Gray Books

Be aware that this book is exactly the same as the London River Cafe Cookbook, published in 2003 by Random House.
The cover is different and the name is different, but the books (including the formatting) are exactly the same.

`The Italian Country Cook Book' authors Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers are two English chefs who carry a lot of weight in the community of writers on Italian Cuisine. They are one of the first employers of Jamie Oliver and were, I suspect, a strong influence on his style and choice of cuisine. Gray and Roger owe nothing to Oliver's current celebrity. Their reputation is firmly based on doing good Italian food before Jamie came to the limelight.

This is their first and most highly acclaimed book, and the last of their three readily available volumes that I am to review. The book can be viewed on at least three different levels, depending on the reader's level of knowledge of Italian cuisine.

The reader who is innocent of any Italian cuisine outside what they may have seen in the local American Italian restaurant will be quite surprised by the absence of the Italian-American classics such as spaghetti and meatballs, veal Parmesan, lasagna, and chicken Marsala. The better informed reader who has read Lydia Bastianich and watched `Molto Mario' will recognize many true Italian standards such as Panzanella salad, osso bucco, slow-cooked lamb shanks, artichokes alla Giudea, and lots and lots of risotto and polenta recipes. This reader may feel slightly disoriented in that there are very few hints and reminders and pointers about how to complete the various recipes. A perfect example is the Roman recipe for `Carciofi alla Giudea' (Fried artichokes, Jewish style). The recipe in David Downie's authoritative `Cooking the Roman Way' covers three pages while Rogers and Gray take three short paragraphs, occupying a quarter of a page to give the recipe with almost exactly the same ingredients. Part of the difference is that Downie's recipe includes detailed instructions on dealing with and cleaning an artichoke and details on techniques for frying with olive oil. Rogers and Gray dispatch this task in four sentences. In dealing with this book, a second paradigm shift is needed to move from the view of culinary newbie to experienced user of Italian recipes.

As with the fried artichoke example, tips on cooking technique are rare in this book. What is not rare are tips on the selection of ingredients. I can honestly say that this is truly the first book I have seen where the recipes are so simple and the ingredients lists so small that the choice of the proper ingredients is essential to achieving the expected results. Some recipes are so specific that they require olive oil fresh from the harvest in December and January. Oil aged as much as six months will simply be too mild to give the proper brightness to the recipe.

The name of the book `Italian Country' was given to `The River Café Cookbook' when its publication was transplanted from the United Kingdom to the United States. This new title and some few statements in the book give a somewhat misleading picture of the book as a collection of `authentic' recipes from rural Italy. I will just point out that two classic artichoke recipes are well known staples of downtown Rome from antiquity. There are also a few statements about the regional source of some recipes, but these do not make this a treatise on regional Italian cookery. The most important point of view to take with this book is the statement in the first sentence of the introduction which proclaims `... a shared vision (to) cook the food we had eaten in Italian homes but could never find outside Italy...'. A corollary to this vision is that since all the recipes were based on or inspired by Italian home cooking, they are truly easy to do in the British or American kitchen. The only catch is that in spite of the wealth of Italian speciality products available in American megamarts, some critical ingredients may still be a bit difficult to find, and the authors tend to make correct ingredient selection an important part of each recipe. Cavolo nero (black cabbage), for example, a native of Tuscany, has not found its way to my local, well-stocked produce palaces. I also think getting fresh olive oil in January may be a bit of a trick for us colonists. But I will reserve judgment on this until I try next year.

While the book contains many recipes familiar to the journeyman Italian cook, there are also many unusual forms. One favorite is rotolo di spinaci, a rolled pasta akin to strudel with a mushroom, ricotta, and spinach filling. This is one of the rare recipes whose method takes a full page and the accompanying photographs detail the steps in the method. While there are tomatoes aplenty in many recipes, the book has a strongly Northern Italian bent, with the lots of risotto, dried bread, and polenta recipes and relatively few hard pasta recipes. For those who crave spaghetti, take a look at the latest cookbook from the River Café, `Italian Easy from the River Café'. This new volume has close to a dozen spaghetti recipes.

The irony of the book is that in spite of the simplicity of the recipes, this is `graduate level' cooking which expects a fair amount of cooking competence from its readers and a considerable dedication to tracking down the right ingredients. But do not be deterred. The world would be pretty dull if every Italian cookbook covered all the same techniques in the same level of detail. Also do not be deterred by the fairly large number of familiar recipes in this book. Most recipes with common names are different enough for you to learn from the variation. The authors' spaghetti Carbonara, for example, is significantly different from, for example, Mario Batali's recipe.

