#kurlansky

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Daphne:  Mark Kurlansky - Big Oyster, New York in the World

  From the bestselling author of Salt and Cod comes a fascinating history of New York and the oyster - its influence on four centuries of cultural, economic, and culinary trends - with recipes throughout

When Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24 in 1626 he showed his shrewdness by also buying the oyster beds off tiny, nearby Oyster Island, renamed Ellis Island in 1770.

From the Minuit purchase until pollution finally destroyed the beds in the 1920s, New York was a city known for its oysters, especially in the late 1800s, when Europe and America enjoyed a decades-long oyster craze. In a dubious endorsement, William Makepeace Thackeray said that eating a New York oyster was like eating a baby.

Travellers to New York were also keen to experience the famous New York oyster houses. While some were known for their elegance, due to a longstanding belief in the aphrodisiac quality of oysters, they were often associated with prostitution. In 1842, when the novelist Charles Dickens arrived in New York, he could not conceal his eagerness to find and experience the fabled oyster cellars of New York City's slums.

The Big Oyster is the story of a city and of an international trade.Filled with cultural, social and culinary insight - as well as recipes, maps, drawings and photographs - this is history at its most engrossing, entertaining and delicious.

€ 11.95 | paperback

      Koen:  Malcolm Gladwell - Uitblinkers (Outliers)

  'Vanuit het niets' bestaat niet

Wat is er zo bijzonder aan een uitzonderlijke prestatie? Dat lijkt een vreemde vraag, maar met vreemde vragen is Malcolm Gladwell op zijn best. Uitblinkers is een stimulerende en verbazende zoektocht naar de herkomst van succes. En die ligt niet, zoals meestal wordt gedacht, in een bijzonder brein of een verbluffend talent. Uitblinkers hebben iets bijzonders, maar dat zit hem vooral in wat ze meegemaakt hebben: hun cultuur, familie, en alle eigenaardigheden waarmee ze in aanraking zijn geweest. De geheimen van de softwaremiljardair, de briljante voetballer, de geniale wiskundige en The Beatles zijn níet onbegrijpelijk. In Uitblinkers laat Malcolm Gladwell zien waarom sommige mensen succes

€ 12.50 | paperback | 344 blz. 

  Philomeen:   Russel Shorto - The Island at the Center of the World

  Drawing on 17th-century Dutch records of New Netherland and its capital, Manhattan, translated by scholar Charles Gehring only in recent decades, Shorto (Gospel Truth) brings to exuberant life the human drama behind the skimpy legend starting with the colony's founding in 1623. Most Americans know little about Dutch Manhattan beyond its first director, Peter Minuit, who made the infamous $24 deal with the Indians, and Peter Stuyvesant, the stern governor who lost the island to the English in 1664. These two seminal figures receive their due here, along with a huge cast of equally fascinating characters. But Shorto has a more ambitious agenda: to argue for the huge debt Americans owe to the culture of Dutch Manhattan, the first place in the New World where men and women of different races and creeds lived in relative harmony. The petitions of the colony's citizens for greater autonomy, penned by Dutch-trained lawyer Adriaen van der Donck, represented "one of the earliest expressions of modern political impulses: an insistence by the members of the community that they play a role in their own government." While not discounting the British role in the shaping of American society, the author argues persuasively for the Dutch origins of some of our most cherished beliefs and their roots in "the tolerance debates in Holland" and "the intellectual world of Descartes, Grotius, and Spinoza." Shorto's gracefully written historical account is a must-read for anyone interested in this nation's origins.