Biography
In 2004, Momofuku Noodle Bar opened in a tiny, stark space in Manhattan's East Village. Its young chef-owner, David Chang, worked the line, serving ramen and pork buns to a mix of fellow restaurant cooks and confused diners whose idea of ramen was instant noodles in Styrofoam cups. It would have been impossible to know it at the time--and certainly Chang would have bet against himself--but he, who had failed at almost every endeavor in his life, was about to become one of the most influential chefs of his generation, driven by the question, "What if the underground could become the mainstream?" Chang grew up the youngest son of a deeply religious Korean American family in Virginia. Graduating college aimless and depressed, he fled the States for Japan, hoping to find some sense of belonging. While teaching English in a backwater town, he experienced the highs of his first full-blown manic episode, and began to think that the cooking and sharing of food could give him both purpose and agency in his life. Full of grace, candor, grit, and humor, Eat a Peach chronicles Chang's switchback path. He lays bare his mistakes and wonders about his extraordinary luck as he recounts the improbable series of events that led him to the top of his profession. He wrestles with his lifelong feelings of otherness and inadequacy, explores the mental illness that almost killed him, and finds hope in the shared value of deliciousness. Along the way, Chang gives us a penetrating look at restaurant life, in which he balances his deep love for the kitchen with unflinching honesty about the industry's history of brutishness and its uncertain future.
Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has crafted a biography that dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishments of a mythic figure whose early-seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion-the man Albert Einstein called the father of modern physics-indeed of modern science altogether. It is also a stunning portrait of Galileo's daughter, a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me.
Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. During that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, Galileo sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. Filled with human drama and scientific adventure, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable story. Praise for Galileo's Daughter: [Sobel] shows herself a virtuoso at encapsulating the history and the politics of science. Her descriptions of Galileo's ideas...are pithy, vivid, and intelligible.-Wall Street JournalAn Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year - A Guardian Best Book of 2020 - Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize - Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize
When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries. I am eleven, a dark-haired child given to staring out window ... Her voice makes it 1773, a fine day in May, and puts English soldiers crouching in ambush; I add ditch-water to drench their knees. Their muskets point towards a young man who is falling from his saddle in slow, slow motion. A woman hurries in and kneels over him, her voice rising in an antique formula of breath and syllable the teacher calls a caoineadh, a keen to lament the dead.
In the eighteenth century, on discovering her husband has been murdered, an Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament that reaches across centuries to the young Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose fascination with it is later rekindled when she narrowly avoids fatal tragedy in her own life and becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the poem Peter Levi has famously called "the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain" during its era. A kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, autofiction, and literary studies, A Ghost in the Throat moves fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and the people who make it.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN "McConaughey's book invites us to grapple with the lessons of his life as he did--and to see that the point was never to win, but to understand."--Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck I've been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life's challenges--how to get relative with the inevitable--you can enjoy a state of success I call "catching greenlights." So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Hopefully, it's medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot's license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears. It's a love letter. To life. It's also a guide to catching more greenlights--and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck. The short dust jacket included with this hardcover edition is an intentional design choice.
Sandy: Wow - what a life Sarah Frey has led. At only 44, she has lived on her own (leaving an erratic homelife behind) since she was 15. Her re-invention of her family farm into the biggest supplier of pumpkins in the world is an inspiring story that strains credulity. Her father’s strange ways nonetheless armed her with the love and self-belief she needed to, say, ask for a $10,000 bank loan at 16 to purchase a bigger better truck because she intended to build her mother’s hobby business of hauling produce from farms to stores. She got it and paid it back in cash in 3 months. It’s not really like Educated though it’s easy to compare the two, because her beloved 4 older brothers are the center of her stability and a big reason for her confidence and work ethic. Her writing style is conversational and plain-spoken - it’s the stories that you will never forget. After the Harvard Business School used her Farm as a case study, she learned and shares with us how and why her upbringing made her the success she is. Great for those who love memoir but also - the entrepreneur or business person in your life.
Frey details her life growing up poor on a southeastern Illinois farm, where they had no indoor plumbing and burned wood for heat in winter and where they grew or shot their food. The author and her brothers learned to be tough at a young age, but she doesn’t relate her circumstances in anything less than a matter-of-fact, frequently enthusiastic voice, making the narrative move along in a highly engrossing manner. Though life was demanding, the family was tight. Frey’s father might have taught her independence, but he had no head for business and got by on his wits. Her mother would do what she could to help—e.g., running a melon route where she would pick up local watermelons and cantaloupes and sell them to regional markets. It was backbreaking work, but it put cash in their hands to pay the mortgage. “I loved meeting people, making deals, and I also knew that this was something that could be scaled up exponentially,” writes Frey, who, at 14, learned the fundamental elements of commerce. At 15, she had her own melon route; at 17, she bought the family farm when the bank came to foreclose. “Without this land, I thought, where will we be? More importantly, who will we be?....If I walked away,” she writes, “my brothers and I would never have anything to come home to.” Throughout, Frey makes clear her belief that family sticks together. “Blood is blood,” she writes. “Alone in the world we would be broken. Together we could withstand anything. Right?” And they did, with endless determination and a lot of learning on the fly. With earnest, effective storytelling, Frey demonstrates her character: “impatient, driven, restless, and at time obsessive”—and highly successful. A heart-gladdening memoir of a rare triumph over poverty.