Snap Judgments

BOOK
NOVELLA CARPENTER AND WILLOW ROSENTHAL: THE ESSENTIAL URBAN FARMER
(Penguin Books)
Gardening books are rarely page-turners, but this one comes as close as they get. Fans of Carpenter know her from her bestselling memoir, Farm City, and from her blog, Ghost Town Farm, named after the garden she established in her Oakland backyard. Now she and Rosenthal, founder of Oakland’s City Slicker Farms, have written this laugh-out-loud, rip-roaring, and miraculously thorough guide to raising your own produce, animals, and bees, in cities or anywhere else. Distilling
a combined 10-plus years of experience with organic, biodynamic, intensive, and permaculture farming, the authors offer easy-to-follow, sustainable, and often cheap
solutions to everything from soil testing, grafting, and pruning your own “urban fruit forest,” to curing a backyard chicken of a cold, to forming a producers’ cooperative. Whether your interest in the current urban-farming revolution runs to harvesting the perfect tomato, saving seeds, or building your own plotting container, you’ll want this book. A+ - EMILY KAISER THELIN

BOOK
JULIA FLYNN SILER: LOST KINGDOM: HAWAII'S LAST QUEEN, THE SUGAR KINGS, AND AMERICA'S FIRST IMPERIAL ADVENTURE
(Grove/Atlantic)
Lost Kingdom is Siler’s second exploration of the death of a dynasty. Her first, The House of Mondavi, was an account of the spectacular fall of the famous wine family. This time, she tackles the last native rulers of Hawaii and their vain attempts to stave off American annexation of their land. She focuses on Queen Liliuokalani, a gifted composer and far-seeing leader who tried to save the monarchy but was outmaneuvered by a rogues’ gallery of American missionaries and magnates and weakened by her own political rivals. Siler, an award-winning reporter, culls her material from a wealth of primary sources (the endnotes alone take up nearly 100 pages), constructing a narrative of both the Hawaiian and the U.S. sides of the struggle. Local history buffs will appreciate anecdotes about the schemings of San Francisco’s own sugar baron, Claus Spreckels, and an unfortunate visit by Mark Twain, whose racist portrayals of the Hawaiian court were widely read at home. Lost Kingdom is not just a valuable account of a particularly ugly chapter in American history; it also serves as a timely cautionary tale of how divided
leadership in the face of a collusion between foreign corporate interests can end in the collapse of a sovereign nation. B+ - SHEERLY AVNI

FILM
SID & NANCY
(MGM)
The new pristine presentation of Blu-ray might seem at odds with the scuzzy squalor of a seminal punk biopic, but then, Sid & Nancy doesn’t exactly shy away from bracing clarity. With as much anarchic vitality and shrewd humor as a movie about gradual mutual suicide can have, director Alex Cox’s 1986 feature recounts the
violent and doomed romance between Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his beloved, fellow heroin fiend Nancy Spungen. They’re played by Gary Oldman, in a volcanic, career-launching performance, and a devotedly shrill Chloe Webb. Using the narrative fulcrum of the Pistols’ final show, staged at Winterland in the Western Addition in 1978, Cox keeps a close watch on the toxic love affair, which plays out in scene after scene of paradoxically peppy miserabilism. The resulting portrait is compassionate and comprehending, but drawn with enough detachment to avoid glorifying its subject, and that’s why it still holds up. Cox’s hyperreal style—visually
odd but alive and unpretentious—stays true to the spirit of his enterprise, and also remains fresh. Any film pitting fed-up young people against billy club–swinging cops seems topical now, and this one is instructively timeless. It’s a bracing reminder of how soft movie portraits of musicians have gone lately. A - JONATHAN KIEFER