Hardcover. Gloucester MA, Peter Smith, reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers, 569 pages. Two decades after Darwin, intellectuals were writing about the evolution of everything. In England Edward Taylor focused on material culture such as fire making, cooking, or tool making. In America, Lewis Henry Morgan, concentrated on social evolution combined with subsistence techniques. His thinking was influenced by his Iroquois neighbors in New York. Like many others he posited three stages of evolution: savagery, barbarism and civilization, but he refined the three periods with three subperiods. In Lower savagery, for example, he saw humans subsisting on fruits and roots in tropical climes, using gesture language and marrying siblings in a consanguine family. Middle savagery saw fish subsistence, monosyllabic language, and marriage of cousins. Bows and arrows appeared in Upper Savagery along with syllabic language, clans, and tribal organization. Obviously Morgan was speculating on most of the developments, but he had found arguments for his positions from the reports of explorers and missionaries around the world. As a result, Morgan inspired an era of inquisitive thought that led to the development of American anthropology. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. San Francisco, Ten Speed, 1st, 2024, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 238 pages, color illustrations. Tom Parker Bowles, award-winning food writer, restaurant critic, and son of Queen Camilla, blends history, monarchy, and gastronomy to provide a fascinating window into the world of royal tastes and traditions as far back as Victorian times. An intimate cookbook exploring 200 years of British royal food, studded with anecdotes, delectable tidbits, and nuggets of history, featuring 100 accessible recipes. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. London, JR Books, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 202 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Signed personal letter from author enclosed. Dust jacket unclipped. Dust jacket has small repaired rip on spine, otherwise very good. Gilt title on spine. There a small bit of staining (food) to a couple of the pages. Binding tight and in excellent shape.
Softcover. NY, Vintage, 1st pbk, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages. That Sweet Enemy brings both British wit (Robert Tombs is a British historian) and French panache (Isabelle Tombs is a French historian) to bear on three centuries of the history of Britain and France. From Waterloo to Chirac's slandering of British cooking, the authors chart this cross-channel entanglement and the unparalleled breadth of cultural, economic, and political influence it has wrought on both sides, illuminating the complex and sometimes contradictory aspects of this relationship--rivalry, enmity, and misapprehension mixed with envy, admiration, and genuine affection--and the myriad ways it has shaped the modern world. Clean copy.