Eat the City, Robin Shulman

Where there's people, there's food production.

Unsolicited galleys are my favorite. I am really going to miss them in the future when we'll have to jack into the net to hack a spreadsheet asking if - wait, never mind! This just plain showed up one day and I decided to take it for the train ride home.

Basically a food history of the city, each chapter addresses a particular edible (honey, vegetables, meat, wine) and the stories of those profiled become interwoven with New York City's food traditions and accompanying industry. The alcohol chapters cover Prohibition, while the vegetables chapter discusses gentrification and fish takes on our historical obsession with polluting water sources. Plus, there's lots of process dropped so you gather facts on say, the chemical reactions controlled for in wine-making or what time of day is best to plant and it all comes together to make you want to start a garden on your fire escape.

Of course, the food history of a city is a lens through which to view its sociopolitical history as well. After all, the full title of the book is Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers Who Built New York. And it's true! Shulman interviews new and old alike to demonstrate how the current locavore movement is as old as the city itself. Her writing casts a bit of spell over you, in that it suddenly feels like you are surrounded by food, wherever you are. In every home, a winery in the basement and an apiary on the roof. Highly recommended.

Eat the City is on sale July 10, 2012.

Thank you, MetaFilter. I love a good oral history project and this is a great one: the personal stories of women entering the workforce during World War II.

On the perks of shelving

They consist mostly of keeping yourself company by list-making. But six carts in, this was a big deal. I totally remember this edition from the shelves of my local library. And that's it really.

Still, it makes me happy that they are back to this cover. Sorry, plant! Sorry, yellow sneakers!

May The Force Be With You

978-88-6613-088-8

Do you use planners? Because this really, really makes me wish I did.

May the Force be with you 365 days a year. These and other Moleskine beauties are now in stock at Shakespeare & Co.

• Pages: 144 pages (72 leaves)
• Size: 3.5 x 5.5 inches (9 x 14 cm)
• Cover Style: Hard Cover
• Paper Color: Off White

Christ in Concrete, Pietro di Donato

Saturday morning.

He could not possibly pause long enough to breathe normally. Job that day would never be forgotten: the day when Job would first give its holy communion of freedom. One-on-two-one-on-two-bend-scoop-swing-spread-tap-clip—and bend on for one-on-two—and now Job was no longer a bewildering corridor which one visited by chance and did not realize. Job was establishing itself in gray of stony joint and red of clayey brick, in smell of men's gray bones and wet red flesh.

Job was becoming a familiar being through aches and hours, plumb and level. Job was a new sense which brought excitement of men and steel and stone. Job was a game, a race, a play in which all were muscular actors serious from whistle to whistle, and he was one of them. It was pay-day, and in a few hours pay-check would sign short-short armistice. It was war for living, and Paul was a soldier. It was not as in marbles where he played for fun, it was men's siege against a hunger that traveled swiftly, against an enemy inherited.

Dinner Party Dictum

John Dos Passos

"When I arrived Ernest was already there, and Martha Gellhorn, looking handsome in her well-tailored pants and good boots. I took along two cans of sardines and two cans of pâté, and Ernest said he was glad I had brought in canned goods from Paris because John Dos Passos hadn't brought in any food but had eaten everybody else's, and he and Dos Passos had had an ugly fight about that."

An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir, Lillian Hellman

World Book Night

Game on! I am ridiculously excited for Monday.