The United States of Arugula is the story of an American revolution—the dramatic culinary changes that brought robust international flavors to a table formerly piled high with bland meat and potatoes. Who was behind this transformation, bringing salsa to the typical American pantry and sushi to chain grocery stores? When did macaroni become “pasta,” while celebrity chefs and organic produce became part of our household vocabularies?
A thrilling ride through decades of innovation and food politics, The United States of Arugula delivers a wickedly entertaining history of these cultural sea changes,
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The Petrakis family lives in Plaka, a small coastal village in Greece. Just off its coast is a tiny island called Spinalonga, home to a former leper colony, which haunts the four generations of women we meet in The Island. They include Eleni, who is ripped from her husband and two young daughters and sent to Spinalonga in 1939; Alexis, Eleni’s great-granddaughter who visits Greece today to unlock her family’s past; and Eleni’s two daughters, Maria and Anna, who are as different as fire and ice and whose story is at the heart of The Island.
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Venice, 1202. Tens of thousands of crusaders set sail for Jerusalem to liberate the great city from Muslim rule. Among them is a British vagabond grudgingly taken under the wing of a pious knight who believes that the mission is truly blessed by God. Before leaving, the vagabond rescues a woman pretending to be an Arab princess, hoping that under the protection of his benefactor knight, he can smuggle the young woman back to the Holy Land. However, this “holy” campaign sinks into tragic moral turpitude – first in an attack on the Adriatic port city of Zara, and ultimately in the dramatic,
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“There are places that I have never forgotten. A little cobbled street in a smoky mill town in the North of England has haunted me for the greater part of my life. It was inevitable that I should write about it and the people who lived on both sides of its ‘Invisible Wall.’ ”
The narrow street where Harry Bernstein grew up, in a small English mill town, was seemingly unremarkable. It was identical to countless other streets in countless other working-class neighborhoods of the early 1900s, except for the “invisible wall” that ran down its center,
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Award-winning historian Martha Hodes brings us into the extraordinary world of Eunice Connolly. Born white and poor in New England, Eunice followed her first husband to the Deep South and soon found her relatives fighting on opposite sides of the Civil War. Back in New England, Eunice and her children struggled to get by — until Eunice fell in love with a well-to-do black sea captain, married him, and moved to his home in the British Caribbean. Tracking every lead in the family letters, Hodes retraced Eunice’s footsteps and met descendants along the way. The Sea Captain’s Wife takes up grand themes of American history —
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Seeking to complete the compelling story of the American West, best-selling Lakota author Joseph Marshall brings a new slant to the traditional Western: historical fiction written from the Native American viewpoint. The first novel in this new series, Hundred in the Hand takes place during the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand otherwise known as the Fetterman Massacre of 1866, which was an important victory for the Lakota and a turning point for both sides. The story is told through the eyes of Cloud, a dedicated and able warrior who fought alongside a young Crazy Horse. A beautifully written and fast-paced Western,
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