Globe Corner Blogs

What follows is a list of books about cooking, eating, and drinking all around the world. Bon Appétit!

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Amarcord: Marcella Remembers
by Marcella Hazan ($16.00)
Bestselling cookbook author Marcella Hazan tells how a young girl raised in Emilia-Romagna became an icon of classic Italian cooking. Widely credited with introducing proper Italian food to the English-speaking world, Hazan, now 84, looks back on the adventures of a life lived for pleasure and a love of teaching.

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Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York
by William Grimes ($30.00)
Noted food critic Grimes explores what determined where a person would eat and how the restaurant scene mirrored the forces shaping 19th and 20th century New York.

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Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
written by A. J. Liebling, illustrated by James Salte (14.00)
In his nostalgic review of his initiation into life’s finer pleasures, Liebling celebrates the richness and variety of French food, fondly recalling great meals and memorable wines.

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The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
by Benjamin Wallace ($14.95)
The Billionaire’s Vinegar tells the true story of a 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux – supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson – that sold for $156,000 at auction and of the eccentrics whose lives intersected with it.

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Eat Memory: Great Writers at the Table: A Collection of Essays from the New York Times
edited by Amanda Hesser ($15.95)
New York Times Magazine food editor Amanda Hesser has showcased the food-inspired recollections of some of America’s leading writers. Eat, Memory collects the twenty-six best stories and recipes to accompany them.

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Food Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 Extraordinary Places to Eat Around the Globe
by National Geographic Traveler, introduction by Keith Bellows ($40.00)
In this illustrated travel gift book, readers find a full itinerary of foods, dishes, markets, and restaurants worth traveling far and wide to savor.

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Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
by Jennifer 8 Lee ($13.00)
Lee writes humorously about the quirky history and worldwide popularity of Chinese restaurants and how traditional Chinese cuisine has been redefined.

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Heat
by Bill Buford ($15.00)
Heat is the chronicle – sharp, funny, wonderfully exuberant – of Buford’s time spent as Mario Batali’s “slave” and of apprenticeships with culinary masters in Italy.

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The Man Who Ate the World
by Jay Rayner ($15.00)
One of the world’s preeminent restaurant critics takes on the giants of haute cuisine in this fascinating and riotous look at the business and pleasure of fine dining.

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My Life in France
by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme ($15.00)
This is a delightful memoir of Julia’s years in Paris, Marseille, and Provence. Funny, earthy, forthright – Julia is with us on every page as she relishes the French way of life that transformed her, and us.

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Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China
by Fuschia Dunlop ($16.95)
When award-winning food writer Dunlop lived in China, she vowed to eat everything she was offered, no matter how alien or bizarre. This work is a unique, evocative account of Chinese culinary culture.

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The Sharper Your Knife the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris
by Kathleen Flinn ($15.00)
Flinn, a 36-year-old American living and working in London, cleared out her savings and moved to Paris to pursue a dream diploma from the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.

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The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World’s Most Glorious – And Perplexing – City
by David Lebovitz ($24.95)
Lebovitz, a pastry chef and cookbook author, always dreamed about living in Paris. This collection of recipes and observations is a funny, offbeat, and irreverent look at the city of lights, cheese, chocolate, and other confections.

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Tenth Muse: My Life in Food
by Judith Jones ($14.95)
Living in Paris after World War II, Jones broke free of bland American food and reveled in everyday French culinary delights.

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Why Italians Love to Talk about Food
by Elena Kostiokovitch, intros by Umberto Eco & Carol Field ($35.00)
Organized according to region and colorfully designed with illustrations, maps, menus, and glossaries, this is an exceptional celebration of Italy’s culinary gifts.

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Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching…as is the curdling panic in my gut about the holiday gift-giving season coming on so fast. While the appearance of Santa at the end of the Macy’s Day Parade used to send me into paroxysms of twitchy excitement, now seeing him makes my stomach sink. It is time to buy.

