Sunday, September 15, 2013

Reading the History of... A President in Yellowstone

For three weeks in August of 1883 the first sitting president to visit Yellowstone National Park, Chester Arthur, made an ambitious 330-mile overland trip from Green River, Wyoming, north to Mammoth Hot Springs with a 75-man military escort led by General Philip Sheridan.

It was the longest and most unusual vacation ever taken by a sitting President. The traveling party included Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, the only surviving son of Abraham Lincoln, who commemorated the trip with a leather-bound album of photographs taken on the journey by a young photographer, F. Jay Haynes, along with the dispatches describing the President’s activities which were sent to the Associated Press.

This volume reprints much of that album, of which only six copies were ever made, and publishes more of Haynes' 130-year-old photographs of Yellowstone National Park and the President's party.

The F. Jay Haynes Photographic Album of Chester
Arthur's 1883 Expedition
by Frank H. Goodyear III
Continued in Out of the Past



Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Reading the History of... The Drunken Botanist

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Thirsty yet?

In The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries.

The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks
by Amy Stewart 
Algonquin Books, 2013



Sunday, September 8, 2013

Farm and Garden Picks: Lobsters

This expanded and fully updated second edition of the most comprehensive and successful book on lobsters, comprises contributions from many of the world’s experts, each providing core information for all those working in lobster biology, fisheries research and management and lobster aquaculture.

The second edition of Lobsters: Biology, Management, Fisheries and Aquaculture delivers exhaustive coverage of these fascinating creatures, stretching from growth and development to management and conservation.

Biology, Management, Aquaculture and Fisheries
by Bruce Phillips
Wiley-Blackwell, 2013