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  Ways of Eating - Exploring Food...

  Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Merry White

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  What we learn when an anthropologist and a historian talk about food. From the origins of agriculture to contemporary debates over culinary authenticity, Ways of Eating introduces listeners to world food history and food anthropology. Through engaging stories and historical deep dives, Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White offer new ways to understand food in relation to its natural and cultural histories and the social rules that shape our meals. Wurgaft and White use vivid storytelling to bring food practices to life, weaving stories of Panamanian coffee growers, medieval women beer makers, and Japanese knife forgers. From the Venetian spice trade to the Columbian Exchange, from Roman garum to Vietnamese nuoc cham, Ways of Eating provides an absorbing account of world food history and anthropology. Migration, politics, and the dynamics of group identity all shape what we eat, and we can learn to trace these social forces from the plate to the kitchen, the factory, and the field.

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  Sit Stay Heal - How an...

  Mel C. Miskimen

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  An inspiring memoir about an unruly Labrador who taught a woman and her father to overcome their grief and find peace with each other.  
  When Mel Miskimen's mother dies, her tough, retired-cop father withdraws into his sadness, and his broken grief is more than Mel can handle on her own. Enter Seamus: a rowdy, hapless Labrador devoted to chaos. In a spark of inspiration, Mel ropes her father into training the wayward hound for a local contest. As the seasons change, Mel finds herself connecting with her last surviving parent more than she'd ever dreamed. The unexpected result of their endeavor might just heal them all.  
  Sit Stay Heal will warm the hearts and tickle the funny bones of dog lovers and anyone seeking a way to connect with those they've lost.

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  The Rise of Yeast - How the...

  Nicholas P. Money

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  The great Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley once wrote, "I know of no familiar substance forming part of our everyday knowledge and experience, the examination of which, with a little care, tends to open up such very considerable issues as does yeast." Huxley was right. Beneath the very foundations of human civilization lies yeast—also known as the sugar fungus. Yeast is responsible for fermenting our alcohol and providing us with bread—the very staples of life. Moreover, it has proven instrumental in helping cell biologists and geneticists understand how living things work, manufacturing life-saving drugs, and producing biofuels that could help save the planet from global warming.In The Rise of Yeast, Nicholas P. Money argues that we cannot ascribe too much importance to yeast, and that its discovery and controlled use profoundly altered human history. Humans knew what yeast did long before they knew what it was. It was not until Louis Pasteur's experiments in the 1860s that scientists even acknowledged its classification as a fungus. A compelling blend of science, history, and sociology, The Rise of Yeast explores the rich, strange, and utterly symbiotic relationship between people and yeast, a stunning account that takes us back to the roots of human history.

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  Toulouse-Lautrec

  Nathalia Brodskaya

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  Lautrec studied with two of the most admired academic painters of the day, Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon. Lautrec’s time in the studios of Bonnat and Cormon had the advantage of introducing him to the nude as a subject. At that time life-drawing of the nude was the basis of all academic art training in nineteenth-century Paris. While still a student, Lautrec began to explore Parisian nightlife, which was to provide him with his greatest inspiration, and eventually undermined his health. Lautrec was an artist able to stamp his vision of the age in which he lived upon the imagination of future generations. Just as we see the English court of Charles I through the eyes of van Dyck and the Paris of Louis-Philippe through the eyes of Daumier, so we see the Paris of the 1890s and its most colourful personalities, through the eyes of Lautrec. The first great personality of Parisian nightlife whom Lautrec encountered – and a man who was to play an important role in helping Lautrec develop his artistic vision – was the cabaret singer Aristide Bruant. Bruant stood out as an heroic figure in what was the golden age of Parisian cabaret. Among the many other performers inspiring Lautrec in the 1890s were the dancers La Goulue and Valentin-le-Desossé (who both appear in the famous Moulin Rouge poster), and Jane Avril and Loïe Fuller, the singers Yvette Guilbert, May Belfort and Marcelle Lender, and the actress Réjane. Lautrec was, along with Degas, one of the great poets of the brothel. Degas explored the theme in the late 1870s in a series of monotype prints that are among his most remarkable and personal works. He depicts the somewhat ungainly posturing of the prostitutes and their clients with human warmth and a satirical humour that brings these prints closer to the art of Lautrec than anything else by Degas.
  However, the truthfulness with which Lautrec portrayed those aspects of life that most of his more respectable contemporaries preferred to sweep under the carpet naturally caused offence. The German critic Gensel probably spoke for many when he wrote: “There can of course be no talk of admiration for someone who is the master of the representation of all that is base and perverse. The only explanation as to how such filth – there can be no milder term for it – as Elles can be publicly exhibited without an outcry of indignations being heard is that one half of the general public does not understand the meaning of this cycle at all, and the other is ashamed of admitting that it does understand it.”

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  The Japanese Bath

  Bruce Smith

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  In the West, a bath is a place one goes to cleanse the body. In Japan,  one goes there to cleanse the soul. Bathing in Japan is about much more  than cleanliness: it is about family and community. It is about being  alone and contemplative, time to watch the moon rise above the garden.  Along with sixty full-color illustrations of the light and airy baths  themselves, The Japanese Bath, delves into the aesthetic of  bathing Japanese style and the innate beauty of the steps surrounding  the process. The authors explain how to create a Japanese bath in your  own home. A Zen meditation, the Japanese bath, indeed, cleanses the  soul, and one emerges refreshed, renewed, and serene.

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  The Civil War Battlefield Guide...

  Frances H. Kennedy

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  This new edition of the definitive guide to Civil War battlefields is really a completely new book. While the first edition covered 60 major battlefields, from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, the second covers all of the 384 designated as the "principal battlefields" in the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission Report. As in the first edition, the essays are authoritative and concise, written by such leading historians as James M. McPherson, Stephen W. Sears, Edwin C. Bearss, James I. Robinson, Jr., and Gary W. Gallager. The second edition also features 83 new four-color maps covering the most important battles. The Civil War Battlefield Guide is an essential reference for anyone interested in the Civil War.

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