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Books: CookBooks: Cheese
American Farmstead Cheese: The Complete Guide To Making and Selling Artisan Cheesesby Paul Kindsedt List Price: $40.00 Available from Amazon $25.20 On 7-22-2006 
See Item's Page From Booklist Not so very long ago the term "American cheese" meant a bland product good for little except melting atop a hamburger patty. Thanks to the efforts of a host of cheese makers around the country, American cheese has begun developing a range of tastes and textures to rival the great cheeses of Europe. To guide those who wish to participate in this burgeoning industry, Kindstedt has developed a manual that covers in detail the scientific and technical bases for turning milk into cheese, describing each of the eight steps of the process. Even the nonprofessional can profit from Kindstedt's discussion of the chemical principles that underlie cheese making, the variations in the final product that are affected by temperature, acidity, salt, and coagulating media. Kinstedt pays particular heed to the importance of sanitation. Other contributors address the art that creates flavor from the science and commercial principles that sustain the cheese maker. Libraries in dairying communities will find this comprehensive book especially useful, and extensive bibliographic data aid students. Mark Knoblauch Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Book Description This comprehensive guide to farmstead cheese explains the diversity of cheeses in terms of historical animal husbandry, pastures, climate, preservation, and transport— all of which still contribute to the uniqueness of farm cheeses today. Discover the composition of milk (and its seasonal variations), starter cultures, and the chemistry of cheese. The book includes: |
Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Worksby Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch List Price: $13.95 Available from Amazon $8.37 On 7-22-2006
See Item's Page Product Review "Both sound and supportiveThe nurturing volume will find an eager audience in all those who are tired of living in the land of forbidden foods and the latest greatest diet fad."--Publishers Weekly
Product Review "Both sound and supportiveThe nurturing volume will find an eager audience in all those who are tired of living in the land of forbidden foods and the latest greatest diet fad."--Publishers Weekly |
I Am the Cheese (Laurel-Leaf Library)by Robert Cormier Available from Amazon $6.50 On 7-22-2006 
See Item's Page Product Review Imagine discovering that your whole life has been a fiction, your identity altered, and a new family history created. Suddenly nothing is as it once seemed; you can trust no one, maybe not even yourself. It is exactly this revelation that turns 14-year-old Adam Farmer's life upside down. As he tries to ascertain who he really is, Adam encounters a past, present, and future too horrible to contemplate. Suspense builds as the fragments of the story are assembled--a missing father, government corruption, espionage--until the shocking conclusion shatters the fragile mosaic. Young adult readers will easily relate to the shy and confused Adam, whose desperate searching for self resembles a disturbingly exaggerated version of the identity crisis common to the teenage years. First published in 1977, I Am the Cheese provides an exciting introduction to psychological thrillers. This sensitive, emotional, subtly crafted novel by Robert Cormier (author of The Chocolate War) was a New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year, as well as a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. --Emilie Coulter
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don'tby Jim Collins List Price: $27.50 Available from Amazon $16.50 On 7-22-2006
See Item's Page Amazon.com's Best of 2001 Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11--including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo--and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come. --Harry C. Edwards From Publishers Weekly In what Collins terms a prequel to the bestseller Built to Last he wrote with Jerry Porras, this worthwhile effort explores the way good organizations can be turned into ones that produce great, sustained results. To find the keys to greatness, Collins's 21-person research team (at his management research firm) read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. That Collins is able to distill the findings into a cogent, well-argued and instructive guide is a testament to his writing skills. After establishing a definition of a good-to-great transition that involves a 10-year fallow period followed by 15 years of increased profits, Collins's crew combed through every company that has made the Fortune 500 (approximately 1,400) and found 11 that met their criteria, including Walgreens, Kimberly Clark and Circuit City. At the heart of the findings about these companies' stellar successes is what Collins calls the Hedgehog Concept, a product or service that leads a company to outshine all worldwide competitors, that drives a company's economic engine and that a company is passionate about. While the companies that achieved greatness were all in different industries, each engaged in versions of Collins's strategies. While some of the overall findings are counterintuitive (e.g., the most effective leaders are humble and strong-willed rather than outgoing), many of Collins's perspectives on running a business are amazingly simple and commonsense. This is not to suggest, however, that executives at all levels wouldn't benefit from reading this book; after all, only 11 companies managed to figure out how to change their B grade to an A on their own. Copyright 2001 Cahners business Information, Inc. |
