Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, Rachel Laudan (University of California Press, 2015).| www.thepsmiths.com
Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea, Peter Lawrence (Manchester University Press, 1964).| www.thepsmiths.com
Imperial China: 900-1800, F.W. Mote (Harvard University Press, 1999).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Philharmonic Gets Dressed, Karla Kuskin (illus. Marc Simont, HarperCollins, 1982). The least negotiable thing in the Psmith household — after death and taxes, but only barely — is bedtime. I won’t say we’ve become a well-oiled machine, because we have been outnumbered for many years and that has a way of throwing toothpaste in the gears, but we are| www.thepsmiths.com
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, Charles C. Mann (Picador, 2018). There used to be famines. Poor harvests and crop failures have been with us since the development of agriculture. Archaeological evidence makes it clear that farmers have always lived on the knife’s edge of subsistence, often hungry or malnourished, and it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge into famine: too much rain or not enough, volcani...| www.thepsmiths.com
A Field Guide to American Houses (Revised): The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America's Domestic Architecture, Virginia Savage McAlester (Knopf, 2013). One January a few years ago, I decided to learn about gardening. January, it turns out, is the perfect time to do this, because the ground is frozen and there’s no way you can be expected to actually| www.thepsmiths.com
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Our famous one-pot pasta makes a delicious dinner in just 20 minutes. All the ingredients—pasta, tomatoes, onions, and olive oil—cook together in one pan.| Martha Stewart
Science in Traditional China, Joseph Needham (Harvard University Press, 1981).| www.thepsmiths.com
How To Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life, Ruth Goodman (Liveright, 2016). Ruth Goodman is a reënactor, costume drama and museum consultant, and historian of Tudor England “as it was lived”: not names and dates, nor tables of agricultural production by county, but the practical concerns of daily life from clothing to cooking to ploughing. We’ve already met her in| www.thepsmiths.com
The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche, Bernard Yack (Princeton University Press, 1986). This is a book by Bernard Yack. Who is Bernard Yack? Yack is fun, because for a mild-mannered liberal Canadian political theorist he’s dropped some dank truth-bombs over the years. For example, check out his short and punchy 2001 journal article “| www.thepsmiths.com