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| Overdue school library books return 50 years later with $1,000 School receives two books checked out in 1959 along with money order to cover fines from anonymous former studentA school librarian in Arizona says a former student has returned two books checked out 50 years ago along with $1,000 (£600) to cover the fines. Georgette Bordine, of Camelback high school in Phoenix, said the two National Audubon Society publications checked out in 1959 and a money order were sent anonymously. A letter explained that the borrower's family moved to another state and the books were mistakenly packed. The money was to cover fines of 2 cents a day for each book – a total of $745. The extra money had been added in case the rates had changed, the letter added.United StatesLibrariesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'Tis the season ... Make the most of the countdown to Christmas with the festive treats hidden behind the doors of our literary advent calendar feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The best food books of 2009 Not a comprehensive list, more of an entrée. Which are your favourite food and drink books of this year, and of the decade?The culinary themes which dominated the food books of 2009 are the common threads of the last few years - obsessions with seasonal, local and home-grown, and the omnivore's perpetual dilemma – how to eat well, cheaply, healthily and ethically. Happily, our (hopefully) improved eating habits are being facilitated by some of our best food writers. Nigel Slater reiterated once again that it isn't necessary to make meat the centre of every meal in Tender. Simon Hopkinson's superbly written and comforting The Vegetarian Option won me over completely from the first page by describing exactly the way I often eat and gives a traditional but perfectly executed take on meatless meals – I particularly liked his method for making vegetable stock. Mitch Tonks' Fish helps us through the maze of ethically sourcing and eating seafood with some fantastic recipes, and doing the same for all things wild are Tom Norrington Davies and Trish Hilferty with Game. Being a bit of a game aficionado I wasn't expecting to learn much from this book but I did, and as the recipes are excellent (especially on pigeon and rook) it's now going to be my first point of reference. Finally, for carnivores mindful of responsible nose to tail eating and with a Heath Robinson bent (Tim Hayward, this means you), Maynard Davies' Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer is a must.I couldn't afford Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck Cookbook last Christmas, but happily found this year's compressed version both satisfying and aesthetically pleasing, it's a third of the price, but has the same content. Food lovers with aspirations to cheffiness should also love Coco, which showcases 100 of the world's best chefs to glorious effect. If, however, you feel this kind of book is best left on the coffee table and you want something which is less daunting to cook from but still of stellar pedigree and full of restaurant anecdote, I suggest taking a look at Stephen Marwick and Fiona Beckett's A Very Honest Cook. The title says it all.2009 was a year for French behemoths. Not only is there a new Larousse Gastronomique to dip into, Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking has been reissued thanks to the film Julie and Julia. I personally find much in this book needlessly overcomplicated, particularly the signature beouf bourguignon recipe. Best of all for me has to be Pascal Aussignac's homage to the rich and delicious food of Gascony in Cuisinier Gascon - anyone thinking of cooking goose for Christmas could do much worse than consult his recipe. I also loved the reissued European Festival Food by Elisabeth Luard which has provided me with plenty of seasonal inspiration. Looking further afield, Jamie Oliver took some time off from improving the nation's eating habits and chronicled his road trip in Jamie's America, and Rose and Ruth of the River Cafe revised many of their recipes in their new Classic Italian Cookbook. I preferred the culinary romp which was Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey – infectiously enthusiastic as ever and featuring key regional recipes which really work. For those of us needing small sweet treats to get us through these difficult times, the Hummingbird Bakery book for cupcake devotees offers sweet solace. I have to admit that cupcakes aren't my thing so instead I would prefer to spend an afternoon of comfort baking with Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra's Warm Bread and Honey Cake – delicious recipes illustrating the author's rich multicultural background. No one can deny that 2009 has been a difficult year, and when we needed to cut back Allegra McEvedy and Paul Merrett were on hand with Economy Gastronomy.If you are still after Christmas presents, consider Len Deighton's reissued Action Cookbook which should encourage any man into the kitchen – much fun with a comic strip layout and uncompromising opinions, such as the entry for dried figs ("Ugh!"). Fans of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency will enjoy Mme Ramotswe's Cookbook – it's a vibrant, colourful affair without compromising authenticity. Nigel Lamb's nostalgic and entertaining Battenberg Britain is more informative than Nigel Slater's Eating for England. My favourite culinary memoir was Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's peripatetic The Settler's Cookbook. We sadly lost Keith Floyd this year but can remind ourselves of his brilliance in the reissued Floyd's Food and delight in the riot that is Stirred but not Shaken.So those are a few of my picks of the year. As the decade is closing in on us, it's perhaps a good time to think about what