Sourdough bread has been around for thousands of years, but it seems to be particularly popular these days. Taylor Swift makes headlines for baking it, scientists are studying its benefits on gut health, and Costco even sells a sourdough kit. Beyond the hype, good sourdough is genuinely delicious.
If your last loaf left you wondering what the fuss was about, it’s possible you weren’t eating the real thing….
In fact, the flavor of genuine sourdough bread can vary quite widely. “Sourdough doesn’t have to be sour, at all,” says Eric Pallant, a professor emeritus of environmental science and sustainability at Allegheny College and the author of Sourdough Culture: A History of Bread Making from Ancient to Modern Bakers. “It just means you’ve used wild yeast to leaven the bread.”
The full article can be found here in FOOD & WINE.
Any book whose main characters are Jewish and living in Paris in 1937 for sure is going to be ominous. And yet, The Invisible Bridge, above all else, is a love story between Klara Morgenstern, a ballet instructor with a 16-year old daughter to whom she gave birth under mysterious circumstances as a teenager herself, and Andras Levi, a 19-year old architecture student. Both are Hungarian which makes their plight slightly more complex than it was for Jews in other countries. Anti-semitism grows year-by-year in Hungary, but as a German ally, Jews like Andras and his brothers are put to work as laborers in the munkaszgolat, Hungary’s labor service for people too unreliable to be given guns and sent to the front.
What the book does exceptionally well is describe how anti-semitic laws and practices arrive inch by inexorable inch. Likewise, survival (or disposal) of Andras and his two brothers, like that of Klara and her family, as the war ensues and Germany begins to lose its dominance in its ill-fated invasion of Russia, is a function of chance encounters for better and ill. While Nazi atrocities are fiercely and accurately portrayed, so too is love and compassion, anger and goodwill. Orringer won many awards in 2010 for a book that is less gut-wrenching than it might have been.
With all of the chipperness and quirky explanatory stories of a Planet Money podcast, Myassi’s book offers an introductory course to micro and macro economics. Using brief chapters, numerous illustrations, informative pull-out boxes, and colorful design, he explains GDP, inflation, the efficiency of free markets, the commodification of leisure time, enshittification (that’s a real economics term) of social media, the hidden cost of credit cards that offer free airline miles, and numerous other activities, not all of which I would have at first recognized as lying within the realm of economics. While there are several allusions to the downside of neoliberal economics – widening income inequality, pollution, climate change, unaffordable health care, housing shortages – the book sticks to its premise that for the most part our current economic system functions pretty well. I suppose it does if you are among those wealthy enough to listen to an NPR broadcast of Planet Money or can afford to purchase this book.
After 400 years of Kingly rule, shut off from the outside world, Korea was pried open by western imperialists in the 19th century. As soon as the doors were cracked Christian missionaries entered with the zeal of Middle Age crusaders. Their goal was to save as many souls as possible from the uncivilized waste of heathenism. By the 1890s Protestantism was experiencing explosive growth. While there must be numerous explanations for why trading indigenous beliefs for a belief in a savior and everlasting life after death, it is not the point of the book.
Rather, Jonathan Cheng’s painstaking, and often tedious, research is aligned to suggest that Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s first dictator in the line of Kims was not only raised in a Protestant environment, but also modeled his cult of personality on Jesus. Cheng puts so much emphasis and effort on maintaining the thread of Christianity as explainer for the last 150 years of Korean history that he shortshrifts myriad other forces at play: the rise of communism in Asia; political maneuvering between China, Russia, and the U.S.; dictatorial cults of personality look pretty much the same around the globe and throughout history, Christian forbears notwithstanding; severe Japanese occupation and oppression prior to WW II; and perhaps some inbred Korean character traits.
An epic novel, akin to a Norse saga, of the island peoples of Polynesia in the centuries prior to contact with European civilization. Two populations destined to intertwine inhabit disparate islands. Korero, a young teenage girl, her family and several other families are doing their best to stay alive on an island in the southern Pacific. Food and water are dangerously scarce. They think they have descended from the Maori of Aotearoa (New Zealand) but have forgotten how to navigate. Far off, the Tongan Empire is ruled by the Tu’itonga (King), a powerful Aunt (the Tomaha), and the King’s three sons. Like the heroes in Greek mythology, the main characters are thoughtful, well-meaning, flawed, hubristic, proud, anxious, timid, insecure, filial, brutal, and compassionate, often all at once, which makes this exceptionally well-researched and expertly told rendition a valuable and inviting introduction to cultures most of us might only catch a glimpse of from a hotel in Hawaii.
