Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

POILÂNE: The Secrets of the World-Famous Bread Bakery de Apollonia Poilâne

Bread is Back!

POILÂNE: The Secrets of the World-Famous Bread Bakery
by Apollonia Poilâne
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 29th 2019

To food lovers the world over, a trip to Paris is not complete without a visit to Poilâne. Ina Garten raves about the bread’s “extraordinary quality.” Martha Stewart says the P in Poilâne stands for “perfect.” For the first time, Poilâne provides detailed instructions so bakers can reproduce its unique “hug-sized” sourdough loaves at home, as well as the bakery’s other much-loved breads and pastries. It tells the story of how Apollonia Poilâne, the third-generation baker and owner, took over the global business at age eighteen and steered it into the future as a Harvard University freshman after her parents were killed in a helicopter crash.
Beyond bread, Apollonia includes recipes for pastries such as the bakery’s exquisite but unfussy tarts and butter cookies. In recipes that use bread as an ingredient, she shows how to make the most from a loaf, from crust to crumb. In still other dishes, she explores the world of grains: rice, corn, barley, oats, and millet. From sunup to sundown, Poilâne traces the hours in a baker’s day, blending narrative, recipes, and Apollonia’s philosophy of bread.

BLOWOUT de Rachel Maddow

Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy–Winner Take All

BLOWOUT:
Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

by Rachel Maddow
Crown, October 2019

Rachel Maddow’s Blowout offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil-and-gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe–from Oklahoma City to Siberia to Equatorial Guinea–exposing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas. She shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the United States, and the West’s most important alliances. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, but ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson emerge as two of the past century’s most consequential corporate villains. The oil-and-gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, « like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature. »
This book is a clarion call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest industry on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of predatory oil executives and their enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, « Democracy either wins this one or disappears. »

Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award-winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, as well as the author of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, a #1 New York Times bestseller. Maddow received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University and earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford University. She lives in New York City and Massachusetts with her partner, artist Susan Mikula.

DIE AUFGEREGTE GESELLSCHAFT de Philipp Hübl

                                                    Applied philosophy with some surprising eye-openers

                                                                       DIE AUFGEREGTE GESELLSCHAFT
                                                                                 by Philipp Hübl
                                                                                                      Blessing, publication Mars 2019

If you are a more conservative kind of person you are more likely to prefer dogs, while the progressive go for cats. And people driven by anger and rage seem to feel nothing but disgust. These are not simply clichés but reveal the core of our morality and are explained by Philipp Hübl in a book packed with amazing philosophical insights.
Research in the fields of psychology and philosophy have shown that emotions are not limited to personal matters but also include the daily news. Philipp Hübl demonstrates how our values and our political views are anchored in our emotional disposition. In other words, emotions influence our moral judgements. We are, however, not helplessly at their mercy; we can overcome them with reason and rational behaviour. With this theory, Hübl is provoking a critical self-examination and at the same time sharpens our view of society.
« The book is particularly interesting because it gives an explanatory approach for the evalutation of political movements in Europe. »

THE VOYAGE OF SORCERER II de J. Craig Venter & David Ewing Duncan

An epic science and adventure story about famed genome scientist Craig Venter’s global expeditions collecting tens of millions of marine microbes and revolutionizing our understanding of the microbiome that sustains us.

THE VOYAGE OF SORCERER II:
The Expedition That Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome
by Dr. J. Craig Venter & David Ewing Duncan
Harvard University Press, September 2023
(via Aaron Priest Literary)

In THE VOYAGE OF SORCERER II, Venter and science writer David Ewing Duncan tell the remarkable story of these expeditions and of the momentous discoveries that ensued―of plant-like bacteria that get their energy from the sun, proteins that metabolize vast amounts of hydrogen, and microbes whose genes shield them from ultraviolet light. The result was a massive library of millions of unknown genes, thousands of unseen protein families, and new lineages of bacteria that revealed the unimaginable complexity of life on earth. Yet despite this exquisite diversity, Venter encountered sobering reminders of how human activity is disturbing the delicate microbial ecosystem that nurtures life on earth. In the face of unprecedented climate change, Venter and Duncan show how we can harness the microbial genome to develop alternative sources of energy, food, and medicine that might ultimately avert our destruction.

J. Craig Venter, PhD, is regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 21st century for his numerous invaluable contributions to genomic research. Dr. Venter is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit research organization with approximately 200 scientists and staff dedicated to human, microbial, plant, synthetic, and environmental genomic research, and the exploration of social and ethical issues in genomics. He is also the founder and CEO of Synthetic Genomics, Inc., and is the author of multiple nonfiction books. He lives in La Jolla, California.

David Ewing Duncan is an award-winning, bestselling author of nine books published in 21 languages, including Talking to Robots, Experimental Man, and The Calendar. David is the CEO and Curator of Arc Fusion, and a Health Strategist in Residence for IDEO.

ATHUR UND LILLY de Lilly Maier

The girl and the Holocaust survivor

ARTHUR UND LILLY
by Lilly Maier
Heyne, November 2018

The poignant biography of a Holocaust survivor and the story of an unusual friendship: « I had a wonderful life », Arthur Kern muses, meaning his childhood in Vienna – up to that fateful moment in 1939, when at the age of just ten he is suddenly separated from his family. Hoping to save him from the Holocaust, his Jewish parents send him away to an unfamiliar world with a Kindertransport or children’s transport – a traumatic experience for the ten-year-old. He manages to escape to America via France, but he never sees his family again. 60 years later, while visiting the apartment of his childhood days in Vienna, he makes the acquaintance of eleven-year-old Lilly Maier – a fateful encounter for both of them and one that not only strongly influences Lilly’s future but also leads to Arthur being bestowed with a late legacy of his parents …