CD
VARIOUS ARTISTS: LOVE IS THE SONG WE SING
(Rhino)
By now you may be sick to death of bleary-eyed, 40th-anniversary rehashes of the Summer of Love. However, this four-CD set, the third in Rhino’s psychedelic-music series, provides something of an alternative view of the San Francisco Sound (1965–1970). While there are plenty of tracks by well-known local acts, such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Steve Miller, most of the collection focuses on the wrongly overlooked and willfully obscure. Thankfully, compiler and longtime local resident Alec Palao isn’t a fan of the extended jams for which the era became known. Instead, he focuses on snarl-ing garage-rock (Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction”), elegant folk-rock (Serpent Power’s “Up & Down”), off-kilter girl-group pop (Ace of Cups’ “Glue”), and proto-heavy metal (Blue Cheer’s cover of “Summertime Blues”). You’ll find many revelations here, from
a seriously spooky soul number by future East Bay star Linda Tillery (Loading Zone’s “The Bells”) to a Country Joe & the Fish instrumental so in-tense it would give the Velvet Underground the heebie-jeebies (“Section 43”). Whether you were having too good a time to remember the ’60s or were born too late to experience them, this lovingly compiled box set will prove both enjoyable and enlightening.  A
DAN STRACHOTA

BOOK
ANN PACKER: SONGS WITHOUT WORDS
(Knopf)
Ann Packer’s first novel, 2002’s bestselling The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, focused on a 23-year-old Midwestern college graduate torn between loyalty to her newly paralyzed high-school boyfriend and her search for a more exciting life in New York. Five years later, Packer, who lives in San Carlos, has turned her attention to two Bay Area women, friends since childhood now in their early 40s. Sarabeth is single; Liz is married and has two children. Packer’s clean, inoffensive prose and eye for quotidian domestic detail achieve a miracle of sorts: to render both women so mundane and ordinary that they fade from memory—at least mine—like disappearing ink on the page. Yet Packer is almost universally lauded for her verisimilitude and her ability to “resonate” with her readers. So one is left wondering: with their affairs and memories and appreciation for the aesthetics of a well-designed room, are women like Liz and Sarabeth really so boring, or did Packer just make these two that way?  C
SHEERLY AVNI

BOOK
ROBERT B. REICH: SUPERCAPITALISM
(Knopf)
If you think our economic system bears more than a passing resemblance to a Viking raiding party, well, Robert Reich feels your pain. A Berkeley professor and Clinton-era cabinet official, Reich is that most exotic of species: an economist who can write. In his user-friendly new book, he offers a unified theory of What Went Wrong and explains why bashing Wal-Mart won’t fix it. An increasingly cutthroat, global strain of capitalism, he argues, “has invaded democracy,” demolishing the barriers (strong unions, strict regulations) that restrained it for decades. While this ruthless, steely machine may benefit us as consumers by driving prices down, it is robbing us of our voices as citizens, shipping good jobs overseas, and widening the gap between rich and poor. Our elected officials are too compromised by corporate cash to put up a fight. Noting the ineffectiveness of consumer boycotts (without laws, they’re like putting fingers in a dike) and corporate self-policing (right), Reich proposes a commonsense, and almost hopelessly retrograde, solution: more and smarter government regulation. In Washington, D.C., of course, this view is as popular as leprosy. But the pendulum always swings. Economic populism
is in again—just ask John Edwards—and maybe Reich’s eminently reasonable ideas will get a hearing. He’s certainly made them clear.  A-
CHRIS SMITH

MAGAZINE
EDUTOPIA
(George Lucas Educational Foundation)
Launched in September 2004, Edutopia aims to be both provocative and pragmatic—an eight-times-a-year guide to everything happening in the world of K–12 public education, from classroom layouts to attention-deficit disorder. The layout is splashy and slick, the articles are short and punchy, and the entire pace of the magazine feels a bit frenetic, like moving through
a school corridor during passing period. At its best, Edutopia explores new ideas and questions old ones, as in Tamim Ansary’s devastating indictment of the Reagan-era “Nation at Risk” report, which has defined the educational debate for more than two decades. At its worst, the magazine gallops through the pros and cons of controversial topics such as gender-segregated schools without fully exploring them, or renders them unreadable by printing them in white type on striped backgrounds. Even so, teachers and others interested in educational practice and policy will find the magazine brimming with useful information. Given how full their days are, they may be grateful for the brevity of most of the articles.  B
DASHKA SLATER

TV
KEN BURNS AND LYNN NOVICK: THE WAR
(Premieres Sept. 23 on PBS stations)
Each episode of this superb 15-hour documentary is built on the ways in which the citizens of four American towns, one of them Sacramento, experienced World War II. Mostly, we learn how men
from those towns—sometimes via letters, more often via
interviews with survivors and family members—fought that war. The film footage and still photography are just incredible; the series also salutes those who risked their lives documenting the war. Watching the seven-night program can be almost unbearable at times, but you really come to understand how the war was fought and won, at home and overseas. And as horrendous as those land, sea, and air battles were, both the reasons for fighting and the strategies for victory seem as morally clear-cut and uniting as they are muddy and divisive for the wars we’re in today. Making clear how closely valor lived with violence, this depiction never glorifies its subject. Early on, the narrator remarks that the war brought out the best and the worst of a generation, and “blurred the two so that they became at times almost indistinguishable.” This great cataclysm grew out of “ancient and
ordinary” emotions, such as anger and bigotry and the lust for power; it ended only because other human qualities—courage, selflessness, faith, and the hunger for freedom—“combined with unimaginable brutality” to change the course of events. I honor a view of war like that.  A
PAMELA FEINSILBER