The Smoked Seafood Cookbook

How do you cook with smoked seafood? And can it work "outside the bagel"? Those are two questions that hundreds of customers asked over the years when they stopped by T.R. Durham's shop, Durham's Tracklements & Smokery in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to buy his famous smoked seafood. Inspired, Durham eventually collected enough recipes not only to fill a book but to answer those questions in imaginative and delicious ways.

The Smoked Seafood Cookbook uniquely addresses a neglected spot on the culinary bookshelf. With everything from smoked salmon to mackerel to finnan haddie and smoked scallops, Durham's recipes offer ideas for exciting salads; pasta, potato, and other starch dishes paired with smoked seafood; soups from every corner of the globe; easy-to-prepare appetizers; even smoked-seafood variations on the classic dish brandade.

The Smoked Seafood Cookbook is also designed to take advantage of the near-universal availability of smoked seafood online, via mail-order, in specialty shops, and in almost every supermarket in America. It offers information on the kinds of smoked seafood available, their particular flavors and textures, and what cooking applications best suit each variety. Durham provides chapters on do-it-yourself techniques for home smoking, an illustrated chapter on slicing and serving your own smoked fish, and a listing of sources for smoked seafood. Additionally, the book is beautifully illustrated throughout with color and black-and-white drawings by local artist Noel Bielaczyc.

As a way to raise further the profile of smoked seafood's role in cooking—and to provide the culinary industry's endorsement of that idea—the book is sprinkled throughout with recipes from professional chefs across the country. Among the contributors are Mario Batali, chef-owner of many restaurants and author of several cookbooks; Sara Moulton, cookbook author and executive chef of Gourmet magazine; Pete Peterson, chef-owner of Tapawingo in Ellsworth, Michigan; Darra Goldstein, cookbook author and editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture; and others.

If you love smoked seafood, or if you've ever wondered what to do with it besides serve it for brunch or put it on a bagel, The Smoked Seafood Cookbook deserves a place in your kitchen.

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Sprawl: A Compact History

As anyone who has flown into Los Angeles at dusk or Houston at midday knows, urban areas today defy traditional notions of what a city is. Our old definitions of urban, suburban, and rural fail to capture the complexity of these vast regions with their superhighways, subdivisions, industrial areas, office parks, and resort areas pushing far out into the countryside. Detractors call it sprawl and assert that it is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Robert Bruegmann calls it a logical consequence of economic growth and the democratization of society, with benefits that urban planners have failed to recognize.

In his incisive history of the expanded city, Bruegmann overturns every assumption we have about sprawl. Taking a long view of urban development, he demonstrates that sprawl is neither recent nor particularly American but as old as cities themselves, just as characteristic of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Paris as it is of Atlanta or Los Angeles. Nor is sprawl the disaster claimed by many contemporary observers. Although sprawl, like any settlement pattern, has undoubtedly produced problems that must be addressed, it has also provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy, and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful.

The first major book to strip urban sprawl of its pejorative connotations, Sprawl offers a completely new vision of the city and its growth. Bruegmann leads readers to the powerful conclusion that "in its immense complexity and constant change, the city-whether dense and concentrated at its core, looser and more sprawling in suburbia, or in the vast tracts of exurban penumbra that extend dozens, even hundreds, of miles-is the grandest and most marvelous work of mankind."

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The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters

Lauded by Calvin Trillin as a man who "does not have to make to with translations like 'Shredded Three Kinds' in Chinese restaurants," in The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters, James D. McCawley offers everyone a guide to deciphering the mysteries of Chinese menus and the opportunity to enjoy new eating experiences. An accessible primer as well as a handy reference, this book shows how Chinese characters are written and referred to, both in script and in type. McCawley provides a guide to pronunciation and includes helpful exercises so users can practice ordering. His novel system of arranging the extensive glossary-which ranges from basics such as "rice" and "fish" to exotica like "Buddha Jumps Wall"-enables even the beginner to find characters quickly and surely. He also includes the nonstandard forms of characters that often turn up on menus.