the most influential food books of the noughties have been. In fact, a little birdie tells me that the Word of Mouth team are putting together a piece on the books you shouldn't have missed from the last 10 years so now's the time to tell us which ones you think should be in it.I'll start the ball rolling – my top pick would have been Nose to Tail Eating but I was confounded by the 1999 publication date (was it really that long ago?!), so I'll stick my neck out and say that amongst the big, glossy productions from restaurateurs and TV chefs, and some wonderful books on various cuisines (eg, David Thompson's "Thai Food" and Claudia Roden's "Arabesque") I have to choose Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall – the River Cottage Cookbook covers everything I mention at the top of this piece, and even better, he followed it up by producing the seminal Meat. What would you choose? And which have been the stand out books from this last year?Food & drinkCatherine Phippsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The World of of GK Chesterton, and what's wrong with it This year is the centenary of one of Chesterton's oddest, but most intriguing, booksRenewal of interest in the work of GK Chesterton continues apace. The writer whose career began when he dictated his first story to his aunt Rose at the age of three started early and aimed high, and his intellectual development was among the more conspicuously interesting of the Edwardian age. His Orthodoxy of 1908 has become a sort of touchstone text during the present vogue for philosophical theology, much cited by the likes of Slavoj Zizek and the radical theologian John Milbank, while oddball novels such as The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) retain the power to entertain and bemuse in equal measure.This year, however, sees the centenary of one of his rather less high-profile publications. What's Wrong with the World represents an extrapolation of Chesterton's original response to a query posed in so many words by the Times to a selection of eminent writers and thinkers of the day. "Dear Sirs," ran GK's succinct rejoinder, "I am". The publication of the book suggested that, on reflection, there might have been more to say on the subject.The Chesterton offered us by his latter-day biographers and critics is a lost proto-radical, if we could but make him out as such. Along with his close friend Hilaire Belloc, he was the proponent of a species of Third Way politics avant la lettre, a plague-on-both-your-houses confutation of capitalism and socialism known as distributism. Drastically simplified, the vision was of an atomised entrepreneurialism in which as many individuals as possible pursued the goal of profit, so as to wrest capital accumulation from both a few vastly powerful interests (such as "Jewish banking families") and a monolithic socialist state.What's Wrong with the World opens with an analysis of the predicament of modern humanity, too obsessed in the great age of political idealism with visions of the future. Has the Enlightenment ideal of continual social progress been a reality, or has it all been a piece of western myth-making? "Are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them?" he wonders. But then again, "Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared?"What it does contain is the wreckage of half-realised ideals. There is a lack of conviction in attempts to enact the radical doctrines of Christianity or of political justice, and too often the espousal of great causes results in panic at the consequences of one's own actions. Where national leaders paid lip-service to such humanist ideals as egalitarianism, they came to rue their faith in humanity. "Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russia quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified them was that the people did."Much in the section on women would take a lot of swallowing today. Woman is naturally thrifty, as against the prodigality of man, "the aim of the good woman [being] to rummage in the dustbin". This is cognate with her moral inclination to chastity in the face of masculine concupiscence. There is scarcely any point in female suffrage (the burning question of the day) where it is so little wanted. The saving grace of not having the vote is that it allows a woman to remain above the level of the baying mob. What she really needs is liberation from drudgery. A paradise of domestic labour-saving devices will spread more spiritual freedom than would the vote. Where many saw the constitutional equality of the sexes as an ideal, meanwhile, Chesterton suspected only the urge to "plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation" of the male by the female. "Boys play football, why shouldn't girls play football … boys go to Oxford, why shouldn't girls go to Oxford – in short, boys grow mustaches, why shouldn't girls grow mustaches[?]"The cumulative impact of the book is a little like reading a supremely elegant, aphoristic Nietzsche, but one domesticated for the English gentleman's study. There is the same vertiginous thrill at lurching from exemplary declarations of universalist ethics ("Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it") to the flared-nostrilled defence of Edwardian privilege, such as public schools. But for its sober humanism, as much as its infuriating patrician conservatism, it deserves to be read.GK ChestertonStuart Waltonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Romantic poets: On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer by John Keats This week, the Guardian and the Observer are running a series of seven pamphlets on the Romantic poets. To coincide with it, I'm blogging daily on one of each day's selected worksA bibulous dinner party given by the artist and diarist Benjamin Haydon to celebrate the completion of the first stage of