The Food Culture of Alice Waters

When you eat fast food, you not only eat the food that is unhealthy for you, but you digest the values that comes with that food. And they're really about fast, cheap and easy. It's so important that we understand that things can be affordable, but they can never be cheap, because, if they're cheap, somebody's missing out. The fast food culture tells us that, you know, cooking is not something important, and it can be in the basement, it can be in the back, when, in fact, it's the most important work that we do. I think it is the unrealistic values of a fast food culture that are really making us very unhappy, that we're all going a little crazy. We spend as much searching for our cell phone than we do preparing a meal.
~Alice Waters, "Brief But Spectacular"

With her new memoir coming out, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, we thought we'd give a little blog space to Alice Waters, often called "the mother of American cooking." Alice Waters opened a little restaurant called Chez Panisse in 1971 in Berkeley, California, and in the 40-plus years since has been a tireless advocate for organic food, slow food, school lunch reform, and local sustainable agriculture. She's been the recipient of several awards and honors - her 2015 National Humanities Medal "proving that eating is a political act, and that the table is a powerful means to social justice and positive change. "

Eating at Chez Panisse looks like a tremendous experience. The Restaurant is downstairs, offering a three to four course dinner with the menu changing nightly, "each [course] designed to be appropriate to the season and composed to feature the finest sustainably sourced, organic, peak-of-their-season ingredients, including meat, fish, and poultry." The Café, upstairs, features "moderately priced à la carte menu for both lunch and dinner." The website describes the experience more poetically than we could ever hope to:

Alice and Chez Panisse are convinced that the best tasting food is organically and locally grown, and harvested in ways that are ecologically sound by people who are taking care of the land for future generations. The quest for such ingredients has always determined our cuisine. For over 45 years, Chez Panisse has invited diners to partake of the immediacy and excitement of vegetables just out of the garden, fruit right off the branch, and fish straight from the sea. In doing so, Chez Panisse has established a close network of suppliers who, like the restaurant, strive for both environmental harmony and delicious flavor.

But, don't think Alice Waters herself will be whipping up your dishes. Since the birth of her daughter in the early 1980s, Alice Waters has served as executive chef - she "contribute[s] to the collaboration of the kitchen...oversees Chez Panisse, writes cookbooks, helps design menus and tries to preserve local food traditions," but she hasn't cooked anything in their kitchen in 30 years. There are a variety of chefs at Chez Panisse - different ones for the restaurant, the café, for pastry - and alumni of the kitchens include Jeremiah Tower, Samin Nosrat, and Cal Peternell.

Are you interested in food activism? Alice Waters supports Slow Food International, which is concerned with topics such as bee population decline, food waste, protecting family farming, and GMOs, and she founded the Edible Schoolyard Project, with its mission being "to build and share a national edible education curriculum for pre-kindergarten through high school...envision[ing] gardens and kitchens as interactive classrooms for all academic subjects, and a sustainable, delicious, and free lunch for every student." Do you agree with her about the importance of "help[ing] people understand the relation of food to agriculture and relationship of food to culture?" Even if you're not as hardcore as Alice Waters, you might still enjoy her cookbooks - New York Times bestsellers and recommended for "everyone who wants to learn to cook, or wants to become a better cook." Learn more about the food culture of Alice Waters with some of the titles listed below.

For Children

Alice Waters and the Trip to Delicious by Jacqueline Briggs Martin

Fanny in France: With French Adventures and French Recipes by Alice Waters


Cookery by Alice Waters

My Pantry

The Art of Simple Food and The Art of Simple Food II

In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn By Heart

Chez Panisse Fruit

Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook

DVD

American Masters: Alice Waters and Her Delicious Revolution


In addition to her own books, Waters has provided the foreword to cookbooks by various other chefs, including Joanne Weir, David Tanis, Cecilia Chiang, the Cheese Board staff, and, one of our favorites, Niloufer Ichaporia King, if you're interested in other cookbooks with a similar ethos.