I know I’m not the only one out there with this seasonal anxiety disorder. Fortunately, there are others out there prepared to help – one being the very owner of The Globe Corner Bookstore, Pat Carrier. He was recently interviewed by AP travel writer Beth Harpaz on the best books one could give to travelers as gifts. You can read the interview here. Two other travel bookstore owners were interviewed for the column, and all their choices appear on this page. No need to fret.

AP travel writer Beth Harpaz recently interviewed several travel bookstore owners, including our own Pat Carrier, for an article about the perfect gift for the traveler. “Booksellers from three travel bookstores…offered their recommendations for travel books that make good holiday gifts, from coffee-table books filled with gorgeous photos, to travelogues of long-ago adventures in faraway places, to practical guidebooks for every type of traveler.” What follows is the list of suggestions from the three bookstores.

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World Heritage Sites: A Complete Guide to 878 UNESCO World Heritage Sites
The first book that full describes every official UNESCO World Heritage site – the world’s most extraordinary places – covers 141 countries and highlights the fascinating facts of almost 900 properties, including 20 in America and 15 in Canada.

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Sites of Antiquity
from the Blue Guides series
Charles Freeman’s book takes 50 sites from Syria and Sinai to southern France and the Solway Firth, stretching right across what became the Roman Empire, to show how civilisation developed in the Mediterranean and spread through Europe, Asia Minor, north Africa and parts of Arabia.

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How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architectural Styles
by Carol Davidson Cragoe
This practical primer is a handbook for decoding a building’s style, history, and evolution. Every building contains clues embedded in its design that identify not only its architectural style but also the story of who designed it, who it was built for, and why.

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The Map As Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography
by Katharine Harmon
Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form. Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists’ maps, that happy combination of information and illusion.

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The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writings
written by W. Somserset Maugham, edited by Pico Iyer
Maugham worked as a secret agent in Russia, published novels in London, staged plays in New York, and traveled throughout Europe, Asia, India, and the United States, chronicling his travels, wherever he went, with exceptional insight. Iyer selects vignettes of Maugham’s prose that track his transformation from a boyish traveler in Spain to a worldly man of letters.

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Stanfords Travel Classics
New editions of classic travel narratives by writers such as Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

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Travelers’ Tales: 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go
by Susan Van Allen
Van Allen shares intriguing details and secrets of her favorite places. The book also includes recommendations for relaxing spas, splendid gardens, and places to shop. Van Allen offers nuts and bolts information and her suggestions fit a range of budgets to make a woman’s Italian vacation dreams come true.

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1000 Ultimate Experiences
by Lonely Planet
Perfect for the eternal wanderers, armchair travelers, and listophiles alike, 1000 Ultimate Experiences showcases the most inspirational, bizarre, entertaining, and classic travel suggestions around the world.

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Life Wonders of the World: 50 Must-See Natural and Man-Made Marvels
In this new LIFE book, the editors return to the sites of the original Seven Wonders and then keep right on traveling around the globe–eventually visiting in words and pictures seven-times-seven Wonders, plus one more.

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The Way of the World
illustrated by Thierry Vernet, text by Nicolas Bouvier
In 1953, twenty-four-year old Nicolas Bouvier and his artist friend Thierry Vernet set out to make their way overland from their native Geneva to the Khyber Pass. They had money to last them a few months and a Fiat to take them where they were going, but above all they were equipped with the certainty that by hook or by crook they would reach their destination.

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Pint-Sized Ireland --by Evan McHugh

My telling green sweater and shamrock pendant will lead most to believe (correctly) that I have Irish in my blood. The people who (incorrectly) believe I want to be kissed because I’m Irish will be surprised to know that I scoff at most St. Patrick’s celebrations. Sure, I suppose it’s a great excuse to drink pint after pint of Guinness and wear bouncy green shamrock antenna things, but if you’re not really Irish, how can you know you’re doing it right?

For those who aren’t Irish (and I’m sorry about that) the best method for ensuring as traditional a St. Patty’s Day experience as possible is to do your homework. One may not be surprised to learn that there are many books about Ireland that center around drinking – both as an attraction for tourists and as a national past-time.

