more lightly on film than on the printed (and electronic) word. As well, American companies until recently feared the legal restrictions on the importation and translation of books from countries, like Iran, the US government had deemed terrorist states - a form of censorship which was recently overturned in court. Here, then, is an opportunity to sample contemporary Iranian short fiction, both prose and poetry. Realism seems to be the prevailing writing style. Not surprisingly, many of the stories and poetry deal with politics, although mostly metaphorically. This book is a good opportunity to sample a literary culture that is rather isolated from Western literary influence.

A Theological Miscellany: 160 Pages of Odd, Merry, Essentially Inessential Facts, Figures, and Tidbits about Christianity
T.J. McTavish
W Publishing Group; ISBN: 0849918391

We've all seen the queues of people lining up to pass the Pope's casket. What do you talk about while you're stuck in that line for 12 hours? Why, theological miscellany of course! After about hour six, when you've exhausted the "Who's your priest?" chitchat with the people around you, you could entertain your queue neighbors with fascinating religious facts from this terrific little booklet. Teach them what "autocephalous" means. Argue about which of the four other guys with a good claim to the title should have been named an apostle. Debate the significance of the erotic content, if any, of the eight famous kisses in the Bible. List all the American Presidents and their denominational affiliations. Try to do it backwards at about hour 11. You get the idea. It's a compendium of religious facts, as useless as they are fascinating. Remember, it's still not too late to pack this volume for the next major religious wait - the election of the new Pope. We do wonder if we were to bring a laptop, would we find a wireless connection in St. Peter's Square? This, of course, would belay any need to talk to our queue neighbors in the first place.

Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs
Mark Jason Dominus
Morgan Kaufmann; ISBN: 1558607013

While it is true that Perl is the Swiss Army knife of modern programming, few people use even a fraction of its potential power. Perl is perfect for many fire-and-forget coding tasks, so coders tend to use it as such and they often remain unaware of the language's hidden depths. This book is an eye-opening look at what you can do with Perl. It shows you features you never knew about and introduces a programming paradigm that most coders are not particularly familiar with. Functional programming - think functions which modify or manufacture other functions - has long been the domain of computer scientists and mostly academic languages like Lisp. Jason Dominus brings this technique firmly into the real world of everyday software development, showing how this kind of approach along with the power of Perl allows you to elegantly solve numerous practical problems.