General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat are you reading now?
In my case, it's this:
A friend of my wife needed some computer help, and so I took care of her laptop for her. In return, she left me this to read.
PJMcK
(22,025 posts)(wink)
area51
(11,902 posts)irisblue
(32,955 posts)A review--https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michael-w-twitty/the-cooking-gene/
THE COOKING GENE
A JOURNEY THROUGH AFRICAN-AMERICAN CULINARY HISTORY IN THE OLD SOUTH
BY MICHAEL W. TWITTY
RELEASE DATE: AUG. 1, 2017
snip--"Food historian Twitty, creator of the Afroculinaria blog, serves up a splendid hearth-based history, at once personal and universal, of the African-American experience."
snip--" Twitty also traces his own family history, beyond the eight or so generations that carry documents, to places all over the world: a white ancestor here, an Indonesian by way of Madagascar forebear there, Native Americans and West Africans and Anglos meeting in bloodstreams and at table. On all these matters, the author writes with elegant urgency, moving swiftly from topic to topic: on one page, he may write of the tobacco economy of the Confederacy, on another of the ways in which the food of the Chesapeake grew legs as the culture of the Upper South was forced to branch out beyond the Appalachians and Mississippi into new territories, such that turkey with oyster dressing on a Maryland plantation became turkey with freshwater clam and mussel sauce on a slaveholding Missouri farmstead. Drawing on a wealth of documentary digging, personal interviews, and plenty of time in the kitchen, Twitty ably joins past and present, puzzling out culinary mysteries along the waye.g., chickens got served to preachers because chickens had always flounced in the hands of African priests, and nobody remembered why.
a bit more at source
betsuni
(25,447 posts)"I'm giving energy to the wood I'm cooking with and starting the day the way my ancestors started their own --singing despite the drudgery. Before I started cooking this way, I didn't know that you had to sing, and that it wasn't a pastime. Every tool you touch becomes a scepter, and the way you start and finish the task opens the door of time. Visitors to the South before the Civil War spoke of enslaved men talking to their farming tools and axes and finishing the work with a part yodel, part cry -- part prayer. ... The songs are like clocks with spells. Some enslaved cooks timed the cooking by the stanzas of the hymns and spirituals, or little folk songs that began across the Atlantic and melted into plantation Creole, melting Africa with Europe and beginnings and endings were muddled.
"When I started going to plantations, you would often hear tour guides ... and docents talk -- actually they joke -- about the 'whistling walk,' a path often covered, leading from the outdoor kitchen to the Big House, the plantation house. Supposedly this was the space where 'the slaves' had to whistle when they brought the food in, to prove they were not eating. It was actually just an old architectural convention, though, that prevented rain and bird droppings from getting in the food, but the old white men chuckle, the white ladies guffaw, and I feel my inner Nat Turner raging. ... In all of my days, I have been asked to prove everything I have ever said, but I have never heard a single one of these docents challenged for using racist folk history as fact."
Mike 03
(16,616 posts)Subtitled, The Kremlin's Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin's Secret War on the West
It's absolutely riveting and shocking. It's the fifth book I've read about Putin's Russia and I'm leaning towards it being my favorite because it clearly explains some things the other books glossed over.
The spies in the riverside headquarters of MI6 looked on with horror as the scope of the Kremlin's global killing campaign became all too clear. And, across the Atlantic, American intelligence officials watched with mounting alarm as the bodies piled up, concerned that the tide of death could spread to the United States. Those fears intensified when a one-time Kremlin henchman was found bludgeoned to death in a Washington, D.C. penthouse. But it wasn't until Putin's assassins unleashed a deadly chemical weapon on the streets of Britain, endangering hundreds of members of the public in a failed attempt to slay the double agent Sergei Skripal, that Western governments were finally forced to admit that the killing had spun out of control.
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-Blood-Kremlins-Ruthless-Assassination/dp/0316417238
abqtommy
(14,118 posts)This book presents psychiatric diagnoses with detail in a ROFLMAO format...
mvd
(65,169 posts)John Grishams Camino Winds book.
mokawanis
(4,438 posts)Downloaded for free on my kindle. Been intending to read it for many years so I'm glad to finally be doing it.
SidDithers
(44,228 posts)Was really good.
About to dive into the Witcher books.
Sid
betsuni
(25,447 posts)Lots of satisfying gossip, quite enjoyed. Began watching the Netflix series "Trump: An American Dream," but uncomfortably overdosing on Trump and had to stop.
Have a pile of mildewy old books to throw out and read "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Great Gatsby." I'd forgotten how beautiful the writing of Gatsby is, and surprised that I don't like Huckleberry any more. Just got "The Autobiography of Mark Twain" and looking forward to that. I finally got a copy of Henry Miller's "The Air-conditioned Nightmare" because my old one disappeared and I never finished it. But it's different from what I remember, strange.
Too much America. Should finish the other books I'm really enjoying: "Blue Trout and Black Truffles, The Peregrinations of an Epicure" and "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, A Memoir of Food & Longing."
marlakay
(11,446 posts)And The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Richard Riso, its a cool book on understanding your personality.