Posts tagged ‘french’
Weekly Book Special: Goat Cheese: Delectable Recipes for All Occasions by Georgeanne Brennan
Weekly Book Special: August 31st-September 6th
August marks National Goat Cheese Month, a celebration of the versatile ingredient that’s made its onto menus and dinner tables around the world. To commemorate, this week’s book special is:
Goat Cheese:
Delectable Recipes for All Occasions
Written by Georgeanne Brennan and Ethel Brennan
Illustrated by Philippe Weisbecker
Hardcover, 1987, 72 pages, ISBN: 0811812391
List Price: $10.00, OUR PRICE: $1.95
Goat cheese is an amazingly versatile ingredient that enhances any course of a meal. Known to the French as “fromage de chevre,” goat cheese has slowly but surely made its way onto American menus and dinner tables.
This is a charming introduction to using goat cheese in your everyday cooking. With a short history of this versatile ingredient and a description of how it’s made, this book features profiles of all the varieties and tips for storing, serving and cooking.
From tempting appetizers such as Grilled Eggplant and Goat Cheese Rolls to satisfying entrees like Gnocchi with Spinach and Goat Cheese to luscious desserts, including Poached Winter Pears with Sweet Goat Cheese. Charmingly illustrated and complete with a guide to the many varieties of goat cheese.
Our favorite recipe is for Chile and Feta Popovers (click to enlarge):
Georgeanne Brennan is the author of numerous cooking and gardening books, and the recipient of the James Beard Foundation Award and the IACP/Julie Child Cookbook Award for her writing. She lives in northern California and Provence, where she has a seasonal cooking school.
This book is discounted only through September 6th. Purchase it for $1.95 (list price $10.00):
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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. |  |
Lionel Gossman’s Orpheus Philologus: Bachofen versus Mommsen on the Study of Antiquity: American Philosophical Society Transactions (73-5) (ISBN: 142237467X)
Orpheus Philologus: Bachofen versus Mommsen on the Study of Antiquity
(American Philosophical Society Transaction 73-5, ISBN: 142237467X)
by Lionel Gossman (Paperback, 89 pages, 1983, $25.00)
Though the great German classical scholar Theodor Mommsen was probably unaware of it, he was the object of the passionate and enduring hatred of J. J. Bachofen, an obscure Swiss philologist in the provincial city of Basle.
See the 
of this book before you purchase it.
Bachofen, not well known in the English-speaking world, is mentioned by anthropologists for his contribution to the popular 19th-century theory of “matriarchy,” and by classicists such as George Derwent Thomson for his contributions to the study of Greek myth and tragedy.
“I chanced on Bachofen, while working on the French historian, Jules Michelet,” author Lionel Gossman tells the American Philosophical Society. “Gender carries great metaphoric weight in Michelet’s historical writings and popular works of natural history. Bachofen highlights its role in ancient classical myth.
“For both, the feminine signifies the body, the primitive, the unbounded, the people; it is the productive source of life, but also marks the eternal, mindless cycle of life and death. The masculine, in contrast, represents spirit, reason, law, and progress; but without the feminine, it is sterile.
“Strikingly, Bachofen’s masterwork Das Mutterrecht (Mother-Right) appeared in the same year (1861) as Michelet’s best-selling La Mer, which is as much about the mother, the feminine, as it is about the sea.
“In Bachofen, I discovered a politically conservative scholar of great imagination and literary talent, whose Romantic vision of historical research, in an increasingly positivist age, as a descent into a forgotten or repressed underworld, was surprisingly similar to that of his left-leaning French contemporary.”
Arnaldo Momigliano writes in The Journal of Modern History: “Gossman’s monograph, penetrating and well informed […] will help enormously to place Bachofen in his time and to indicate his interest for our time. Gossman sees him as the lonely heir of a previous generation and tradition […] whose philological interpretation of individual texts had been characterized by a deep suspicion of the modernization of ancient views and by a predisposition to an intuitive global understanding of the wisdom of classical and preclassical stories.”
Grape Varieties for Wines Book by Pierre Galet, Now 45% Off
June 29th-July 5th Weekly Book Special
July 14th is Bastille Day, the French national holiday that commemorates the storming of the Bastille fortress-prison, which led to the founding of modern France. To mark the holiday, this week’s special is:
Grape Varieties (Hachette Wine Library)
by Pierre Galet (Paperback, 46 pages)
List Price: $17.95, Lowest Amazon.com Price: $18.00, OUR PRICE: $9.95
This book in the Hachette Wine Library series shows you how to identify the different grape vines, the range of flavors they give to the wines, and also discusses the cultivation process.
Describes 36 well-known grape varieties in detail. Some varieties, such as Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Riesling, Chardonnay and Syrah are cultivated throughout the world, others only flourish in certain areas.
Find out which wines are produced from a single grape variety, or how grapes can be blended to produce some of the most famous wines in the world. Each variety is beautifully illustrated in full-color and accompanied by several key points to assist in their identification.
