Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, Rachel Laudan (University of California Press, 2015).| www.thepsmiths.com
A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard 1930-1932 (eds. S.T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke; Hippocampus Press, 2017). In my review of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories I mentioned his two-volume collected correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, for which I was of course not going to shell out the $60.| www.thepsmiths.com
Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, Timothy P.| www.thepsmiths.com
We try pretty hard to review good books we think are worth reading.| www.thepsmiths.com
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Colin Woodard (Viking, 2011). We once lived for a few years in another part of the country. It was nice in a lot of ways — I have fond memories of that time, and not just because two of my babies were born there — but it was also| 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
