David Sax's delightful travelogue is a journey across the United States and around the world that investigates the history, the diaspora, and the next generation of delicatessen. David Sax was alarmed by the state of Jewish delicatessen. As a journalist and lifelong deli lover, he watched in dismay as one beloved deli after another closed its doors, only to be reopened as some bland chain restaurant laying claim to the cuisine it just paved over. Was it still possible to save the deli? He writes about the food itself--how it's made, who makes it best, and where to go for particular dishes--and, ultimately, what he finds is hope: deli newly and lovingly made in places like Boulder, Colorado, longstanding deli traditions thriving in Montreal, and the resurrection of iconic institutions like New York's 2nd Avenue Deli. No cultural history of food has ever tasted so good.

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year Final reflections on a happy life-from acclaimed historian Tony Judt. Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any other. Each essay brings the smallest details of personal experience into the larger frame of history. Judt's youthful love of a London bus route becomes a reflection on public civility. Food and trains and smells all come alive as Judt takes us from the postwar London of his childhood through Paris, Prague, and points east to New York, where he found his home. Judt brings his moral clarity and wit to bear on everything from fast cars to radical politics and, finally, the devastating illness that took his life. This book, composed when Judt was paralyzed and unable physically to write, found its shape in the ordered rooms of a Swiss Chalet of the mind: a warm refuge in the closing darkness of his final years. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land , republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer , Ta-Nehisi Coates.

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER 'Honest, funny and dripping with witty aphorisms. Extremely entertaining and enlightening [...] all the way to journey's end' Herald One of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life, presents a travel guide with a difference - an exploration of why we travel, and what we learn along the way... Few activities seem to promise as much happiness as going travelling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel to, we seldom ask why we go and how we might become more fulfilled by doing so. With the help of a selection of writers, artists and thinkers - including Flaubert, Edward Hopper, Wordsworth and Van Gogh - Alain de Botton provides invaluable insights into everything from holiday romance to hotel minibars, airports to sightseeing. The perfect antidote to those guides that tell us what to do when we get there, The Art of Travel tries to explain why we really went in the first place - and helpfully suggest how we might be happier on our journeys. 'Delightful, profound, entertaining. I doubt if de Botton has written a dull sentence in his life' Jan Morris 'An elegant and subtle work, unlike any other. Beguiling' Colin Thubron, The Times

In 1922, a young Agatha Christie, still at the dawn of her literary career, received an incredible opportunity. Britain was preparing for a grand festival - the British Empire Exhibition - to be held in Wembley in 1924. But such an ambitious event needed planning, and Agatha and her husband, Archie, were asked to help. Would they like to travel to different parts of the Empire to assist in its preparation? Naturally, their answer was a resounding yes.Nearly a century later, the legendary Sir David Suchet and his wife Sheila were invited to retrace Agatha's remarkable journey. In Travels with Agatha Christie, Suchet - renowned for his iconic portrayal of Hercule Poirot - follows in Agatha's footsteps, visiting the diverse landscapes of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada. With his trademark charm and warmth, and insightful reflections, David not only explores the enduring legacy of the British Empire but also uncovers the profound impact these travels had on a young Agatha Christie, shaping her future as the Queen of Crime.Rich with personal anecdotes, David's own stunning photography and fascinating history, Travels with Agatha Christie offers a fresh, intimate look at the woman behind the distinguished mysteries. Through David's eyes, we gain a deeper understanding of Agatha's early writing, her love for adventure and the lasting influence of her travels on her creative journey. A captivating blend of history, travel and personal insight, this book reveals a side of Agatha Christie that few know.

Discover why Denmark is one of the happiest countries in the world. Are you searching for a way to change your negative attitudes and embrace a happier way of living? Looking for a way to incorporate minimalism or Feng Shui into a broader worldview? Then it's time to try Hygge. Hygge, the Danish philosophy of happiness, is a concept which has been rapidly spreading throughout the modern world. Built on the principles of minimalism, mindfulness, and a feeling of 'cosiness', practicing Hygge is a powerful way of improving your life, relationships, and attitudes. This detailed guide uncovers the secrets behind Hygge, and gives you all the tools you need to begin implementing this incredible philosophy. Inside, you'll find: The Origin and History of Hygge Experiencing Hygge Every Day - Simple Activities Hygge and Relationships Living a Minimalist Hygge Life The Link Between Hygge and Mindfulness How Hygge and the Chinese Feng Shui go Hand-in-Hand And So Much More! Whether you already practice one of these philosophies or you're a complete beginner, this guide is your ticket to the world of Hygge - along with a happier, more fulfilling life. With a range of daily Hygge activities to help you put these ideas into practice, it's never been easier to implement this happiness philosophy and begin seeing the benefits immediately! So don't wait! Buy now to see why Denmark is one of the happiest countries in the world!

