Bøger af Justin Spring

Alice Hickey: Between Worlds: is a fast-paced, lightly fictionalized, and sometimes troubling memoir of a seven year period in which the author and psychic Alice Hickey try to unwind a skein of bewildering psychic events that threaten to unseat the author. That effort sends them ricocheting back and forth between Sarasota, Tavernier Key, Panama, Santa Monica, Sedona, and the San Blas Islands and then, finally, back in time to the dawn of the human race. This is a totally new look at the roots of human consciousness, the psychic roots of poetry, the early Mother Goddess period, and our constantly evolving consciousness.

RIVER MOTHER: The Face of the Sphinx is the story of an extraordinary female shaman and leader of a hunter-gatherer tribe living between the second and third cataracts in Nubia. The story is set in the Proto-Egyptian Mother Goddess period c. 6000 B.C. and is told by River Mother herself. She begins by describing her birth and early life followed by the shamanic training and prophetic visions that eventually drive her to journey to the Nile delta where her spiritual beliefs are challenged by the somewhat different beliefs of Semitic tribes immigrating into the delta from the north. She rises to that challenge by becoming a great visionary leader whose impact on the spiritual and physical lives of the delta's inhabitants eventually brings them to honor her as a living Goddess by carving her face on a rocky outcropping on the Giza plateau-an outcropping that was gradually transformed over time into what we now know as the Great Sphinx of Giza. Although River Mother is a fictional character, her story is not a fantasy. It is rooted in the known artistic, cultural, Weathering, and historical facts of that period.

2010 National Book Award Finalist for NonfictionDrawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail.After leaving the world of academe to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago's notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex research. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write exceptionally literate, upbeat pro-homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros.Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow-but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1993, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Justin Spring's Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.

A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2017 and a Christian Science Monitor Best Book of 2017. Winner of the Gourmand World Cookbook Award in Culinary History."The broad outline of Spring's thesis is so persuasive, the details so evocative (not to mention mouth watering), that anyone interested in the evolution of cooking in America will find The Gourmands' Way informative and indispensable." -Wendy Smith, The Boston GlobeA biography of six writers on food and wine whose lives and careers intersected in mid-twentieth-century France. During the thirty-year boom in France following World War II-les Trente Glorieuses-Paris was not only the world's most stylish tourist destination, it was also the world capital of gastronomic genius. In The Gourmands' Way, Justin Spring tells the story of six American writer-adventurers having the time of their lives in the City of Light during this period and, in doing so, transforming the way Americans talk and think about food-and the way they eat.The six are A. J. Liebling, Alice B. Toklas, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Alexis Lichine, and Richard Olney. The Gourmands' Way is the first book ever to look at these unforgettable figures as a group. It is also the first to focus specifically on their Paris-based adventures. Liebling was a great war correspondent, reporter, and humorist who opens Spring's narrative by sweeping into Paris with the French and Allied forces in August 1944; Toklas was Gertrude Stein's life partner who reinvented herself at age seventy-five as a cookbook author; Fisher was a sensualist storyteller and fabulist; Child was a cookbook author, America's greatest television food celebrity, and the reinventor of the dinner party; Lichine was an ambitious wine merchant who, through an astounding series of risk-taking ventures, became the leading importer of French wines in America; and Olney was a reclusive but freewheeling artist who reluctantly evolved into one of the foremost American writers on French cuisine and French wine.Justin Spring focuses on the most joyful, exciting, formative, and dramatic moments of these six lives, many of which were intimately connected to the exploration and discovery of fine French food and drink-whether they experienced it at top Michelin-starred restaurants or straight from a hot plate in an artist's garret. The Gourmands' Way leads us through both the fabled world of haute cuisine and the vibrant bohemian and artistic haunts of the Left Bank during the 1950s. Intimate, anecdotal, and beautifully researched, The Gourmands' Way is an eye-opening exploration of the rich, storied annals of mid-twentieth-century Franco-American culinary history.