A Pint of Plain --by Bill Barich

A few suggestions one can find on the Globe Corner bookshelves include the newly released A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub. When author Bill Barich moved to Dublin he wanted to find a real Irish pub of his own–an old watering hole where the barkeep knew how to pour a Guinness and musicians gathered to play traditional Irish music. Barich discovered finding this was a more difficult task than he imagined.

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Insiders' Guide to St. Louis

My family and I took a trip to St. Louis to spend Christmas with my brother and his family.  This was our second Christmas in a row in which we managed the daring thousand mile drive.  It was brutal: the first three hours of the trip we drove through a treacherous snowstorm where the average speed on the highway was 20 mph.  Not to mention three backseat drivers that were of minimal use.  Eventually we made it and the 19 hour car ride was topped off with a beer at two am with my brother.

We spent the week at his house relaxing and driving the kids crazy with the pending arrival of the mysterious Santa.  The food was delicious and St. Louis was fun.  I was finally able to catch up on some long-awaited reading and movie watching.  Then disaster struck…

There I was on Christmas Eve at about ten o’clock at night.  All was going great and my brother’s kids were about to go to bed.  Continue Reading »

Veuve Cliquot estate

Tomorrow night, thousands, nay millions, of bottles of champagne will be popped, sprayed around and drank. As I try to figure out where, and if, I’ll be having a champagne toast this New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t help but reminiscing about my semester in Paris and my visit to the champagne cellars in Reims, France. I visited the Pommery and Veuve Cliquot-Ponsardin champagne houses. Touring the champagne valley may sound luxurious and extravagant, but in actuality, it’s less pretentious than it sounds.

While the Pommery and Veuve Cliquot houses and showrooms aren’t exactly modest, the best part of the tours, and the most important part of any visit to the region, is walking through the chalk and limestone caves in which each and every bottle of champagne ferments for well over a year. Even if damp, dusty, cool wine cellars don’t appeal to you, never fear, for each visitor is rewarded with a glass of bubbly at the end of the tour. So whether you’re toasting with Andre, Veuve or Dom Perignon, Happy New Year!!

Read more about the Veuve Cliquot empire in the recently released book, The Widow Cliquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo and about the Champagne valley in the Michelin Green Guide for the Alsace Lorraine Champagne region.

Lonely Planet Greenland & The Arctic

**The GCB recently coerced Santa (with the help of cookies and plenty of egg nog) to write a guest post for our blog**

In less than a week, I will be loading up my sleigh for my annual trip around the globe. Millions of little minds all over the world are wondering not only, “what will I get this year?!” but also, “how does he do it?” Well, my tiny tots, there is no GPS system in Santa’s ride. All year long I pore over world maps, country maps, city street maps until I’m sure I have the best route down. This is not to say I don’t keep a few in the mitten compartment. (Always make a wrong turn at Albuquerque…) Of course, the magic reindeer help out too.

Now, I come visit each of you once a year–it’s time for you to come visit me up in the North Pole! Maybe this year I’ll leave some brightly wrapped books on the Arctic region under your Christmas tree. Or perhaps I’ll just leave you a guide to the Arctic–or how about a guide to the animals here? It’s not just reindeer and snowmen, you know; there are even polar bears up here!

Things are pretty busy in the ol’ workshop these days, though, so hold off on your trip till after Christmas – and after Santa’s winter vacation in Cancun… As for now, just snuggle up in your PJs with some hot cocoa and make sure the grown-ups clean out the chimney.

Birdscapes -by Miyoko Chu

Past a certain age, pop-up books no longer seem like an appropriate style of book to have prominently displayed on the bookshelf or laying out on the coffee table. Most would probably choose a leather-bound world atlas or a lovely photography book of, say, Paris, over any pop-up book. After all, pop-up books are always for kids, right? Well, as you may have guessed, there are adult-friendly pop-up books too! And we have two of them: Birdscapes, A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound and Modern Architecture Pop-Up.

These two books are carefully designed and crafted by “paper engineers” (yes, that is the proper title for pop-up artists) whose attention to detail proves that pop-ups can be truly complex and artistic.

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