"War is over; the heroic French population reaffirms superiority. Love, Paris, and Flowers ... but London was black, white, and gray, the elegance, the style, all present in front of always changing fog. Then I met a man from Wales talking about the Miners and I had read How Green Was My Valley . This became my only try to make a 'Story.'" --Robert Frank This magnificent edition of London/Wales --a reprint of the 2007 Steidl edition that included never-before-seen photographs, expanding on Scalo's first edition of 2003--juxtaposes Frank's images of the elegant world of London money with the grimy working-class world of postwar Wales. It brings together two distinct bodies of work, and reveals a significant documentary precedent for The Americans. It also offers an important view of Frank's development, demonstrating an early interest in social commentary, in the narrative potential of photographic sequencing, and innovative use of the expressionistic qualities of the medium.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Walking the Bible and Abraham comes a revelatory journey across four continents and 4,000 years exploring how Adam and Eve introduced the idea of love into the world, and how they continue to shape our deepest feelings about relationships, family, and togetherness. Since antiquity, one story has stood at the center of every conversation about men and women. One couple has been the battleground for human relationships and sexual identity. That couple is Adam and Eve. Yet instead of celebrating them, history has blamed them for bringing sin, deceit, and death into the world. In this fresh retelling of their story, New York Times columnist and PBS host Bruce Feiler travels from the Garden of Eden in Iraq to the Sistine Chapel in Rome, from John Milton's London to Mae West's Hollywood, discovering how Adam and Eve should be hailed as exemplars of a long-term, healthy, resilient relationship. At a time of discord and fear over the strength of our social fabric, Feiler shows how history's first couple can again be role models for unity, forgiveness, and love. Containing all the humor, insight, and wisdom that have endeared Bruce Feiler to readers around the world, The First Love Story is an unforgettable journey that restores Adam and Eve to their rightful place as central figures in our culture's imagination and reminds us that even our most familiar stories still have the ability to surprise, inspire, and guide us today.

When he visited Israel in 1975, Saul Bellow kept an account of his experiences and impressions. It grew into an impassioned and thoughtful book. As he wryly notes, -If you want everyone to love you, don't discuss Israeli politics.- But discuss them is very much what he does. Through quick sketches and vignettes, Bellow evokes places, ideas, and people, reaching a sharp picture of contemporary Israel. The reader is offered a wonderful panorama of an ancient and modern world city. Like every other visitor to Israel, Bellow tumbles into -a gale of conversation.- He loves it and he makes the reader feel at home. Bellow delights in the liveliness, the gallantry of Israeli life: people on the edge of history, an inch from disaster, yet brimming with argument and words. He delights not in tourist delusions but with a tough critical spirit: his Israel is pocked with scars and creases, and all the more attractive for it. Simply as a travel book, the reader finds remarkable descriptions, such as one in which Bellow finds -the melting air- of Jerusalem pressing upon him -with an almost human weight- Something intelligible is communicated by the earthlike colors of this most beautiful of cities. The impression that Bellow offers is that living in Israel must be as exhausting as it is exciting: a murderous barrage on the nerves. Israel, he writes, -is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything, to make provisions for everything. All resources, all faculties are strained. Unremitting thought about the world situation parallels the defense effort.- Jerusalem's people are actively and individually involved in universal history. Bellow makes you share in the experience.

Oskar has just killed himself. After waiting a quarter century, he returned to Prague only to find it was no longer his home. With his memorial service, Yale historian and prize-winning author Marci Shore leads us gently into the post-totalitarian world. We meet a professor of literature who as a child played chess with the extortionist who had come to deliver him to the Gestapo and an elderly Trotskyite whose deformed finger is a memento of seventeen years in the Soviet gulag. Parents who had denounced their teenage dissident daughter to the communist secret police plead for understanding. For all of these people, the fall of Communism has not ended history but rather summoned the past: rebellion in 1968, Stalinism, the Second World War, the Holocaust. The revolutions of 1989 opened the archives, illuminating the tragedy of twentieth-century Eastern Europe: there were moments in which no decisions were innocent, in which all possible choices caused suffering. As the author reads pages in the lives of others, she reveals the intertwining of the personal and the political, of love and cruelty, of intimacy and betrayal. The result is a lyrical, touching, and sometimes heartbreaking portrayal of how history moves and what history means.