Links

The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Alice Waters [First We Feast]

Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, and Her Farm-To-Table Journey [CNN]

Life's Work: An Interview with Alice Waters [HBR]

California Cooking

We recently read Ten Restaurants That Changed America, a fascinating study of how American foods, dining habits, and even the role of chefs has changed over time. As you might expect, it had a lengthy section on Alice Waters and San Francisco's Chez Panisse, which touched on topics such as California cuisine versus New American cuisine and what has been called California's "food revolution."

Joyce Goldstein, formerly of Chez Panisse and author of  Inside the California Food Revolution, has this to say about the culinary climate of California in the 1970s:

In California, we decided we would serve things that were in season and local. Restaurants like the French Laundry and Chez Panisse were the first in the country to change the menu every day. We also had self-taught chefs. Everywhere else, people were going to cooking school or working their way up through the ranks. We had a lot of people opening restaurants who had never worked in a restaurant or gone to cooking school. And it was not only chefs who were self-taught. Warren Weber taught himself how to farm organically. Bill Niman learned how to raise animals himself. Laura Chenel taught herself how to make cheese. Steve Sullivan taught himself how to bake bread. We had no rules, and we had an audience to support us. It was an amazing climate. We also had the largest number of women chefs anywhere in the world.

Now, California cuisine is such an accepted idea that you can go on California "culinary adventures" and "culinary retreats." The tastes may have changed a little, statewide, though in 2013 Rick Bayless critiqued San Francisco restaurants for being "all a little bit too alike," and now there are food trucks in the mix; but you can still go to Chez Panisse, and other chefs have embraced "hippie-chic...vegetable-centric...simple ingredients, simply prepared" for their up-and-coming restaurants, and local is still a watchword.

California cuisine has had such an impact that it even has its own subject in the library catalog - "Cooking, American -- California style." We've compiled a list of books, mostly from that subject search, to represent California cuisine for you.


This is Camino by Russell Moore + Allison Hopelain with Chris Colin and Maria Zizka

Gjelina: Cooking From Venice, California by Travis Lett 

Brown Sugar Kitchen: New-Style, Down-Home Recipes From Sweet West Oakland by Tanya Holland with Jan Newberry 

Bar Tartine: Techniques & Recipes by Nicolaus Balla and Cortney Burns  

A New Napa Cuisine by Christopher Kostow  

Manresa: An Edible Reflection by David Kinch with Christine Muhlke  

Everything I Want To Eat: Sqirl and the New California Cooking by Jessica Koslow  [eBook]  

My Nepenthe: Bohemian Tales of Food, Family, and Big Sur by Romney Steele  [eBook]

The Cheese Board: Collective Works Bread, Pastry, Cheese, Pizza by Cheese Board Collective Staff [eBook] 

My Pantry by Alice Waters with Fanny Singer 

Mourad: New Moroccan by Mourad Lahlou ; with Susie Heller, Steve Siegelman, and Amy Vogler 

Bouchon Bakery by Thomas Keller and Sebastien Rouxel ; with Susie Heller ... [et al.]   

Susan Feniger's Street Food: Irresistibly Crispy, Creamy, Crunchy, Spicy, Sticky, Sweet Recipes by Susan Feniger, with Kajsa Alger, and Liz Lachman 

 

FSA Photography, The Works Progress Administration, and the New Deal

Contrary to popular association, photography was not the primary work of the Farm Security Administration. The FSA was a New Deal agency designed to combat rural poverty during a period when the agricultural climate and national economy were causing great dislocations in rural life. The photographers who worked under the name of the FSA were hired on for public relations; they were supposed to provide visual evidence that there was need, and that the FSA programs were meeting that need. Beyond serving this institutional image, the photographers were to document aspects of "the American way of life" that caught their eye. This looser and farther-reaching mission ultimately accounted for the vast file of photographs (over 80,000 black and white images) that is now considered one of the most famous documentary photography projects ever.
~Juliet Gorman 

We have long had an interest in the Great Depression and the New Deal - perhaps early exposure to the musical Annie is to blame, or we got too caught up in the drama of 1999's Cradle Will Rock, or we saw Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" photograph at an impressionable age. But when New Deal Photography: USA 1935-1943  rolled across our desk one day, we thought now might be a good time to delve deeper into this topic!

