A FINALIST FOR THE NEW ENGLAND BOOK AWARD FOR NON FICTION A PASTE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF TIMEOUT NEW YORK’S BEST SUMMER BEACH READS OF 2017 ONE OF REAL SIMPLE’S 25 FATHER’S DAY BOOKS THAT COVER ALL OF DAD’S INTERESTS The stunning and long-awaited memoir from the beloved founder of the James Beard Award-winning website Leite’s Culinaria—a candid, courageous, and at times laugh-out-loud funny story of family, food, mental illness, and sexual identity. Born into a family of Azorean immigrants, David Leite grew up in the 1960s in a devoutly Catholic, blue-collar, food-crazed Portuguese home in Fall River, Massachusetts. A clever and determined dreamer with a vivid imagination and a flair for the dramatic, “Banana” as his mother endearingly called him, yearned to live in a middle-class house with a swinging kitchen door just like the ones on television, and fell in love with everything French, thanks to his Portuguese and French-Canadian godmother. But David also struggled with the emotional devastation of manic depression. Until he was diagnosed in his mid-thirties, David found relief from his wild mood swings in learning about food, watching Julia Child, and cooking for others. Notes on a Banana is his heartfelt, unflinchingly honest, yet tender memoir of growing up, accepting himself, and turning his love of food into an award-winning career. Reminiscing about the people and events that shaped him, David looks back at the highs and lows of his life: from his rejection of being gay and his attempt to “turn straight” through Aesthetic Realism, a cult in downtown Manhattan, to becoming a writer, cookbook author, and web publisher, to his twenty-four-year relationship with Alan, known to millions of David’s readers as “The One,” which began with (what else?) food. Throughout the journey, David returns to his stoves and tables, and those of his family, as a way of grounding himself. A blend of Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, the food memoirs by Ruth Reichl, Anthony Bourdain, and Gabrielle Hamilton, and the character-rich storytelling of Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris, and Jenny Lawson, Notes on a Banana is a feast that dazzles, delights, and, ultimately, heals.

"Award-winning journalist Dan Koeppel navigates across the planet and throughout history, telling the cultural and scientific story of the world's most ubiquitous fruit"--Page 4 of cover.

A boy's-eye-view of the everyday brings alive all the wonder and oddity of the world inside our own heads.

In THE COMPLETE BOOK OF BANANAS, W.O. Lessard writes to fill a void in information available to a small but growing population of the world. One interested in growing bananas as a hobby. The author is an accepted authority on the growing of bananas with twenty five years of growing experience. He is well known throughout the banana industry & is currently employed by a major South American banana company as a growing consultant. The book consists of 120 pages packed with information on history, culture, diseases & cold protection of the banana. There is a compendium consisting of a discussion of 50 varieties of bananas along with 42 color photographs. There are 11 pages of recipes gleaned from many tropical countries describing how to use bananas in every stage of maturity from green to overripe. The book is of top quality in every respect. It is hardbound with a leather cover & a high quality dust cover. It gives all the information a hobby grower needs to grow a small grove of bananas in the American sunbelt or a greenhouse. The cost of the book is $35.00. Contact person is William Lessard, 19201 SW 248 St., Homestead, FL 33031. (305) 247-0397.

Depicted as braggart, brute, and bore in The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan has gotten a bad rap and means to correct the record. That weak-kneed, simpering cousin of his wife's, with his prattling about some lost idealized American individualism and rectitude, was not only a fool and a liar, but worse: a failed bond salesman. Pathetic. But by 1924 Tom has bigger problems than the pathos of the summer of '22. First, there's Aunt Gertrude, who has assumed control of the Buchanan fortune. Second, what with Daisy getting jowly and the maids indiscreet, there's little tranquillity at home. Third, a revolution is brewing in Nicaragua that's threatening to ensnare the family investments. So when Tom is dispatched to maneuver among Nicaragua's international corporate intrigues, machine-gun-toting rival political parties, and competing American intelligence agencies, he spies his chance. A rollicking, outrageous, and altogether brilliant perversion of known facts, Banana Republican sends the sexist, racist, elitist Buchanan careening through America's brilliantly mismanaged intervention in Nicaragua in the early twentieth century. Eric Rauchway bends history to Buchanan's memoir as Tom blunders, shoots, and screws his way through the historical record and makes the case that greed and amorality have always been at the heart of the American dream.

This re-telling of an Indonesian trickster tale is beautifully illustrated on cloth in the traditional Kalamkari style of textile painting.

An adaptation of an Indonesian trickster tale about Kanchil the mouse deer.