Fruit from the Sands

Author: Robert N. Spengler
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520379268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Book Description
"A comprehensive and entertaining historical and botanical review, providing an enjoyable and cognitive read.”—Nature The foods we eat have a deep and often surprising past. From almonds and apples to tea and rice, many foods that we consume today have histories that can be traced out of prehistoric Central Asia along the tracks of the Silk Road to kitchens in Europe, America, China, and elsewhere in East Asia. The exchange of goods, ideas, cultural practices, and genes along these ancient routes extends back five thousand years, and organized trade along the Silk Road dates to at least Han Dynasty China in the second century BC. Balancing a broad array of archaeological, botanical, and historical evidence, Fruit from the Sands presents the fascinating story of the origins and spread of agriculture across Inner Asia and into Europe and East Asia. Through the preserved remains of plants found in archaeological sites, Robert N. Spengler III identifies the regions where our most familiar crops were domesticated and follows their routes as people carried them around the world. With vivid examples, Fruit from the Sands explores how the foods we eat have shaped the course of human history and transformed cuisines all over the globe.

Red Sands

Author: Caroline Eden
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
ISBN: 1787134830
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 526

Book Description
Winner of the André Simon Food Book Award 2020 Fortnum & Mason’s Awards, shortlisted in ‘Food Book’ category (2021) "Caroline Eden is an extraordinarily creative and gifted writer. Red Sands captures the sights, tastes and feel of Central Asia so well that when reading this book I was sometimes convinced I was there in person. A wonderful book from start to finish." Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads "Caroline Eden, whose book Black Sea was showered with awards, is on the road again, this time travelling through the heart of Asia. It’s not your usual cookbook, it’s more a travel book with recipes, the recipes acting as postcards which she sends as she meets new characters, most of them involved with food... Eden travels quietly and lets you in on every encounter and every bite. A moving... as well as a fascinating read." Diana Henry, Telegraph "Red Sands follows in the footsteps of Caroline Eden's previous volume Black Sea. Both are pleasures to read, triangulating journalism, literary writing, and cookbookery. The recipes are part of the reporting, and Eden describes them as edible snapshots." Devra First, Boston Globe Red Sands, the follow-up to Caroline Eden’s multi-award-winning Black Sea, is a reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping-off point to explore Central Asia. In a quest to better understand this vast heartland of Asia, Caroline navigates a course from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the sun-ripened orchards of the Fergana Valley. A book filled with human stories, forgotten histories and tales of adventure, Caroline is a reliable guide using food as her passport to enter lives, cities and landscapes rarely written about. Lit up by emblematic recipes, Red Sands is an utterly unique book, bringing in universal themes that relate to us all: hope, hunger, longing, love and the joys of eating well on the road.

Lost Crops of Africa

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309164435
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
This book is the third in a series evaluating underexploited African plant resources that could help broaden and secure Africa's food supply. The volume describes 24 little-known indigenous African cultivated and wild fruits that have potential as food- and cash-crops but are typically overlooked by scientists, policymakers, and the world at large. The book assesses the potential of each fruit to help overcome malnutrition, boost food security, foster rural development, and create sustainable landcare in Africa. Each fruit is also described in a separate chapter, based on information provided and assessed by experts throughout the world. Volume I describes African grains and Volume II African vegetables.

Plant and Animal Endemism in California

Author: Susan Harrison
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520275543
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
California is globally renowned for its biological diversity, including its wealth of unique, or endemic, species. Many reasons have been cited to explain this abundance: the complex geology and topography of its landscape, the special powers of its Mediterranean-type climate, and the historic and modern barriers to the wider dispersal of its flora and fauna. Plant and Animal Endemism in California compiles and synthesizes a wealth of data on this singular subject, providing new and updated lists of native species, comparing patterns and causes of both plant and animal endemism, and interrogating the classic explanations proposed for the state’s special significance in light of new molecular evidence. Susan Harrison also offers a summary of the innovative tools that have been developed and used in California to conserve and protect this stunning and imperiled diversity.

Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

Author: Gary Paul Nabhan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520956958
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
Gary Paul Nabhan takes the reader on a vivid and far-ranging journey across time and space in this fascinating look at the relationship between the spice trade and culinary imperialism. Drawing on his own family’s history as spice traders, as well as travel narratives, historical accounts, and his expertise as an ethnobotanist, Nabhan describes the critical roles that Semitic peoples and desert floras had in setting the stage for globalized spice trade. Traveling along four prominent trade routes—the Silk Road, the Frankincense Trail, the Spice Route, and the Camino Real (for chiles and chocolate)—Nabhan follows the caravans of itinerant spice merchants from the frankincense-gathering grounds and ancient harbors of the Arabian Peninsula to the port of Zayton on the China Sea to Santa Fe in the southwest United States. His stories, recipes, and linguistic analyses of cultural diffusion routes reveal the extent to which aromatics such as cumin, cinnamon, saffron, and peppers became adopted worldwide as signature ingredients of diverse cuisines. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans demonstrates that two particular desert cultures often depicted in constant conflict—Arabs and Jews—have spent much of their history collaborating in the spice trade and suggests how a more virtuous multicultural globalized society may be achieved in the future.

THE WISDOM OF THE SANDS

Author: ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

Tupai

Author: Louise H. Emmons
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520925041
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
Treeshrews suffer from chronic mistaken identity: they are not shrews, and most are not found in trees. These squirrel-sized, brownish mammals with large, dark, lashless eyes were at one time thought to be primates. Even though most scientists now believe them to belong in their own mammalian order, Scandentia, they still are thought to resemble some of the earliest mammals, which lived alongside the dinosaurs. This book describes the results of the first comparative study of the ecology of treeshrews in the wild. Noted tropical mammalogist Louise H. Emmons conducted this pathbreaking study in the rainforests of Borneo as she tracked and observed six species of treeshrews. Emmons meticulously describes their habitat, diet, nesting habits, home range, activity patterns, social behavior, and many other facets of their lives. She also discusses a particularly interesting aspect of treeshrews: their enigmatic parental care system, which is unique among mammals.

Faerie Fruit

Author: Charlotte E. English
Publisher: Frouse Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description

The Ratline

Author: Philippe Sands
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525562532
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
A tale of Nazi lives, mass murder, love, Cold War espionage, a mysterious death in the Vatican, and the Nazi escape route to Perón's Argentina,"the Ratline"—from the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning East West Street. "Hypnotic, shocking, and unputdownable." —John le Carré, internationally renowned bestselling author Baron Otto von Wächter, a lawyer, husband, and father, was also a senior SS officer and war criminal, indicted for the murder of more than a hundred thousand Poles and Jews. Although he was given a new identity and life via “the Ratline” to Argentina, the escape route taken by thousands of other Nazis, Wächter and his plan were cut short by his mysterious, shocking death in Rome. In the midst of the burgeoning Cold War, was he being recruited by the Americans or by the Soviets—or perhaps both? Or was he poisoned by one side or the other, as his son believes—or by both? With the cooperation of Wächter’s son Horst, who believes his father to have been “a good man,” award-winning author Philippe Sands draws on a trove of family correspondence to piece together Wächter’s extraordinary life before and during the war, his years evading justice, and his sudden, puzzling death. A riveting work of history, The Ratline is part historical detective story, part love story, part family memoir, and part Cold War espionage thriller.

Poison Fruit

Author: Jacqueline Carey
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698158636
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Book Description
The hot-as-Hel series with the “Sookie Stackhouse type of vibe” (Paranormal Haven) is back—but this time the paranormal Midwestern town of Pemkowet is feeling a frost in the air and the residents are frozen in fear.... The Pemkowet Visitors Bureau has always promoted paranormal tourism—even if it has downplayed the risks (hobgoblins are unpredictable). It helps that the town is presided over by Daisy Johanssen, who as Hel’s liaison is authorized by the Norse goddess of the dead to keep Pemkowet under control. Normally, that’s easier to do in the winter, when bracing temperatures keep folks indoors. But a new predator is on the prowl, and this one thrives on nightmares. Daisy is on her trail and working intimately with her partner and sometime lover from the Pemkowet PD, sexy yet unavailable werewolf Cody Fairfax. But even as the creature is racking up innocent victims, a greater danger looms on Pewkowet’s horizon. As a result of a recent ghost uprising, an unknown adversary—represented by a hell-spawn lawyer with fiery powers of persuasion—has instigated a lawsuit against the town. If Pemkowet loses, Hel’s sovereignty will be jeopardized, and the fate of the eldritch community will be at stake. The only one who can prevent it is Daisy—but she’s going to have to confront her own worst nightmare to do it.