The French Laundry Cookbook

Thomas Keller, chef/proprietor of the French Laundry--the most exciting place to eat in the United States, writes Ruth Reichl in the New York Times--is a wizard, a purist, a man obsessed with getting it right. His flavors have clarity and intensity. His methods dazzle. Every mouthful is an explosion of taste. This cookbook, Keller's first, is as satisfying as a French Laundry meal, a series of small, highly refined, intensely focused courses. 150 recipes an more than 200 photographs  

In this remarkable new biography, Peter Ackroyd offers a different view of Dickens to that presented in his earlier study of the author. In that book, Ackroyd's attempts to mimic the voice of the great writer were highly controversial, though some saw the book as a radical re-invention of the biography form. There is no arguing with the brilliant achievement of the more straightforward Charles Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion, however; the picture of Dickens and his complicated private life that emerges is fastidiously detailed and powerfully evocative 

Rodrick rules

Imaginative cartoon drawings combined with fresh, wacky humor. It is just plain fun to read. Useful stuff for english teachers and teen students. Second book of the serie.

Marc Bloch's supreme achievement was to recreate the vivid and complex world of Western Europe from the 9th to the 13th centuries. The author treats feudalism as a vitalising force in European society. He surveys the social and economic conditions in which feudalism developed; he sees the structures of kinship which underlay the formal relationships of vassal and overlord. His insights into the lives of the nobility and the clergy and his deep understanding of the processes at work in medieval Europe, are profound and memorable.

The Birth of Purgatory is concerned not with theological discussion but with the growth of an idea, with the relation between belief and society, with mental structures, and with the historical role of the imagination. Le Goff argues that the doctrine of Purgatory did not appear in the Latin theology of the West before the 12th century. He shows that the growth of a belief in an intermediate place between Heaven and Hell was closely bound up with profound changes in the social and intellectual reality of the Middle Ages.