"Chip Off the Old Block and Cleaver: A Memoir, A Cookbook, A Dollop of Poetry" represents the first foray into book writing by this author; it is the completed realization of at least one of my personal pipe dreams picked off before my demise. I discovered that, during the course of writing the memoir portion, I actually had a lot of living to look back on with a semblance of pride and a fair share of variety, given my experiences as a proud Western New Yorker by birth, with an even more interesting smorgasbord of work experiences once moving REALLY upstate to Lake Placid. I became a Jersey guy upon graduation from college (in Ohio) and embraced the Garden State as my new home, and found it just as hospitable and appealing as The Empire State had been. I discovered my professional niche while working in a well-regarded private psychiatric hospital and fell in love with being part of the healing which transpired there. In the past 10+ years since full-time retirement I have endeavored to capitalize on the food funnery by writing the recipes I had collected over so many years, and spreading the wealth, as it were, to anyone who loves to cook good, unostentatious grub. I thought I might just as well add the lyrical musings amassed over the years as a cherry on the top of the recipes. The only question remaining: will people appreciate a life journal, a handful of recipes, and some fine arts literature all in the same book? That remains to be seen. Here's hoping.

Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award A Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey--a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam--made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland. Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people." Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.

This classic cookbook brings together 87 recipes for pasta sauces and 36 pizza and calzone recipes, as well as tasty pasta doughs, such as buckwheat, red pepper and saffron. Featuring beautiful line drawings throughout, the book is a feast for the eyes as well as the palate. Alice Waters, whom Craig Claiborne has called “that great American rarity, a deservely celebrated native-born chef,” gives us here the extraordinary pastas, pizzas, and calzones that she serves in her famous Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkley, California. Based on the freshest and best seasonal ingredients, every recipe is bursting with flavor and unexpected combinations. Inspired as much by Providence as by Italy, these recipes reveal Chez Panisse's strong Mediterranean affinities, not only in the choice of ingredients, but also in the combinations that make them so tantalizing. Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza & Calzone will send cooks from the garden to the kitchen, rejoicing in the bounty of nature and in miraculous transformations of fresh, beautiful ingredients into tantalizing meals. Praise for Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza & Calzone “After reading Alice Water's new book, I'm ready to proclaim her a culinary oracle. She dazzles me—the things she does with garden-fresh ingredients, the unexpected and wonderful results she obtains. This is a glorious book by a great chef.”—Paula Wolfert “These recipes are fun to read, a good combination of the tried and true and the extrasensory perception that is almost a trademark of Alice's cooking. I especially like havuing the four seasonal sections in which the accent is on what is fresh then. The fruits and herbs and everything else that goes on the table are of that one special time in the year.”—M.F.K. Fisher “Pizza? What an odd, ordinary thing for one of America's most respected establishments to put on the menu. When the pizza came and I tasted it, I saw what Alice Waters was about: the ordinary made extraordinary by the use of fine unusual ingredients—in this case girolles in a general creaminess, spiked with a little Parmesan and onion—put together by a skillful and unusual taste.”—Jane Grigson

A culinary tour of Italy offers regional specialties and includes a guide to shopping for ingredients.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A fascinating look at how consumers perceive logos, ads, commercials, brands, and products.”—Time How much do we know about why we buy? What truly influences our decisions in today’s message-cluttered world? In Buyology, Martin Lindstrom presents the astonishing findings from his groundbreaking three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study—a cutting-edge experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what captures our interest—and drives us to buy. Among the questions he explores: • Does sex actually sell? • Does subliminal advertising still surround us? • Can “cool” brands trigger our mating instincts? • Can our other senses—smell, touch, and sound—be aroused when we see a product? Buyology is a fascinating and shocking journey into the mind of today's consumer that will captivate anyone who's been seduced—or turned off—by marketers' relentless attempts to win our loyalty, our money, and our minds.