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Combining the best of memoir, travel literature, and food writing, Christopher Bakken delves into one of the most underappreciated cuisines in Europe in this rollicking celebration of the Greek table. He explores the traditions and history behind eight elements of Greek cuisine--olives, bread, fish, cheese, beans, wine, meat, and honey--and journeys through the country searching for the best examples of each. He picks olives on Thasos, bakes bread on Crete, eats thyme honey from Kythira with one of Greece's greatest poets, and learns why Naxos is the best place for cheese in the Cyclades. Working with local cooks and artisans, he offers an intimate look at traditional village life, while honoring the conversations, friendships, and leisurely ceremonies of dining around which Hellenic culture has revolved for thousands of years. A hymn to slow food and to seasonal and sustainable cuisine, Honey, Olives, Octopus is a lyrical celebration of Greece, where such concepts have always been a simple part of living and eating well.

Offering simple foolproof recipes that anyone can cook at home, this is a delicious journey into new worlds, making delicious discoveries. With 180 delicious recipes like spicy Gujarati Potatoes, Southern Fried Chicken, Pho, Empanadas, Haleem—king of curries, and Stone-Bowl Bibimbap, cooks are taken on a culinary globetrot. Desserts include Baklawa, Crepes Suzette, and Fig Loukoumades. Demystifying unfamiliar cuisines, this book offers stories and traditions related to each cuisine, helps readers shop for the key ingredients and cooking implements, and includes simple recipes from cultures as far flung as Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and South America. Soon readers will be experts at making Dolma from Turkey, Bulgogi from Korea, and Black Forest Cake from Germany.

This insider's glimpse into the manipulative world of branding is sedately delivered by reader Lloyd James in a bland, occasionally smirking tone. This seems appropriate, as author Levine, a marketing guru, has "handled" movie star and rock star clients (Michael Jackson, among others), corporate public relations disasters, and major product launches. He's rather smug about it all. James walks us through the creation and cold-blooded branding of a fictional brand of ice cream to illustrate the "creation of a superbrand," a quasi- psy-ops project that requires marketers to second-guess every nuance of public response. While full of useful pointers, A BRANDED WORLD suffers from its manipulative approach to marketing.

In The Head Trip, science journalist Jeff Warren explores twelve distinct, natural states of consciousness we can experience in a twenty-four-hour day, each state offering its own kind of knowledge and insight and its own adventure. The hypnagogic state, when our minds hover between waking and sleeping, can be a rich source of creativity and even compassion. The Watch is an almost magical waking experience in the middle of the night that has been all but lost to electric light and modern sleep patterns. Daydreaming and trance, lucid dreaming, the Zone, and the Pure Conscious Event from sleep laboratory to remote northern cabin, neurofeedback clinic to Buddhist retreat, Warren fearlessly tries them all. Along the way, he talks to neuroscientists, chronobiologists, anthropologists, monks, and many others who illuminate his stories with cutting-edge science and age-old wisdom.