Mark Kurlansky's first global food history since the bestselling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, economic, and culinary story of milk and all things dairy--with recipes throughout.According to the Greek creation myth, we are so much spilt milk; a splatter of the goddess Hera's breast milk became our galaxy, the Milky Way. But while mother's milk may be the essence of nourishment, it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | THE BOOK BEHIND THE VIRAL TIKTOKOne tiny rock. One epic history.'A must-have for any serious cook or foodie.' Anthony Bourdain'This is a "wow!" book: roving, startling, engaging.' Washington Post'Kurlansky finds the world in a grain of salt.' New York Times Book ReviewAn unlikely world history from the bestselling author of Milk! and C...

"Reaches back 500 years to track the city's evolving history . . . political, social, musical, culinary." — New York Times , "Summer's Best Travel Books"New York Times–bestselling and award-winning author Mark Kurlansky presents an insider's view of Havana: the elegant, tattered city he has come to know over more than thirty years. Part cultural history, part travelogue, with recipes, historic engravings, photogra...

'Who would ever think that a book on cod would make a compulsive read? And yet this is precisely what Kurlansky has done' Express on SundayThe Cod. Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been triggered by it, national diets have been based on it, economies and livelihoods have depended on it. To the millions it has sustained, it has been a treasure more precious that gold. This book spans 1,000 years and four continents. From the Vikings to Claren...

An extraordinary look at an ordinary substance—and one we'd be dead without: salt.Salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and the story of this common household seasoning proves a fascinating one. In a kaleidoscope of history, Mark Kurlansky—bestselling author of  1968 and Cod—blends economic, scientific political, religious, and culinary elements to produce this tasty account of salt, the only rock we humans eat. Populated by colorf...

**"A lively, anecdotal, all-encompassing history of Basque ingenuity and achievement." —Atlantic MonthlyFrom Mark Kurlansky, the bestselling author of Cod, Salt, Birdseye, and Paper—the illuminating story of an ancient and enigmatic people**Straddling a small corner of Spain and France in a land that is marked on no maps except their own, the Basques are a puzzling contradiction—they are Europe's oldest nation without ever having...

From the New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today’s world.Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, p...

From the award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Cod and Salt, a new global history of the mysterious, misunderstood, globally beloved crustacean.When Mark Kurlansky was 17, he got his first job as a commercial fisherman in the Atlantic on a 45-foot, wooden-hulled, two-man lobster boat, thus igniting a lifelong fascination and kinship with the mysterious creature. Since that defining experience, the lobster's role in cuisine a...

Mark Kurlansky's first global food history since the bestselling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, economic and culinary story of milk and all things dairy – with recipes throughoutWhile mother's milk may be the essence of nourishment, it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated ever since the domestication of animals more than 10,000 years ago. Today, milk is a test case in the most pressing...

The conventional history of nations, even continents, is a history of warfare. According to this view, all the important ideas and significant changes of humankind occured as part of an effort to win one violent, bloody conflict or another.But there have always been a few who refused to fight. Following the grand sweep of history from Confucius to Tolstoy, Erasmus to Gandhi, bestselling author Mark Kurlansky traces pacifism and its proponents to show how many modern ideas, a united...

The New York Times–bestselling author of Salt examines the intersections between his life and Ernest Hemingway's in this mix of travel memoir and history.By a series of coincidences, Mark Kurlansky's life has always been intertwined with Ernest Hemingway's legend, starting with being in Idaho the day of Hemingway's death. The Importance of Not Being Ernest explores the intersections between Hemingway's and Kurlansky's lives, resulting in c...

Will most of the major fisheries of the world be exhausted by 2048, as has been claimed? Have the number of large fish in the ocean decreased by 90 per cent over the past 50 years, as has been asserted by a respected scientist? Are 60 per cent of the fish species studied by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation either fully exploited or depleted, as one of their reports attests? Fishing at sea, an ancient trade and a way of life that has defined coastal towns throughout hist...