The styling and photography adds to the joyful feeling of the text without being too obstrusive. And, the translation of Italian dish names is less consistant than it should be in an important book published by Random House.

Highly recommended classic for important Italian recipes.

Szatkowski (you can't say it, but it reads pretty good) has done it again. This time in a more mature, more polished fashion. His other books are certain timeless works, but the characters in this really chime. It's like a hangover without an aspaMushrooms and Applesaucerin in the universe. Perhaps more alarming. Perhaps more real. There's something authentic and haunting about this novel, like Brett Ellis pulled himself out of drug induced stupor, shrank, and splattered himself all over a plot of pages. It's like the dream is dreaming us...
I can't seem to get the scene with John and Shea watching the videotape of John and that frat guy out of my mind. The way it ends: "Don't remember me this way. There are drugs in my pocket."
He's got a way of describing simplistic things, like everything's a horror, a love affair, a time of despair, a hedonistic cesspit.
Life.

Wow! What a story, what great characters! The third novel from Christopher Szatkowski dives into the minds of two characters who are spiraling out of control in uncertainty and the worlds they live in. The story is dark and demented yet grabs such a hold on you that you cannot put the book down! With so many twists and turns that makes Tarantino look like an amateur the book is riveting from start to finish!! The story makes you really feel for the characters and the ending is flat out amazing!! Great read, highly recommend it!! When does the next novel from this fantastic author come out??

I loved this second book! I really liked getting to know the two main characters better. The mystery surrounding Kat makes her that much more interesting. The new characters are great too. The Raven and the Wolf are perfect as the new adversaries. I couldn't put this book down. The action scenes are VERY well done. I can't wait for the rest of the series! There is so much that I'm looking forward to finding out.

I love this series. And book two just makes it even better. I love the twin Closers in this novel, they are wickedly evil. The action again is none stop. And there are more and more mysteries to uncover like who is Kat? And just who murdered Kim's mom. I can't wait for book three.

I loved this second book! I really liked getting to know the two main characters better. The mystery surrounding Kat makes her that much more interesting. The new characters are great too. The Raven and the Wolf are perfect as the new adversaries. I couldn't put this book down. The action scenes are VERY well done. I can't wait for the rest of the series! There is so much that I'm looking forward to finding out

Shades of Gray Book Two is an exciting second book in this series. The story continues to follow Kim and Kat as they search for answers. I can't wait for Shades of Gray Book Three Cerberus Versus Pandora.

When I was visiting the east coast at the beginning of August from my home in California, the recall of Gray Davis was on everyone's lips.

However, thanks to the superficial and leftist coverage of the national news, very few people I talked to had any understanding of the grievances against Davis that led to the recall petition's overwhelming 1.6 million signatures.

I wish I'd brought about 100 copies of this book with me to hand out to each of them. It chronicles the five years worth of corruption, graft, cronyism, incompetence, and overall crookedness of the Davis administration that never made the national news.

If you're wondering what's behind the so-called "circus," as the leftist media inaccurately calls it, read this book.

Wall Street Journal hit the nail on the head when they wrote that Davis was "corrupt, imcompetent and passive."

If you don't live in California or feel that the recall was wrong for any reason, read this book. See what Gray Davis did to this great state and why the state would have been far worse off had he been allowed to stay in office.

The nicest thing I can say bout Mr. Davis is that he was gracious in his concession speech. That was a class act. Unfortunately, his administration as Governor was not class at all.

Most fly fishermen are artists at heart. This wonderful book does not disappoint. Reneson's watercolors are among the best out there and a perfect complement to Gray's essays. This book will nourish the soul of a fly fisherman on a cold night.

This is both a beautiful (the art of Reneson) and a thoughtful (the writing of Gray) book. It is not a "how to" book, but rather a book to set your mind for a good trip, or to reflect on a past trip. If you can't be there, this is the next best thing.

Easy read. Great book for dog lovers and those that like boats.

"Sinbad of the Coast Guard" is a wonderful book for adults and
children about a homeless puppy who gets sneaked onboard a
Coast Guard ship by one of the sailors and grows up to be the world famous mascot of not only his ship, the USS Campbell, but
also the mascot of the entire Coast Guard.
It is a story of how Sinbad received his name, how exactly he
got on the ship, his life on board with his shipmates, most of
this occurring during the height of World War II on the stormy
waters of the North Atlantic.
Sinbad and his crew had some real scary encounters with Nazi
U boats who had only one objective: to sink the Campbell and
any other Allied ships they could destroy. In one incident, the
Campbell ends up sinking the German sub, but is severely damaged
in the process and has to be towed to port.
Sinbad eventually retired and lived out his life at the Barnegat Light, New Jersey Coast Guard Station where he was buried with
honors and his gravestone survives to this day as does his
memory which will endure forever thanks to "Sinbad of the Coast
Guard".