his vast painting, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem brought together the "Lakeland" and "Cockney" schools of poets, ie William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and John Keats. In fact, among the crowd of dazzled spectators with which Haydon has surrounded the triumphant Christ, are portraits of Wordsworth and Keats, as well as Voltaire and Newton. Lamb humorously took the pious Haydon to task for including Newton, "a Fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle". The poetic company concurred, rising to drink to "Newton's health and confusion to mathematics".Keats was bantering, perhaps, when he asserted at Haydon's gathering that Newton had spoiled the rainbow by reducing it to a prism. But again in his poem Lamia he alludes to the power of "cold philosophy" to "unweave the rainbow". There's no doubt that his death-shadowed early life provided an additional impulse to his devotion to literature: he needed an escape route into enchantment. And yet, Keats's openness to experience and his powerful impulse towards self-education are hardly the qualities of an opponent of science. That famously stated willingness to remain "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts" is surely proof enough of an essentially scientific temperament. He was medically trained, and, as all biographical accounts make clear, he confronted his own mortality to the very end with courageous, pitiless realism.It's in an early sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816) that Keats displays the attitudes of a true scientist. With a superbly sustained metaphor of exploration, the sonnet describes an episode in the imaginative voyage that was of paramount importance to his development – that of reading. He had learned Latin, but Greek was not available to "Cockney" poets. It was thanks to his schoolmaster Charles Cowden Clarke that Keats had first discovered Edmund Spenser. Now Clarke introduced him to the work of another Elizabethan, George Chapman, whose translations of Homer the young men read together during an evening's get-together which the enthralled Keats would describe as "our first symposium". The celebratory sonnet was completed the same night, in time to be delivered to Clarke in the following morning's post.Chapman was the first poet to try to render Homeric rhythms in English. Translation, for such a writer, is a voyage in pursuit of the truthfulness of linguistic beauty, and reading a translation aimed at fidelity to the original was perhaps the profoundest way in which Keats could appropriate scientific method to the literary art to which he had sworn "fealty". Keats's metaphor would be less effective if he did not invoke two actual discoveries in the poem - one astronomical, the other terrestrial. It's well-known that the sighting of the Pacific Ocean, alluded to in the last four lines, should not have been attributed to Cortez but to another conquistador, Balboa. (Yes, Keats should have done more research – but he was in a forgivable hurry.) Less widely known is the fact that the "watcher of the skies" summoned in lines nine and 10 is the astronomer, William Hercshel, who had discovered a new planet, Uranus, in 1781.Keats had learned about astronomy in boyhood. At school he had taken part in a learning-game devised by the marvellously imaginative educator John Rylands, in which the boys arranged themselves on the school playground in the form of an orrery. Later, for the self-imposed project of translating Virgil, Keats was awarded a copy of Bonnycastle's Introduction to Astronomy, an early work of popular science fully up-to-date on the latest developments, including Herschel's discovery of Uranus.The rhythms of the Chapman sonnet convey a wide-sweeping sense of movement – of planets circling the heavens, and ships circumnavigating the earth. These patterns were perhaps already implicit in the Petrarchan sonnet. But the last object to move physically in the poem is the planet that "swims into" the watcher's ken at the start of the sestet. And then there is immobility: the stock-still immobility of wonderment.Keats and his readers are truly in a new world – a rather cinematic one. The moment of revelation on Darien is viewed in lingering long-shot. Somehow, the comfortable closure which the sonnet-form invites is "translated" into an open question. We see the focused, interrogative stare of the expedition's leader, and, on the faces of his men, the "wild surmise" that generates further questions. We have not only reached the Pacific Ocean, but the emotional core of scientific discovery. There is no need for overstatement, and the poem's quiet last line – literally quiet in that the men are silent with amazement, but also quiet in its perfectly-realised naturalism – is perhaps its greatest triumph. No other proof is needed of Keats's power to conquer territories in his short swift voyage to poetic mastery. "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is an early page in the log-book of a journey from lush fancifulness to telescopic clarity of observation. On First Looking into Chapman's HomerMuch have I travelled in the realms of gold,   And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;   Round many western islands have I beenWhich bards in fealty to Apollo hold.Oft of one wide expanse had I been told   That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;   Yet did I never breathe its pure sereneTill I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:Then felt I like some watcher of the skies   When a new planet swims into his ken;Or like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes   He stared at the Pacific – and all his menLooked at each other with a wild surmise –  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.  PoetryJohn KeatsCarol Rumensguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |