Americas Garden

America’s Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It’s also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.

Combining an insider's passion with down-to-earth humor, chef and food writer Patric Kuh traces the evolution of American high-style restaurants from the 1941 opening of Le Pavillon to the recent rise of less traditional restaurants, such as Le Cirque, Spago, and Danny Meyer's Union Square group. Kuh takes readers inside this high-stakes business, sharing little-known anecdotes, describing legendary cooks and bright new star chefs, and relating his own reminiscences.

Her Korean name was Ah-Chim-Hai, meaning Flame-of-the-Morning. Af our-year-old chestnut-colored Mongolian racehorse with a white blaze down her face and three white stockings, she once amazed the crowds in Seoul with her remarkable speed. But the star racer was soon sold to an American marine and trained to carry heavy loads of artillery shells up and down steep hills under a barrage of bullets and bombs. The marines renamed her Reckless. Reckless soon proved fearless under fire, boldly trekking alone through the fiery gauntlet, exposed to explosions and shrapnel.

Chez Panisse opened its doors in 1971. Founded by Alice Waters, the restaurant is rooted in her conviction that the best-tasting food is organic, locally grown, and harvested in ecologically sound ways by people who are taking care of the land for future generations. The quest for such ingredients has always determined the restaurant’s cuisine, and over the course of 40 years, Chez Panisse has helped create a community of local farmers and ranchers.

Hi, I’m benny blanco. I’m in a television show with my best friend Dave and I probably produced most of the songs you have heard on the radio from 2008 until now. When I was thirteen, my friend got a George Foreman Grill and it changed my life forever. We would invite friends over, get stoned, and make the most elaborate sandwiches our prepubescent minds could fathom. I became obsessed with food and cooking for friends.

The year is 1925. It is sixty degrees below zero. The wind sweeps tons of snow over the deep-frozen Alaskan landscape. The nearest railhead is seven hundred miles away. Airplanes cannot fly. The way to Nome is blocked by a treacherous frozen sound, an icebound port, and mountains to the west. But there is a diphtheria epidemic in Nome. The children need serum from the outside world if they are to survive. Their only hope is a few chosen Eskimo drivers and their teams of dogs.

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated.

Acclaimed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris weaves an utterly engaging history of African American cuisine, taking the listener on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, and tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way. From chitlins and ham hocks to fried chicken and vegan soul, Harris celebrates the delicious and restorative foods of the African American experience and details how each came to form an important part of African American culture, history, and identity.

Fear rocked Chip St. Clair's world. As a boy, he never knew what would set his father off--maybe the ice cubes had melted in his glass of Tab, maybe dinner was overcooked or undercooked or the gravy was too runny. Regardless, the beatings always came. As did the twisted games of cat and mouse - being thrown from a rowboat into frigid Lake Michigan, the middle-of-the-night moves to different states, or being left to dangle over a 10-story balcony while his father watched from inside.

As late as the 1960s, tacos were virtually unknown outside Mexico and the American Southwest. Within fifty years the United States had shipped taco shells everywhere from Alaska to Australia, Morocco to Mongolia. But how did this tasty hand-held food - and Mexican food more broadly - become so ubiquitous? In Planet Taco, Jeffrey Pilcher traces the historical origins and evolution of Mexico's national cuisine, explores its incarnation as a Mexican American fast-food, shows how surfers became global pioneers of Mexican food, and how Corona beer conquered the world.

Unraveling the many myths and misconceptions surrounding America's most iconic spirit, Bourbon Empire traces a history that spans frontier rebellion, Gilded Age corruption, and the magic of Madison Avenue. Whiskey has profoundly influenced America's political, economic, and cultural destiny, just as those same factors have inspired the evolution and unique flavor of the whiskey itself.

Hutton has now written a fascinating full biography of Sergeant Reckless, who earned two Purple Hearts for her heroic efforts, among other military decorations. Hutton has spoken with the marines who fought alongside Reckless and tells the complete and captivating tale of how a would-be Korean racehorse became one of the greatest Marine Corps wartime heroes. Sgt. Reckless brings the legend back to life more than half a century later.

For centuries, skeptical foreigners - and even millions of Americans - have believed there was no such thing as American cuisine. In recent decades, hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza have been thought to define the nation's palate. Not so, says food historian Paul Freedman, who demonstrates that there is an exuberant and diverse, if not always coherent, American cuisine that reflects the history of the nation itself.

In a powerful blend of history and contemporary reporting, New York Times reporter David Philipps traces the rich history of wild horses in America: their introduction by the Spanish conquistadors, their role in the epic battles between Native Americans and settlers, their vital place in American self-mythology. He travels through some of the most remote parts of the American West, known as Wild Horse Country, to investigate the wild horse's current dilemma, caught between the clashing ideals of ranchers, scientists, and more.

In April 2009, First Lady Michelle Obama planted a kitchen garden on the White House's South Lawn. It is a garden with roots in the American past, stretching back to George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, but it is also a garden very much designed for America's future. As fresh vegetables, fruit, and herbs sprouted from the ground, this White House Kitchen Garden inspired a new conversation all across the country about the food we feed our families and the impact it has on the health and well-being of our children.

Through the eyes of a reporter and the stomach of a hungry gay man, Dining Out examines the rise, impact and legacies of the nation's gay restaurants past, present, and future, connecting meals with memories. Hamburger Mary’s, Florent, a suburban Denny’s queered by kids: Piepenburg explores how these and many other gay restaurants, coffee shops, diners, and unconventional eateries have charted queer placemaking and changed the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement for the better.

Did you know you can eat dandelions? Have you thought about what plants, flowers, nuts, and berries around you are edible? You could save money by foraging for food—in the wild! Hunting and gathering were the way humans fed themselves before the age of farming and homesteads. The Earth can provide all you need, even in the wild and uncultivated areas of nature. I will teach you what to find and how to make a yummy meal from wild plants. Foraging is something that can connect you with the world around you—it is not hunting, and I believe it is more sustainable than farming.

In the 1970s, New York City was plagued by crime, filth, and an ineffective government. The city was falling apart, and even the newly constructed World Trade Center threatened to be a fiasco. But in April 1976, a quarter-mile up on the 107th floor of the North Tower, a new restaurant called Windows on the World opened its doors - a glittering sign that New York wasn't done just yet. In The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World, journalist Tom Roston tells the complete history of this incredible restaurant, from its stunning $14-million opening to 9/11 and its tragic end.

From farm-to-table restaurants and farmers markets, to support for fair trade and food sovereignty, movements for food-system change hold the promise for deeper transformations. Yet Americans continue to live the paradox of caring passionately about healthy eating while demanding the convenience of fast food. Rooted Resistance explores this fraught but promising food scene. This book wagers that socially responsible agrarian mythmaking should be a vital part of a food ethic of resistance if we are to rectify the destructive tendencies in our contemporary food system.

Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America's Forgotten People and Pets unites the causes of animal welfare and social justice, moving between Weise's story and that of the US rescue movement: from the dog's twentieth-century transition from property to family to the rise of the no-kill campaign to stop shelter euthanasia and the contradictions that hampered those efforts.