Musings of A Chinese Gourmet

This book, written in the early 1950s by a former Chinese ambassador to London, is a cultured and entertaining view of the gastronomic side of Chinese life. F.T. Cheng sets out to show Westerners that there was a lot more to Chinese food culture than chop suey. It is a wonderful reminder of the richness and depth of Chinese culture from a man who also completely understood the West.

Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller

Composer, conductor, French horn player, publisher, broadcaster and former president of the New England Conservatory of Music, Schuller is a learned authority on jazz and one of the world's best writers on music. Introduced by a formidable pundit, this collection of Schuller's writings brings together pieces on Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, Sarah Vaughan and the third stream, reflections on the performance of new music (including his own opera The Visitation), esthetic and educational ideals, and objectivity and subjectivity in the arts.