Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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We think we live in an time of great cooking and we do but in 18th-century England, the worldwide boom in travel and trade was mirrored by housewives’ discovery of an equally wide world of foods: exotic spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper and cloves; nuts and fruits; new vegetables (including American corn, tomatoes, chilies and beans); chocolate, vanilla, tea and coffee. It was also a time when prominent writers began extolling the virtues of fresh vegetables, scientific farming, botanical research and so on. Once cooking became not a chore but a profession, simple recipes became ambitious cookbooks.

Sandra Sherman’s fascinating Fresh from the Past: Recipes and Revelations from Moll Flanders’ Kitchen is a culinary and cultural history with 120 revamped and modernized recipes developed by Maryland caterers Henry and Karen Chotkowski. A professor of English lit and history at the University of Arkansas, Sherman puts not just food but politics, trade policy, etiquette, social climbers (witness her titular heroine), rakes and rouŽs (the Earl of Sandwich and his famous gambling snack) and even the fragile male ego on the table. (British men swore by those notoriously huge slabs of roast beef of Old England because they believed meat increased virility.) The Chotkowskis have come up with everything from sweet pumpkin soup to black pudding and gooseberry trifle, from roast turkey with crayfish to Polish chicken, from pickled lemon to Parmesan ice cream. And the many woodcut reproductions and folk songs make this book a prize.

We think we live in an time of great cooking and we do but in 18th-century England, the worldwide boom in travel and trade was mirrored by housewives' discovery of an equally wide world of foods: exotic spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper and…
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Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is best known for his classic prescient satirical novel Brave New World, in which leaders maintain their power by thought manipulation. "The Machiavelli of the mid-twentieth century," the author said, "will be an advertising man; his Prince a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time." That novel was part of a unique literary career that began with poetry, included such acclaimed novels as Antic Hay, Eyeless in Gaza, and Island and explored various scientific and literary subjects, mysticism and mind-altering drugs among other topics, in elegant essays. In addition to authoring more than 50 books, he also wrote for the stage and screen.

Biographer Nicholas Murray traces Huxley’s life and the development of this thought and work in Aldous Huxley: A Biography. Huxley’s personal motto was aun aprendo or "I am always learning," appropriate for the grandson of Victorian scientist Thomas Huxley, a prominent supporter of Charles Darwin. Among his many interests were the environmental movement, nuclear weapons, militarism and ruinous nationalism. When he was 16 years old, Aldous suffered a serious eye infection that rendered him unable to do any reading for almost two years and left him with partial sight for the rest of his life. Murray notes that for Huxley, "It was a catastrophe which he always believed was the single most important determining event in his early life." One of the first wave of those to study the then new discipline of English literature at Oxford, Huxley was drawn to a literary career. He did not consider himself a born novelist. "By profession I am an essayist who sometimes writes novels and biographies, an unsystematic cogitator whose books represent a series of attempts to discover and develop artistic methods for expressing the general in the particular." In the 1930s, he began to be much more concerned with politics, society and the problems of the world.

Murray deftly conveys both Huxley’s outer and inner lives. Early in his career, his friendships included literary figures Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Later on, his friends were often scientists, physicians and academic specialists in various disciplines. The astronomer Edwin Hubble and his wife Grace were close friends of the Huxleys.

Personally, Huxley was not much interested in practical matters and enjoyed solitude. He was very close to his first wife, Maria, and dependent on her for many things she read books to him and served as his driver. In his later years, he became increasingly drawn to mysticism, but it was not insulated from the real world. He understood mysticism as data, real elements in life, not abstractions.

Murray’s carefully researched biography, including interviews with Huxley’s second wife Laura and son Matthew, gives us a vivid portrait of a complex figure. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.

 

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is best known for his classic prescient satirical novel Brave New World, in which leaders maintain their power by thought manipulation. "The Machiavelli of the mid-twentieth century," the author said, "will be an advertising man; his Prince a textbook of the…

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It should come as no surprise that writer and former hunter James Kilgo, terminally ill, facing that most universal of fears, would leap at the chance to go to Africa as an observer on a big game safari. Literature is filled with stories of what the dark continent does to men and women, from Conrad to Hemingway, from Gordimer to Dinesen. Kilgo was an eager follower in their footsteps, seeking reaffirmation of life, and perhaps redemption. Some people believe there are no coincidences, so maybe some sort of synchronicity was at work when a casual acquaintance asked Kilgo to accompany him on safari. Having fought prostate cancer for almost a decade, the writer’s one regret was that he had never seen Africa. Now, at the age of 58, he immediately accepts the offer. Kilgo’s journey into another world starts from the moment his plane touches down. After dealing with corrupt customs officials, he is on his way into the bush. The safari makes daily hunting forays, for food as well as for trophies: Hippo, leopard, zebra and several kinds of deer none endangered are on the hunting list, as well as that most dangerous of game, the African lion. Though Kilgo has come along merely as a photographer, when he is given the opportunity to stalk the elusive Kudu deer, he wonders if he is up to the same challenge conquered by his literary forebear, Ernest Hemingway.

Colors of Africa is more than a travelogue it is part literary exploration, part personal journey. The hunters’ camp is near the area where missionary David Livingstone died, and the deeply religious Kilgo finds his faith coming into play, whether it be his unease at distributing bags of shoes and crosses to the local population, talking with a Muslim guide named Karim or dealing with the reality of his cancer. An encounter with a lion marries faith with deeper, primal emotions, setting the stage for the Kudu hunt.