The Places in Betweenby Rory Stewart List Price: $14.00 Available from Amazon $10.78 On 7-22-2006
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly We never really find out why Stewart decided to walk across Afghanistan only a few months after the Taliban were deposed, but what emerges from the last leg of his two-year journey across Asia is a lesson in good travel writing. By turns harrowing and meditative, Stewart's trek through Afghanistan in the footsteps of the 15th-century emperor Babur is edifying at every step, grounded by his knowledge of local history, politics and dialects. His prose is lean and unsentimental: whether pushing through chest-high snow in the mountains of Hazarajat or through villages still under de facto Taliban control, his descriptions offer a cool assessment of a landscape and a people eviscerated by war, forgotten by time and isolated by geography. The well-oiled apparatus of his writing mimics a dispassionate camera shutter in its precision. But if we are to accompany someone on such a highly personal quest, we want to know who that person is. Unfortunately, Stewart shares little emotional background; the writer's identity is discerned best by inference. Sometimes we get the sense he cares more for preserving history than for the people who live in it (and for whom historical knowledge would be luxury). But remembering Geraldo Rivera's gunslinging escapades, perhaps we could use less sap and more clarity about this troubled and fascinating country.(May) Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Stewart, a resident of Scotland, has written for the New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books, and he is a former fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In January 2002, having just spent 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, Stewart began a walk across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul. Although the Taliban had been ousted several weeks earlier, Stewart was launching a journey through a devastated, unsettled, and unsafe landscape. The recounting of that journey makes for an engrossing, surprising, and often deeply moving portrait of the land and the peoples who inhabit it. Stewart relates his encounters with ordinary villagers, security officials, students, displaced Taliban officials, foreign-aid workers, and rural strongmen, and his descriptions of the views and attitudes of those he lived with are presented in frank, unvarnished terms. Nation building in Afghanistan remains a work in progress, and this work should help those who wish to understand the complexities of that task. Jay Freeman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
The Secret Life of Beesby Sue Monk Kidd List Price: $14.00 Available from Amazon $8.40 On 7-22-2006
See Item's Page Product Review In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their Georgia peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate Lily's story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd's debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern Gothic. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From Publishers Weekly Honey-sweet but never cloying, this debut by nonfiction author Kidd (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter) features a hive's worth of appealing female characters, an offbeat plot and a lovely style. It's 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, in Sylvan, S.C. Fourteen-year-old Lily is on the lam with motherly servant Rosaleen, fleeing both Lily's abusive father T. Ray and the police who battered Rosaleen for defending her new right to vote. Lily is also fleeing memories, particularly her jumbled recollection of how, as a frightened four-year-old, she accidentally shot and killed her mother during a fight with T. Ray. Among her mother's possessions, Lily finds a picture of a black Virgin Mary with "Tiburon, S.C." on the back so, blindly, she and Rosaleen head there. It turns out that the town is headquarters of Black Madonna Honey, produced by three middle-aged black sisters, August, June and May Boatwright. The "Calendar sisters" take in the fugitives, putting Lily to work in the honey house, where for the first time in years she's happy. But August, clearly the queen bee of the Boatwrights, keeps asking Lily searching questions. Faced with so ideally maternal a figure as August, most girls would babble uncontrollably. But Lily is a budding writer, desperate to connect yet fiercely protective of her secret interior life. Kidd's success at capturing the moody adolescent girl's voice makes her ambivalence comprehensible and charming. And it's deeply satisfying when August teaches Lily to "find the mother in (herself)" a soothing lesson that should charm female readers of all ages. (Jan. 28)Forecast: Blurbs from an impressive lineup of women writers Anita Shreve, Susan Isaacs, Ursula Hegi pitch this book straight at its intended readership. It's hard to say whether confusion with the similarly titled Bee Season will hurt or help sales, but a 10-city author tour should help distinguish Kidd. Film rights have been optioned and foreign rights sold in England and France. Copyright 2001 Cahners business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. |
The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Talesby Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith List Price: $16.99 Available from Amazon $11.04 On 7-22-2006
