Posts tagged ‘England’
Weekly Book Special: Terry Foster’s Pale Ale, No. 1 in Classic Beer Style Series (ISBN: 0937381187)
Weekly Book Special: August 3rd-August 9th
August 5th is International Beer Day, a celebration of beers, breweries and bars. Learn about the history of pale ale in this week’s book special:
Pale Ale: No. 1 in Classic Beer Style Series
by Terry Foster (Hardcover, 134 pages)
List Price: $15.00, OUR PRICE: $5.95
This concise guide traces the convoluted history of pale ale, the giant of beer styles.
Terry Foster, the author and longtime master brewer who holds a Ph.D. in chemistry, dissects the flavor profile, lays out an in-depth examination of brewing techniques, tosses in a handful of recipes and wraps up with a look at several leading commercial examples of pale ales.
Chapters: History: The First India Pale Ale, Competition, Bitter and Modern Times, Adjuncts — Use or Abuse; Character Profile of Pale Ale; How Pale Ale is Brewed: Ingredients, Equipment and Procedures; Pale Ale Recipes; and Glossary.
More than a dozen Illustrations and recipes highlight this highly-prized handbook, which combines the British tradition with intense American ideas.
Read how to brew the perfect wheat malt (click to enlarge):
“Foster is perhaps the last of this tradition of British home brewing writers […] a bit folksy while also well researched,” writes Alan McLeod on A Good Beer Blog. “Foster provides context and technique, showing how historical styles can be recreated with confidence.”
This book is discounted only through August 9th. Purchase it for $5.95 (list price $15.00):
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In addition, let your loved one, relative or friend choose a unique gift from our extensive selection of nearly 40,000 hard-to-find books and prints. Give a gift certificate in any amount. |  |
Weekly Book Special: Food for the Vegetarian: Traditional Lebanese Recipes (ISBN: 1566561051)
Weekly Book Special: July 20th-July 26th
This is the last day for Jonathan Fritz, our outstanding marketing associate. For this week’s book special, he chose a wholesome vegetarian cookbook. He says: “As a vegetarian who loves to cook, I can tell you these recipes are easy-to-make and delicious.”
Food for the Vegetarian:
Traditional Lebanese Recipes
By Aida Karaoglan (Paperback, 167 pages, ISBN: 1566561051)
List Price: $16.00, Lowest Amazon.com Price: $11.00, OUR PRICE: $5.95
Lebanon’s cuisine draws from a culinary history truly unlike any other in the world. This healthy and wholesome diet is a reflection of Lebanon’s unique interaction with Babylonians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Turks, and more recently, Europeans.
This tantalizing collection of more than 200 vegetarian recipes — passed down from mother to daughter, generation after generation — has been carefully collected from the rural villages of Lebanon, patiently tested and adapted to Western kitchens.
Accompanied by more than 30 full-color photographs, these tempting and delicious dishes are straightforward and easy to prepare. Also includes detailed descriptions of Lebanese cooking’s food groups and ingredients.
Jonathan’s favorite recipe is for burghul, a wholesome and delicious wheat base (click to enlarge):
“Aida Karaoglan has put together a fabulous collection of delectable vegetarian dishes,” writes noted cookbook author Paula Wolfert. “You can almost smell the fragrant spices while leafing through the pages. I will cherish this book.”
Sam and Sam Clark, owners of the award-winning Moorish restaurant “Moro” in London, have ranked this book among their Top 10 Cookbooks. “Vegetable cooking of the Islamic regions of Mediterranean is some of the most enlightened in the world – and this book helped open our eyes.”
This book is discounted only through July 26th. Purchase it for $5.95 (list price $16.00):
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In addition, let your loved one, relative or friend choose a unique gift from our extensive selection of nearly 40,000 hard-to-find books and prints. Give a gift certificate in any amount. | |
Sporting with the Classics: The Latin Poetry of William Dillingham: American Philosophical Society Transactions, Vol. 100, Part 1. (ISBN: 9781606180013)
Sporting with the Classics:
The Latin Poetry of William Dillingham:
American Philosophical Society Transactions
Vol. 100, Part 1.
by Estelle Haan (American Philosophical Society, ISBN: 9781606180013)
(Paperback, 123 pages, 2010, $35.00)
This study focuses on the original Latin poetry of William Dillingham, a 17th-century editor, anthologist, and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University.