With this guide in hand, English speakers hold the key to a world of tantalizing-and otherwise unavailable-Chinese dishes.

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Michigan Herb Cookbook

In this unique book, midwest natives Suzanne Breckenridge and Marjorie Snyder have pooled their cooking experience to bring spice to the meals of culinary enthusiasts. The Michigan Herb Cookbook provides essential information for herb novices and experts alike, including a detailed history of the use of herbs, growing tips, and of course recipes including such natural ingredients as herbs, fruits, and produce specific to Michigan customs and climates. Recipes such as "Blueberry Smoked Fish Salad with Dill," "Pumpkin & Pear Tart," and "Michigan Cherry Sauce" rely on regional bounties for their original tastes. The meals bring herbs from Michigan's verdant outdoors inside with a perfect combination of guidance straight from the cook, gardener, or herbalist's mouth.

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The Complete Guide to Petoskey Stones

The Complete Guide to Petoskey Stones is the authoritative guide for everyone who visits northern Michigan and can't wait to comb the beautiful beaches in search of Michigan's official state stone, the Petoskey. This book dispels myths about the Petoskey and reveals the true facts of this ancient fossilized coral. Instructive pictures and maps keep Petoskey fans on track every step of the way while guiding them to the best places to find the stone, including those favored by local Petoskey stone hunters and collectors. Once you've found a piece of the prized Michigan fossil, The Complete Guide to Petoskey Stones leads you through the many methods of polishing that bring this beautiful stone to life.

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Lake Superior Rock Picker's Guide

This guidebook is for anyone who has walked along a Lake Superior beach, picked up a stone, and wondered, "What is this?" Bruce Mueller and Kevin Gauthier researched Lake Superior's entire shoreline to create this thorough and accessible volume. With great detail and helpful illustrations, they describe the kind of rocks you'll find---including copper, iron, and gold---provide hints for telling the stones apart, and show you the best places to find each stone. Also included are suggestions for handling the stones, including the best polishing methods, and fascinating information on the rocks' origins.

A section of color photographs is included to help with identification.

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Voodoo Science - The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Press)

In a time of dazzling scientific progress, how can we separate genuine breakthroughs from the noisy gaggle of false claims? From Deepak Chopra's "quantum alternative to growing old" to unwarranted hype surrounding the International Space Station, Robert Park leads us down the back alleys of fringe science, through the gleaming corridors of Washington power and even into our evolutionary past to search out the origins of voodoo science. Along the way, he offers simple and engaging science lessons, proving that you don't have to be a scientist to spot the fraudulent science that swirls around us.

While remaining highly humorous, this hard-hitting account also tallies the cost: the billions spent on worthless therapies, the tax dollars squandered on government projects that are doomed to fail, the investors bilked by schemes that violate the most fundamental laws of nature. But the greatest cost is human: fear of imaginary dangers, reliance on magical cures, and above all, a mistaken view of how the world works.

To expose the forces that sustain voodoo science, Park examines the role of the media, the courts, bureaucrats and politicians, as well as the scientific community. Scientists argue that the cure is to raise general scientific literacy. But what exactly should a scientifically literate society know? Park argues that the public does not need a specific knowledge of science so much as a scientific world view--an understanding that we live in an orderly universe governed by natural laws that cannot be circumvented.

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Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (University of Nebraska Press)

The Great Plains is a vast expanse of grasslands stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Missouri River and from the Rio Grande to the coniferous forests of Canada--an area more than eighteen hundred miles from north to south and more than five hundred miles from east to west. The Great Plains region includes all or parts of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

The region, once labeled "the Great American Desert," is now more often called the "heartland," or, sometimes, "the breadbasket of the world." Its immense distances, flowing grasslands, sparse population, enveloping horizons, and dominating sky convey a sense of expansiveness, even emptiness or loneliness, a reaction to too much space and one's own meager presence in it.