See Item's Page Product Review If geese had graves, Mother Goose would be rolling in hers. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales retells--and wreaks havoc on--the allegories we all thought we knew by heart. In these irreverent variations on well-known themes, the ugly duckling grows up to be an ugly duck, and the princess who kisses the frog wins only a mouthful of amphibian slime. The Stinky Cheese Man deconstructs not only the tradition of the fairy tale but also the entire notion of a book. Our naughty narrator, Jack, makes a mockery of the title page, the table of contents, and even the endpaper by shuffling, scoffing, and generally paying no mind to structure. Characters slide in and out of tales; Cinderella rebuffs Rumpelstiltskin, and the Giant at the top of the beanstalk snacks on the Little Red Hen. There are no lessons to be learned or morals to take to heart--just good, sarcastic fun that smart-alecks of all ages will love. From Publishers Weekly Grade-school irreverence abounds in this compendium of (extremely brief) fractured fairy tales, which might well be subtitled "All Things Gross and Giddy." With a relentless application of the sarcasm that tickled readers of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs , Scieszka and Smith skewer a host of juvenile favorites: Little Red Running Shorts beats the wolf to grandmother's house; the Really Ugly Duckling matures into a Really Ugly Duck; Cinderumpelstiltskin is "a girl who really blew it." Text and art work together for maximum comic impact--varying styles and sizes of type add to the illustrations' chaos, as when Chicken Licken discovers that the Table of Contents, and not the sky, is falling. Smith's art, in fact, expands upon his previous waggery to include increased interplay between characters, and even more of his intricate detail work. The collaborators' hijinks are evident in every aspect of the book, from endpapers to copyright notice. However, the zaniness and deadpan delivery that have distinguished their previous work may strike some as overdone here. This book's tone is often frenzied; its rather specialized humor, delivered with the rapid-fire pacing of a string of one-liners, at times seems almost mean-spirited. Ages 5-up. Copyright 1992 Reed business Information, Inc. |
Cheese Primerby Steven Jenkins List Price: $16.95 Available from Amazon $11.02 On 7-22-2006
See Item's Page Product Review If you want a fascinating food book, say Cheese Primer. For 20 years, Steve Jenkins has lead the way in upgrading the quality of cheese sold at fine food stores in the U.S. Finally, in this volume, he shares his encyclopedic knowledge. Jenkins tells all about cheesemaking at the commercial as well as the artistic level. Generously punctuated with maps and photos, the book includes all kinds of historical and other relevant information. Jenkins seems to describe every kind of cheese made in the U.S. and Europe, including when to eat them, how and with what. His passion and blunt opinions make it easy to travel the 548 pages of this book if you have even the smallest interest in cheese. The guide to pronunciation is particularly helpful. From Publishers Weekly "Once ripened the inner cheese becomes liquescent, bone-colored, and extraordinarily flavorful nutty, beefier, and woody, with hints of peat, like a single malt Scotch from Islay. The cheese is tumescent, glistening." It may be cheese to you, but to Jenkins it's a perfect Teleme California cheese originally made by Greek immigrants. In 1973, Jenkins moved to New York City from Missouri to pursue dreams of acting?which explains how he came to run the cheese department at two of New York's gourmet meccas, Dean & DeLuca and Fairway. The first American invited into the the Guilde de St. Uguzon and a Chevalier du Taste-Fromage, Jenkins is really a missionary. After a lesson in cheesemaking from which readers can truly understand why washing the rind or cheddaring makes the end product taste different, Jenkins examines, country by country, the great cheeses of France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Britain, the U.S. and, in one fell swoop, Canada and the rest of the European cheese-making countries. He describes how they are found, served and what makes them great?or not. "Bel Paese," he notes, "is immensely popular because it is very mild (read bland) I don't recommend it to my customers under any circumstances for any purpose." He takes a similarly unrelenting posture towards young Goudas or Provolones, but most of his ire is aimed at the mass produced cheeses and the misguided government regulations, like the USFDA's refusal to allow the importation of raw milk cheeses aged less than 60 days, that keep Americans ignorant of some of the world's great cheeses. Hence, this volume becomes partly a travel book as Jenkins urges Americans abroad to sample the forbidden. With unflagging enthusiasm and a seemingly endless reserve of information (much offered in boxes and sidebars), The author combines the romance and legend of an ancient craft with addresses, names, recipes and other hard facts. Jenkins employs prose as gloriously redolent, seductive and irresistible as his favorite cheeses to demonstrate how sight, smell and touch can be marshaled in the service of taste. Illustrations not seen by PW. BOMC featured alternate; 15-city author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed business Information, Inc. |
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