It does so in an attempt to disprove claims that Dillingham’s talent lay in criticism rather than in original composition, and that his Latin verse shows his complete independence of the old school of classical imitation.
This study has the twofold aim of highlighting both the classical and the contemporary intertexts with which this hitherto neglected poetry engages.
It argues that far from constituting the leisurely product of a gentleman in rustic retirement, this is highly talented verse that “sports” with the classics in several ways: first in its self-consciously playful interaction with the Latin poets of Augustan Rome, chiefly Virgil and Ovid; second in its appropriation of a classical world and its linguistic medium to describe such 17th-century sports or pastimes as bowling, horticulture, and bell-ringing.
It also foregrounds the pseudoromanticism surprisingly inherent in the work of a late-17th-century poet, who, it is argued, discovered in his twilight years a neo-Latin inspirational Muse.
About the Author
Estelle Haan is Professor of English and Neo-Latin Studies at the Queen’s University of Belfast. Her research interests lie mainly in links between English and neo-Latin poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in particular the Latin poetry of English poets.
Previously with the APS, she authored: “Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne” (2007), “Vergilius Redivivus: Studies in Joseph Addison’s Latin Poetry” (2005) and “From Academia to Amicitia: Milton’s Latin Writings and the Italian Academies (1998).
Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth-Century Natural History Exchange (American Philosophical Society Memoir 264, ISBN: 9780871692641)
Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth-Century Natural History Exchange
(American Philosophical Society Memoir 264, ISBN: 9780871692641)
by Jean O’Neill and Elizabeth P. McLean
(Paperback, 216 pages, 2008, $75.00)
Collinson’s life is a microcosm of 18th-century natural history. A gardener and naturalist by avocation, he was what we would now call a facilitator in natural science, disseminating botanical and horticultural knowledge during the Enlightenment.
He influenced the Comte de Buffon and Linnaeus. He found clients for the Philadelphia naturalist John Bartram. American plants populated great estates like those of the Dukes of Richmond, Norfolk, and Bedford, as well as the Chelsea Physic Garden, and the nurseries of James Gordon and Robert Furber. Botanic painters such as Mark Catesby and Georg Dionysius Ehret painted American plants in Collinson’s garden.
He had an unprecedented effect on the exchange of scientific information on both sides of the Atlantic, being credited for introducing more than 150 plans to horticulture. Illustrations.
“One man can make a difference,” co-author Elizabeth McLean tells Green Scene [PDF] in the September/October 2009 issue. “[Collinson] did it for love. He was self-educated, yet he made enormous contributions to natural history in the eighteenth century.”
This book has been indexed by H.W. Wilson in their “Essay and General Literature Index” for June 2009.
H.W. Wilson writes: “These essays describe the life and achievements of the Quaker Peter Collinson, an 18th century London draper and naturalist whose interest in horticulture led him to establish contact with the Philadelphia Quaker farmer and naturalist John Bartram and to import Bartram’s American plants to England.
“The consequent popularity of American plants in English gardens, reflected even in the botanic paintings of the period, have earned Collinson a place in the history of botany as a facilitator between English and American horticulture.”
Weekly Book Special: Forget not Mee and My Garden . . . : Selected Letters, 1725-1768, of Peter Collinson, F.R.S. (American Philosophical Society)
March 15th-21st Weekly Half-Price Book Special
Warm weather and buds on the trees means only one thing: spring is right around the corner! Coinciding with the season, this week’s special is:
Forget Not Mee and My Garden:
Selected Letters, 1725-1768, of Peter Collinson, F.R.S.
by Alan W. Armstrong (Hardcover, 300 pages, 2002, $60.00)
English-style gardens around the world, from suburban yards to large parks, owe their foundations to businessman Peter Collinson.
Flowers and plants in these gardens are descended from the hundreds of seeds that Collinson imported from celebrated American botanist John Bartram in the 1700s.
This limited-edition book published by the American Philosophical Society, in shrinkwrap, features Collinson’s nearly 200 letters to the colonial world’s top scientists, including Batram, Carl Linnaeus and Benjamin Franklin, and features more than 100 full-color illustrations.