Recently we were at Roosevelt Park in southeast Albuquerque and noted its sign:

We had never before considered how the New Deal had touched New Mexico - in fact, had touched all the states, if the amount of  WPA state guides in the library catalog are anything to go on. But what was it, exactly? We had always thought of the Works Progress Administration (sometimes called the Works Project Administration) in terms of the murals, posters, and the photography. But  that was just the tip of the iceberg, we discovered.

The WPA was created in 1935 as a work project for the unemployed. There were 11 million unemployed in 1934 and the WPA put 8 million of them to work, constructing roads, creating parks, building public buildings, bridges, and airports, and, as the Federal Arts Project, Federal Writers' Project, and Federal Theater Project, entertaining. There was even an arm of the WPA responsible for finding part-time jobs for youth. Critics of the program called it " a device for creating a huge patronage army loyal to the Democratic Party," and that the work it created was unnecessary; Harry Hopkins, one of FDR's advisers, believed  “giv[ing] a man a [handout]… you save his body and destroy his spirit. [But by giving] him a job… you save both body and spirit.” The WPA only endured 8 years, ending in 1943 with some charges of mismanagement and with the employment boom of the wartime years.

For more about the WPA, the Farm Security Administration (also created in 1935, to fight rural poverty - many famous Depression-era photographers got their start in this branch of the New Deal), and how they affected New Mexico, consider checking out one of the items from the library catalog listed below.

Russell Lee's FSA Photographs of Chamisal and Peñasco, New Mexico  edited by William Wroth 

Pie Town Revisited by Arthur Drooker 

Gordon Parks  introduction by Paul Roth 

Bound For Glory: America in Color, 1939-43  introduction by Paul Hendrickson 

Official Images: New Deal Photography by Pete Daniel ... [et al.]  

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon 

Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning [DVD]

The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food - Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal, Regional, and Traditional - From the Lost WPA Files edited and illustrated by Mark Kurlansky 

America Eats!: On the Road With the WPA - The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food by Pat Willard 

Public Art and Architecture in New Mexico 1933-1943: A Guide to the New Deal Legacy compiled by Kathryn A. Flynn 

Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography by Errol Morris 

On the Ropes by James Vance and Dan E. Burr 

The Muralist: A Novel by B. A. Shapiro 

The New Deal: A Modern History by Michael Hiltzik  

A More Abundant Life: New Deal Artists and Public Art in New Mexico by Jacqueline Hoefer  

America 1933: The Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Shaping of the New Deal by Michael Golay  

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson 

A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe

  

 

Links

Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives [Library of Congress]

The Dust Bowl by Ken Burns: Photo Gallery [PBS]

America's Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal [Digital Public Library of America]

Southern Literature

The American South has long been seen as the focus of the country’s Civil Rights Movement, carrying with it the stigma of poverty, racism, and anti-intellectualism. Yet the region has also produced a disproportionate number of intellectuals, poets, and writers, possibly because of the complicated and layered identities each Southerner holds within him- or herself. The South has begotten some of our nation’s most important authors, including prize winners like William Styron, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, and that titan of American letters, William Faulkner...a reminder that the South cannot be defined solely by its failings; it is also responsible for shaping the minds of countless thinkers who offered to American literature essential insights about not only their region but the world at large.
~Tyler Coates, The 50 Best Southern Novels Ever Written

