My New Book List

I love shopping for new books! Love, Love, Love it! Of course there are always two impediments to actual book buying the first being time the second being money, but isn't that the case for just about everything in this world. Yesterday I was able to spend a little time in the Barnes and Noble and walked away with Little Heathens :Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. I've been talking a lot lately with a good man I know who happened to grow up on an Iowa farm during the great depression, still owns the farm and, at eighty years old, travels back to Iowa several times a year to help with the farm work. After talking with him I couldn't pass up this absorbing and inspiring looking memoir. With great reviews by Elizabeth Gilbert and others.

I also walked away with The Gardeners A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food by Tanya L.K. Denkla (1994, updated and republished in 2004). Since 1997 she has worked as Senior Associate at the UVA Institute for Environmental Negotiation. Within the last couple of years she has also helped found and conduct the Virginia Natural Resources Leadership Institute. This is on top of finishing her pre-med requirements and writing one of the most successful organic gardening guides around. As always, however, there were way more books than could fit in my basket. Here is a quick run down of five more I'm adding to my reading wish list (with their links to amazon.com all with free supper savor shipping! Whoopee!

1. Farm City by Novella Carpenter. This book is being reviewed by everyone, positively. Chronicling Carpenter's experience farming inside a troubled Oakland California neighborhood, Farm City gets into the head on gritty of urban Oakland farming... reputedly with wit, intelligence, and compassion.

2. Life is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days by James and Kay Salter. This book contains all kinds of practical, historical, and fantasmical information about food, and it's preparation, preservation, presentation, and of course, it's consumption. Mostly this book is beautiful! I was so tempted by it's pretty pages.

3. Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, impractical, often eccentric, ultimately Brilliant Making of a Revolution. by Thomas McNamee

4. Wisdom of the Last Farmer by David mas Masumoto

5. Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Goat Hearding and the Art of Making Cheese by Brad Kessler.