The Best Travel Books Are More Than Guides

In looking for gifts at Christmas, my kids are baffled by my interest in travel books. After all, they can use Internet search to find highly rated places to visit without the cost and bulk of a book! What they don't seem to realize is that the best books about travel go way beyond tourist info. The best books are explorations of nature, culture, art and philosophy, and are really quests that lead to expanded self-knowledge for the author and, vicariously, for the reader. For example, consider the late TV star Anthony Bourdain's memoir Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to The World of Food and the People Who Cook, in which Bourdain still expresses his long-held convictions about what makes good cooking but also reveals, by meeting people who are less fortunate yet happier than he can ever be, how stepping outside comfort zones can be a road to growth--even if he could not follow that road beyond a premature end. Another classic combination of food and travel is A Moveable Feast (Life Changing Food Adventures Around The World), a collection of 38 short stories from famous chefs, culinary writers and foodies, edited by Don George. This book will definitely spur a foodie travel lust! For women hesitating to travel alone, find the impetus to explore the world solo in A Woman Alone: Travel Tales From Around the Globe, a collection of inspiring tales of female adventure edited by Faith Conlon, Ingrid Emerick and Christina Henry de Tessan. Then maybe you can follow the path of Kate Harris, author of Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road as she spends a year cycling the Silk Road and penning meditations on remote places, history and human borders. Or get inspired by Judith Schlansky's Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will to go where she has not, based on both the factual secrets, enticing and daunting, of 50 isolated islands and her poetic essays on rare wildlife, surprise discoveries and human folly. For those who dream of an African safari, Paul Theroux satisfies in Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, taking readers on a road trip via rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train, as he details his encounters with dangers, hardships and delays as well as revealing interactions with Africans, aid workers, missionaries, and tourists. Finally, if you want to know less about where to travel and more about why to travel, read Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel, as he discusses the "pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything," from grand vistas to mundane events, and enriches his own observations with those of famous travelers. For more inspiration, see https://www.rearviewmirror.tv/best-travel-books/

Books for Novice and Expert Cooks in Your Life

My holiday gift shopping list always includes cookbooks for the foodies in my life, but the list of possibilities is so huge that I scour the Internet for recommendations. I've found that the Food Network has a good list of cookbooks for a range of tastes (from foreign gourmet dining to down-home BBQ to gluten-free believers) and a range of skill levels, from novice to expert. While TV celeb chefs are perhaps overrepresented, there are many listed books that I found recommended by multiple other sources, such as gourmet magazines, book reviewers and lifestyle editors. The books that seem to be getting the biggest buzz this year include: Lucky Peach, a 101 easy Asian recipes from the independent foodie mag; Nopi: The Cookbook, a collection of Asian-meets-Middle-Eastern recipes from the famed London restaurant Nopi's Head Chef Ramael Scully teamed with author Yotam Ottolenghi; Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking, featuring Israeli cuisine from the Philadelphia restaurant of James Beard Award-winning Chef Michael Solomonov; Bien Cuit: The Art of Bread by New York artisanal baker Zachary Golper; Milk Bar Life featuring new savory recipes from Christina Tosi, author of Momofuku Milk Bar's creative sweets; Near & Far: Recipes Inspired by Home and Travel offering 120 vegetarian dishes from the personal collection of award-winning food blogger Heidi Swanson; Gjelina, the first cookbook inspired by Travis Lett's Venice Beach-based California-Mediterranean restaurant; The Nomad Cookbook with sweet and savory creations from New York's popular The Nomad restaurant menu, plus bonus cocktail recipes; and, finally, Mexico from the Inside Out, a debut cookbook from Chef Enrique Olvera, combining the sophistication of his Mexico City Pujol restaurant with family home cooking. For many more gift ideas, go to http://www.foodnetwork.com/holidays-and-parties/photos/cookbook-gift-guide.html

Traditional Feasts Serve Up Food's Emotional Power

Busy prepping for Thanksgiving Day's shared feasting, I began to think about the role food plays in our lives and our literature. There's no denying that food generates some of our most evocative memories of emotions, places, and people. Few other experiences can match eating for both cultural uniqueness and universality. Numerous old saws equate food and love (the way to a man's heart, of course). Why? In The Omnivorous Mind, John Allen has written a whole book about the evolving human relationship with food. Nearly all cultures engage in feasting to commemorate past or seasonal events with an abundance of food. The practice probably began about 1 million or 2 million years ago, posits Allen, when humans began hunting really big animals, like mammoths, and needed to share temporary excesses of food so that it would not go to waste. When agriculture developed, humans added harvest feasts--which led to our own Thanksgiving tradition. But our relationship with food is more than historical; somewhere along our evolutionary path, we developed the special wiring that makes food so central to human social and emotional life. For one thing, Allen points out, the digestive system produces hormones like insulin, leptin and ghrelin that act on the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory; thus, we tend to remember food events, and a certain food can trigger vivid recall of people, settings and feelings. The brain's dopamine system, which rewards us with feelings of pleasure, also becomes active when people look at a favorite food--or someone they love. In our brains, food really is linked to love. To get ready for the feasts still ahead, you may want to sample food's emotional resonance in stories such as Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen, and A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. And you can check out Allen's book at http://www.amazon.com/The-Omnivorous-Mind-Evolving-Relationship-ebook/dp/B008533FSI