Elizabeth Romer chronicles each season's activities month by month: curing prosciutto and making salame in January, planting and cheesemaking in March, harvesting and threshing corn in July, hunting for wild muchrooms in September, and grape crushing in Ocober. Scattered throughout this lovely calendar are recipes—fresh bread and olive oil, grilled mushrooms, broad beans with ham, trout with fresh tomatoes and basil, chicken grilled with fresh sage and garlic, and apples baked with butter, sugar, and lemon peel, among many others. Alive with the rhythms of country tradition, The Tuscan Year is a treasure for the armchair traveler as well as the cook.

    Impressed by the devotion of its owners — les Mesdemoiselles Artraud and Girard — to perpetuating the tradition of supreme country dining, Mr. de Groot returned to the inn to record their recipes for natural country soups, heavy winter stews, roasted meats, pâtes, terrines, and fruity and spirituous desserts — the best of French cooking.Superb food, fine wine, and the perfect blending of both into a series of menus for memorable lunches and dinners, together with the unique French Alpine recipes that build each meal — these are the ingredients of this remarkable book, now considered a classic.

    When the reader meets Jordan, he is a hard-throwing pitcher with seemingly limitless potential, one of the first “bonus babies” for the Milwaukee Braves organization. Jordan’s sojourn through the lower levels of minor-league ball takes him through the small towns of America: McCook, Waycross, Davenport, Eau Claire, and Palatka. As the promised land of the majors recedes because of his inconsistency and lack of control, the young man who had previously known only glory and success is forced to face himself.

    Travelers and guests flow into and past the inn--warriors on the march, lovers fleeing to a new life, pilgrims on their merry expeditions, great men going to and from the capital. The story of the Minaguchi-ya is a social history of Japan through 400 years, a ringside seat to some of the most stirring events of a stirring period.

    This is really a book about a kind of madness with rules, and anyone can appreciate the appeal of that." -Newsweek THE BOGEY MAN remains arguably the funniest book on golf ever written.George Plimpton here joins the pro golf circuit for a month of self-imposed torture in the name of bringing professional sport to the sphere of the average man. Arnold Palmer, Dow Finsterwald, Wlater Hagan, and others populate this intriguing, classic, candid view from the first tee.

    Stationed as a Peace Corps instructor in the village of Lavié (the name means "wait a little more") in tiny and underdeveloped Togo, Packer reveals his own schooling at the hands of an unforgettable array of townspeople--peasants, chiefs, charlatans, children, market women, cripples, crazies, and those who, having lost or given up much of their traditional identity and fastened their hopes on "development," find themselves trapped between the familiar repetitions of rural life and the chafing monotony of waiting for change.

    In that bleak time, no one could have predicted the political upheaval awaiting Communist Europe and the city of Kafka and Rilke. Hampl's subsequent memoir, a brilliant evocation of Czech life under socialism, attained the stature of living history, and added to our understanding not only of Central Europe but also of what it means to be engaged in the struggle of a people to define and affirm themselves. Reissued now, during the tenth anniversary of that astonishing upheaval known as the Velvet Revolution, A Romantic Education includes an extensive updated afterword based on Hampl's annual return trips to Prague and the Czech countryside. Here is an excellent introduction to what was once the unknown "other Europe" behind the Iron Curtain and is now the continent's hottest new travel destination. Once again, as she did in a darker time, Hampl sees the texture beneath the surface of things and intuits the changing life of one of Europe's most bewitching cities. A Romantic Education is an exquisite journey into history and into the conundrum of personal memory

    S. G. Boggs, an artist whose consuming passion is money, or perhaps more precisely, value. Boggs draws money-paper notes in standard currencies from all over the world-and tries to spend his drawings. It is a practice that regularly lands him in trouble with treasury police around the globe and provokes fundamental questions regarding the value of art and the value of money.

    In this book he sets out to rediscover that lost land before all trace of it finally disappears beyond recall. As he tries to see it through the eyes his parents and the others who shaped his life, he comes to realise how little he ever knew or understood about them.This is above all the story of his father, the quick-witted boy from a poor and struggling family, who overcame so many disadvantages and shouldered so many burdens to make a go of his life; who found happiness, had it snatched away from him in a single instant, and in the end, after many difficulties, perhaps found it again.Father and son were in some odd ways ridiculously alike, in others ridiculously different; and the journey back down the corridors of time is sometimes comic, sometimes painful, as Michael Frayn comes to see how much he has inherited from his father - and makes one or two surprising discoveries about both of them along the way . . .

    Author Bill Barich explores explores the day-to-day internal world of horse racing-- from the backside to the backstretch. This entertaining story of the lives and tribulations of various racetrack personalities is sure to extract every human emotion. The author's summer adventure after a family tragedy finds him living the life many diehard racing enthusiasts wish they could. Barich's adventure discovers more than he could ever imagine about something much bigger than racing-life itself.

    An intimate and unvarnished view of Winston Churchill at his best.

    First published in 1912, The Sea and the Jungle remains one of the most popular accounts of a traveler's experience in Amazonia. As Peter Matthiessen observed fifty years later, " The Sea and the Jungle is one of the few level-headed works in the literature of this region. . . . accurate and difficult to improve upon."

    In Memories of the Great & the Good he shares his portraits of the men and women that he felt made the world a better, more stimulating place.We read about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s maintenance of his public image by means of a gentleman’s agreement with the press and Lyndon Johnson’s masterful backroom dealings. “Eisenhower at Gettysburg” reveals a conversation between Cooke and the president, touching on everything from their mutual love of golf to what it was like to grow up in a small Kansas farming town at the turn of the twentieth century.Literary figures including P. G. Wodehouse, Erma Bombeck, and George Bernard Shaw are succinctly sketched. And, in the final pair of essays, Cooke pays moving tribute to two of the men he admired the most: Winston Churchill and golfing legend Bobby Jones.

    Victor, Illich celebrates the culture of the book from the twelfth century to the present. Hugh's work, at once an encyclopedia and guide to the art of reading, reveals a twelfth-century revolution as sweeping as that brought about by the invention of the printing press and equal in magnitude only to the changes of the computer age—the transition from reading as a vocal activity done in the monastery to reading as a predominantly silent activity performed by and for individuals.

    These small fish form a species flock -- closely related species that have descended from a common ancestor and radiated, or fanned, into different specializations -- that is the most spectacular in the world, fascinating anatomists, ecologists, ethologists, and evolutionary biologists alike. The process of speciation was still under way until just recently, when the introduction of the large, predatory Nile perch so disrupted the Lake's intricate ecosystem that the glorious spectrum of cichlids has almost vanished. Darwin's Dreampond tells the evolutionary story of the extraordinary "furu" and the battlefield leading to extinction. Tijs Goldschmidt skillfully blends a masterful discussion of the principles of neo-Darwinian evolution and speciation with a history of Lake Victoria's ecosystem. The science unfolds in the context of the engaging first-person narrative of Goldschmidt's adventures and misadventures as a field researcher. An astute observer and a clear and witty writer, he warmly portrays the colors and textures of the landscapes and the lives of the local people as he interacts with them during the course of his fieldwork.