Whisky and Scotland or Feast and Folly

Whisky and Scotland: A Practical and Spiritual Survey

Author: Neil M Gunn

Good malt whisky, brewed and distilled in the time-honored way excites the same appreciation as fine wine. This witty, erudite, and often lyrical toast to the Celts' "water of life" shares the fascinating history and lore surrounding the art of whisky distilling. The book travels back to whiskey's ancient roots among the Celts and laments the passing of rituals that were handed down until Scotland's conquerors transformed the drink made in a man's home into a public affair ripe for taxation and regulation. Describing in loving detail the process of malting, distilling, and maturing, the author explains how to recognize a good pot still from a patent blend.

Go to: Mortal Evidence or The Second Plane September 11

Feast and Folly

Author: Allen S S Weiss

Treats French cuisine as a fine art, offering both historical background as well as a deep analysis of the social, political, and aesthetic aspects of cuisine and taste. BACKCOVER: What would it mean to speak of cuisine as a fine art? Combining an analysis of French cuisine with cutting-edge postmodernist critique, Feast and Folly provides , on the one hand, a fascinating history of French gastronomy and cuisine over the past two centuries, as well as considerable detail regarding the preparation of some of the colossal meals described in the book. It offers a deep analysis of the social, political, and aesthetic aspects of cuisine and taste, exploring the conceptual preconditions, the discursive limits, and the poetics and rhetorical forms of the modern culinary imagination. Allen S. Weiss analyzes the structural preconditions of considering cuisine as a fine art, connects the diverse discursive conditions that give meaning to the notion of cuisine as artwork, and investigates the most extreme psychological and metaphysical condition of the aesthetic domain-the sublime-in relation to gastronomy.

Author Biography: Allen S. Weiss teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author and editor of over twenty-five books, including The Aesthetics of Excess and Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon, both published by SUNY Press, and (with Lawrence R. Schehr) French Food: On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture.