This Mediterranean travel memoir offers “an engaging mix of history, food travelogue, and botany lesson . . . There is much to enjoy here” (Library Journal). Inspired by her Syrian forebears’ intimate relationship with the olive, Julie Angus embarks on a voyage around the Mediterranean to unlock the secrets of the fruit that meant so much to them. Accompanied by her husband and their ten-month-old son, Angus collects samples from ancient trees to determine where the first olive tree originated; feasts on inky black tapenades and codfish drizzled with olive oil, among many other delights; witnesses the harvesting of olives in Greece; and visits perhaps the oldest olive tree in the world, on Crete. The result is a fascinating history and biography of this most influential and irresistible fruit. “It is a pleasure to try to keep up with this book; like its author, it covers an enormous amount of territory.” —Christopher Bakken, Wall Street Journal
When Israel attacked Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria on June 5, 1967, husband and wife, Sally Bahous and Delmas Allen, knew that to ensure their safety they must soon leave Beirut, Lebanon, which had been their home for the last four years. With their three young children Carrie, Jimbo, and Sudie they boarded the USS Exilona bound for the United States. At that time more than forty years ago, author Sally Bahous didn't realize she would never return to Beirut. Based on letters Sally and Delmas wrote to their parents during the four years they lived in Beirut, this memoir vividly conveys the richness of Palestinian family life, history, and culture before and after Israel took possession of Palestinian lands, the political forces that originated and sustained Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands, and the injustice to the people that followed. Through a detailed portrayal of the daily lives of Sally's family in the Palestinian community already in exile in Beirut, Under Olive Trees describes the events and attitudes that led to that exile. Interwoven throughout are easy to- follow memories of life in Palestine before the exile to Beirut. Bahous paints a beautiful portrait of a life enriched by family and friends.
This book follows Savannah, a teenager as she travels through Greece and Crete with her aunt and uncle. Her aunt captures her photographically, as she experiences the food, the culture, and the history. As an athlete, she spends each day hiking, climbing, swimming, and running throughout the ruins of ancient Greece. Savannah invites you to come on an armchair adventure with her on her first international odyssey.
Despite the growing interest in olive oil, most people know very little about what it is or how it is made. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of olive oil from the tree to table, from a molecular and personal perspective. Growers often do not know what is happening at a molecular level or why certain practices produce superior or inferior results, for example, why adjusting a temperature rewards them with winning oils. This book aims to provide some of the answers as well as the importance of the chemicals responsible for the flavour and health effects. Readers will also get a deeper understanding of what makes an extra virgin olive oil authentic and how scientists are helping to fight fraud regarding this valuable commodity. Including anecdotes from growers of olives and producers of oils, the authors provide an accessible text for a wide audience from food science students to readers interested in the human story of olive oil production.
When NPR contributor Scott Huler made one more attempt to get through James Joyce’s Ulysses, he had no idea it would launch an obsession with the book’s inspiration: the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey and the lonely homebound journey of its Everyman hero, Odysseus. No-Man’s Lands is Huler’s funny and touching exploration of the life lessons embedded within The Odyssey, a legendary tale of wandering and longing that could be read as a veritable guidebook for middle-aged men everywhere. At age forty-four, with his first child on the way, Huler felt an instant bond with Odysseus, who fought for some twenty years against formidable difficulties to return home to his beloved wife and son. In reading The Odyssey, Huler saw the chance to experience a great vicarious adventure as well as the opportunity to assess the man he had become and embrace the imminent arrival of both middle age and parenthood. But Huler realized that it wasn’t enough to simply read the words on the page—he needed to live Odysseus’s odyssey, to visit the exotic destinations that make Homer’s story so timeless. And so an ambitious pilgrimage was born . . . traveling the entire length of Odysseus’s two-decade journey. In six months. Huler doggedly retraced Odysseus’s every step, from the ancient ruins of Troy to his ultimate destination in Ithaca. On the way, he discovers the Cyclops’s Sicilian cave, visits the land of the dead in Italy, ponders the lotus from a Tunisian resort, and paddles a rented kayak between Scylla and Charybdis and lives to tell the tale. He writes of how and why the lessons of The Odyssey—the perils of ambition, the emptiness of glory, the value of love and family—continue to resonate so deeply with readers thousands of years later. And as he finally closes in on Odysseus’s final destination, he learns to fully appreciate what Homer has been saying all along: the greatest adventures of all are the ones that bring us home to those we love. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part critical reading of the greatest adventure epic ever written, No-Man’s Lands is an extraordinary description of two journeys—one ancient, one contemporary—and reveals what The Odyssey can teach us about being better bosses, better teachers, better parents, and better people.
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Winner of the James Beard Award Until one stops to notice, an olive is only a lowly lump at the bottom of a martini. But not only does a history of olives traverse climates and cultures, it also reveals fascinating differences in processing, production, and personalities. Aficionados of the noble little fruit expect miracles from it as a matter of course. In 1986, Mort Rosenblum bought a small farm in Provence and acquired 150 neglected olive trees that were old when the Sun King ruled France. He brought them back to life and became obsessed with olives, their cultivation, and their role in international commerce.
An analysis of globalisation as an international system that today directly or indirectly influences the politics, environment, geopolitics and economics of virtually every country in the world.
This book is, essentially, a love story. The story of an Irish girl who fell in love with a Lithuanian man, then fell in love with his country and its food. The book contains nine of June's favourite traditional Lithuanian dishes, including kugelis (potato pudding), cepelinai (potato dumplings), koldūnai (pasta dumplings) and SaltibarSčiai (cold beet soup). The recipes are explained in detail with step-by-step instructions and illustrations where required, making this book ideally suited to anyone attempting these dishes for the first time. Substitute ingredients are suggested where certain ingredients might be hard to find outside of Lithuania. Each recipe is accompanied by a short preamble about June's life in Lithuania and how the recipe was developed. The book also contains a number of stunning photographs of the Lithuanian landscape and wildlife.
