Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder-a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she's never been to, yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family-

    From the incredible seafood of the north Pacific coast, and the mole of Oaxaca, to the spices and salsas of Yucatan and Quintana Roo, no one better captures the foodie essence of a country like Rick.With the trademark beautiful photography and evocative design of Rick's books, The Road to Mexico is a must-have cookbook for Autumn 2017.

    It’s even rarer when that someone is a middle-aged, six-foot three-inch woman whose first exposure to an unsuspecting public is cooking an omelet on a hot plate on a local TV station.  And yet, that’s exactly what Julia Child did.  The warble-voiced doyenne of television cookery became an iconic cult figure and joyous rule-breaker as she touched off the food revolution that has gripped America for more than fifty years. Now, in Bob Spitz’s definitive, wonderfully affectionate biography, the Julia we know and love comes vividly — and surprisingly — to life.  In Dearie, Spitz employs the same skill he brought to his best-selling, critically acclaimed book The Beatles, providing a clear-eyed portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential Americans of our time — a woman known to all, yet known by only a few.At its heart, Dearie is a story about a woman’s search for her own unique expression.  Julia Child was a directionless, gawky young woman who ran off halfway around the world to join a spy agency during World War II.  She eventually settled in Paris, where she learned to cook and collaborated on the writing of what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book that changed the food culture of America.   She was already fifty when The French Chef went on the air —  at a time in our history when women weren’t making those leaps.  Julia became the first educational TV star, virtually launching PBS as we know it today; her marriage to Paul Child formed a decades-long love story that was romantic, touching, and quite extraordinary. A fearless, ambitious, supremely confident woman, Julia took on all the pretensions that embellished tony French cuisine and fricasseed them to a fare-thee-well, paving the way for everything that has happened since in American cooking, from TV dinners and Big Macs to sea urchin foam and the Food Channel.  Julia Child’s story, however, is more than the tale of a talented woman and her sumptuous craft.  It is also a saga of America’s coming of age and growing sophistication, from the Depression Era to the turbulent sixties and the excesses of the eighties to the greening of the American kitchen.  Julia had an effect on and was equally affected by the baby boom, the sexual revolution, and the start of the women’s liberation movement. On the centenary of her birth, Julia finally gets the biography she richly deserves.  An in-depth, intimate narrative, full of fresh information and insights, Dearie is an entertaining, all-out adventure story of one of our most fascinating and beloved figures.From the Hardcover edition.

    Five Quarters of the Orange represents Harris's most complex and sophisticated work yet - a novel in which darkness and fierce joy come together to create an unforgettable story.When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous Mirabelle Dartigen - the woman they still hold responsible for a terrible tragedy that took place during the German occupation decades before. Although Framboise hopes for a new beginning she quickly discovers that past and present are inextricably intertwined. Nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the scrapbook of recipes she has inherited from her dead mother.With this book, Framboise re-creates her mother's dishes, which she serves in her small creperie. And yet as she studies the scrapbook - searching for clues to unlock the contradiction between her mother's sensuous love of food and often cruel demeanor - she begins to recognize a deeper meaning behind Mirabelle's cryptic scribbles. Within the journal's tattered pages lies the key to what actually transpired the summer Framboise was nine years old.Rich and dark. Five Quarters of the Orange is a novel of mothers and daughters of the past and the present, of resisting, and succumbing, and an extraordinary work by a masterful writer.

    This second collection brings together the best of his other non-fiction pieces, on film and tv, writers and painters and music, and including one exceptional fragment of autobiography. With subject matter ranging from the Sundance Festival to Abbey Road Studios, from P.G. Wodehouse to The West Wing, these are pieces that ‘were written for fun, or because I felt I had things to say and time to say them, or because the commissions were unusual and imaginative, or because … I was being asked to go somewhere I had never been before.’