A celebration of her life-long love for New York, Hanff embarked on this project as an assignment, and realized she had not been to many of the main tourist attractions- the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, the World Trade Center. As make-believe tourists, off she and Patsy travel to describe the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grant's Tomb, Fraunces Tavern, some of New York's very special small museums, Orchard Street, a tour of Harlem, and much more. Hanff weaves in historical events and tidbits on some of New York's most notorious personalities.

From the highly acclaimed author of Out of Egypt and Call Me by Your Name , a series of linked essays on memory by "the poet of disappointed love--and of the city" ( New York Times Book Review ). In these fourteen essays Andre Aciman, one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, dissects the experience of loss, moving from his forced departure from Alexandria as a teenager, though his brief stay in Europe and finally to the home he's made (and half invented) on Manhattan's Upper West Side. From False Papers : We remember not because we have something we wish to go back to, nor because memories are all we have. We remember because memory is our most intimate, most familiar gesture. Most people are convinced I love Alexandria. In truth, I love remembering Alexandria. For it is not Alexandria that is beautiful. Remembering is beautiful.

The author of the classic Keep the River on Your Right here tells the remarkable story of his four years among the Asmat of New Guinea, a jungle-dwelling people rumored to have killed Michael Rockefeller. Instead of ferocious cannibals, Schneebaum found a regal, loving, gentle people who freely accepted him and initiated him into a way of life no outsider had ever seen before. Adopted into an Asmat family in the village whose people were said to have killed Rockefeller, he crossed the boundaries into another culture and another age, learning secrets no other outsider had been allowed to see before. But it wasn't until Schneebaum met Akatpitsjin, a handsome married man with five children, that he entered the erotic world of the Asmat, when the two became "exchange friends' and lovers, a practice basic to the sexual life of the village. Schneebaum's encounter with the Asmat ultimately became something more intimate and liberating for him than the mere discovery of tribal secrets. He confronted himself. His odyssey is as much the record of a journey into himself as it is a unique and sensitively observed account of a vanishing society, written with a shimmering sensuality that has no equal in the literature of anthropology or self-confession.

The author of Call Me by Your Name returns with a deeply romantic memoir of his time in Rome while on the cusp of adulthood. In Roman Year , André Aciman captures the period of his adolescence that began when he and his family first set foot in Rome, after being expelled from Egypt. Though Aciman’s family had been well-off in Alexandria, all vestiges of their status vanished when they fled, and the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother moved into a rented apartment in Rome’s Via Clelia. Though dejected, Aciman’s mother and brother found their way into life in Rome, while Aciman, still unmoored, burrowed into his bedroom to read one book after the other. The world of novels eventually allowed him to open up to the city and, through them, discover the beating heart of the Eternal City. Aciman’s time in Rome did not last long before he and his family moved across the ocean, but by the time they did, he was leaving behind a city he loved. In this memoir, the author, a genius of “the poetry of the place” (John Domini, The Boston Globe ), conjures the sights, smells, tastes, and people of Rome as only he can. Aciman captures, as if in amber, a living portrait of himself on the brink of adulthood and the city he worshipped at that pivotal moment. Roman Year is a treasure, unearthed by one of our greatest prose stylists.

A wealth of breathtaking photographs shot from unusual camera angles and imaginative viewpoints provide new perspectives on the beauty and magic of the City by the Bay--under moonlight, shrouded in fog or simply shining under the California sun. San Francisco Chronicle photojournalist Frederic Larson and the late Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Herb Caen shared a love of San Francisco's beauty and majesty that they captured in photographs and words over the course of decades. Now they are united: Larson's spectacular photographs--shot from unique perspectives in the light of the moon and the rising sun, shrouded in fog--and Caen's beautiful tributes excerpted from hundreds of columns. The city's glorious landmarks are seen through the camera lens, places like the Golden Gate Bridge and Golden Gate Park, Chinatown and Alcatraz, the frenzied bustle of Fisherman's Wharf, the timeless romance of cable cars. The Larson-Caen collaboration exposes the city for what it is--vibrant, innovative, and endlessly surprising.

