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Did you see The Matrix II and wonder about that weird French guy, the Merovingian? Me neither. But after reading The Da Vinci Code, a bestseller by Dan Brown, now I know who the Merovingians were, what the Holy Grail is, and a great place to look for the grail. If you're looking for the holy grail of summer reading, folks this is it.

At first I was put off by the blurb on the dust jacket. The premise sounded implausible and I feared it would just lead to another overplotted adventure. But there's a good reason that The Da Vinci Code [buy at amazon] . by Dan Brown is a New York Times bestseller. You could easily turn pages until three in the morning finishing this one. That's what happened to me. I started The Da Vinci Code on the beach in the afternoon (someone else, actually two other people were reading that particular copy but they made the mistake of getting up to stretch their legs on a fine beach walk) and after a lengthy pause for a leisurely meal at the local road house, I read happily until the wee hours. The action is non-stop, the descriptions fascinating, the hero and heroine clever. Do they find the Holy Grail? But of course! But of course, yes and no.

A nice gimmick of the book is that all of the architectural descriptions are true, and much of the action is set in various historic monuments in Europe. So if you're planning a visit to Paris or London make sure you read the Da Vinci Code first, and get ready to have your interest in Leonardo Da Vinci re-awakened (especially his painting, The Last Supper).

I got the nicest thank-you note from Mary Roach, author of the best-selling "Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers". At least I think it's best-selling, it certainly ought to be.

Anyway, Mary says I'm the "first reader of Stiff to properly appreciate The Romance of Proctology [buy at amazon] . footnote." High praise indeed! Thanks, Mary!!

Albert Einstein lived in Berlin from 1914 until 1932, a period which encompassed the time my own father's childhood in Germany; born in Paris in 1920, his family moved to Hamburg around 1922, and so he lived in Germany during the time of hyperinflation which Thomas Levenson describes in this book. This aspect of my own family history gives the book, for me, a more personal interest; by focussing on these 18 years Levenson has brought to life a time in Germany that cannot have too much attention paid to it: the time during which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party seized power.

Because I skipped to a part near the end of the book, I have hardly read anything about Einstein and physics yet! Because there is nothing in the book's marketing that even mentions Naziism, the political aspect of the book came as somewhat of a surprise. It should be obvious, though, shouldn't it? This is the time before the Holocaust, well before it, when the Nazi party first came into existence as an insignificant minority, then won just a few seats in the parliament, and then...

It is as important to understand and remember this time in history, considering what came after, as it is to recall the Holocaust, when it was too late to do anything about it, but go to war or perish.

I'm looking forward to reading the theoretical physics aspects of the book, but even without them, I think of this as an important and worthwhile book.

Einstein in Berlin [buy at amazon] . by Thomas Levenson.

For its insights, its readability, and even its flaws, Ethan Watters' forthcoming memoir "Urban Tribes" promises to be a sociological classic for years to come. Flaws are important, of course, because they give hard-working sociology professors fodder for their ravening hordes of students to devour, honing everyone's critical skills in the process.

The principal flaw of Urban Tribes [buy at amazon] ., and it's an annoying one, is that Watters fails to define the scope of a tribe, or the context of what he asserts as the defining fact of the study. While saying 'The numbers can't be ignored, the current generation of oung Americans is delaying marriage longer than any other generation in history,' Watters makes absolutely no effort to tell you what these numbers are, to give a baseline year for comparison, or even to define the term 'generation.'

Occasionally Watters commits the unforgiveable statistical sin of citing proportions without baselines, to wit: "The facts were certainly dramatic: the proportion of never-married women between 20 and 24 had doubled in thirty years while in the same time the proportion of never married between 30 and 34 had tripled." Dramatic facts indeed, but (leaving aside the question of just which 30-year period he is talking about: we never find out) perhaps the proportions were not too large to begin with. Or perhaps they were.

In fact I spent a good deal of time trying to determine how old he was and how long he had been 'living tribal', because aside from two central dissimilarities, his tribal generation sounded pretty much like my tribal generation.

