"How to Eat a Small Country shares a few key traits with Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love in particular an infectiously likeable narrator and mouthwatering descriptions of European food. But Finley’s memoir is less precious, more honest, and ultimately more rewarding." -- Boston Globe A professionally trained cook turned stay-at-home mom, Amy Finley decided on a whim to send in an audition tape for season three of The Next Food Network Star, and the impossible happened: she won. So why did she walk away from it all? A triumphant and endearing tale of family, food, and France, Amy’s story is an inspiring read for women everywhere. While Amy was hoping to bring American families together with her simple Gourmet Next Door recipes, she ended up separating from her French husband, Greg, who didn’t want to be married to a celebrity. Amy felt betrayed. She was living a dream—or was she? She was becoming famous, cooking for people out there in TV land, in thirty minutes, on a kitchen set . . . instead of cooking and eating with her own family at home. In a desperate effort to work things out, Amy makes the controversial decision to leave her budding television career behind and move her family to France, where she and Greg lived after they first met and fell in love. How to Eat a Small Country is Amy’s personal story of her rewarding struggle to reunite through the simple, everyday act of cooking and eating together. Meals play a central role in Amy’s new life, from meeting the bunny destined to become their classic Burgundian dinner of lapin à la moutarde to dealing with the aftermath of a bouillabaisse binge. And as she, Greg, and their two young children wend their way through rural France, they gradually reweave the fabric of their family. At times humorous and heart-wrenching, and always captivating and delicious, How to Eat a Small Country chronicles the food-filled journey that one couple takes to stay together.

Science gossip and Country queries and notes are incorporated with this.

Latitude 20.04N, Longitude 155.71W is a Hawaiian story told through snapshots and snippets of the lives of fabled and fictionalized family members named Lindsey, Beckley, and others. Through them, I recall bits and pieces of Hawaiis rich and glorious past, everyday folks living ordinary lives doing extraordinary things. I hope you, as the reader, will be able to relate to and find the tie that binds us as Gods childrenone planet, one people, one purpose. A wide swath of time is covered in this book of short chapters from the creation of the Hawaiian Islands (eighty million years ago), to the landing of our people at Waiahukini (AD 300), to the arrival of James Cook (1778) and the first New England Missionary Company (1820), to the establishment of sugar and pineapple plantations and cattle empires (1800s), and to the political trade winds that blew across the archipelago; and from chiefdoms to unified kingdom (1819), to provisional government (1893), to republic (1895), to territory (1900), and to statehood (1959). Holly Birch and Mister John are focal characters. Latitude 20.04N, Longitude 155.71W is history written in shorthand in a fun, interesting, and dynamic way. I started this journey with that intent. I hope I have achieved my intention. You be the judge. Always with aloha . . . Bob Lindsey.