James Kilgo, who died in December 2002, was an exceptional, starkly honest writer. This literate, moving, unsentimental book his last will take you to a world you may have only imagined.

It should come as no surprise that writer and former hunter James Kilgo, terminally ill, facing that most universal of fears, would leap at the chance to go to Africa as an observer on a big game safari. Literature is filled with stories of…
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From 1975 to 1979, the murderous Khmer Rouge regime of dictator Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians. And according to some historians, the American destabilization of Cambodia was probably the main cause of Pol Pot’s ascent. War can create, as well as eliminate, murderous dictators.

Not all victims were Cambodians. Indeed, some were Americans, and some foreigners suffered a fate worse than death. Before 1975, Frenchman Francois Bizot was arrested by the Communists, imprisoned, interrogated and tortured. Though a scholar of Buddhism and a friend to Cambodia, Bizot was suspected of being a CIA spy. He would ultimately be acquitted of this absurd charge and released. But he would remain in Cambodia to witness the eerie and epochal evacuation of Phnom Penh. His record of this time, The Gate, is a nightmarish indictment of the Pol Pot regime and all false utopias.

Bizot’s prison warden is a man named Douch, who would later oversee the extermination of 16,000 prisoners at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. Surprisingly, Bizot is sympathetic toward his captor. He records their numerous conversations, in which Douch is portrayed as a wily patriot whose main faults are his fanatical pursuit of justice and his extreme faith in an alien (indeed French) interpretation of revolutionary Marxism. Douch lobbies for Bizot’s freedom, and the two communicate long after the regime’s demise. The book also relates the frantic efforts by the French embassy in Phnom Penh to protect foreign citizens from the Communists’ severe vengeance. Fluent in Khmer, Bizot becomes the embassy’s liaison, and thus is required to make unbearable life-and-death decisions. Even now, Bizot is plagued with remorse over his actions and omissions.

The tale concludes at the Thai-Cambodian border where he and other refugees have been trucked to seek asylum. Here a married Frenchman coldly abandons his Cambodian mistress to her doomed country and, despite Bizot’s pleading, a Eurasian girl is also rebuffed. The ensuing scenes are a heart-wrenching condemnation of the Khmer Rouge and its curiously ostrich-like supporters, among them France and the United States.

Bizot indulges the often unthinking French hatred of Americans and “their irresponsibility, their colossal tactlessness, their inexcusable and false naivetŽ, even their cynicism.” But as these words might suggest, the anger expressed in The Gate is universal and its prose masterful. May it finally bring the Cambodian “sideshow” to center stage. Kenneth Champeon, a Thailand-based writer, is a regular contributor to www.thingsasian.com.

From 1975 to 1979, the murderous Khmer Rouge regime of dictator Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians. And according to some historians, the American destabilization of Cambodia was probably the main cause of Pol Pot's ascent. War can create, as…
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Hallelujah! Ruby Ann Boxcar, "Dame Edna of the double-wide world," is back and giving St. Nick a run for his money in Move Over, Santa Ruby's Doin' Christmas!. Ruby Ann and the folks at the High Chaparral Trailer Park are celebrating the 12 days before Christmas in true down-home style with a cornucopia of kitschy crafts, thrifty decorating ideas, rustically exotic recipes and kicky entertaining tips. "I wanted to show the world what a real-life Christmas is like, warts and all," she declares. Replete with Ruby's holiday makeup suggestions, tales of Chaparral Christmases past, a blessing from Pastor Ida May Bee of the Holier Than Most Baptist Church, and 12 days of yuletide advice, this hilarious little bible will rock your Christmas present, especially after a shot of sister Donna Sue's Jingle Bell Punch. And when you're finally finished making that wooden spoon reindeer and shotgun shell Santa for your mantel, you can relax with a plateful of O, Tanenbaum, Taters and Velveeta Cheese Fudge. Yum, y'all!

Alison Hood still waits up for Santa every Christmas Eve and eats way too many cookies while keeping watch at the hearth.

Hallelujah! Ruby Ann Boxcar, "Dame Edna of the double-wide world," is back and giving St. Nick a run for his money in Move Over, Santa Ruby's Doin' Christmas!. Ruby Ann and the folks at the High Chaparral Trailer Park are celebrating the 12 days before…

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Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston is a one-of-a-kind retrospective of a remarkable author. Produced by Lucy Anne Hurston, niece of the novelist, and the estate of Zora Neale Hurston, this unique book provides an in-depth look at one of the formative voices in American literature.

Presented in an interactive, lift-the-flap, scrapbook format, Speak traces the life of this spirited writer, from her birth in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, through her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance and career as a fiction writer, to her groundbreaking work as a collector of Southern folklore. As the book reveals, the woman who wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God was an innovative, independent artist who attended Barnard College in the mid-1920s (she was the only black student at the time), worked as a drama teacher for the Works Progress Administration (along with Orson Welles and John Houseman), and embraced scandal (she smoked in public and had a trio of husbands, one of whom was 25 years her junior).

Filled with artifacts, correspondence and rarely seen visuals, this special volume, which also includes a CD of radio interviews and folk songs performed by Hurston herself, is a unique homage to an adventuresome author.

 

Julie Hale is a writer in Austin, Texas.

 

Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston is a one-of-a-kind retrospective of a remarkable author. Produced by Lucy Anne Hurston, niece of the novelist, and the estate of Zora Neale Hurston, this unique book provides an in-depth look at…

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