I just finished reading an advanced copy of David Sax’s marvelous book, “Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen,” and now I can’t shake my hankering for my favorite food on earth. And just in time for Rosh Hashanah!

Sax makes for a marvelous tour guide through the highs and lows of Jewish deli, in North America and Europe. He’s got me desperate to make pilgrimmages to Los Angeles and Montreal, and happy that I live nowhere near Florida. I know my next trip to New York will feature a run to Katz’s - always mandatory anyway, but now even more so after the hilarious scene where Sax gets to work a shift at the counter, slicing meat with the pros.

Sax inspires hope with all the examples of successful delis, as well as despair at the difficulty of keeping them open. The section on Warsaw is heartbreaking — the birthplace of Jewish cuisine is now devoid of Jews, and people keep the tradition alive like white Westerners trying to keep Indian culture alive. And it is here that Sax unearths the real culprit in the decline of deli: the extermination of Jews in the Holocaust, which wiped out the creators and consumers of this cuisine.

The book can be pre-ordered in the U.S. here — can I put in a plug for Powell’s or another independent book-seller?

Sax will be in San Francisco, reading from the book at Book Passage in the Ferry Building at 6 p.m. on Oct. 26.

Frances Dinkelspiel started looking into her family history, and found 50 boxes of papers at the California Historical Society. It turns out her great-great-grandfather — a Jewish immigrant — was a pivotal figure in building California’s economy, yet was so behind-the-scenes that he had been lost to history. She now has a great book out about him: “Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California.” 
 
Her web site is www.francesdinkelspiel.com. (She also writes a great blog on the Bay Area book scene.)
 
She’s speaking Saturday in San Marino and Long Beach, and Dec. 2 in NY at Congregation Shearith Israel. then at numerous Bay Area events Dec. 2 and onward (including Temple Emanu-el Friday Dec. 5) and Dec. 11 and 12 at Metropolis Books and Congregation Kol Tikvah in LA. 
 
And Jonathan Curiel, a Chronicle reporter and former colleague, told the fascinating tale of how the Islamic world has influenced so many things in modern culture that so few people realize, from the Alamo to blues music to, ironically, the World Trade Center.

 Jonathan’s book, “Al’ America: Travels Through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots,” is a great read about an important but little-known topic. His Web site is www.jonathancuriel.com and he has readings coming up Dec. 7 and 8 in the Washington, DC area.

Way to go, Frances and Jonathan!

I’m talking about the theories that the San Francisco Giants have been somehow cursed since they moved to California 50 years ago. Think about it: During that half century, the original cursed team — the Brooklyn Dodgers — became the LA Dodgers, winning five World Series titles (1959, 1963, 1965, 1981, 1988). The Giants have won — zero.

Now, with the two teams marking their 50th anniversary, the Giants announced that one of their most prominent connections to New York — owner Peter Magowan, a native New Yorker, a boyhood denizen of the Polo Grounds — is retiring. And the Dodgers import native New Yorker Joe Torre, who brought Yankee mojo, and Yankee legend Don Mattingly to LA. And in the heat of the pennant race, they acquired another native New Yorker, Manny Ramirez. If baseball abandoned its AL/NL MVP voting for an MLB MVP (like every other major sports league), it would have to be Manny, whose gaudy stats (.332 avg., 37 HRs, 121 RBIs, .430 on base pct., .601 slugging pct.) led two teams to the playoffs.

I don’t care how many goats the Cubs’ sacrificed, this playoff series isn’t about them. It’s Old New York, cursing the Giants by rewarding the Dodgers again.

(Illustration is from the talented John Mavroudis, www.zenpop.com)

 My main thought was: I felt sorry for Sarah Lacy. Sure, I thought she could have done things differently, and I generally prefer a much more subdued style of interviewing. But the criticism was over the top and out of proportion to what happened. In addition, she had a notoriously tough subject on stage, one who was heavily coached as well as not particularly forthcoming.

