Category Archives: Books

Books

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Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women – Ellen Atlanta

We live in a new age of beauty. With advancements in cosmetic surgery, walk-in treatments, augmented-reality face filters, photo-editing apps, and exposure to more images than ever, we have the ability to craft the image we want everyone to see. We pinch, pull, squeeze, tweeze, smooth, and slice ourselves beyond recognition. But is modern beauty culture truly empowering? Are we really in control?

In Pixel Flesh, Ellen Atlanta holds a mirror up to our modern beauty ideal and the pressure to present a perfect image, to live in an age of constant comparison and curated feeds. She weaves in her personal story with others’ to reconfigure our obsession with the cult of beauty and to explore the reality of living in a world of paradoxes: We know our standards are unhealthy, but following them helps us succeed. We resent social media but continue to scroll. We know digital beauty is artificial, yet we strive for it.

From Love Island to lip filler, “blackfishing” to the “beauty tax,” Pixel Flesh exposes what young women face under a dominant industry. Nuanced, unflinching, and razor sharp, it unmasks the absurdities of the standards we suddenly find ourselves upholding and acts as a rallying cry and a refusal to suffer in silence.

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I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine – Daniel J. Levitin

Music is one of humanity’s oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind.

In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.

Levitin is not your typical scientist—he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today’s most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.

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The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading – Dwight Garner

Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, simply gone together. The book you’re holding is a product of these combined gluttonies.

Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of Garner’s Quotations , serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination therein, The Upstairs On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading is a charming, emotional memoir, one that only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and of this breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking, and dinner.

Through his lifelong infatuation with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (and about his father’s famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family (“Cree grew up taking leftover frog legs to school in her lunch box”), and the words and dishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored, though it may just whet your appetite for more.
Genres
Food
Memoir
Nonfiction
Books About Books
Essays
Audiobook
Biography

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Science Of Spice – Stuart Farrimond

Break new ground with this spice book like no other, from TV personality, food scientist and bestselling author, Dr Stuart Farrimond.

Taking the periodic table of spices as a starting point, explore the science behind the art of making incredible spice blends and how the flavour compounds within spices work together to create exciting layers of flavour and new sensations.

This is the perfect cookbook for curious cooks and adventurous foodies. Spice profiles – organised by their dominant flavour compound – showcase the world’s top spices, with recipe ideas, information on how to buy, use, and store, and more in-depth science to help you release the flavours and make your own spice connections.

There is also a selection of recipes using innovative spice blends, based on the new spice science, designed to brighten your palate and inspire your own culinary adventures. If you’ve ever wondered what to do with that unloved jar of sumac, why some spices taste stronger than others, or how to make your own personal garam masala, this inspirational guide has all the answers.

Explore the world’s best spices, be inspired to make your own new spice blends, and take your cooking to new heights. You’ll turn to this beautiful and unique book time and again – to explore and to innovate.

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Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World – Bethany Allen

Beijing Rules is a superb expose which reveals how China learned to master capitalism which it now wields in its own authoritarian form to achieve global dominance. As Bethany Allen, the China reporter for Axios, reveals, the long-standing belief that free-trade capitalism is a democratizing force–the assumption underlying much of American and Western policy since World War II–is demonstrably false. Capitalism is actually a two-way street: if democratic values can travel in one direction, authoritarianism can travel in the other. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has successfully engineered what Cold War champions believed to be impossible: an unabashedly Communist Party leading a prosperous capitalist state.

Written by the first American journalist to expose covert Chinese influence operations in the United States, Beijing Rules includes headline-making stories of western institutions bowing to Beijing’s coercion–a glimpse of what American’s future might look like should liberal democracy come firmly under the thumb of authoritarian capitalism. Grounded in deep investigative reporting, it sounds the alarm about what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we now take for granted.