Category Archives: Books

Ivan Day’s Ice Cream: A History

Ask anyone waving around a Drumstick cone or Klondike Bar where ice cream comes from, and you’re lucky if you get a smart-aleck response like “the freezer.” Ice cream may be near universally loved (there’s an ice cream truck going … Continue reading

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Three 2025 novels from notable authors

Egyptian Motherlode by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman, Tachyon Press 2025 This book is a series of acid trips taken during a series of concerts by a series of people who are all connected, who perform in the same concerts, … Continue reading

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Daniel Karaczun’s Out of This Kitchen: A History of the Ethnic Groups and Their Foods in Steel Valley

Food is part of the daily life of everyone, but the labouring class that worked in particularly dangerous occupations such as mining and steel making came to consider food more than something that you ate to keep going: food was … Continue reading

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Lesley Chamberlain’s The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe

I have previously reviewed The Food and Cooking of Russia, and I am finally ready to tell you about Chamberlain’s companion volume, The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe. Both are reissues of books initially released in the 1980s. This … Continue reading

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Lesley Chamberlain’s The Food and Cooking of Russia

I decided to stretch my reviewing muscles and try something a little different this time around, by accepting two regional cookbooks. The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe is now out as well, but today, from the same author, we … Continue reading

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Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus’s The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad

A while back Gary Whitehouse reviewed a compilation CD entitled The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad here in these very pages. It was a CD containing twenty American “ballads.” The book of the … Continue reading

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Alison Lurie’s Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter

“It often seems that the most gifted authors of books for children are not like other writers: instead, in some essential way, they are children themselves. There may be outward signs of this condition: these people may prefer the company … Continue reading

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The Brothers Grimm and T.A. Dockray’s Grimm’s Grimmest; introduction by Maria Tatar

So you want read a nice, pleasant story with a happy ending to your daughter as she drifts off to sleep? Let’s see what offered up in Grimm’s Grimmest… Hmmm… There’s the story of the woman who decapitates her stepson, … Continue reading

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Maria Tatar’s The Annotated Brothers Grimm

I can’t even guess how many editions of The Brothers Grimm there have been printed since the Victorian Era. Hundreds would be a safe guess, but if I’d add in the various chapbooks and the like that printed illustrated versions … Continue reading

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Jack Zipes’s The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

Do come in. Just give me a moment to mark my place in Patricia McKillip’s Solstice Wood, the novel I’m reading just now. Did you know that she started her exemplary career writing young adult fiction, including The House on … Continue reading

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