Southern literature has certainly had its ups and downs, or popularity followed by backlash. Just since the last century, it had its only Nobel Prize for Literature winner, William Faulkner in 1949.  What might be called the heyday of Southern Gothic began in the 1930s and stretched to the 1990s, featuring some of the most famous names in American literature. There has been a swell of interest surrounding writing about the South almost once a decade, from Gone With the Wind to All the King's Men to A Streetcar Named Desire to In the Heat of the Night to Deliverance to Fried Green Tomatoes, and, most recently, The Help, as the publication as a book turns to the drama of making the movie - and the downside is usually issues about the world portrayed within. Just last year, The New York Post declared "'Gone With the Wind' should go the way of the Confederate flag"; The Help ignited similar controversy. Beloved author Harper Lee's long-awaited second book, Go Set a Watchman, with its more difficult portrayal of the upstanding Atticus, was said to have "diminished" her legacy. The September 2016 issue of Vanity Fair features an article called "The Literary Battle for Nat Turner's Legacy", a thoughtful and piercing history of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner - published to much lavish praise for its portrayal of the title character in 1967, but no longer a staple of syllabuses and roundly dismissed by many African-American activists. Even in 1968, Styron was called upon to debate his book with actor and activist Ossie Davis, in a debate moderated by no less than James Baldwin. One of the issues with Styron's "form-bending" opus that had already come to light was this one:

Styron had miscalculated. His "common history" was narrower than he knew. He'd had superb historical advisers such as C. Vann Woodward, the great Yale historian of the South, and Robert Penn Warren, who had recently published a powerful book, Who Speaks For the Negro?, based on searching interviews with civil-rights leaders. But Styron has overlooked another part of the story that was familiar in the African-American world; Nat Turner's standing as a mythic figure, celebrated "in pageants during Negro History Week...a magnificent forefather enshrined in the National Pantheon beside the greatest heroes of the Republic..."

Many Southern writers have "come under attack for being politically tone-deaf," but as, Sam Tanenhaus asserts in his Vanity Fair article, "...The Confessions of Nat Turner may be Styron's most significant work, having accomplished the rare feat of meeting a traumatic moment with a story powerful enough to create a culture war."

Some of us at abcreads have family from the Southern states, and have enjoyed reading books set in the region, most recently Lee Smith's memoir, Dimestore: A Writer's Life. We like the way she sums up Southern culture:

Some things never change. Some Southern food will never go out of style, no matter how much it may get nouveau'ed. And large parts of the South still look a lot like they used to - the Appalachian coal country where I'm from, for instance, and the old Cotton Belt. A layer of cultural conservatism still covers Dixie like the dew. As a whole, we Southerners are still religious, and we are still violent. We'll bring you a casserole, but we'll kill you, too.

We hope to capture some of the best in Southern literature, redolent of both casseroles and death, with this list of recommended Southern reads mostly taken from "The Crowded Canon of the South" by Hal Espen, as featured in The Southerner's Handbook: A Guide to Living the Good Life by David DiBenedetto and the editors of Garden & Gun - a delightful compendium of Southern manners, slang, hobbies, and more. These books can be "like bellying up to a twenty-four-hour all-you-care-to-eat-buffet overflowing with decay, destruction, exploitation..." and more, so read at your own risk!


Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; A Death in the Family, & Shorter Fiction by James Agee

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

Look Homeward, Angel: The Story of a Buried Life by Thomas Wolfe

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

A Long and Happy Life by Reynolds Price

Those Bones Are Not My Child By Toni Cade Bambara [eBook]

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

True Grit by Charles Portis

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? by Padgett Powell

Father and Son by Larry Brown

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions by Daniel Wallace

Cane by Jean Toomer

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Oral History by Lee Smith [eAudiobook]

Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

Dogs of God by Pinckney Benedict

The Ballad of Frankie Silver by Sharyn McCrumb [eAudiobook]

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

For more about Southern literature, check out South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature by Margaret Eby, or try a search of Southern States - Fiction. For more on Southern culture - especially food, because in our opinion that's another great way to soak up a regional way of life - try also The Southerner's Cookbook: Classic Recipes to Feed the Soul, by the same authors, Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler's Journey Through the Soul of the South, or try a subject search of Southern States -- Social life and customs.  