The Plains region is the home of the Dust Bowl, the massacre at Wounded Knee, the North-West Rebellion, the Tulsa race riot, the Lincoln County War, the purported Roswell alien landing, and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. From it have emerged furs, cattle, corn, wheat, oil, gas, and coal, as well as jazz, literature, and political reform. It has been inhabited for more than twelve thousand years, since Paleo-Indians hunted mammoth and bison. More recent emigrants came from eastern North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, resulting in a complex and distinctive ethnic mosaic.

With 1,316 entries contributed by more than one thousand scholars, this groundbreaking reference work captures what is vital and interesting about the Great Plains--from its temperamental climate to its images and icons, its historical character, its folklore, and its politics. Thoroughly illustrated, annotated, and indexed, this remarkable compendium of information and analysis will prove the definitive and indispensable resource on the Great Plains for many years to come.
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The Notebooks of Robert Frost (Harvard University Press)

Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. In his day, he was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of intense aphoristic thoughts, observations, and meditations in small pocket pads and school theme books throughout his life. These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into Frost's complex and often highly contradictory thinking about poetics, politics, education, psychology, science, and religion--his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War--as well as Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James. Covering a period from the late 1890s to early 1960s, the notebooks reveal the full range of the mind of one of America's greatest poets. Their depth and complexity convey the restless and probing quality of his thought, and show how the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath his appearance of supreme poetic control.

Edited by preeminent Frost scholar Robert Faggen and annotated to help readers with the poet's more elusive references, the notebooks are also thoroughly cross-referenced, marking thematic connections within these and Frost's other writings, including his poetry, letters, and other prose. This is a major new addition to the canon of Robert Frost's writings. Available at Amazon.com

The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home (University of California Press)

"Can you change a tire? Then you can make wine. This according to Sheridan Warrick, Berkeley author of The Way to Make Wine, a step-by-step guide for home vintners. Warrick walks readers through each step of the process, explaining in plain English crushing, the Brix scale, fermentation, racking and bottling. The second part of the book is a how-to on fine-tuning the process. Along the way Warrick includes tips, sidebars and sources for grapes and other supplies. And even if you never bottle a drop, you'll come away with a greater appreciation of what goes into your glass." -- San Francisco Chronicle
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The Scientific Study of Mummies (Cambridge University Press)

Mummies are studied to answer questions about the health, social standing, and beliefs of past human populations, and to reveal the lessons that they present to modern populations. This authoritative reference work explores the reasons why people mummify bodies and the mechanisms by which they are preserved. Arthur Aufderheide details study methods and surveys the myriad examples that can be found worldwide. In addition, he evaluates the use and abuse of mummified bodies throughout the ages, and discusses how mummified remains can be conserved for the future.

"This is one of the best texts ever on mummy studies. It is well written, indexed, profusely illustrated and comprehensive. A great work at a great value." Journal of the American Association of Forensic Dentists

"...impressive and informative...Aufderheide deserves great credit for his tremendous contribution to a field of study touching upon so many areas of medicine." Journal of the American Medical Association

"The Scientific Study of Mummies is a veritable encyclopaedia of mummies and of mummy-research projects. Arthur C. Aufderheide is uniquely equipped to write such a book, having personally dissected more than 500 mummies.... this book should be required reading for any serious researcher on the sometimes gory but always fascinating subject of mummies and what they can teach us about human beliefs and behavior." Nature

"This compelling 625-page magnum opus, destined to become a classic, is an authoritative reference work.... Essential." Choice

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The Vernor's Story (University of Michigan Press)

With a secret formula in his pocket and a soda pop named after him, in 1866 entrepreneur and inventor James Vernor introduced Detroiters to his gingery concoction, Vernor's Ginger Ale—a drink that shook the local beverage world and one that's still a player in the ultra–competitive beverage industry.

Observing nearly a century and a half of this great American thirst quencher, The Vernor's Story tells the tale of Vernor's passionate drive to make his brew the ginger ale of choice in the then fledgling business of carbonated soft drinks.

Ginger ale connoisseurs love "deliciously different" Vernor's for its distinctive gingery flavor and unique packaging. And for Vernor's fans everywhere, The Vernor's Storymarks a nostalgic revival of interest in this important piece of Americana—a Detroit original and great American success story! Available at Amazon.com