"The Sister Arts is A BRILLIANT CLASSIC of scholarship, the inaugural text in the comparative study of literature and the visual arts.
It also has a broader importance for aesthetics, semiotics, and the study of text-image relations in a variety of genres and media."
---W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicage

"No single scholar has had a greater influence than Hagstrum in suggesting the intimate (and sometimes troubled) relationship between poetry and painting.
Few books can truthfully be described as 'seminal,' but this seems to be the most accurate description of The Sister Arts, which MORE THAN ANY OTHER WORK has provided a basis for development and refinement within the comparative field of art and literature."
---Richard Wendorf, from Articulate Images (1983)

"The proper way to read and teach... poets from Dryden to Gray is still to see their poems.
Hagstrum's book remaings by FAR THE BEST introduction to that method."
---Lawrence Lipking, Northwestern University

"The first part of Hagstrum's works is devoted to a history of the Ut pictura poesis concept, the second part brings penetrating analyses of the imagery of the major neoclassical poets.
Both contribute ESSENTIALLY to our understanding and appreciation of Romantic poetry.
The book is EXCELLENTLY DOCUMENTED and Hagstrum's style itself has much of the incisive stateliness of those poets whose works he so brilliantly analyzes."
---Johannes A. Gaertner, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

"JEAN H. HAGSTRUM is John C. Shaffer Professor Emeritus of English and the Humanities at Northwestern University.
He is the author of Samuel Johnson's Literary Criticism, William Blake: Poet and Painter, and Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart, all published by the University of Chicago Press."
[from the book of the back cover]

"I have been interested in the relations of poetry and painting as the subject of research ever since Professor Chauncey B. Tinker in 1938 published his Norton Lectures under the title Painter and Poet.
But it was only during recent investigations of Anglo-Italian cultural relations that I became convinced that the impact of the visual arts upon the English imagination should be made the subject of a separate study that would also attempt to trace the history of ut pictura poesis in criticism and to define the pictorial image of neoclassical poetry.
The present book is the fruit of that conviction....."
[from the book of the preface by Jean H. Hagstrum]

I first read this book when I was working on a graduate thesis. Hagstrum is the father of a whole discipline of criticism that centers around the connections between visual art and poetry. He addresses the work of poets who have written about art works and other ramifications--why they do so, what is the connection, what do they tell us about poetry and painting? His insights and methods of analysis are the models for the work that has been done since. He "prepares our vision" to understand the important visual context of the poets he discusses. With myriad examples from both the literary and the plastic arts, Hagstrum traces the history of an important tradition from the Classical Period through the Christian Era, the Renaissance, the Baroque period and finally the Neoclassical age. He then applies this historical background to five neoclassical poets (Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Collins and Gray). He then demonstrates the value and efficacy of careful critical examination of single poets from a visual-pictorial perspective. The book is very ambitious, and succeeds in all it attempts. An excellent resource and a good, if dense and complex, read. After reading this book in the early 80's, I got so excited I have been researching this stuff ever since. John Hollander has recently published a book called The Gazer's Spirit which addresses some of the same concerns in the modern tradition. The two books together cover the discipline very well, but Hagstrum's alone is a real education. A wonderful book.

Reading "Small Acts of Grace" by Alice Gray is like sitting down with a mentor. Her writing style is not "forced." She tells stories of real people, real happenings, and real feelings, through which the reader finds gentle encouragement to make needed changes in her own life. I appreciate the thought questions at the end of each section. Sometimes, I need to "sit" on them for a few days as I consider what is lacking in my own life regarding relationships and reaching out to others. When a book makes me stop and think, I know the writer has connected!

Alice Gray gives one specifics as to how do small acts of grace toward others. They are practical, and everyone can do them. This book is definitely a must read, must do! Not only does one practice these, but in practicing these small acts of grace from God, they too are blessed. I highly recommend it for self use, and as a gift giver!

I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves to read to young children. The snappy, rhyming text, alliteration, spunky illustrations and mildly mischievous main character make it a book that young children ask to hear over and over again!

Looking for a great book to read to a child? I've been reading this one since my son was 1! Great fun to read and lots of lessons to learn. Beautiful illustrations.