Varna’s Mind

A bumper crop of books about vegetable gardening claims that the answer is in our own backyards. Not one convinces me, but they all make a good case for the simple joy of growing things. The best is the breezy, cantankerous and funny GROW THE GOOD LIFE: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise (Rodale, $24.99), by Michele Owens, a co-founder of the fabulous Garden Rant blog. Owens’s warm, enthusiastic, bossy-boots tone will make you want to swipe your credit card in soil. First, though, let me get my own garden rant out of the way. Why must cheerleaders for backyard veggies repeat the canard that Michelle Obama’s White House garden cost only $180? Just price the lumber, wire mesh, soil, mulch, amendments, pipes, spigots and seeds — never mind the labor — for a 1,100-square-foot plot. Was it the taxes that came to $180?

You won’t necessarily get a fast return on your investment, but Owens’s own home economics are sensible. Vegetable gardens, she reminds us, “require less and less time, labor and money every year as the soil gets richer.” She genially refuses to engage in the usual patter about how to water what plant, knowing most of us just point and shoot. And she makes short work of how-tos: “First, take care of the . . . soil. Second, diversify to avoid disaster. Third, pay attention to timing. And fourth, be a little Zen.” The only way to learn to garden is to do it.

Owens boldly stakes a claim for the moral superiority of the home grower. Why delicious food doesn’t suffice as its own best argument, I don’t know. “Thanks to my garden,” Owens declares, “I can take a small stand against everything I find witless, lazy and ugly in our civilization.” Which is a lot. The vegetable garden, it turns out, is a ripening political force: the best response to the energy crisis, the climate crisis, the obesity crisis, the family crisis and the financial crisis.

Most of the country’s population lives in cities and suburbs, even if, as Owens says, suburbia is “so 20th century. And it’s over.” Realistically, though, if home growing is to gain serious traction, it will happen in the suburbs. It’s unlikely that any city will grow enough to feed its population, even though fantastic urban green roofs are defying tail-pipe emissions, rats and flaking lead. It will be no small irony if suburbia becomes the locavore’s home of choice. And growing backyard veggies could be the answer to the crisis of disaffected suburban youth.

At the least, vegetable gardening is a healthy trend. But Owens has a vision of saving the world with “a billion sustainable backyard gardens and small farms.” As with knitting a sweater, one row is meaningless; 90 don’t add up to much; but eventually you get something useful. Hers is a slow revolution, but one about which it could cheerfully be said that the end justifies the means. On a macro level, I’m not persuaded that small farms can feed everyone, but I’ll take homegrown micro greens any day.

Sarah Hayden Reichard has written a modest and unassuming but powerful book, THE CONSCIENTIOUS GARDENER: Cultivating a Garden Ethic (University of California Press, $27.50), arguing that gardeners should be on the front line when it comes to recognizing the interconnection of mankind and nature. “Practices and products,” she writes, have crept into the craft of gardening “that decrease its long-term sustainability.” I, for one, will never again resort to pesticides or peat moss after reading her book. Reichard’s chapter on soil, “the skin of the earth,” is an excellent refresher for any gardener. There are 20,000 identified types of soil in the United States alone. Dirt may even be the new Prozac. Both Reichard and Owens mention that working the soil might alleviate depression: a specific soil bacterium has been found to activate serotonin-releasing neurons. Which would, at the very least, explain why more gardeners don’t throw down their shovels and quit.

The chicest — and I use the term advisedly — book of the season is the lavish BEEKEEPER’S BIBLE: Bees, Honey, Recipes and Other Home Uses (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $35). Beekeeping has new cachet as a status indicator among the moneyed classes. Luckily, it’s an exemplary activity for anyone to do — or read about.

Thick as a family Bible, this team effort by Richard A. Jones and Sharon Sweeney-Lynch reads like a textbook, lacking the buzz of authorial personality. Still, it’s hard to go wrong with such a remarkable subject. The Bushmen of southern Africa believed the first human was born when a bee planted a seed in a mantis’s body. In Roman times, secret love letters were carved into wax tablets, from which the incriminating evidence could be easily removed. Jones and Sweeney-Lynch explain the science and society of bees in clear, accessible language. And the recipes are admirably useful: honey scones, honey soap, honey hangover cures. “Oh, stuff and fluff,” as Pooh might say. Dip a paw into this richly satisfying volume and you won’t have to do stoutness exercises.

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Dominique Browning, author of the memoir “Slow Love,” writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Web site and blogs at SlowLoveLife.com.

Cookbooks aren’t really about cooking, and haven’t been since the advent of color photography and food stylists. They’re mostly lifestyle catalogs, aspirational instruction manuals for lives we’d like to live. Prose used to have to do the heavy lifting in this regard. No more. Now images implore us to cook, and it can take a toll on the reading.

This is true even if the prose is excellent, as in the case of AT ELIZABETH DAVID’S TABLE: Classic Recipes and Timeless Kitchen Wisdom (Ecco/HarperCollins, $37.50). A collection of dozens and dozens of David’s simple, beautiful and bullet-proof recipes, tied together with a few essays and top-notes, it was compiled by Jill Norman and photographed by David Loftus.

