Books

By Everett Potter Larry Olmsted’s new book Fans: How Watching Sports Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Understanding, will be released in hardcover on Tuesday, March 2, 2021. Olmsted is an award-winning journalist and the New York Times bestselling author of Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re

By Richard West In this Age of Vanished Normalcy, when travel is restricted and ill-advised, travel books become vital for ramblers of the globe. Here are my top five of 2020: The Lost Pianos of Siberia, by Sophy Roberts. An irresistible title, prodigious research, hard travel, Siberian slang (switchbacks are

  By Beverly Stephen “Black food matters,” so declares Marcus Samuelsson in his new book The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food.  Note that the title is not “soul food” but rather the “soul of American food.” Samuelsson laments that “many readers may still think that Black

Reviewed by Richard West “The past flows with the present, Into the deep pool of Now.’ (Anon.) Visiting Iceland, even reading about it, is never a disappointment as when Friday visits Sunday. The landscape is Day Four of the Creation: huge glaciers, naked lava, hot springs and geysers, volcanoes, black-sand

By Brian E. Clark One hundred and twenty-four days through an arduous, 4,000-mile paddle down the Amazon River, Darcy Gaechter was losing it. Frustrated by the slow pace, she slapped her kayak paddle at a plastic jug floating nearby, screamed in rage, lost her balance and tumbled into the muddy water. “I

By Everett Potter The coronavirus outbreak has many of us canceling, amending or postponing our travel plans. Fair enough, and sensible enough. But it fails to stave off the very real human need to get away. So if you can’t travel, you might as well delve into a classic travel

By Everett Potter Writer and poet Frances Mayes lives the kind of life most of us can only dream about. Wandering through Italy, she and her husband, Ed, came upon a villa in the Tuscan town of Cortona. They bought and restored the villa, an effort she chronicled in her

  By Bobbie Leigh Even if you are addicted to celebrity cooking shows or online advice from Mark Bittman or Melissa Clark, these cookbooks will add to your repertoire and come in handy when you are “shopping” in your fridge to see what’s around. Each one promises to teach you

By Brian E. Clark When Seth Kugel’s parents sent him off to Kenya at age 16 for a six-week YMCA exchange program, the way he viewed travel was forever changed. Kugel, author of the newly released Rediscovering Travel, A Guide for the Globally Curious (Liveright, $26.95), had made other, more mundane

By Jeffrey Ryan In 1987, just seven years after the mountain’s devastating eruption, climbers were allowed to ascend Mount St. Helens. I was one of those lucky climbers who ascended through the ash to experience an ecosystem in the early stages of recovery. The landscape was raw. Steam rose from