New & Notable

Anne Stephenson
The Arizona Republic

THE WARRIOR ELITE
By Dick Couch

   The good news is that you can lie back in your Barcalounger and eat pizza all day while you read about the brutal regimen that turns ordinary men into the world-class warriors of the Navy SEALs. The bad news is that you might doze off and get sauce on your shirt. Except for a brief story about a narrow escape by a squad in Granada in 1983, Couch concentrates not on the clandestine operations of these men, but on their training. His subjects: the members of Class 228, who are put through a grueling rotation of lessons, most involving push-ups and freezing water. This happens in 1999 at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, California, and we know that many of the men will “drop on request,’’ or DOR (one of many acronyms here - we longed for a cheat sheet, a sign that we aren’t SEAL material). Why does one man quit and another stay? What motivates them to try? Couch explores this and, in an epilogue written before Sept. 11, the role of the SEALs in future conflicts. The Gulf War, he says, was easy. “It is unlikely we will find so inept a foe the next time around.’’

THE RAW AND THE COOKED
By Jim Harrison

   Novelist Harrison talks of rigging tiny lights to his eating utensils and having someone film him while he eats in a dark room. “Imagine,’’ he says, “the dancelike swirl of these points of light.’’ He loves to eat, and he loves to write about food and about himself. Like his favorite kind of meal, this collection of his food essays is rich, manly and unabashedly self-centered. He writes about his homes in northern Michigan and southern Arizona, his hunting trips and his disdain for dieting (he calls eating light “the moral equivalent of the fox trot,’’ and nutrition guru Jane Brody is “the arch-health ninny of Gotham’’), as well as meals he has prepared for his family and friends. He acknowledges that food can become an obsession. Orson Welles once “designed’’ a dinner for him, “and called me at dawn with the tentative menu as if he had just written the Ninth Symphony.’’ Harrison, too, has been known to overfeed friends. Years ago, Jack Nicholson ate at Harrison’s table and observed afterward that “only in the Midwest is overeating still considered an act of heroism.’’