Anyone who has spent time thumbing through the thin, smudged pages of a paperback edition of one of David’s books, looking for instruction and finding joy, will be shocked by the result. Absent are the spare pages gone yellow with age, the words ticking by beneath covers showing only a watercolor image, solid advice from this sensible, writerly woman, who died in 1992 at the age of 78.

Gone is the experience of reading a description of a dish and then creating it yourself, with no physical model, no expectation that it must look like this or that: her marvelous pork in milk, for instance, or shoulder of lamb. Here instead is the food rendered in blooming center-focus color, the images as soft at the edges as a dream, instantly recognizable to all those who have seen Loftus’s photographs before, in Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks.

It is weird, and disconcerting, for those who know the source material. The feeling is similar to the one that can arise when lush movies are made from favorite books. But for those who have never heard of David, who have never experienced the joy of her chicken baked with green pepper and cinnamon butter? This title serves as a good introduction — to be followed by trips to the used-book store for the originals, best consumed with an omelet and a glass of wine.

Oliver’s influence can be found up and down the cookbook piles this season. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the puckish seasonal-cooking advocate and champion of British food television, has turned directly toward Oliver’s aesthetic in his RIVER COTTAGE EVERY DAY (Ten Speed Press, $32.50). With marvelous (Loftus-like!) photographs by Simon Wheeler, and a layout that owes something to 2008’s “Jamie at Home,” this book is more reader-friendly and useful than some of Fearnley-­Whittingstall’s past River Cottage offerings, and the food is ace. Start with the chicken and mushroom casserole with cider for dinner, or a celery root Waldorf salad for lunch. There aren’t many days that can’t be served by the rest.

A reissue of Richard Olney’s 1970 classic, THE FRENCH MENU COOKBOOK (Ten Speed Press, paper, $22), is emphatically not for everyday use, as its Dickensian subtitle may attest: “The Food and Wine of France — Season by Delicious Season — in Beautifully Composed Menus for American Dining and Entertaining by an American Living in Paris and Provence.” But there are some excellent recipes in here all the same, for poached eggs and beef stew, stuffed artichoke bottoms and roast saddle of lamb, saffron rice with tomatoes, a pure and simple sauce ivoire. From the simple (peaches in red wine!) to the complex business of stuffing calves’ ears for service with béarnaise sauce, this is a project book, best for cooks seeking intermediate badges or ju=nior-pilot wings.

More accessible for the new cook and the exhausted, overworked experienced one alike is FRENCH CLASSICS MADE EASY (Workman, paper, $16.95), by Richard Grausman. Also a reissue, from a 1988 original, it combines smart advice for streamlined versions of timeless French dishes with a simple, reader-friendly and ­Workman-specific layout and type style that will be familiar to anyone who has cooked from the Silver Palate cookbooks. Here’s a top-notch blanquette de veau darkened (to the good!) with morels, as well as fine instruction on making a truffled roast chicken, fast soufflés, all the great French egg-yolk sauces, an onion tart and crêpes suzette. For those interested in, if slightly intimidated by, the intricacies of French cuisine, this book will be a balm.

Jonathan Waxman’s ITALIAN, MY WAY (Simon & Schuster, $32), seeks to do something similar for Italian cuisine. The book is slightly slap-dash, with recipes that can at times seem padded (two pages on arugula salad with olive oil and shaved Parmesan!) and black-and-white printing that does no justice to the legendary Christopher Hirsheimer’s photographs. But if you can overlook the filler (recipes for peas with pancetta and mint, or smashed new potatoes) and the steep price tag, Waxman does have some excellent ideas for pork ribs, chicken and a seven-hour braise of lamb. And the instruction on how to make his salsa verde is worth a peek.

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Sam Sifton is the restaurant critic for The Times.

His recent scrapbook compilation, “Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010,” shows him in a decades-long game of chess against the man who is his favorite subject, bugaboo, muse, hobbyhorse and intellectual crush object. Dylan will try to pull a fast one, and Marcus will usually catch him in the act and call him on it. Amusingly enough, he cannot stand one of Dylan’s most beloved songs. “Line by line,” Marcus writes, “ ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is pious, or falsely innocent — isn’t it obvious whoever wrote ‘Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail / Before she sleeps in the sand?’ already knows the answer, assuming he or anyone can actually bring him or herself to care about such a precious question?” Neither does he care for “The Times They Are A-Changin.’ ” Or Dylan’s religious period. Or most of his 1980s output. Same with a lot of his 1970s material. He takes special glee in pointing out the horridness of a little-heard Dylan composition, from 1963, called “You’ve Been Hiding Too Long.” After quoting a few of its stilted lines, Marcus reports that it “is so awful it’s been erased from Dylan’s published song collections.” He piles on, calling it “self-congratulatory spew” and “the deformed spawn of the impulses behind ‘Masters of War.’ ”

His prose can get overheated, a little loopy even, but Marcus can tell a story simply and effectively, as he does when describing his first encounter with Dylan, at a tent concert in 1963. He was 18 years old at the time. His future subject was 22. Marcus had gone to the show to see the main act on the bill, Joan Baez, but the guest performer was the one who captured him. “When the show was over, I saw this person, whose name I hadn’t caught, crouching behind the tent,” Marcus writes. “He was trying to light a cigarette, it was windy, his hands were shaking; he wasn’t paying attention to anything but the match. . . . ‘You were terrific,’ I said.” When the future star finally made his reply to the future author, in this cultural-Americana version of the old “Little Archie” comics, he described his performance that day with a word not fit for a family newspaper.

