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  Pandora's Seed - The Unforeseen...

  Spencer Wells

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  This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers. What do terrorism, pandemic disease, and global warming have in common? To find the answer we need to go back ten millennia, to the wheat fields of the Fertile Crescent and the rice paddies of southern China. It was at that point that our species made a radical shift in its way of life. We had spent millions of years of evolution eking out a living as hunter-gatherers. When we learned how to control our food supply, though, we became as gods-we controlled the world rather than it controlling us. But with godliness comes responsibility. By sowing seeds thousands of years ago, we were also sowing a new culture-one that has come with many unforeseen costs.Taking us on a 10,000-year tour of human history and a globe-trotting fact-finding mission, Pandora's Seed charts the rise to power of Homo agriculturis and the effect this radical shift in lifestyle has had on us.Focusing on three key trends as the final stages of the agricultural population explosion play out over this century, Wells speculates on the significance of our newfound ability to modify our genomes to better suit our unnatural culture, fast-forwarding our biological adaptation to the world we have created. But what do we stand to lose in the process? Climate change, a direct result of billions of people living in a culture of excess accumulation, threatens the global social and ecological fabric. It will force a key shift in our behavior, as we learn to take the welfare of future generations into account. Finally, the rise of religious fundamentalism over the past half-century is explained as part of a backlash against many of the trends set in motion by the agricultural population explosion and its inherent inequality. Ultimately, the world's present state of crisis will force us to evolve culturally, but can we self-correct our culture to solve these problems that we ourselves, in our race to succeed, have caused?

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  Simply in Season - Recipes and...

  Mary Beth Lind, Cathleen...

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  Simply in Season serves up more than three hundred recipes organized by season, along with a popular and expanded fruit and vegetable guide. This 10th anniversary edition transforms a beloved cookbook with recipes and stories linking food and faith into a visual masterpiece with colorful photographs to help cooks—novice to seasoned—learn how to prepare local and seasonal produce.Part of the World Community Cookbook series published in cooperation with Mennonite Central Committee. Proceeds help support this worldwide ministry of relief, development, and peace. Royalties from the sale of these books go to nourish people around the world.What’s new in the 10th anniversary edition:•Colorful photographs of seasonal dishes•Expanded fruit and vegetable guide with storage, preparation, and serving suggestions•Labels on gluten-free and vegetarian recipes •Seasonal menus to guide meal planning

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  Arizona Bay

  Bill Hicks

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  Hicks developed a more complex plan for Arizona Bay, alternating music and comedy and painting a portrait of life on the beach after the “big one” dropped California into the Pacific Ocean.

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  Out of the East - Spices and the...

  Paul Freedman

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  How medieval Europe’s infatuation with expensive, fragrant, exotic spices led to an era of colonial expansion and discovery: “A consummate delight.” —Marion Nestle, James Beard Award–winning author of Unsavory Truth   The demand for spices in medieval Europe was extravagant—and was reflected in the pursuit of fashion, the formation of taste, and the growth of luxury trade. It inspired geographical and commercial exploration, as traders pursued such common spices as pepper and cinnamon and rarer aromatic products, including ambergris and musk. Ultimately, the spice quest led to imperial missions that were to change world history.   This engaging book explores the demand for spices: Why were they so popular, and why so expensive? Paul Freedman surveys the history, geography, economics, and culinary tastes of the Middle Ages to uncover the surprisingly varied ways that spices were put to use—in elaborate medieval cuisine, in the treatment of disease, for the promotion of well-being, and to perfume important ceremonies of the Church. Spices became symbols of beauty, affluence, taste, and grace, Freedman shows, and their expense and fragrance drove the engines of commerce and conquest at the dawn of the modern era.   “A magnificent, very well written, and often entertaining book that is also a major contribution to European economic and social history, and indeed one with a truly global perspective.” —American Historical Review

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  Klee

  Donald Wigal

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  An emblematic figure of the early 20th century, Paul Klee participated in the expansive Avant-Garde movements in Germany and Switzerland. From the vibrant Blaue Reiter movement to Surrealism at the end of the 1930s and throughout his teaching years at the Bauhaus, he attempted to capture the organic and harmonic nature of painting by alluding to other artistic mediums such as poetry, literature, and, above all, music. While he collaborated with artists like August Macke and Alexej von Jawlensky, his most famous partnership was with the abstract expressionist, Wassily Kandinsky.

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  Edinburgh Days - Or Doing What I...

  Sam Pickering

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  Tales of meandering walks through Scotland’s capital by an essayist known for “often hilarious, sometimes poignant, takes on life” (The New York Times).   After a forty-year absence from the city, Sam Pickering—author, literary scholar, and inspiration for the lead character in Dead Poets Society—came to the University of Edinburgh on a fellowship in 2004. Edinburgh Days maps the transition from his life in Connecticut, defined by family, academic appointments, and the recognition of neighbors and avid acolytes, to a temporary existence on foreign soil that is at once unsettlingly isolating and curiously liberating. Part travelogue, part psychological self-study, it’s a walking tour of the Scottish capital as well as through the labyrinth of Pickering’s swerving moods and memories—and a look at what befalls the curious mind of an intellectual removed from the relations and responsibilities that otherwise delineate his days.   His daily explorations include Edinburgh Castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Castle Rock, the Museum of Childhood, the National Gallery, the Writers’ Museum, the Museum of the People, the Huntly House, the John Knox House, the Royal Botanic Garden, and the Edinburgh Zoo, as well as neighborhood pubs, antique stores, and bookshops. Between his ambling tours, he revisits the works of writers renowned and obscure, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Smiles, John Buchan, Tobias Wolff, Russell Hoban, Patrick White, Hilaire Belloc, and Van Wyck Brooks. But it is not so much his erudition as his fascination with minutiae that infuses these essays with dynamic descriptions, quirky observations, and jesting interludes that bring the historic city to life.   “As he travels the damp, cobalt-gray streets of the great northern city, we rummage with him in old shops, follow him through gardens and graveyards, and see oft-visited monuments and museums through his fresh eyes . . . prose that glistens with natural details and an unapologetic delight in the foibles of humankind at its most genuine. We are fortunate to have Pickering as our tour guide.” —Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me

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