GREAT READS

Animal, vegetable, miracle [a year of food life]

Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver.

Cooking, Nonfiction

The art of simple food : notes, lessons, and recipes from a delicious revolution

Alice Waters ; with Patricia Curtan, Kelsie Kerr & Fritz Streiff ; illustrations by Patricia Curtan.

Roadfood sandwiches : recipes and lore from our favorite shops coast to coast

Jane and Michael Stern.

Cooking

My life in France

Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme.

Amazingly energetic, creative, and ultimately inimitable (despite many attempts), Julia Child (d.2004) brought French cooking to American kitchens. For this book she worked with her husband's grandnephew Alex Prud'homme to record her experiences between 1948 and 1954 in Paris and Marseille (and a few later adventures), which she terms the best years of her life. Like her life, her book is full of fun and zest. Fans will savor, or devour, this acc...

A history of the world in 6 glasses

Tom Standage.

Kitchen confidential: Adventures in the culinary underbelly.

Anthony Bourdain.

The updated edition of the wickedly funny and insightful bestseller filled with "25 years of sex, drugs, bad behavior, and haute cuisine," now includes three new chapters about the author's adventures since the book was originally published.

Garlic and sapphires the secret life of a critic in disguise

[compiled by Jennifer Christiansen].

Salt : a world history

Mark Kurlansky.

The omnivore's dilemma : a natural history of four meals

Michael Pollan.

Pollan writes about the ecology of the food humans eat and why--what it is, in fact, that we are eating. Discussing industrial farming, organic food, and what it is like to hunt and gather food, this is a surprisingly honest and self-aware account of the evolution of the modern diet.