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"Kurlansky, Mark, author"
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Birdseye : the adventures of a curious man
While working as a fur trapper in Labrador, Canada, Clarence Birdseye encountered an age-old problem: bad food and an unappealing, unhealthy diet. However, he observed that fresh vegetables wetted and left outside in the Arctic winds froze in a way that maintained their integrity after thawing. As a result, he developed his patented Birdseye freezing process and started the company that still bears his name. Birdseye forever changed the way we preserve, store, and distribute food, and the way we eat. Mark Kurlansky's vibrant and affectionate narrative reveals Clarence Birdseye as a quintessential \"can-do\" American inventor--his other patents include an electric sunlamp, a harpoon gun to tag finback whales, and an improved incandescent lightbulb--and shows how the greatest of changes can come from the simplest of ideas and the unlikeliest of places.
Book
Informed society, yes; informant society, no
Rapidly the U.S. government has turned us into the arbitrators of a more general condition known as \"suspiciousness.\" This is problematic. Remember how, just after the attacks, Sikhs in this country were singled out by angry, frightened citizens as suspicious because they wore turbans, as did Afghanistan's Taliban rulers? It is a tragic waste of historical experience that no one today wants to study the fall of communism. Communism was not defeated by the Cold War; it collapsed incrementally from hundreds of bad decisions. And one of those decisions was setting neighbor against neighbor, watching for suspicious activity. They complained of their plight and explained that they had simply been defending their country. They did not see the role they had played in its slow dismantling. One of them asked me, \"If you were told that your country was threatened, wouldn't you give information to your government to help it?\" I thought about this because I felt that they deserved the most honest answer I could give. But it was very difficult to relate my experience in the United States to theirs in East Germany. I thought of the FBI informants who infiltrated the peace movement in the 1960s, and the former communists who had named names to congressional committees a decade earlier. The problem was that every example I could think of was not a true threat. Finally, I had to say, \"No, I wouldn't.\" But today the U.S. government asks for help with what I believe is a real threat. But I still have to say, \"No, I wouldn't.\" A system of informants undermines a society and is inevitably abused by government. Governments too easily become addicted to information. And that is how it always begins.
Newspaper Article
WINTER IN THE SUN; Lazy Days in Montserrat
IT was in Montserrat that I finally did it. I had read about it, talked about it (cricket talk is a necessary prelude to serious discussion with most West Indian political leaders), but I never actually went to a cricket match until I went to Montserrat. The truth is that there was nothing else to do there, and that sense of leisure, I have come to realize, is the essence of cricket, and one of the reasons why the Caribbean has produced the world's greatest cricket players. Montserrat is a British colony, officially called a dependent territory. Some, such as Chief Minister [John Osborne], do not conceal their ambitions for independence, but so far they haven't been able to muster enough support for this idea. And the arguments don't get too heated. After all, the head of the government and the head of the opposition are cousins, both named Osborne, which forces politics into first names. Not that this strikes anyone in Montserrat as particularly noteworthy. In 1970 the head of government, William Bramble, was voted out of office in a landslide victory by Austin Bramble, his son, who ran on a platform that called his father too autocratic. William unsuccessfully denounced his son as \"a chip off the old block.\" Old Road Beach has the island's distinctive black powder sand. A [Monserrat] resident makes a toy from palm fronds for a young visitor at Vue Point Hotel. (Photographs by Len Kaufman for The New York Times)(pg. 8); A lobster claw heliconia, one of many exotic plants on lush Montserrat. (Gerry Ellis)(pg. 8); War memorial clock tower at Plymouth. (Len Kaufman for The New York Times)(pg. 32) Map of the Caribbean Sea showing locations and maps of Monsterrat and Dominica.
Newspaper Article
The core of an onion : peeling the rarest common food - featuring more than 100 historical recipes
A delectable look at the cultural, historical, and gastronomical layers of one of the world's most beloved culinary staples - featuring original illustrations and recipes from around the world.
Book
WINTER IN THE SUN; Lazy Days in Montserrat
IT was in Montserrat that I finally did it. I had read about it, talked about it (cricket talk is a necessary prelude to serious discussion with most West Indian political leaders), but I never actually went to a cricket match until I went to Montserrat. The truth is that there was nothing else to do there, and that sense of leisure, I have come to realize, is the essence of cricket, and one of the reasons why the Caribbean has produced the world's greatest cricket players. Montserrat is a British colony, officially called a dependent territory. Some, such as Chief Minister [John Osborne], do not conceal their ambitions for independence, but so far they haven't been able to muster enough support for this idea. And the arguments don't get too heated. After all, the head of the government and the head of the opposition are cousins, both named Osborne, which forces politics into first names. Not that this strikes anyone in Montserrat as particularly noteworthy. In 1970 the head of government, William Bramble, was voted out of office in a landslide victory by Austin Bramble, his son, who ran on a platform that called his father too autocratic. William unsuccessfully denounced his son as \"a chip off the old block.\" Old Road Beach has the island's distinctive black powder sand. A [Monserrat] resident makes a toy from palm fronds for a young visitor at Vue Point Hotel. (Photographs by Len Kaufman for The New York Times)(pg. 8); A lobster claw heliconia, one of many exotic plants on lush Montserrat. (Gerry Ellis)(pg. 8); War memorial clock tower at Plymouth. (Len Kaufman for The New York Times)(pg. 32)
Newspaper Article
POLITICAL TURMOIL THROWS HAITI'S FLEDGLING TOURIST INDUSTRY INTO A QUANDARY
The fall and exile of Jean-Claude \"Baby Doc\" Duvalier, Haiti's president-for-life last month, sent this tropical island into a tourism chill. From Jan. 31 until Feb. 14, the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs advised Americans to avoid all travel to Haiti. The advisory has been lifted, but Americans are advised to \"exercise normal precautions and obey curfew laws in the country.\" Continual reports of brutal repression by Francois \"Papa Doc\" Duvalier kept the industry from being developed along with its Caribbean neighbors in the 1960s. But by the second half of the 1970s his son, Jean-Claude, who took over in 1971, had improved the country's reputation only slightly, but enough for tourism to begin growing. The 40-room beach front Jacmelienne was only one of several new hotels to open in the late 1970s. They prospered for a few years and then reports started spreading linking Haitians to the deadly disease, AIDS. Tourism fell drastically. According to Eric Danies, owner of the Jacmelienne and newly named director of tourism for external affairs, the number of visitors dropped from 200,000 in 1982-83 to 50,000 last year. In the last four years, he said, 14 major hotels have gone out of business in Haiti.
Newspaper Article
German Autumn
First published in Sweden in 1947, German Autumn, a collection of Stig Dagerman’s articles on Germany immediately after the fall of the Third Reich, was unlike any other reporting at the time. Presented here in its first American edition, Dagerman’s essays on the tragic aftermath of war, suffering, and guilt are as hauntingly relevant today as they were sixty years ago.
eBook