Lonely Planet: The world's leading travel guide publisher*Life-changing food adventures around the world.From bat on the island of Fais to chicken on a Russian train to barbecue in the American heartland, from mutton in Mongolia to couscous in Morocco to tacos in Tijuana - on the road, food nourishes us not only physically, but intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually too. It can be a gift that enables a traveller to survive, a doorway into the heart of a tribe...

Winner of the National Book Award"What an elegant book this is, starting with that most elegant of creatures, the Belon oyster. . . . [Clark's] fantastic blending of science and art, history and journalism, brings the appetite back for life and literature both." — Los Angeles Times Book ReviewOn the northwest coast of France, just around the corner from the English Channel, is the little town of Locmariaquer (pronounced "loc-maria-...

Mark Kurlansky's first global food history since the bestselling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, economic, and culinary story of milk and all things dairy--with recipes throughout.According to the Greek creation myth, we are so much spilt milk; a splatter of the goddess Hera's breast milk became our galaxy, the Milky Way. But while mother's milk may be the essence of nourishment, it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated...

From the award-winning and bestselling author of Cod comes the dramatic, human story of a simple substance, an element almost as vital as water, that has created fortunes, provoked revolutions, directed economies and enlivened our recipes.Salt is common, easy to obtain and inexpensive. It is the stuff of kitchens and cooking. Yet trade routes were established, alliances built and empires secured – all for something that filled the oceans, bubbled up from springs, formed cr...

From New York Times bestselling author Mark Kurlansky, a delectable novel following one Manhattan block as an ancient cheesecake recipe-and a conniving landlord-change the Upper West Side forever.West 86th Street knows its desserts. It's the 1970s, and poppyseed strudel, praline ice cream cake, and New York cheesecake are as integral to Manhattan's Upper West Side as clustered pigeons, suited doormen, and greasy diners. That is, until Cato comes to town. C...

"They are a mythical people, almost an imagined people," writes Mark Kurlansky. Settled in a corner of France and Spain in a land marked on no maps except their own, the Basques are a nation without a country, whose ancient and dramatic story illuminates Europe's own saga.Where did they come from? Signs of their civilization exist well before the arrival of the Romans in 218 B.C., and their culture appears to predate all others in Europe. Their mysterious and forbidden tongue, Eusk...

National Outdoor Book Award Winner for Outdoor Literature**From the award-winning, bestselling author of Cod—the irresistible story of the science, history, art, and culture of the least efficient way to catch a fish.Fly fishing, historian Mark Kurlansky has found, is a battle of wits, fly fisher vs. fish—and the fly fisher does not always (or often) win. The targets—salmon, trout, and char; and for some, bass, tarpon, tuna, bonefish, and e...

Part of Emile Zola’s multigenerational Rougon-Macquart saga, The Belly of Paris is the story of Florent Quenu, a wrongly accused man who escapes imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Returning to his native Paris, Florent finds a city he barely recognizes, with its working classes displaced to make way for broad boulevards and bourgeois flats. Living with his brother’s family in the newly rebuilt Les Halles market, Florent is soon caught up in a dangerous maelstrom of food and p...

Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been spurred by it, national diets have been based on it, economies have depended on it, and the settlement of North America was driven by it. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod -- frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten l...

The New York Times–bestselling author of Salt examines the intersections between his life and Ernest Hemingway's in this mix of travel memoir and history.By a series of coincidences, Mark Kurlansky's life has always been intertwined with Ernest Hemingway's legend, starting with being in Idaho the day of Hemingway's death. The Importance of Not Being Ernest explores the intersections between Hemingway's and Kurlansky's lives, resulting in c...

By now you've probably heard that bees are disappearing--but they aren't the only species at risk. Populations of fireflies, butterflies, and ladybugs have all been declining in recent years, too. This middle grade nonfiction explains the growth, spread, and recent declines of each of these four types of insects. Exploring human causes, like the Baltimore electric company that collected fireflies to attempt to harness their phosphorescent lighting source, to natural occurrences, like the m...

“Mr. Brunner’s winning book is a reassuring, nostalgic reminder that winter is the season of both play and regeneration.”—Wall Street JournalIn Winterlust, a farmer painstakingly photographs five thousand snowflakes, each one dramatically different from the next. Indigenous peoples thrive on frozen terrain, where famous explorers perish. Icicles reach deep underwater, then explode. Rooms warmed by crackling fires fill with scents of cinnamon, clov...