Links

The wonderful, terrible Gone with the Wind [A.V. Club] 

Finding humanity in Gone with the Wind [Atlantic]

The Evolution of Southern Gothic [Huffington Post]

Why southern gothic rules the world [Guardian]

100 Must-Read Works of Southern Literature [Book Riot]

America Reads

In 2012, a group of curators and subject experts in the Library of Congress developed the institution's popular exhibition, Books That Shaped America. The books chosen were not intended to be a list of the "best" books published in the United States. Rather, the group chose eighty-eight core books by American authors that had, for a wide variety of reasons, a profound effect on American life. Knowing that opinions can be as varied as the number of people you ask, we urged the public to name "other books that shaped America" and to tell us which of the eighty-eight core books on our list were most important to them. That survey forms the basis of this exhibition, America Reads.
~from the America Reads exhibition overview

We're far away from the Library of Congress, so most likely you missed their Books That Shaped America exhibition (and its follow-up, America Reads), as we did. But it's a fascinating idea, isn't it? What books have "shaped America" - have been influential, or have had a "profound effect on American life"? There are probably as many answers to that question as there are American readers, and while we applaud the Library of Congress for taking on such a project, we don't envy them the work of sifting, compiling, deciding, and then sorting through the inevitable backlash as people weigh in their own opinions. But the folks at the Library of Congress didn't just accept criticism of their list - they embraced it, creating "possibly the first sequel exhibition at the Library of Congress".

The list of the Books That Shaped America is quite lengthy and and the America Reads list runs to 65 items, so we have opted not to reproduce them here. However, we will share with you the top America Reads titles, chosen by public survey, and the top titles from the Books That Shaped America list, chosen by "[c]urators and experts from throughout the Library of Congress".  These lists were both created by the Library of Congress. What do you think of these lists? Are there other books you think have shaped America more, or books you think don't belong on these lists? Do you think it's impossible to come up with an all-inclusive list in the first place? Let us know in the comments!

America Reads - New Titles Chosen by the Public

• Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
• Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods
• Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon
• Willa Cather, My Ántonia
• Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family
• Ayn Rand, Anthem
• Alice Walker, The Color Purple
• John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
• John Steinbeck, East of Eden
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
• Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
• Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men
• Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
• Arthur Miller, The Crucible
• Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
• Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
• John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage
• Stephen King, The Stand
• Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
• Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
• Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
• James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757
• Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
• Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows
• Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
• Frank Herbert, Dune
• Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
• Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening
• Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree
• Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
• Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
• John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
• Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
• Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

America Reads - The Public’s Top Choices from the Original 2012 List

• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Thomas Paine, Common Sense
• Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
• The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
• J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
• Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism
• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy
• Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
• Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), The Cat in the Hat
• Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods
• Jack Kerouac, On the Road
• Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
• L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale
• Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Photo Credit:

Books. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 29 Jul 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/132_1258202/1/132_1258202/cite

The Olympics Are Coming! The Olympics are Coming!

The winter games are quickly approaching and we're starting to turn our minds from literary pursuits to more athletic ones.

While the modern summer games have been going since 1896, but the winter games didn't start until 1924 as "International Winter Sports Week".  They have grown from a beginning of six sports and 14 events to 15 sports and 98 events.  If you're interested in arm chair refereeing, but need to brush up on the finer points of the rules of curling, we've got The Sports Rules Book.