A series of concise, inspirational, exquisitely crafted essays about nature, friendship, basketball, love of basketball, hawks, children, children growing up, childhood, brothers, and so on. Doyle has the writer’s gift of making you feel like he’s just spinning yarns; as if you and he are just having a conversation, only his descriptor words are so fresh that you can hardly imagine how he conjured them. While nearly every essay feels close to perfect, a pair of back-to-back compositions floored me. The first on “What the Dog Ate” had me peeing myself. And then his account of how no person who ever battled cancer thought of himself as a “warrior.” People with cancer endure, learn patience, and above all value what they have in life to appreciate. They do not dream about combat.
Virgil Wounded Horse is a vigilante for hire on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Vigilantes are a real thing because tribal police do not have sufficient authority to prosecute federal crimes and federal police refuse to enforce anything smaller than mass murder. That leaves drug sales, domestic violence, rape, and assault left to personal accounts. When Nathan Wounded Horse, Virgil’s 14-year-old nephew and personal responsibility, is caught up in an attempt by a no-goodnik Indian, or is it an encroaching Mexican cartel, to expand the sale of deadly drugs across the rez, Virgil is swallowed by a maelstrom.
The description of life on a modern day Indian reservation, for good and mostly bad, feels firsthand. The plot and dialogue, however, feel very much like a first draft. Lines like, “I entered the dark room. I knew there had to be a gun. My eyes would not adjust. It felt very dangerous,” are commonplace. Accurate, but painfully stale.
On September 22 2022, four underwater blasts in the Baltic Sea blew up the Nordstream pipelines. The pipelines delivered natural gas from Russia to Germany. Every American President from Bush through Trump opposed Germany’s reliance on Russian gas. Germany, determined to wean itself from nuclear power and coal, nevertheless, felt compelled to purchase the gas and was confident that Russia would honor its contracts regardless of international politics. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and revenue gained from gas sales funded their war effort.
Pancevsky’s investigation is part whodunit. Conspiracy theories abound: CIA?, Ukraine?International terrorists? It is part spy story as the perpetrators are not only revealed, but their daring adventure defies imagination. There is an insider’s accounting of Ukrainian politics, its inherited Cossack culture, its deep corruption, its military creativity in the face of overwhelming odds, and President Zelensky’s general ineptitude. And by contrast there is detailing of the German investigation into the contravention of international law, and as is inherent to German culture, following precise legal procedures to bring criminals to court and to assess judgement.
The 22nd book in the Detective Dave Robicheaux series should have been skipped. The short version is that a serial killer in the Louisiana bayous inhabited by Robicheaux has a fixation on ritualistic murders. Detective Robicheaux, now in his 80s (like the author) is dour and grumpy about the world, but acts and performs around women one-third his age as if he were 25 years old. The book is twice as long as it should be, probably because the editor didn’t have the courage to let Burke know. But wait, there’s more.
The plot includes a secondary killer who speaks like Elmer Fudd (“I wuv ice cweam cones”), the mafia, secretive dealers in Russian nuclear weapons, New Jersey casino operators, the Knights of Templar, cartoonish Hollywood directors, mercenaries who fought in Africa, and Tarot. Any one of those facets and the book would have been untenable; together, New Iberia Blues should have been sunk in a Louisiana swamp.
James Lee Burke, when he was younger, was one of my favorite authors. Here is the 4-star review of his first book.
This is a fictionalized account of a 1769 British expedition from northern Canada across the frozen tundra to very-northern Canada in search of gold. Three British explorers accompanied by four Indians (as they were called in the old accounts) set forth from Prince of Wales Fort, a remote outpost where Indian trappers exchanged furs for utilitarian European artifacts. Indians and Eskimos harbored considerable animus and mistrust for one another. The Europeans considered both groups subhuman. The political and personal interactions insofar as they might be historically accurate are insightful. The corrupting influence of gold, modern technology, and greed is predictably discouraging.