How I spent my winter vacation

Book editors on vacation end up doing what they always do — reading books and, just in case, answering questions.

It was flattering, I must say, to be ushered into family kitchens and plied with leftover holiday cookies. “You don’t mind talking shop, do you?” queried friends and relatives. “We’re avid readers.”

“Why, books are my life,” I answered expansively. “What do you want to know?”

“What’s Jon Carroll really like? Do you know Art Hoppe? Is Herb Caen funny in person? Do you ever see Terrence O’Flaherty? Does Jane Benet really cook all the things ...”

Thank you, friends, thank you — one more cookie and I must get back to report on the many superb books I’ve discovered on this here vacation.

These are generally unknown but recently published titles I tried to curl up with but found so fascinating I had to run for the typewriter to carve out some sort of formal but brief review.

Take, for example, “U.S. 40 Today: Thirty Years of Landscape Change in America” by Thomas and Geraldine Vale (University of Wisconsin Press, $14.95 paper, $27.50 cloth). This is a great idea: In 1953, George Steward wrote a small American classic in “U.S. 40,” a photographic essay of his trip from Atlantic City to San Francisco on Highway 40. Using that book as their base, geographers Vale have made the same trip, observed the same landscape and taken pictures of the same locations.

I opened the book thinking that 30 years would have brought dramatic changes to the landscape — gone would be the quaint little farms, the charming small towns and pristine skylines, all replaced by skyscrapers or junk food stands or tract housing.

Wrong. Incredibly, so much hasn’t changed along Highway 40 that in some cases (downtown Atlantic City especially; not of course, the San Francisco skyline) it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between past and present photographs. We do see a widening of highway into freeway and a few tracts; but we do not see The Los Angelizing of America, thank heaven.

Then there’s “Nasal Maintenance: Nursing Your Nose Through Troubled Times” by William Stuart, M.D. (McGraw, $6.95 paper). This is to my knowledge the first serious, nonjudgmental title on cocaine use to appear on the market, and what a boon for tissue-torn noses it is. For much has happened, Dr. Stuart contends, between the innocent “snorting 70s” and what he now calls ominously the “indiscriminate 80s.”

This is not a book I personally need of course, but it certainly will be valuable for those who suffer from “cocaine rhinitis,” allergies, chronic dryness or runniness. In fact, everything you ever wanted to know about your septum and sinuses (Why can’t you taste anything when you have a cold? Why do your eyes water when you smell something awful?) is clearly explained, including these strange sniffles I seemed to have picked up at some party or another.

Speaking of allergies, I decided to read “The Type 1/ Type 2 Allergy Relief Program” by San Francisco physician Alan Scott Levin and The Chronicle’s Merla Zellerbach (Tarcher/Houghton, $12.95) because I have a friend who appears allergic to every kind of synthetic substance made, including processed gas in central heating, stoves, water tanks, etc. This, I decided, had to be a rare form of high-tech allergy, but thanks to this book I now know it’s an occupational hazard of contemporary life.

Type 1 allergies, the authors say, are the ones we all know about — everything ranging from hay fever to asthma; but Type 2 allergies are so new and so difficult to diagnose that any of us might be affected, and the symptoms aren’t the usual wheezing and sneezing either; they range from mood swings to periods of deep depression, and they can last a lifetime if left unchecked.

Here again is the first book on the market to explain a rising health problem in clear, sympathetic terms. Alcoholism and obesity are also treated nonjudgmentally, and I found the “Tips for Travel” section to be worth the price of the book.

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle Jan. 17, 1984.

Then there’s “Nasal Maintenance: Nursing Your Nose Through Troubled Times” by William Stuart, M.D.