Friday, June 22, 2012

June 2012 Browsing Books---Finding the Feasts

Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers and One Picky Kid by Melanie Rehak
Library Call Number: TX633.R45 2010
Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor) 
Author Rehak begins a year-long search as a thoughtful eater and new mother into the food choices of today’s world, trying to understand how to choose the right foods, do the right thing, eat the best meals possible and “make peace with our food,” even if it means her child will occasionally hit the Burger King later on.
American Terroir: Savoring the Pleasures of our Woods, Waters and Fields by Rowan Jacobson.
Library Call Number: TX631.J335 2010
Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor)
 
Terroir means “taste of place,” the local soil, air and water that gives many of our foods, from apples to maple syrup, chocolate to oysters, a distinct and local flavor. Like a Michigan apple grower who can bite into a local apple and tell you whose orchard it came from, Jacobson’s book explores the “flavor landscapes of America…where our great foods live.”  With recipes.

Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens by Andrew Beahrs 
Library Call Number: TX633.B393 2010
Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor)
Adapted from the dust jacket:  In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain paused during a tour of Europe to compose a fantasy menu of the American dishes he missed the most. Desperately sick of European hotel cooking, his menu included some 80 regional specialties, a true love letter to American food: Lake Trout, from Tahoe. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Canvasback-duck, from Baltimore. Black-bass, from the Mississippi.  Beahrs’ book sets out to discover whether eight of these forgotten regional specialties can still be found on American tables. The menu, it turns out, was also a memoir and a map. The dishes he yearned for were all connected to cherished moments in his life-from the New Orleans croakers he loved as a young man on the Mississippi to the maple syrup he savored in Connecticut, with his family, during his final, lonely years


Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Library Videos for June 2012---Glimpses of America


Selling Sickness: A Pill for Every Ill, a documentary by Catherine Scott 
Call Number:  HF5439.D75S44 2004
          A Film that looks at how drug manufacturers today fund aggressive marketing campaigns designed to create public awareness of previously unknown diseases, and how what were previously thought of as character traits become “medicalized.”  Shyness thus becomes branded as 'Social Anxiety Disorder,' constant worry becomes 'Generalized Anxiety Disorder,' and premenstrual tension is now 'Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder.' The sale of SSRI anti-depressant medications used to treat these and other diseases, such as Paxil, Zoloft and Prozac, has become an annual $20 billion market.   The film features commentary from paid medical consultants to the drug companies, patients, researchers, patient advocates, advertisers, attorneys, and psychiatrist Dr. David Healy, a critic of the pharmaceutical industry. SELLING SICKNESS also visits trade shows and professional conferences to show how the pharmaceutical industry promotes the use of its drugs within the medical community.

Disconnected, a documentary; executive producer, Melody Gilbert.
Library Call Number: QA76.9.C66D57 2008. 
     Three college students take on the challenge of giving up their computers to see how their academic, social, and work lives are affected. No Facebook. No YouTube. No e-mail. How will they get their work done? Will they cheat? Who will survive the longest? This one-hour documentary follows Carleton College students Andrew, Caitlin, and Chel as they go through "digital detox" and learn to interact with themselves and with others in ways we have largely forgotten.



When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts by Spike Lee 
Call Number: HV636 2005.L8 W496 2006.
     One year after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, director Spike Lee presents a four-hour, four-part chronicle recounting, through words and images, one of our country’s most profound natural disasters. In addition to revisiting the hours leading up to the arrival of Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane before it hit the coast of Louisiana, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts tells the personal stories of those who lived to tell about it, at the same time exploring the underbelly of a nation where the divide along race and class lines has never been more pronounced.