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Hot Tips & Recommendations |
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Books,
people, organizations, visionairies, artists, activists, and
more.
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Award-winning food writer Fuchsia
Dunlop went to
live in China as a student
in 1994, and from the very beginning she vowed
to eat everything she was offered, no matter
how alien and bizarre it seemed. In this extraordinary
memoir, Fuchsia recalls her evolving relationship
with China and its food....- Publishers Weekly |
Fuchsia dropped
by our office for a brief visit while in San Francisco
on booktour for Shark's
Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour memoir of Eating
in China. Davia and Nikki were preparing
for an upcoming presentation in London and were anxious
to hear about some of the "hidden kitchens" in London
that Fuchsia might know about. Along with stories of
jellied eels, rubbery foods, and the tradition of Allotments,
she described her own London kitchen as "full
of interesting things - antique Hunanese wooden statues
of the Kitchen God and his wife, with food offerings
before them, a Sichuanese teahouse kettle with a yard-long
spout, a gadget made from chicken quills for pricking
the patterns onto Xinjiang nan breads, a Ming Dynasty
clay table laden with models of food (from a tomb in
Shaanxi), carbon steel cleavers and tree-trunk chopping
boards, and all kinds of things for making Chinese tea
and more. " |
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NONFICTION -
Photographs from
the film sets of Errol
Morris taken
by Nubar
Alexanian over a period of 15 years, including Fast,
Cheap and Out of Control, Mr. Death, the First Person
series, and Morris’s current
film, Standard Operating Procedure. Nubar Alexanian is
an amazing documentary photographer whose worked has
been regularly featured in major magazines in the United
States and Europe. Visit his website to order a
signed copy of the book see more of his
work. |
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FOOD FIGHT
The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill
By
Daniel Imhoff
The Farm Bill is perhaps the single
most significant land use legislation enacted in the
United States, yet many citizens remain unaware of its
power and scope. With subsidies ballooning toward $25
billion per year, the Farm Bill largely dictates who
grows what crops, on what acreage, and under what conditions,
all with major impacts on the country's rural economies,
health and nutrition, and biodiversity. As debate and
wrangling over the 2007 Farm Bill intensifies, Food Fight
offers a highly informative and visually engaging overview
of legislation that literally shapes our food system,
our bodies, and our future. |
Designed
by Roberto Carra / Foreword by Michael Pollan / Intro
by Fred Kirschenmann
Daniel
Imhoff is an award-winning author and publisher. Roberto
Carra is an internationally acclaimed graphic designer,
photographer, and art director. They have collaborated
on book projects for over fifteen years, including
Building with Vision, Farming with the Wild, and Paper
or Plastic, all distributed by University of California
Press. |
Links: Video: A
conversation with Dan explaining how the farm bill has
evolved, and what it has come to mean for farmers and
the American public.
FoodFirst
Blog: Eric Holtgim's Farm Bill notes / Institute
for Food & Development Policy |
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WAITING
FOR DAISY by Peggy Orenstein
A Tale of Two Continents,Three
Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic
Bomb, a Romantic Night and One Woman's Quest to Become
a Mother
Waiting
for Daisy is about loss, love, anger and redemption.
It’s about doing all the things you swore you’d
never do to get something you hadn’t even been
sure you wanted. It’s about being a woman in
a confusing, contradictory time. It’s about
testing the limits of a loving marriage. And it’s
about trying (and trying and trying) to have a baby. |
Peggy's
story begins when she tells her new husband that she’s
not sure she ever wants to be a mother; it ends six
years later after she’s done almost everything
humanly possible to achieve that goal, from “fertility
sex” to escalating infertility treatments to
New Age remedies to forays into international adoption.
Her saga unfolds just as professional women are warned
by the media to heed the ticking of their biological
clocks, and just as fertility clinics have become a
boom industry, with over two million women a year seeking
them out. Buffeted by one jaw-dropping obstacle
after another, she seeks answers both medical
and spiritual in America and Asia, along the way visiting
an old flame who’s now the father of fifteen,
and discovering in Japan a ritual of surprising solace.
All the while she tries to hold onto a marriage threatened
by cycles, appointments, procedures and disappointments.
Read
an excerpt »
Web
site
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The
Very Hard Way: Bert Loper
and the Colorado River by Brad Dimock
We interviewed Brad Dimock for our upcoming radio
story "Cry Me A River" that
will be broadcast on public radio this spring as part of
the series "Stories from the Heart of the Land."
We hope you take the opportunity to read this, his latest
book, "The Very Hard Way."