Those two differences are instructive. One is, of course, the role of the internet. Watters got started on this project after he wrote a magazine article on Urban Tribes and appeared on a TV morning show, then returned home to find about 500 emails from strangers about their own urban tribal experience. (This must have been before the big spam explosion of 2002, otherwise the book would never have gotten conceived. He would have just deleted the messages).

He writes of his own tribe: "We constantly kept track of each other in a never-ending e-mail thread. On an average week, among my group of twenty friends, there were hundreds of one-to-one e-mails, a dozen group e-mails, and perhaps fifty phone calls exchanged."

The book's genuine insights and colorful cultural anecdotes make it well worth dodging past whatever statistical howlers and minor illiteracies haven't been eliminated by publication time.

In addition to the many supportive tribes he encounters, Watters paints a wonderful picture of several instances of mal-adaptive urban tribes, including how a tribe based on cocaine eventually fails, and how his own experience a gambling addiction is ignored and mis-characterised by his friends.

Countless examples of romantic cues and mis-cues are presented, which should make for great reading in Sociology of the Family, Small Groups, or Basics of Social Organization.

Watters' visit to another urban tribal group near Philadelphia presents one of the most fundamental insights of the book: he is at the meeting, he knows exactly what's going on, and he can't even identify the tribe, even though he knows it's there. It just looks like fifty people, in groups of twos and threes, trading gossip. He thinks, well, this is just so quotidian. These people aren't doing anything special at all. It's not like MY tribe. But wait! It is! That's what WE do, we gossip.

I'm sure one of the reasons Urban Tribes will be successful is that people like to think of themselves as being in a tribe, rather than in a gossip group. If he named this book "Gossip Groups," do you think it would do nearly as well?

A nice inclusion in the book is a treatment of Robin Dunbar's work on the size of groups, both human and chimpanzee. It's only about four pages, but it really makes the connection between gossip, grooming, chimpanzees, and human group sizes. Members of one of the tribes he talked to cut each others' hair; he doesn't make the connection explicitly with chimpanzees' mutual grooming, because he does not need to.

Perhaps best of all, Urban Tribes will stand as a counterweight to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.In chapter 4, How Tribes Connect a City, he completely trashes Putnam's doom-and-gloom scenario of a fragmented and isolated population, pointing out some of the darker aspects of Putnam's supposedly stronger social organizations, while highlighting the strengths of the large numbers of weak social ties that tribes provide. He is probably making a big mistake in criticizing Putnam's statistical presentations, however, given that his own statistics are so bad. He and his tribal raiders had better hop into their Millenium Falcon-class ships, because you can bet that Putnam, after all a Harvard professor, will be cranking up his statistical Death Star as soon as he gets wind of 'Urban Tribes'.

The other central dissimilarity between his tribe and mine is that in his tribe, people put huge amounts of energy into communication with each other, whether their ties are weak or strong. While I, at this juncture, am going happily to sleep.

I just did a funny thing. I copied my website (this one that you're reading now, unless you're reading it in syndication) onto my iPod. Am I a pod person now, or what? Actually the pod is great, even though it doesn't have a keyboard. With a keyboard all manner of things are possible. The new iTunes, for example, lets you search for selections just by typing in a few letters of the name, artist, album, whatever you're looking for, and it immediately manufactures a playlist from its list of tunes.

Another nice piece of software - actually a web service - is Browsercam, which takes a snapshot of any website you give it, in as many as ten different browsers including the new browser from Apple, Safari 1.0. Welcome to the dailychannel.com, Safari readers, now you'll actually be able to read the text, without all kindsn of ookey superimposition of menu garbage!

Irene just finished the fifth Harry Potter magic adventure, and can't wait for the sixth to appear. Copycat magic adventures are turning up all over the world, as this article in Slate attests. Maybe she would enjoy Harry Potter in Calcutta? I'd read it if I were looking for another Harry Potter adventure right now. As for me, I'm happy to have read it, even though I found poor Harry's circumstances to be oppressing for almost the entire book. There were some lyrical moments of springtime at the end, where everyone was outdoors on the sunny grass, enjoying life and all that life makes worthwhile.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone! Live free and pursue happiness, and I'll see you all again on Monday.