By Bill Marsano. Frankly I've always wondered why people go crazy about the splendid leather goods available in Florence. Yes, they're stylish, well-priced and well made--but can you eat them? To each his own, however. You want to buy shoes and handbags, or go to museums--help yourself. When I'm in Florence, I'm going to eat. The only things I buy to take away is food I want to smuggle back into the U.S.

I go to Italy three to five times a year (and I'm always hungry), and Florence is one of the best cities forrestaurants, pizzerias, wine bars, specialty shops and gorgeous markets piled with fresh produce. I have lots of scribbled notes and crumpled business cards, but this book does a much better job. If I've succeeded in whetting your appetite, then grab this book before you go on your own trip. Emily Wise Miller is a good writer and an outstanding guide to the gustatory city. She hits the high spots but doesn't neglect the little-known spots that aren't smack downtown; she knows the regional specialties (the unsalted bread, the magnificent lard); she also remembers that some amongst us are vegetarians and health-food devotees. And when she's got you positively salivating, she closes her book with chapters on cooking schools and culinary tours. All you really need to do is check the photo facing the introduction. It shows a newspaper headline that freely translates as "Delicatessen Clerk Condemned! Sold Prosciutto Different from the One the Customer Asked For!" That alone will give you an idea of how seriously Florentines take their food--and how well-tuned-in Emily Wise Miller is. (Bill Marsano is an award-winning writer on travel and wines and spirits.)

This book takes the reader to Greece in the year 1964, along with Emily Kimbrough and three of her travelling companions. It has several chapters with titles which are stories that illustrate the Greek culture. The rest of the book is simply a delightful travelogue in Emily Kimbrough's usual style. Although the book must be considered a period piece in that the trip described took place nearly 40 years ago, it is nevertheless educational and inspiring. "Forever Old, Forever New" is a pleasant companion book, and a great escape!

The section on Heirloom alone is worth the price of the book. Every piece is listed in every color, with prices, and dates! The photographs are in vivid color, with every piece identified. These gals have got it together. Milk Glass is a revelation as well. Lots of goodies in this book. Lots of color and more information than I've ever seen about this period. A must for Fostoria collectors!

The Four Ingredient Cookbook, Coffee & Cale, eds. Here's a helpful kitchen guidebook for fast, easy, nearly foolproof dishes -- and the range is excellent, from beer-batter bread to flourless fruitcake. Simple, quality ingredients plus imaginative combinations provide alternatives to fast food that are as quick, and less expensive to prepare. Plus, if a special diet consideration is important, readers can readily substitute low-fat or low-sodium versions of ingredients right off the shelf. I would recommend this book -- and its sequels -- for anyone who wants to improve the speed, ease and variety of make-at-home dishes in his or her repertoire. I think students, brides, newly single folks or recently empty-nesters would find it a welcome gift, both practical and fun. Handy features include a lay-flat spiral binding and heavy pages, which allow a cook to stand the book vertically during use in a small kitchen. Its format is clear and its typeface very readable; the one change I would make is a larger size of text.