Our favorite illustration is for Muscat Blanc grapes (click to enlarge):
Author Pierre Galet is a world-renowned French ampelographer (grapevine botanist). He has been elected an Officer in the French National Order of Agricultural Merit, and received a prize of special recognition by L’Office national Interprofessionnel des Vins (OIV), the association of French vintners.
The Kentucky Vineyard Society, which founded the first commercial vineyard in the United States dating to 1798, lists this book among their recommended reading list.
This book is discounted only through July 5th. Purchase it for $9.95 (list price $17.95):
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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: July 4th Children’s Book: Building Liberty: A Statue is Born (ISBN: 0792269691)
Weekly Book Special: June 22nd-June 28th
The Fourth of July celebrates American independence, and this week’s special tells the story of the Statue of Liberty — a gift from the French people to celebrate the 100th anniversary of American independence:
Building Liberty: A Statue Is Born
Written and Illustrated by Serge Hochain
(Hardcover with reinforced library binding, 46 pages, 2003, $25.00)
Did you know that Statue of Liberty did not begin her life in New York?
The extraordinary construction of the Statue of Liberty began in France in 1875, and with the work of many people, was completed 11 years later on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in New York.
Join a cross-Atlantic adventure with four boys — Italian construction worker Leo, French sailor Fanch, African-American newsboy Benjamin and Irish ironworker Angus — as they help to build one of the world’s most famous landmarks.
Also includes a step-by-step illustrated history of the statue’s creation (with captions) from Bartholdi’s sketch pad to its completion.
Our favorite illustration is when the Statue of Liberty is unveiled in Paris (click to enlarge):
“This is a great little book,” writes Social Studies for Kids. “The illustrations are amazing in their depth and choice of color. The book also showcases the difficulties young boys and their families faced in the late 19th century in America and in France. There are many excellent details that leave the reader knowing much more than the average American about how the statue came to be.”
Purchase this book for $25.00:
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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. | |
Cinco de Mayo: Yesterday and Today
Cinco de Mayo: Yesterday and Today
by Maria Cristina Urrutia and Rebeca Orozco (Hardcover, 29 pages, 1999)
May 5th is the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo, which celebrates the Mexican victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1852. Though it’s not Mexico’s Independence Day, it is a day to celebrate Mexican heritage, especially in the United States, with education, food and dance.
In “Cinco de Mayo: Yesterday and Today,” learn about one of the most celebrated days in the Mexican calendar. Using historical sources and the photographic record of a contemporary reenactment, children learn what the holiday commemorates and what it means today.
In the mid-19th century Mexico was in a crisis. Using the pretext that Mexico was not paying off its debt to European powers, the French emperor Napoleon III decided to invade and annex the country.
The Mexicans fought back and eventually defeated the French. One of the decisive battles took place on the fifth of May. As a result, this day has become a symbol of Mexican pride and independence and it continues to be celebrated wherever Mexicans live. Illustrations.
The North American Montessori School lists this book among their “suggested reading” for Cinco de Mayo.
Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark Publications
Today is the 106th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase.
On March 10, 1804 there was a formal ceremony in St. Louis to transfer ownership of the territory from Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France to the United States. This territory included most of the Westward Expansion of the U.S., with the present-day Midwest, Great Plains and Western states, plus New Mexico and Louisiana.
We offer you a wide selection of publications on the Lewis and Clark Expedition from 1804-1806. Below are two of our highlights:
The principal objective of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery 1804-06 was the mapping of the West to the Pacific Ocean. Clark’s final cartographic achievement was his 1814 engraved map. One of the great maps of all times, it is perhaps the single most influential one of the American West, for it was upon this map that our modern understanding of the topography of that vast areas would evolve.
The first publication of the Lewis and Clark journals was Nicholas Biddle’s 1814 two-volume chronological narrative containing the map. In 1998 there was another “run” of the map produced by means of offset lithography, printed by our affiliate the American Philosophical Society. Size: 2-1/2′ long x 14″. Tan. One thousand regular copies were printed, with Black plus 1 PMS ink for duotone. Also includes a 10-page booklet on the history of the expedition and the map.
Jefferson’s Botanists: Lewis and Clark Discover the Plants of the West
by Richard McCourt and Earle Spamer
(Academy of Natural Sciences, Paperback, 25 pages, $20)
This beautiful concise book discusses how Meriwether Lewis collected plant specimens on the journey of exploration that he and William Clark led across the American West to the Pacific Ocean & back, sent by President Thomas Jefferson. It includes facsimile excerpts from their original journals.
The task of plant collecting was Lewis’s military duty, but he seems to have had a real flair for collecting and describing the specimens. It is clear that he spent long hours observing the specimens, perhaps with a magnifying glass, cross-checking the anatomy of the plant before him with an illustrated edition of Linnaeus’s botany book.
The hundreds of Lewis and Clark specimens that survive today, known as the Lewis and Clark Herbarium, are stored in protective folders in special storage cabinets, in a climate controlled room at our affiliate, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Visiting scholars can readily retrieve and study the plants. Illus. (Paperback, 25 pages.)
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