    The spirit was sold from shops and market stalls, from basements and barrows in the streets, until every Londoner was averaging two pints of gin a week. Early eighteenth-century London was a violent and insecure town. Reformers blamed 'Madam Geneva' for everything from social decay to rising crime and passed eight major acts in an attempt to control it. When prohibition was attempted, it was greeted with popular riots and the explosion of a bomb in Westminster Hall. With arguments about gin drawing in writers such as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, the campaign for reform reached its climax with the unforgettable image of Hogarth's 'Gin Lane'. This is the story of the rise and fall of 'Madam Geneva'. Gin-drinkers and sellers, politicians and distillers all add their voices to Patrick Dillon's vivid account of London's first drug craze, and the ultimately successful attempts to control it. 'Excellent.' - Andrew Marr 'Patrick Dillon has gathered together some marvellous tales here... This book is as crowded with sensational incident as an 18th-century newspaper... With its manic tempo, Dillon's prose embodies the relentless energy of the time... the city's infinite variety is also successfully invoked. He has, too, a gift for simplifying complex issues.' - Daily Telegraph 'A crisp, fast-paced account... Dillon paints a vivid picture of hard-drinking London, high on spirits and speculation... Dillon's book offers a fascinating tale, ringing with authentic voices.' - Sunday Times

    In High Heat he takes us on a quest to separate verifiable fact from baseball lore, traveling from ballparks across the country to the Baseball Hall of Fame, piecing together the fascinating history of the fastball from its early development to the present form while exploring its remarkable impact on the game and the pitchers who have been blessed (or cursed) with its gift. From legends such as Nolan Ryan, Walter Johnson, Steve Dalkowski, and Satchel Paige to present-day standard bearers like Tim Lincecum, Billy Wagner, and Randy Johnson, Wendel examines the factors that make throwing heat an elusive ability that few have and even fewer can harness. Along the way he investigates the effectiveness of early speed-testing techniques (including Bob Feller’s infamous motorcycle test), explains why today’s radar gun readings still leave plenty of room for debate, and even visits an aerodynamic testing lab outside of Birmingham, Alabama, in order to understand the mechanics that make throwing heat possible in the first place. At its heart, High Heat is a reflection on our infatuation with the fastball—the expectation it carries, the raw ability it puts on display, and, most of all, the feats and trials of those who have attempted to master it. As Wendel puts it, “The tale of high heat can lead in several different directions at once, and the real story has more to do with triumph and tragedy that with the simple act of throwing a baseball.”

    For more than three quarters of a century, he has cycled from a figure of darkness to one of lightness and back again; he’s a bat-shaped Rorschach inkblot who takes on the various meanings our changing culture projects onto him. How we perceive Batman’s character, whether he’s delivering dire threats in a raspy Christian Bale growl or trading blithely homoerotic double-entendres with partner Robin on the comics page, speaks to who we are and how we wish to be seen by the world. It’s this endlessly mutable quality that has made him so enduring.And it’s Batman’s fundamental nerdiness—his gadgets, his obsession, his oath, even his lack of superpowers—that uniquely resonates with his fans who feel a fiercely protective love for the character. Today, fueled by the internet, that breed of passion for elements of popular culture is everywhere. Which is what makes Batman the perfect lens through which to understand geek culture, its current popularity, and social significance.In The Caped Crusade, with humor and insight, Glen Weldon, book critic for NPR and author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, lays out Batman’s seventy-eight-year cultural history and shows how he has helped make us who we are today and why his legacy remains so strong.

    For while Josey has settled into an uneventful life in her mother's house, her one consolation is the stockpile of sugary treats and paperback romances she escapes to each night ...Until she finds her closet harboring none other than local waitress Della Lee Baker, a tough-talking, tender-hearted woman who is one part nemesis - and two parts fairy godmother ...

    The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers. In 2012, thousands of Al Qaeda militants from northwest Africa seized control of most of Mali, including Timbuktu. They imposed Sharia law, chopped off the hands of accused thieves, stoned to death unmarried couples, and threatened to destroy the great manuscripts. As the militants tightened their control over Timbuktu, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali. Over the past twenty years, journalist Joshua Hammer visited Timbuktu numerous times and is uniquely qualified to tell the story of Haidara’s heroic and ultimately successful effort to outwit Al Qaeda and preserve Mali’s—and the world’s—literary patrimony. Hammer explores the city’s manuscript heritage and offers never-before-reported details about the militants’ march into northwest Africa. But above all, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is an inspiring account of the victory of art and literature over extremism.