If Jean Baudrillard wrote music it would indeed transcend the musical languages and styles of modernity to popular tex/mex forms,it would have the negativity of Schoenberg mixed with the traditional beauty of Mozart with the energy of Joanie Jett,the subversiveness of The Dead Kennedys and the directness of Sharon Crow;Baudrillard indeed has paid his dues writing from the late Sixties,he also became frustrated when the revolution didn't come as quickly as expected. His work today cuts across many genres. I know painters who don't paint until they read him first. Also philosophers wanting a good time,those who need to escape the stifling air of academia,and the interlocking complexity that can be a part of todays philosophic scene of intertextual interdiscipline without being committed in anyone direction. But to call Baudrillard an compact anarchist would be too cruel his thought has too much discipline of it,although that's how his language comes across. Yet he has a deep-rooted feeling for humanity; he can't quite seem to find a place for its demise. He wants to see something happen,well people still make sex and art,and music. I think behind all the dark-edged pessimism that emanates from his sentence constructions there is a need to emote, Baudrillard is a new genre artist,there is no label yet for who he is like Hannible Lecter. For instance on politics,"There is no need to attack politicians. They are engaged in spontaneous self-destruction. You simply have to be firm about not going to their aid." Baudrillard has seen and will seen things going,jettisoning down the tubes for some time to come. And that's why we need him. He has a gift for picking the smallest nuance of reality, the tiniest particle of the life-world as a means toward whatever is larger. A political system and institution. We find value in the fragments,Wittgenstein said this of God: I always find other things in Baudrillard than what he means. Like danger zones, like tripping over a cliff,The beauty in a Chicago ho! t-dog,yet it can kill you. "In Amazonia,certain butterflies simulate the markings of their poisonous fellows to protect themselves. When you have the good fortune to be poisonous,you have to use deception." Since the world has long stood on its philosophic head(Hegel/Marx), we can find comfort in being "Other" or so it seems. To be outcast is cool soemtimes, it doesn't help pay any bills,you need to be a Derridean for that to find a normative world. To Baudrillard all culture is worth the trip to understand it. Although you feel his European roots all the time, with the heavies he introduces us to Canetti,Pessoa. He always speaks within eye-shot of a monument. Years of theory does that to you. And he searches the mysteries of expression,from one fountain head one manifold source,culture going over Niagara Falls,expression teeming with amoeba,paramecium. He also is/was the first to speak on postmodernity,another stick in the side of art. In fact we owe a debt to him for taking the rigours of the postmodernist credo to a new level of cognition. Composers would never have been able to distinguish five strains of tango without it. He finds meaning in anything today,antique sales in Pennsylvania Even pornography has a double meaning. The skinny porno-queen blond who ran for the Italian Pariliament, (La Cicciolina),she married Jeff Koons who also accelerated the postmodern language to its head,carnal ectoplasm. Baudrillard speaks of the ends of things. And since we are at the end of languages,styles,meanings,subjects and objects,we are at the beginning of them as well. Too bad Baudrillard can't give us any third base guidance. Well who can? I hear he lectures at UCLA today. But I love Baudrillard because he looks for meaning anywhere. In Egyptian pyramids(ultimate space) inside,in a hermit's life,in boredom, in Andy Warhohl,in the scar on a womens face,which lends her all her charm. I think Baudrillard's next zone should be on the mystery of women throughout the ages. "Not to think any! more. To be like a dog. To be in one's head like a dog in a kennel." After you read Baudrillard you can get high from the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. He can also look beyond his own coffe-table, The French conceit that Chernobyl didn't cross to Paris,1,000 French impervious to Russian fission. Of course the dark side to all this is that Baudrillard sees us as all in a zoo,that we all have basic fatal attraction instincts that can put the rabbit into boiling water faster than the anyone.

a very personal, creative, poetic reckoning between a mixed-race young woman and her black father. layers of longing, violence, pain, silencing, and final reconciliation in physically leaving her father behind are all present in this stunning, short, neat book. great read! hope ms. ching puts out more of her writing because the multiracial literary canon is in dire need of it.

A wonderful tome by Janice Emily Bowers. These essays combine gardening, ecology and self reflection with a wonderful use of vocabulary. Thoroughly enjoyable; definitely not a one-read book!

I loved this book so much that I sent my mom a copy too. I've asked the questions from this book to both of my grandmothers (through the mail) and it inspired some really great conversations. It was written by a mother-daughter team who really wanted to know more about each other and the questions they came up with to ask each other are things I wanted to know too. I would totally recommend to people who want a closer relationship with their moms or aunts or grandmothers to get a copy of this book.

A lovely innocent must shed her shyness to win London's handsomest Lord, whom she lost her heart to at first site.

The volumes in Betterway's "Genealogist's Guide" series have been genrally excellent in leading researchers through the special problems, situations, and resources connected with non-Anglo-European-male ancestors. Anyone, even an otherwise experienced family historian, who has attempted to develop a black lineage more than three or four generations back in the United States knows the historical and social problems involved often are considerable - but they aren't insurmountable, as the authors show. Smith, a Houston librarian with legal training, learned early of the reluctance of his elderly relatives to discuss the "slave days" and of the tendency of black genealogists to end their quest with the 1870 census. He begins with the basics, the stuff we all learned (or should have) in the first year of research, but slants it toward the necessities of African-American history, including the need to deal with frequent name-changes, "consulting the elders," and evaluating family stories (both of which are especially important here). Likewise, in reading the federal census schedules, one must understand what was meant, both officially and locally, by "colored" and "mulatto," the definitions of which changed over time. Military service records, an important resource in most white pedigrees, are more problematic for black lineages before World War II. Church records are proportionately more important. Smith gives considerable space to the use of white (i.e., slaveholding) family records in tracing black families, and to the proper use of the federal census slave schedules -- subjects few of us have much experience with. Finally, he relates all this through three extended cases drawn from his own family research which exemplify the techniques and adjusted mind-sets he explained earlier. They're well written, carefully worked out, and inspirational as well as informative, and are worth the price of admission by themselves.