“The intricacies of family and the complexities of the games they play mingle wonderfully here in a memoir quite unlike any other.”—George Plimpton, author of Truman Capote Katy Lederer grew up on the bucolic campus of an exclusive East Coast boarding school where her father taught English, her mother retreated into crosswords and scotch, and her much older siblings played “grown-up” games like gin rummy and chess. But Katy faced much more than the typical trials of childhood. Within the confines of the Lederer household an unlikely transformation was brewing, one that would turn this darkly intellectual and game-happy group into a family of professional gamblers. Poker Face is Katy Lederer’s perceptive account of her family’s lively history. From the long kitchen table where her mother played what seemed an endless game of solitaire, to the seedy New York bars where her brother first learned to play poker, to the glamorous Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, where her sister and brother wager hundreds of thousands of dollars a night at the tables, Lederer takes us on a tragicomic journey through a world where intelligence and deceit are used equally as currency. Not since Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood has a writer cast such a witty and astringently analytic eye on the demands of growing up. An unflinching exploration of trust and betrayal, competition, suspicion, and unconventional familial love, Poker Face is a testament to the human spirit’s inventiveness when faced with unusually difficult odds.

In April 2018, seasoned adventurer Ben Fogle and Olympic cycling gold medallist Victoria Pendleton, along with mountaineer Kenton Cool, took on their most exhausting challenge yet - climbing Everest for the British Red Cross in an attempt to highlight the environmental challenges mountains face. The expedition was to become the adventure of a lifetime, the culmination of a journey that started with a moment of tragedy years before. For Ben was inspired to take on this challenge by the memory of his son, Willem, who was stillborn in 2014. This is the story of an incredible journey that has for ever changed the lives of those involved. `The climb from Camp 4 to the summit is like stepping into a parallel universe. One in which life and death become frighteningly close. In places the lines become blurred. There are few places where the margin is so close and visceral. Angels and the grim reaper are bed pals. When you are in the zone, in the moment, you are literally counting by the step. By the second. In some ways you are in your own little bubble. In places, the fear was almost paralysing. ... In that fine line between life and death I only saw brightness. ... While I hope my expedition has helped inspire, it is also a reminder of the fragility of life. Hold those you love close to you. Don't forget to tell them how much you love them and never become complacent in life. We are all mere mortals on this planet, but don't let that reality stop you from living it to the full.' To laugh is to risk appearing the fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out to another is to risk involvement. To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self. To place your dreams, ideas before a crowd is to risk their loss. To love is risk not being loved in return. To live is to risk dying. To hope is to risk despair. To try is to risk failure. But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, and is nothing. They may avoid suffering and sorrow, but they cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love, live. Chained by their certitudes, they are a slave: they have forfeited their freedom. Only a person who risks is truly free.

A New York Times Bestselling AuthorRiding a bicycle across the United States is one of those bucket-list goals that many dream about but few fulfill. In 2011 at the age of fifty-seven, New York Times obituary writer Bruce Weber made the trip alone and wrote about it as it unfolded mile by mile. Now, expanding upon the articles and blog posts that quickly became a must-read adventure story, Weber gives us a witty, inspiring, and reflective diary of his journey.

Venice for Lovers is a memorable collaboration by two fine stylists who have fashioned their own personal homages to Venice, one with a novella, the other with a personal essay. Every year for all the thirty they have been married, Begley and Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In her contribution to the book, Muhlstein charmingly describes how she and her husband dine at the same restaurant every night for years on end, and how becoming friends with restaurateurs has been an unsurpassed means of getting to know the city and its inhabitants, far from the tourists in San Marco Square. In his short novella, Begley writes a story of falling in love with--and in--Venice. His twenty-year-old protagonist, enamored with an older, far worldlier woman of twenty-seven, is lured by her to the City of Water, only to be unceremoniously dumped and left to fend for himself after a brief rendezvous. But he discovers a lasting love for Venice itself--not an uncommon romance, as Begley's brilliant literary essay on the city's place within world literature demonstrates: Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann were all illustrious predecessors.

"ART BUCHWALD DOES IT AGAIN. . . . A GREAT READ." --Larry King, USA Today In 1948, an American innocent named Art Buchwald set sail for Paris, France, determined to crash Hemingway's moveable feast and make himself famous. What's more, he did it. Now he remembers those golden years--when he wrote for the Paris Herald Tribune, fell in love, spoofed Hemingway, dined with gangsters, and crashed costume balls in Venice. Everything that has made Buchwald one of the world's best-loved writers is in this funny, enchanting, poignant book. "HONEST AND MOVING . . . A CONSUMMATE STORYTELLER." --The New York Times Book Review "ROLLICKING . . . The book gallops and gambols along. . . . Buchwald is a master of the anecdote." --The Baltimore Sun

An extraordinary journey deep into the history and landscape of the Hebrides, exploring their turbulent history, the spread of their influence, and how these islands shaped the nations of Britain.