Pity the cookbook editor, faced with a glorious stack of new cookbooks and the inglorious task of selecting a mere handful to feature in this annual exaltation. What screen, what theme, what criteria should be used to make the selections?... Read More
Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Covers 200 Years of Classic Covers Margaret C. Sullivan Quirk Books Hardcover $24.95 (224pp) 978-1-59474-725-0 This book is such a great idea, and so masterfully put together, no one should... Read More
Andrea Cheng has written and illustrated a very unusual book, "Where the Steps Were" (WordSong, 978-1-932425-88-8), about an ordinary class of third graders, their always extraordinary questions, and the teacher who guides them. Miss D.... Read More
Doesn’t a picnic sound fun and relaxing right about now? Yeah, it’s February, and depending on where you live, the weather might not be ideal. But, according to Ashley English, a leading picnicologist (I just invented that word to... Read More
Michael Branch: “Because we dwell on the wild edge of the ecotone where the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin meet, this drink is a refresher that evokes both our home mountains and our home desert.” Ten Easy Steps to Concocting a... Read More
This couchbuster could be the tipping point for a second Freudian revolution. The first began in the privacy of a Viennese consulting room, where Sigmund Freud’s patient Anna O. coined the term “talking cure.” In a few decades,... Read More
Dr. Smith’s clinic in the Amazon is a 9-by-12-foot room with plywood walls, no ceiling, no running water, kerosene lighting and bats roosting beneath her desk. In this modest arena she delivers babies and treats snakebite, malaria,... Read More