Garden History

Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes listeners to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story.

Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.

Much Depends on Dinner is a delightful and intelligent history of the food we eat. Presented as a meal, each chapter represents a different course or garnish. Margaret Visser looks to the most ordinary American dinner for her subject - corn on the cob with butter and salt, roast chicken with rice, salad dressed in lemon juice and olive oil, and ice cream - submerging herself in the story behind each food.

An improbable world beckons. We think we know Madagascar, but it's too big, too eccentric and too impenetrable to be truly understood. If it was stretched out across Europe, the islands would reach from London to Algiers, and yet its road network is barely bigger than tiny Jamaica's. There is no evidence of any human life until about 10,000 years ago, and, when eventually people settled, it was migrants from Borneo - 3,700 miles away - who came out on top.

You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention.

A true celebration of food in all its forms, The Food Book follows the human quest for sustenance through the stories of individual ingredients and examines our millenia-long relationship with nearly 200 foods—with the help of tales from all over the world. Food is the cornerstone of daily life, culture, and even religion. Staples like bread, beans, and cereal crops are part of our culinary history, and used in many ways around the world. This fascinating reference covers all food groups, providing information on every aspect of their history, and their place in world cuisine.

Sourdough bread fueled the labor that built the Egyptian pyramids. The Roman Empire distributed free sourdough loaves to its citizens to maintain political stability. More recently, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, sourdough bread baking became a global phenomenon as people contended with being confined to their homes and sought distractions from their fear, uncertainty, and grief. In Sourdough Culture, environmental science professor Eric Pallant shows how throughout history, sourdough bread baking has always been about survival.

Provence, 1970 is about a singular historic moment. In the winter of that year, more or less coincidentally, the iconic culinary figures James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Richard Olney, Simone Beck, and Judith Jones found themselves together in the South of France. They cooked and ate, talked and argued, about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery.

Chez Panisse opened its doors in 1971. Founded by Alice Waters, the restaurant is rooted in her conviction that the best-tasting food is organic, locally grown, and harvested in ecologically sound ways by people who are taking care of the land for future generations. The quest for such ingredients has always determined the restaurant’s cuisine, and over the course of 40 years, Chez Panisse has helped create a community of local farmers and ranchers.

The characters in Tasting the Past include a young Swiss scientist who set out to decode the DNA of every single wine grape in the world; Middle Eastern researchers who seek to discover the wines that King David drank; and a University of Pennsylvania academic who has spent decades analyzing wine remains. The science illuminates wine in ways no critic can, and demolishes some of the most sacred dogmas of the industry: well-known French grapes aren't especially noble.

Timepieces have long accompanied us on our travels, from the depths of the oceans to the summit of Everest, the ice of the arctic to the sands of the deserts, outer space to the surface of the moon. The watch has sculpted the social and economic development of modern society; it is an object that, when disassembled, can give us new insights both into the motivations of inventors and craftsmen of the past, and, into the lives of the people who treasured them.

Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on? In Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking—that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books—as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control.

A book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Denmark Vesey's Garden reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the heart of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the US slave population stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof shot nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection.

An instant hit in the UK, this is the true account of a German shepherd who was adopted by the Royal Air Force during World War II, joined in flight missions, and survived everything from crash-landings to parachute bailouts-ultimately saving the life of his owner and dearest friend. In the winter of 1939 in the cold snow of no-man's-land, two loners met and began an extraordinary journey that would turn them into lifelong friends.

Greyhounds, streaks of lightning, were bred to be the fastest dogs on earth. Yet for decades, tens of thousands were destroyed, abandoned, and abused each year when they couldn't run fast enough. Scrappy Marion Fitzgibbon, whose empathy for animals made her relentless, became obsessed with saving these dogs - despite the overwhelming power of dog-racing proponents - when she became head of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

And a Bottle of Rum tells the raucously entertaining story of America as seen through the bottom of a drinking glass. With a chapter for each of 10 cocktails, Wayne Curtis reveals that the homely spirit once distilled from the industrial waste of the exploding sugar trade has managed to infiltrate every stratum of New World society. Curtis takes us from the taverns of the American colonies, to the plundering pirate ships off the coast of Central America, to the watering holes of pre-Castro Cuba, and to the kitsch-laden tiki bars of 1950s America.

Set against the backdrop of the war in Afghanistan, Saving Cinnamon chronicles the love story of Navy Reservist Mark Feffer and a stray puppy he bonded with while stationed outside of Kandahar. When Mark is about to return stateside, he decides to adopt Cinnamon and sets up her transport back to the United States. But the unthinkable happens: Cinnamon is abandoned by the dog handler who was supposed to bring her home and disappears without a trace.

His winning percentage was well above Jordan’s shooting average or Woods’s domination of golf tournaments. And he sold products and drew spectators like no one had ever done. He was hands down the most famous athlete in America’s most popular spectator sport, and exactly one hundred years ago you would have been hard pressed to find anybody in the country who didn’t know his name. He was Dan Patch, and he was a racehorse.

Jay Kopelman sets forth more than a dozen lessons, including: Life can change in an instant, but you'll be able to handle it; passion for something can help you tap into your most powerful reserve of energy; have a standard operating procedure for everything; and never forget who you are or how you got here. Active and retired troops, soldiers' friends and families, and everyone who has ever loved a dog will embrace this book.

A beloved culinary historian's short takes on six famous women through the lens of food and cooking - what they ate and how their attitudes toward food offer surprising new insights into their lives. It's a lively and unpredictable array of women; what they have in common with one another (and us) is a powerful relationship with food.