Food writer and clinical psychologist Scott Haas wanted to know what went on inside the mind of a top chef—and what kind of emotional dynamics drove the fast-paced, intense interactions inside a great restaurant. To capture all the heat and hunger, he spent eighteen months immersed in the kitchen of James Beard Award-winner Tony Maws’ restaurant, Craigie on Main, in Boston. He became part of the family, experiencing the drama first-hand. Here, Haas exposes the inner life of a chef, what it takes to make food people crave, and how to achieve greatness in a world that demands more than passion and a sharp set of knives. A lens into what motivates and inspires all chefs—including Thomas Keller, Andrew Carmellini, whose stories are also shared here—Back of the House will change the way you think about food—and about the complicated people who cook it and serve it.

Honorable Mention, Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, given by the Eastern Sociological Society 2021 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine How workers navigate race, gender, and class in the food service industry Two unequal worlds of work exist within the upscale restaurant scene of Los Angeles. White, college-educated servers operate in the front of the house—also known as the public areas of the restaurant—while Latino immigrants toil in the back of the house and out of customer view. In Front of the House, Back of the House, Eli Revelle Yano Wilson shows us what keeps these workers apart, exploring race, class, and gender inequalities in the food service industry. Drawing on research at three different high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, Wilson highlights why these inequalities persist in the twenty-first century, pointing to discriminatory hiring and supervisory practices that ultimately grant educated whites access to the most desirable positions. Additionally, he shows us how workers navigate these inequalities under the same roof, making sense of their jobs, their identities, and each other in a world that reinforces their separateness. Front of the House, Back of the House takes us behind the scenes of the food service industry, providing a window into the unequal lives of white and Latino restaurant workers.

Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery

A classic work on farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders refreshed with a new introduction. Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn portrays the four essential components of the stately and beautiful connected farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders that stand today as a living expression of a rural culture, offering insights into the people who made them and their agricultural way of life. A visual delight as well as an engaging tribute to our nineteenth-century forebears, this book, first published nearly forty years ago, has become one of the standard works on regional farmsteads in America. This new edition features a new preface by the author.

A home of one’s own has always been a cornerstone of the American dream, fulfilling like nothing else the desire for comfort, financial security, independence, and with a little luck, even a touch of distinctive character, or even beauty. But what we have come to regard as almost a national birthright has recently begun to elude more and more prospective homebuyers. Where housing is concerned, affordable and well-crafted rarely exist together. Or do they? For years, founding editor-in-chief of Dwell magazine and noted architecture and design critic Karrie Jacobs had been confronting this question both professionally and personally. Finally, she decided to see for herself whether it was possible to build the home of her own dreams for a reasonable sum. The Perfect $100,000 House is the story of that quest, a search that takes her from a two-week crash course in housebuilding in Vermont to a road trip of some 14,000 miles. In the course of her journey Jacobs encounters a group of intrepid and visionary architects and builders working to revolutionize the way Americans thinks about homes, about construction techniques, and about the very idea of community. By her trip’s end Jacobs, has not only had a practical and sobering education in the economics, aesthetics, and politics of homebuilding, but has been spurred to challenge her own deeply held beliefs about what constitutes an ideal home. The Perfect $100,000 House is a compelling and inspiring demonstration that we can live in homes that are sensible, modest, and beautiful.

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Just like every other Christmas, eleven-year-old Eric is looking forward to visiting his grandmother during winter break along with his sister and cousins. After he arrives, Eric mistakenly believes that this visit will be just like all the others. One night when Eric notices his grandmother acting strangely as she emerges out of a secret room she keeps locked in the back of the house, his curiosity about the room ignites. After he enlists the help of his sister and cousins, Eric sets out to unearth the truth behind the secret room and his grandmother’s connection. In their quest to learn more, the children unwittingly open a gate that has been holding back dark spirits for thousands of years, and then realize that the spirits have been using his grandmother to lure children into the shadows. Now it is up to Eric and his companions to try to save his grandmother from being possessed by the spirits, and hopefully more children from meeting a dark fate. In this horror tale, an eleven-year-old boy, his sister, and cousins set out to discover the dark secrets hidden in a room in the back of his grandmother’s house.