NCW Libraries

"Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll transports readers back in time to witness the remarkable evolution of the American restaurant chef in the 1970s and '80s. Taking a rare, coast-to-coast perspective, Andrew Friedman goes inside Chez Panisse and other Bay Area restaurants to show how the politically charged backdrop of Berkeley helped draw new talent to the profession; into the historically underrated community of Los Angeles chefs, inclduing a young Wolfgang...

"With his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of why civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how some nations successfully recover from crises while adopting selective changes--a coping mechanism more commonly associated with individuals recovering from personal crises. Diamond compares how six countries have survived recent upheavals--ranging...

"A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution-from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality-and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told,...

This monograph celebrates the life of a remarkable man of Regency times – the banker, brewer, wine merchant and hop factor Timothy Brown. Its publication also serves to mark the bicentenary of his elevation to Master of the Worshipful Company of Brewers, in 1817. Brown was as well known for his advanced, reformist views in the politics of the day –earning him the soubriquet 'Equality' Brown – as for his acts of philanthropy and Radical patronage....

Contrary to popular belief fostered in countless school classrooms the world over, Christopher Columbus did not discover that the earth was round. The idea of a spherical world had been widely accepted in educated circles from as early as the fourth century B.C. Yet, bizarrely, it was not until the supposedly more rational nineteenth century that the notion of a flat earth really took hold. Even more bizarrely, it persists to this day, despite Apollo...

As famous during his lifetime as after his death, Rembrandt (1606-1669) was one of the greatest masters of the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century. His portraits not only transport us back to that fascinating time, but also represent, above all, a human adventure, beneath every dab of paint the spirit of the model seems to stir. Yet these portraits are only the tip of the Rembrandt iceberg, which consists of over 300 canvasses, 350 engravings, and...

While Adolf Hitler was seizing power in Germany, Adrien Arcand was laying the foundations in Quebec for his Parti national social chrétien. The Blue Shirts, as its members were called, wore a military uniform and prominently displayed the swastika. Arcand saw Jewish conspiracy wherever he turned and his views resonated with his followers who, like him, sought a scapegoat for all the ills eroding society. Even after his imprisonment during the Second...

A century on from the construction of an Edwardian street in inner Manchester, this contemporary portrait of the street tells the stories of today's residents. Born in sixteen countries from four continents, the stories told by the residents themselves narrate their journeys from nomadic herding in Somalia to conscientious objection in post-war Germany and the UK, and from arranged marriages in South Asia to arriving penniless from rural Ireland....

As time passes, we often forget or in many situations, we never know the history of us as a nation and as a people. This book contains both positive and negative accounts of us as a nation of immigrants of whom many found success. It also tells the story of those who although worked hard found it as an unfriendly all too often a place of isolation and brokenness. There is, however, a hope that for what seems to have taken centuries to arrive-a hope...