To
order this book visit Fretwater Press |
| Bert Loper,
the Grand Old Man of the Colorado, was born the day Major
Powell discovered the confluence of the San Juan and
Colorado in 1869. He died just days after the first motorboat
had passed through Grand Canyon. He knew every river
runner in between, and by the time of his death at 80
years old, had run more of the Colorado than anyone.
But it was never easy--orphaned an abused, Loper had
to make his way along the bottom of society, often as
a hard-rock miner, coal miner or lonely placer miner
on a gravel bar. But in the Colorado River he found inspiration,
and he died at the oars of his own wooden boat in a major
Grand Canyon Rapid. Loper is truly mythic, and his is
the story of the Colorado. |
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The
Ground We Lived On / Soundportaits
Adrian Nicole
LeBlanc
The Ground
We Lived On documents
the loving relationship between journalist Adrian
Nicole LeBlanc and her father, Adrian Leon LeBlanc,
in the last months of his life. Using recordings
she made of her namesake and inspiration from his
hospital bed in the family living room, The Ground
We Lived On is an ode to the ordinary ways we continue
loving even as we are letting go. On NPR's All
Things Considered and online at soundportraits.org.» We
met Adrian Leon at the Neiman Conference we attended
a few years back She is extraordinary. Please give
a listen. |
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The
Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Award-winning journalist,
Sandy Tolan, tells of an astonishing
act of trust between two young people—one Palestinian,
one Israeli—in
1967 that led to a decades-long friendship.
Publishers Weekly - title of this moving, well-crafted
book refers to a tree in the backyard of a home in Ramla, Israel. The home is
currently owned by Dalia, a Jewish woman whose family of Holocaust survivors
emigrated from Bulgaria. But before Israel gained its independence in 1948, the
house was owned by the Palestinian family of Bashir, who meets Dalia when he
returns to see his family home after the Six-Day War of 1967. Journalist Tolan
(Me & Hank)
traces the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the parallel personal
histories of Dalia and Bashir and their families—all refugees seeking a
home. As Tolan takes the story forward, Dalia struggles with her Israeli identity,
and Bashir struggles with decades in Israeli prisons for suspected terrorist
activities. Those looking for even a symbolic magical solution to that conflict
won't find it here: the lemon tree dies in 1998, just as the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process stagnates. But as they follow Dalia and Bashir's difficult friendship,
readers will experience one of the world's most stubborn conflicts firsthand. |
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This
I Believe by Jay Allison & Dan Gediman
Published by Henry Holt & Company
Publishers
Weekly- In
the 1950s, the Edward R. Murrow's This I Believe
prompted Americans to briefly explain their most cherished
beliefs, be they religious or purely pragmatic. Since
the program's 2005 renaissance as a weekly NPR segment,
Jay Allison and Dan
Gediman have collected some of the best
essays from This I Believe then and now. "Your personal
credo" is what Allison calls it in the book's introduction,
noting that today's program is distinguished from the
1950s version in soliciting submissions from ordinary
Americans from all walks of life. These make up some
of the book's most powerful and memorable moments, from
the surgeon whose illiterate mother changed his early
life with faith and a library card to the English professor
whose poetry helped him process a traumatic childhood
event. And in one of the book's most unusual essays,
a Burmese immigrant confides that he believes in feeding
monkeys on his birthday because a Buddhist monk once
prophesied that if he followed this ritual, his family
would prosper. There are luminaries here, too, including
Gloria Steinem, Warren Christopher, Helen Keller, Isabel
Allende, Eleanor Roosevelt, John Updike and Newt Gingrich. This feast of ruminations is a
treat for any reader.
(Oct.) |
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Success
Built to Last:
Creating A Life That Matters
By Jerry
Porras, Stewart Emery, Mark Thompson
Published by Wharton School Publishing
Imagine
meeting more than 300 people who've made a profound
difference: not for weeks or months, but for decades.
Imagine discovering what they've got in common, distilling
it into a set of simple practices, and using them
to transform your life.
Authored
by three legends in leadership and self-help -- including
Built to Last co-author Jerry Porras -- it challenges
conventional wisdom at every step. Meet world-renowned
leaders like Nelson Mandela and Charles Schwab. Meet
unsung heroes who've achieved lasting greatness without
obvious power or charisma. Famous or not, they all
started out ordinary. Discover how they learned how
to "harvest" their
strengths and their weaknesses, their victories and
their surprising failures. You'll learn how they
found meaning, and the courage to follow their passions.
Above all, see how they've sustained success, while others
faded into oblivion. |
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Copyright ©
2006 The Kitchen Sisters
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