My favorite spread is of the Chestnut, Dogwood and Fringe Trees (click to enlarge):
“All letters in this volume are Collinson’s; they’re fully footnoted, and all correspondents are well-introduced,” writes Book News. “The color plates of correspondents, flora, and fauna make this a beautiful, as well as informative, read.”
“[The] deft match of text and image and [the] superb but unobtrusive editing,” writes historian Eugenia Herbert, “leave no doubt the Quaker merchant’s seminal role in the grand Enlightenment project of mapping the natural world.”
Weekly Book Special for Winter Olympics: Ice Skating School
February 22nd-28th Weekly Half-Off Book Special
To commemorate the Winter Olympics, we are offering a wonderful illustrated book about ice skating. This week’s special is:
Ice Skating School
Written by Naia Bray-Moffatt, Photographs by David Handley
(Hardcover, 47 pages, 2004, $20.00)
This enchanting guide to the world of figure skating follows a class of young skaters from their first steps on the ice to the thrilling moment they take part in a performance.
Aspiring skaters will be introduced to the basic movements and techniques involved in skating, as they learn how to move forwards and backwards, and to jump, spin and turn.
Young readers will see how much fun skating can be, as well as the hard work and dedication needed to succeed.
My favorite scene is when Lilly and James learn how to jump on the ice
(click the image to enlarge):
“Lilly, a cherubic skater, guides children through the stages of training as she helps a younger friend at her first lesson,” writes Jennifer Mattson on Booklist. “[She also] practices with her own class (which includes two enthusiastic boys); receives a tutorial from an older student; and, finally, performs in her own end-of-session show.”
This book has been made with the help of students from The School of Figure Skating, Lee Valley Ice Centre, Leyton and The Ice Rink, Alexandra Palace, both in London, U.K.
Acclaimed children’s photographer David Handley‘s shot the stunningly crisp full-color photos. Naia Bray-Moffatt, who has also authored “Ballet School” and “I Love Gymnastics,” wrote the lively text. Together they inspire young readers everywhere to turn their dreams of ice skating into reality.
Weekly Book Special: Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution, Novel on Darwin Film Creation
Weekly Book Special: January 25th-31st
In cinemas this week is the film Creation, about Charles Darwin, who proposed the groundbreaking theory of evolution in the 1850s. The film is based on the novel:
Annie’s Box:
Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes (Hardcover, 331 pages, 2001, $30.00)
Annie was Charles Darwin’s favorite child before she died at 10 years old. In her writing box were keepsakes that illuminated Darwin’s work and his love for his wife and children.
Randal Keynes, Darwin’s great-great Grandson and guardian of the box, uses Annie’s story as the starting point in this book, which makes a major contribution to our understanding of Darwin.
“It’s such an intensely personal memoir, because Randal had access to all the journals, letters, writings, objects of the Darwin family,” the director of Creation, Jon Amiel, told McClatchy-Tribune News Service. “I found these remote Victorians suddenly becoming absolutely real, living, moving people.”
Keynes conjures up a world in which great thinkers – including Carlyle, Babbage and George Eliot – were struggling with ideas in science and humanity that shook mankind to its core.
At the forefront was Darwin himself, whose thinking about evolution and human nature was profoundly influenced by his life with his family, pictured in this intimate portrait of the man and his private world.
“Your book had me from the very first minute,” National Public Radio host Terry Gross tells Keynes in a radio interview with Keynes. “It’s such a contemporary way of thinking about marriage — trying to balance between work and marriage, and here’s Darwin trying to figure it out.”
Michael Shermer of TrueSlant calls the novel “a moving portrait of the middle-aged Darwin—after the five-year voyage of the Beagle and before the white-bearded sage of Down basked in scientific triumph.”
“[Annie’s] death strengthened [Darwin’s] belief in the bleak, amoral character of natural selection,” writes Robin McKie in The Guardian. “A creature’s deserved fate had little to do with its prospects for survival, he realised.”
“When the publisher finally sends [Darwin] his copy of the book, he says, ‘How wonderful to see my child,'” Keynes told Seán Martinfield of the San Francisco Sentinel. “He often talks about his most cherished ideas as ‘my child’ and link that with Annie.”
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