Other books about winter sports include:

Children's

Extreme Sports Snow

Bobsledding And The Luge

The Winter Olympics

Freeze Frame: a Photographic History of the Winter Olympics

Adults

White Planet: A Mad Dash Through Modern Global Ski Culture

The Complete Book Tf The Winter Olympics

Edge Of Glory: The Inside Story Of The Quest For Figure Skating's Olympic Gold Medals

Albertville 92: The Official Book Of The International Olympic Committee

Salt Lake 2002: An Official Book Of The Olympic Winter Games

Patriot Hearts: Inside The Olympics That Changed A Country

We've also got biographies on past famous US winter Olympians

Children's

Superstars Of Women's Figure Skating

Top 10 American Women's Figure Skaters

A Winning Edge

Kristi Yamaguchi: Artist on Ice

Top 10 American Men's Olympic Gold Medalists

Male Olympic Champions

Boitano's Edge

Adults

A Skating Life

How To Be Like Women Athletes Of Influence

Zero Regrets: Be Greater Than Yesterday

Picabo: Nothing To Hide

The Long Program

For a fun movie night, Miracle, gives a dramatic account of the 1980 US Men's Hockey team's win over Russia.

If you're interested in up to the minute info and pictures, the US Team's twitter feed is pretty fun.

Lastly, if you're inspired to try some of the sports you see on TV, local information on lessons and ski conditions for skiing can be found here and ice sports here.

America the Beautiful: Trees, Coins, & Lost States

Here at abcreads, we are celebrating history - with a twist!  We love an offbeat, engaging take on history, such as you might find in the works of Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation) and Amy Stewart (Flower Confidential) - books exploring history via an unusual angle or topic, with a slice of personal experience and/or opinions on the side. Here some off-the-beaten-track books with an American history bent that we hope you'll enjoy:


American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation by Eric Rutkow

How the States Got Their Shapes Too: The People Behind the Borderlines by Mark Stein.

A Pocketful of History: Four Hundred Years of America--One State Quarter at a Time by Jim Noles

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America edited by Matt Weiland & Sean Wilsey

Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States that Never Made It by Michael J. Trinklein

Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf

Driving Home: An American Journey by Jonathan Raban

Why Sacagawea Deserves the Day Off & Other Lessons from the Lewis and Clark Trail by Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs

Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars by Paul Ingrassia

Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America by Jeff Wiltse

The Lives of Cities

We recently read Graham Robb's Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, which is a "series of stories about the Paris you never knew" [from the library catalog], starring Napoleon Bonaparte, Proust, Baron Haussmann, and others; London also has its own biography, by Peter Ackroyd. This made us wonder, did cities in the United States also have their own biographies? We thought of Erik Larson's Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America would probably count, but we thought we might be able to find more books that told the histories of cities, either in a biography form or through the window of one particular era in the life of the city.  Here's some of the titles we came up with:

San Francisco

Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot

Chicago

City of Scoundrels: The Twelve Days of Disaster that Gave Birth to Modern Chicago by Gary Krist

The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream by Thomas Dyja

Detroit

Detroit: A Biography by Scott Martelle

Los Angeles

L.A. '56: A Devil in the City of Angels by Joel Engel

A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner

Houston

The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story by Lily Koppel

New York

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America by Sam Roberts

Good Guys, Wiseguys, and Putting Up Buildings: A Life in Construction by Samuel C. Florman

Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Trappers, Hunters, Foragers, Slaughterers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers Who Built New York by Robin Shulman

Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life by Evan Hughes

The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins

Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Lox, Stocks, and Backstage Broadway: Iconic Trades of New York City by Nancy Groce

Boston

Rebound!: Basketball, Busing, Larry Bird, and the Rebirth of Boston by Michael Connelly  [eBook]

Philadelphia

A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul by John A. Jackson


Washington, D.C.

First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School by Alison Stewart

Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 by Jefferson Morley

Nashville

Outlaw: Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and the Renegades of Nashville by Michael Streissguth

Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City by Craig Havighurst

St. Louis

Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer by William Knoedelseder

Miscellaneous

Seven Fires: The Urban Infernos that Reshaped America by Peter Charles Hoffer

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Dead Cities and Other Tales by Mike Davis


And don't forget Albuquerque!  You can find books under the subject heading Albuquerque (N.M.) - Description and travel, and if that's not enough, try a subject search of just Albuquerque (N.M.) to get even more titles! Also try the subject Santa Fe N M for more local history.