    As a young man, William Lang worked as a gardener at the old college of Glasgow University but he has spent most of his subsequent life as a printer and bookseller in the growing city of Glasgow. When the novel begins, in the mid 1800s, he is in his seventies, widowed and living with his grown-up family. He has just received a parcel containing a book called the Scots Gard’ner, as well as a handwritten journal. With these volumes comes a letter saying that they were left to him by Thomas Brown, a gentleman who has recently died at his country house in Ayrshire. So many years later, the unexpected legacy of the books reminds William of his youth when he and Thomas became unlikely friends. The memories come flooding back. Some of this is based on truth. There was a gardener in Glasgow called William Lang. There was a nineteenth century lecturer in botany at the old college of Glasgow University whose name was Thomas Brown. It is clear from surviving correspondence that the two men, who were not very far apart in years, struck up a friendship. It is also clear that Thomas valued the work William did in collecting plant specimens for him. Later, when William found himself struggling to cope with a polluted garden and the necessities of providing for a widowed mother and younger siblings, Thomas Brown helped him as far as he could. The printed books mentioned are real. But the rest is entirely fictional.

    He noted their general healthiness (and good teeth), and an absence of many of the diseases that plagued western cultures, such as scurvy, heart disease, and diabetes. Observing their dietary habits, he determined that their primary food was meat, both lean and fatty, and that their diets were very low in sugary or starchy carbohydrates. Was this meaty diet the key to their good health?The book chronicles a 1928 scientific experiment, conducted by the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology at Bellevue Hospital in New York, in which Stefansson and his colleague Dr. Karsten Andersen ate a meat-only diet for one year. The two men stayed healthy and fared very well, leading him to claim that we should reexamine our notion of what foods constitute a healthy diet.Later chapters promote the benefits of pemmican, a compact, portable, and high-energy food consisting of a concentrated mix of fat and protein made from dried lean bison meat, sometimes mixed with berries. Pemmican is like the original energy bar, and Stefansson spent considerable time and energy urging the military to adopt it for emergency rations.

    Packed with beloved lines of verse, literary portraits, and illustrations — and statements from the bearers on their tattoos’ history and the personal significance of the chosen literary work — The Word Made Flesh is part photo collection, part literary anthology written on skin.

    He was looking forward to starting his senior year at Earl L. Vandermeulen High School the next day. But instead, Marty woke in the morning to find his parents brutally bludgeoned, their throats slashed. His mother, Arlene, was dead. His father, Seymour, was barely alive and would die a month later. With remarkable self-possession, Marty called 911 to summon help. And when homicide detective James McCready arrived on the scene an hour later, Marty told him he believed he knew who was responsible: Jerry Steuerman, his father’s business partner. Steuerman owed Seymour more than half a million dollars, had recently threatened him, and had been the last to leave a high-stakes poker game at the Tankleffs’ home the night before. However, McCready inexplicably dismissed Steuerman as a suspect. Instead, he fastened on Marty as the prime suspect–indeed, his only one. Before the day was out, the police announced that Marty had confessed to the crimes. But Marty insisted the confession was fabricated by the police. And a week later, Steuerman faked his own death and fled to California under an alias. Yet the police and prosecutors remained fixated on Marty–and two years later, he was convicted on murder charges and sentenced to fifty years in prison. But Marty’s unbelievable odyssey was just beginning. With the support of his family, he set out to prove his innocence and gain his freedom. For ten years, disappointment followed disappointment as appeals to state and federal courts were denied. Still, Marty never gave up. He persuaded Jay Salpeter, a retired NYPD detective turned private eye, to look into his case. At first it was just another job for Salpeter. As he dug into the evidence, though, he began to see signs of gross ineptitude or worse: Leads ignored. Conflicts of interest swept under the rug. A shocking betrayal of public trust by Suffolk County law enforcement that went well beyond a simple miscarriage of justice. After Salpeter’s discoveries brought national media attention to the case, Marty’s conviction was finally vacated in 2007, and New York’s governor appointed a special prosecutor to reopen the twenty-year-old case. At the same time, the State Investigation Commission announced an inquiry into Suffolk County’s handling of what has come to be widely viewed as one of America’s most disturbing wrongful conviction cases. As gripping as a Grisham novel, A Criminal Injustice is the story of an innocent man’s tenacious fight for freedom, an investigator’s dogged search for the truth. It is a searing indictment of justice in America.

    Author and burger expert George Motz covers traditional grilling techniques as well as how to smoke, steam, poach, and deep-fry burgers based on signature recipes from around the country. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific regional burger, from the tortilla burger of New Mexico to the classic New York–style pub burger, and from the fried onion burger of Oklahoma to Hawaii’s Loco Moco. Motz provides expert instruction, tantalizing recipes, and vibrant color photography to help you create unique variations on America’s favorite dish in your own home. Recipes feature regional burgers from: California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.