Kirjahaku

Food has functioned both as a source of continuity and as a subject of adaptation in the course of human history. Onions have been a staple of the European diet since the Paleolithic era, while the orange is once again being cultivated in great quantities in Southern China, where it was originally cultivated. Other foods—such as the apple and pear in Central Asia, the tomato in Mexico, the chili pepper in South America, and rice in South Asia—remain staples of their original regions and of the world diet today.Still other items are now grown in places that would have seemed impossible in the past-bananas in geothermally heated greenhouses in Iceland, corn on the fringes of the Gobi, and tomatoes in space. But how did humans discover how to grow and consume these foods in the first place? How were they chosen over competing foods? How did they come to be so important to us? In this charming and frequently surprising compendium, Gregory McNamee gathers revelations from history, anthropology, chemistry, biology, and many other fields, and spins them into entertaining tales of discovery, complete with delicious recipes from many culinary traditions around the world. Among the 30 types of food discussed in the course of this alphabetically-arranged work are: the apple, the banana, chocolate, coffee, corn, garlic, honey, millet, the olive, the peanut, the pineapple, the plum, rice, the soybean, the tomato, and the watermelon. All of the recipes included with these diverse food histories have been adapted for recreation in the modern kitchen.

Food has functioned both as a source of continuity and as a subject of adaptation over the course of human history. Onions have been a staple of the European diet since the Paleolithic era; by contrast, the orange is once again being cultivated in large quantities in southern China, where it was originally grown. Other foods remain staples of their original regions as well as of the world diet at large. Still others are now grown in places that would have seemed impossible in the past—bananas in heated greenhouses in Iceland, corn on the fringes of the Gobi Desert, tomatoes on the International Space Station. But how did humans discover how to grow and incorporate these foods into their diet in the first place? How were they chosen over competing foods? In this charming and frequently surprising compendium, Moveable Feasts gathers revelations from history, anthropology, chemistry, biology, and many other fields and spins them into entertaining tales of discovery while adding more than ninety delicious recipes from various culinary traditions around the world. Among the thirty types of food discussed in the course of this alphabetically arranged work are the apple, the banana, chocolate, coffee, corn, garlic, honey, millet, the olive, the peanut, the pineapple, the plum, rice, the soybean, the tomato, and the watermelon. All the recipes accompanying these diverse food histories have been adapted for re-creation in the modern kitchen.

For sixty million years, the Gila River, longer than the Hudson and the Delaware combined, has shaped the ecology of the Southwest from its source in New Mexico to its confluence with the Colorado River in Arizona. Today, for at least half its length, the Gila is dead, like so many of the West’s great rivers, owing to overgrazing, damming, and other practices. This richly documented cautionary tale narrates the Gila’s natural and human history. Now updated, McNamee’s study traces recent efforts to resuscitate portions of this important riparian corridor.

In this entertaining history, Gregory McNamee explores the many ethnic and cultural traditions that have contributed to the food of the Southwest. He traces the origins of the cuisine to the arrival of humans in the Americas, the work of the earliest farmers of Mesoamerica, and the most ancient trade networks joining peoples of the coast, plains, and mountains. From the ancient chile pepper and agave to the comparatively recent fare of sushi and Frito pie, this complex culinary journey involves many players over space and time. Born of scarcity, migration, and climate change, these foods are now fully at home in the Southwest of today—and with the “southwesternization” of the American palate at large, they are found across the globe. McNamee extends that story across thousands of years to the present, even imagining what the southwestern menu will look like in the near future.

Not much can be said with certainty about the life of Claudius Aelianus, known to us as Aelian. He was born sometime between A.D. 165 and 170 in the hill town of Praeneste, what is now Palestrina, about twenty-five miles from Rome, Italy. He grew up speaking that town's version of Latin, a dialect that other speakers of the language seem to have found curious, but--somewhat unusually for his generation, though not for Romans of earlier times--he preferred to communicate in Greek. Trained by a sophist named Pausanias of Caesarea, Aelian was known in his time for a work called Indictment of the Effeminate, an attack on the recently deceased emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who was nasty even by the standards of Imperial Rome. He was also fond of making almanac-like collections, only fragments of which survive, devoted to odd topics such as manifestations of the divine and the workings of the supernatural. His De Natura Animalium (On the Nature of Animals) has a similar patchwork quality, but it was esteemed enough in his time to survive more or less whole, and it is about all that we know of Aelian's work today. A mostly randomly ordered collection of stories that he found interesting enough to relate about animals--whether or not he believed them--Aelian's book constitutes an early encyclopedia of animal behavior, affording unparalleled insight into what ancient Romans knew about and thought about animals--and, of particular interest to modern scholars, about animal minds. If the science is sometimes sketchy, the facts often fanciful, and the history sometimes suspect, it is clear enough that Aelian had a fine time assembling the material, which can be said, in the most general terms, to support the notion of a kind of intelligence in nature and that extends human qualities, for good and bad, to animals. His stories, which extend across the known world of Aelian's time, tend to be brief and to the point, and many return to a trenchant question: If animals can respect their elders and live honorably within their own tribes, why must humans be so appallingly awful? Aelian is as brisk, as entertaining, and as scholarly a writer as Pliny, the much better known Roman natural historian. That he is not better known is simply an accident: he has not been widely translated into English, or indeed any European language. This selection from his work will introduce readers to a lively mind and a witty writer who has much to tell us.

The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Stories is a celebration of the people, ideas, inventions, teaching, and structures that have been part of the school’s evolution from a small land-grant institution to an internationally renowned research institution. Drawing on half a century of connection with the University of Arizona as a student, staff member, and faculty member, Gregory McNamee presents a history through the lens of a hundred subjects. That story begins in 1885, with the establishment of the school, which quickly proved itself to be a powerhouse in its foundational “four pillars”: agriculture and earth sciences, followed by astronomy and anthropology. In the years following World War II, those four pillars became ever more important to the University, even as countless other fields of study gained prominence: optical sciences, women’s studies, the humanities, mathematics, and more. This phenomenal institution has as its setting the Sonoran Desert, and, closer to home, to a built environment that is widely considered among the most scenic in the country, from the Historic District with its buildings that are more than a century old to the latest steel-and-glass constructions on the edges of the ever-expanding campus. McNamee relates this history in an entertaining manner, peppering discussion of serious intellectual and institutional themes with lighter moments—the origins of the university's rivalry with Arizona State, the ghosts that are said to lurk about campus, and more. Wildcats everywhere will delight in McNamee’s celebration of the people, places, learning, books, and pastimes that have distinguished our school.

For 2,500 years, adults and children alike have been listening to the stories of Aesop. Originating in the folk wisdom of rural Asia Minor, these popular fables have been retold, repurposed, and altered over the centuries; in the process, they have sometimes been changed so much that they bear little resemblance to their simple forebears, which ask their listeners and readers to think for themselves, to supply their own conclusions. In this collection, Gregory McNamee draws on the Greek originals to provide Aesop's fables in a form that Aesop himself might recognise -- ones in which fleas and foxes converse, people sometimes learn from their errors, and things are not always what they seem.

Philoktetes, a classical book, has been considered essential throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.