RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleAn engaging new book by San Francisco Chronicle food writer Jonathan Kauffman, Hippie Food, makes the case that the most durable contribution of the counterculture can be found in your kitchen. By uncovering the surprising histories behind the domestication and widespread adoption of foods once considered the exotic province of cultists and communards...Kauffman pays tribute to a generation of practical-minded idealists who forever changed our relationship to what we eat ... The heroes of Hippie Food are tireless in their quests to rediscover or reinvent traditional ways of coaxing vivid flavors from the humblest of ingredients. It’s hard to read more than a few pages without feeling compelled to do something — whether it’s digging a plot for lettuce in your backyard, taking a trip to the farmers’ market or busting out an old tamari-stained copy of Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook to resurrect your mushroom moussaka.
Bill Hayes
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleA memoir of Hayes’ surpassingly tender and exuberant romance with Sacks in his last seven years of life, it is also a book about the necessity of self-reinvention ... The excerpts from this journal that appear in Insomniac City capture the neurologist’s exquisitely memorable way of saying things, which made one wish that one was always carrying a tape recorder in his presence ... Much of the loveliest writing in the book, however, belongs to Hayes alone...Ultimately, what makes a memoir worth reading is its acuity of observation, and Hayes is a 21st century flaneur — like Whitman or Baudelaire with a digital camera and an insatiable appetite for the serendipitous connections that thrive in liminal places like the subway ... Like Patti Smith’s haunting M Train, Hayes’ book weaves seemingly disparate threads of memory into a kind of sanctuary — a secret place where one can shake off the treasured relics of past lives and prepare to be reborn anew.
David France
RaveThe Financial Times...an important and powerfully written book ... Instead of diluting the emotional force of his narrative, France’s personal perspective on the story amplifies it, particularly because his meticulously chronicled version of events is never clouded by sentimentality or petty score-settling ... With a novelist’s eye for telling details and a poet’s gift for indelible images, France describes blind patients in Aids wards ... inspiring, uplifting and necessary reading.
Alan Schwarz
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...an important, humane and compellingly written new book ... ADHD Nation focuses on an unholy alliance between drugmakers, academic psychiatrists, policy makers and celebrity shills like Glenn Beck that Schwarz brands the 'A.D.H.D. industrial complex' ... should be required reading.
