Author: Rudi Supek File Type: pdf

Author: Noel Riley Fitch File Type: mobi Amazon.com ReviewNoel Riley Fitchs savory new biography, Appetite for Life, reveals a woman as appealing as the good food and serious cooking she popularized. As a California girl and Smith College undergraduate, Fitch writes, Julia McWilliams was notable for her high spirits and voracious appetite. Performing intelligence work in Asia during World War II, she met Paul Child, and their marriage of mutual devotion and affection endured until his death in 1994. His postwar assignment took them to France, where she discovered her true calling. Fitch reminds us that Child championed fresh ingredients at a time when frozen foods and TV dinners dominated American supermarket shelves, and that she demystified haute cuisine with her earthy humor and casual attitude toward mistakes. This affectionate portrait of the remarkable Julia Child reflects her fervent belief that the pleasures of the table are a natural accompaniment to the pleasures of life. FromNo one person in the U.S. improved the nations standard of eating more than Julia Child. Her celebrity stems less from her masterwork, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, than from her perennially popular PBS television series, The French Chef. Born into a wealthy Southern California home, Julia McWilliams led a lively but pampered existence until she met Paul Child in wartime India. These two eager esthetes, for whom the worst possible sin was being boring, bonded into an extraordinarily strong marriage that helped the husband survive McCarthys purges and gave the wife a decade to focus on her revolutionary book. Although the Childs crossed paths with dozens of political, artistic, and literary notables in postwar Paris, Marseille, Bonn, Oslo, and Washington, biographer Fitch does little but catalog names. But he does make both Childs personalities come alive, from Pauls meticulousness to Julias exuberant, even bawdy, gusto. Uneasy yet productive relationships among Julia and her coauthors fed off both professional and cultural differences. Fitch recounts in mortifying detail one of publishings great gaffes Houghton Mifflin let Mastering slip away to Knopf. Julias evolution from author into television personality and food guru began in her fifties now in her eighties, she continues to reshape the food world she transfigured. Mark Knoblauch

Author: Mark Coker File Type: epub This free book marketing primer provides authors easy-to-implement advice on how to market their books at Smashwords and major ebook retailers. It starts with an overview of how Smashwords helps promote your book, and then provides 41 simple do-it-yourself marketing tips. The book is useful to all authors, even those who dont yet publish on Smashwords. Updated August 23, 2013.

Author: Claire Fanger File Type: pdf In Rewriting Magic, Claire Fanger explores a fourteenth-century text called The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching. Written by a Benedictine monk named John of Morigny, the work all but disappeared from the historical record, and it is only now coming to light again in multiple versions and copies. While Johns book largely comprises an extended set of prayers for gaining knowledge, The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching is unusual among prayer books of its time because it includes a visionary autobiography with intimate information about the books inspiration and composition. Through the window of this record, we witness how John reconstructs and reconsecrates a condemned liturgy for knowledge acquisition the ars notoria of Solomon. Johns work was the subject of intense criticism and public scandal, and his book was burned as heretical in 1323. The trauma of these experiences left its imprint on the book, but in unexpected and sometimes baffling ways. Fanger decodes this imprint even as she relays the narrative of how she learned to understand it. In engaging prose, she explores the twin processes of knowledge acquisition in Johns visionary autobiography and her own work of discovery as she reconstructed the background to his extraordinary book. Fangers approach to her subject exemplifies innovative historical inquiry, research, and methodology. Part theology, part historical anthropology, part biblio-memoir, Rewriting Magic relates a story that will have deep implications for the study of medieval life, monasticism, prayer, magic, and religion. **Review Rewriting Magic is a deeply interesting book. It gives the reader a sense of the personal immediacy of scholarly discovery as well as a deep sense of the intimate interior practice of a remarkable monk. The book takes you into the heart of medieval magic and its complex visionary experience. I know of no other book like it. Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University Claire Fanger, now having established how it is appropriate to write about magic, rewrites her rules. And this is what makes Rewriting Magic a really exciting read, the central theme being not only the medieval monk and his visionary book, but also a historical inquiry that lasted nearly two decades, involv[ing] a lot of colleagues, archives, and manuscripts. Benedek Lang, Reviews in History A pithy and intellectually enriching exploration, not of a strange intellectual outlier, but of a profoundly imaginative and quintessentially medieval mind. Frank Klaassen, University of Saskatchewan Fangers book deeply complicates our understanding of late medieval ritual magic, while opening up new vistas on monastic devotional practices. It is a must-read for scholars of medieval religion as well as for those working on the history of magic. Laura Ackerman Smoller, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft [Rewriting Magic] represents a refreshingly honest account of a scholars attempt to overcome the problem of understanding and analysing a form of medieval religiosity that relied upon lived experience. Michael D. Barbezat, Parergon About the Author Claire Fanger is Assistant Professor of Religion at Rice University. She is the editor of Invoking Angels Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries (Penn State, 2012) and Conjuring Spirits Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Penn State, 1998).