Another recent Dylan book, “Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown,” written by a younger critic, David Yaffe, comes in at a pleasing 135 pages of text. The structure is tidy. Its four main sections deal with essay-worthy subjects: Dylan’s voice; Dylan in film; Dylan’s relationship to race and minstrelsy; Dylan and plagiarism. But too many of Yaffe’s sentences hurt your puzzler. Perhaps because he is writing about the composer of trippy songs like “Visions of Johanna,” Yaffe feels the need to drift into high style himself, as when he writes, “He exists onstage and in our dreams, our fantasies, our real and concocted histories, our colleges, our state fairs and our concert halls at the same time.” What does that even mean? First guy: “Hey, did you know Dylan is playing at the concert hall tonight?” Second guy: “Really? He’s also at my college.” Third guy: “That’s funny, because he’s in my concocted history.”

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Jim Windolf is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

But there are also deeper questions about how best to make an impact — even about how to do something as simple as get more kids in school. Mortenson and a number of other education organizations mostly build schools. That seems pretty straightforward. If we want to get more kids in school around the world, what could make more sense than building schools?

How about deworming kids?

But, first, a digression: a paean to economists.

When I was in college, I majored in political science. But if I were going through college today, I’d major in economics. It possesses a rigor that other fields in the social sciences don’t — and often greater relevance as well. That’s why economists are shaping national debates about everything from health care to poverty, while political scientists often seem increasingly theoretical and irrelevant.

Economists are successful imperialists of other disciplines because they have better tools. Educators know far more about schools, but economists have used rigorous statistical methods to answer basic questions: Does having a graduate degree make one a better teacher? (Probably not.) Is money better spent on smaller classes or on better teachers? (Probably better teachers.)

And, yes, I’m getting to deworming. Hold your horses!

Now we reach a central question for our age: How can we most effectively break cycles of poverty? For decades, we had answers that were mostly anecdotal or hot air. But, increasingly, we are now seeing economists provide answers that are rigorously field-tested, akin to the way drugs are tested in randomized controlled trials, yielding results that are particularly credible and persuasive.

Prof. Michael Kremer, a Harvard economist, helped pioneer randomized trials in antipoverty work. In the 1990s, Kremer began studying how to improve education in Africa, trying different approaches in randomly selected batches of schools.

One intervention he tried was deworming kids — and bingo! In much of the developing world, most kids have intestinal worms, leaving them sick, anemic and more likely to miss school. Deworming is very cheap (a pill costing a few pennies), and, in the experiment he did with Edward Miguel, it resulted in 25 percent less absenteeism. Even years later, the kids who had been randomly chosen to be dewormed were earning more money than other kids.

Kremer estimates that the cost of keeping a kid in school for an additional year by building schools or by subsidizing school uniforms is more than $100, while by deworming kids, the cost drops to $3.50. (In a pinch, kids can usually go to “school” in a church or mosque without a uniform.)

Look, school buildings are important, too. My wife and I built a school in Cambodia, and whether it’s our school or one of Greg Mortenson’s, they can make a big difference. My point is that for years people have been arguing until they were blue in the face about how to help people — and, finally, we’re getting some reliable data suggesting how to do that.

Another example: What’s the most cost-effective way to prevent H.I.V. transmission in Africa? Most liberals focus on condoms and conservatives on abstinence-only programs. But one program that proved particularly cost-effective in randomized testing in Kenya was simply an initiative to warn teenage girls against “sugar daddies.”

This cost less than $1 per girl reached. The result was not that the girls engaged in less sex, but that they slept with boys their age rather than with older men (who, according to prevalence surveys, were more likely to have H.I.V.).

Randomized trials are the hottest thing in the fight against poverty, and two excellent new books have just come out by leaders in the field. One is “Poor Economics,” by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and the other is “More Than Good Intentions,” by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel.

For years, we’ve seen a sterile debate about whether humanitarian aid works. (Sometimes yes, sometimes no.) These terrific books move the debate to the crucial question: What kind of aid works best?

For those who want to be sure that to get the most bang for your buck, there is also a “proven impact fund” (www.poverty-action.org/provenimpact/fund). It supports interventions like deworming or microsavings that have proved to be cost-effective in rigorous trials.

I’ve been worried that the “Three Cups of Tea” uproar would lead people to give up on helping others. That would be a tragedy because, over the last decade, we’ve actually gotten much smarter at figuring out how to make a difference. Increasingly, we have a good idea what works — if people still are trusting enough to try to help.

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