I do also think the interview raised some age-old questions about the journalist-source relationship. Lacy was apparently Zuckerberg’s hand-picked choice, and she has become something of his Boswell. They clearly had some rapport on stage. That’s great for her, as a lot of journalists would love to have that kind of access. But it also comes with a price, as it’s in her interest to maintain that relationship, which sometimes can affect the tone of the questioning.

The geeks in the audience thought this would de-rail Lacy’s career. I don’t see it. She’s immensely talented, and I anticipate that her book coming out on Web 2.0 figures will be a great read and will sell well. And hey: A little controversy never really hurts. No publicity is bad, right?

 I don’t know if Get Satisfaction, the startup that I profiled in today’s New York Times, will hit it big either, but I do feel that the folks behind the company are onto something big. And that’s the notion that in the networked economy, companies no longer control the discussion about their products. Customers are increasingly in the driver’s seat, writing on blogs and their own Web sites aimed at different products. 

 Smart companies will listen to their customers, and embrace this new transparency. Get Satisfaction is giving these companies a way to do just that.

 The other fun thing for me, in writing this story, was catching up with Thor and Amy Muller, who I knew at their old company, Rubyred Labs. Thor told the story of Get Satisfaction’s inspiration in a silly side project the Mullers had started at Rubyred. Called Valleyschwag, people could pay $15 a month and get a care package of Web companies’ t-shirts, stickers, buttons and other paraphernalia. When the blogosphere touted it, it took off, and Valleyschwag had 2,000 paying customers in the first six weeks. The Mullers and their partner Jonathan Grubb were overwhelmed. Eighty percent of customer issues were repetitive, and in some cases the community solved the problem before the Mullers could get to it, giving birth to the idea for Get Satisfaction. (Jonathan is moving to L.A. to keep running Rubyred while the Mullers teamed with Lane Becker on Get Satisfaction.)

Om was already wrestling with the issue. His chief operating officer Paul Walborsky told me that others, most notably Martha Stewart, have had to figure a way to extend their name across a media business in which others do most of the work. Martha’s staff was forced to work without her through one kind of hardship; Om’s staff is coping with another.

It can be done. Utne Reader survives without founder Eric Utne (although his wife Nina, who sold the magazine, is still an editor-at-large), and Collier’s survived its founder for nearly 50 years. (Others haven’t fared as well: Jane magazine didn’t last long without Jane Pratt, and let’s not even get into what happened to Rosie.)

For Dow Jones, the demotion is but one more sign of the painful move into Rupert Murdoch’s fold. For devotees of Dow Jones, it’s bad enough that a king of the tabloids now takes ownership of the Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones is an iconic company, whose very name is synonymous with Wall Street. Yet because it now is no longer a publicly traded company, but instead merely a division of the conglomerate News Corp., Dow Jones has lost its spot on the stock market’s most influential index.

Fortune has revamped its Web site, and it looks great. Now, instead of stories appearing to come from CNNMoney, you can tell that they’re by Fortune writers. I hope to contribute more in the weeks ahead.

 Yet I struggle with the notion that longer is not always better. Mark Twain summed this up in an epistle: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Editing takes extra effort.

 Now comes proof, in several delicious forms.

First was a story by Motoko Rich in the New York Times last month, about how Raymond Carver’s widow Tess Gallagher wants to publish the original versions of some of his marvelously minimalist short stories. These versions reveal that Carver wasn’t always so economical with language, and his editor stripped out entire sections, imbuing them with the ambiguity that made them so intriguing.

Almost immediately thereafter, Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker wrote a fascinating piece on how the British publisher Orion is releasing new, heavily edited versions of old classics.

The subtraction does not turn a good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book. It is all Dick and no Moby.

 And  today, in the Times, David Carr extolls the virtues of The Week, Felix Dennis’s weekly magazine that summarizes the long stories published elsewhere in favor so that busy readers can know what’s in the news.

Yet shortening a lengthy work is not always an improvement. And I was reminded of that as I put together this post, and looked up Gopnik’s piece online. The piece is not there, but an abstract is.

While all the experts I spoke to said this is a very secure technology, there are plenty of skeptics out there, judging from the comments the story is receiving.

I welcome the skeptics. I’m a big fan of paying with cash myself.