Pennsylvania Books

Kitchen Culture in America provides a review of popular representations of food, gender and race and uses everything from television to ads and magazines to examine how women's roles have been shaped by the practice of consuming and making meals. From 1895 to 1970, this provides examples which argue that 'kitchen culture' instructs women in acceptable social behavior patterns.

I recently used this text in a university class; my students and I value this work a great deal. It's great to see a medievalist criticize Aries appropriately, without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of childhood.

John C. Unkovic sure is an awesome writer!!! He is great!!! Five stars!!! A++++

Professor Cazelles' commentary and translations of these hagiographic romances bring to life a part of literary history ignored, for the most part, until quite recently. Her 70+ page commentary at the beginning of the book helps introduce the topic of sanctity to her readers, and the various motifs of female sanctity in the 13th century are examined with reference to various hagiographic tales within and without the text. Comparison is drawn with male sanctity throughout the work, and I feel that I not only learned about "The Lady As Saint" from the book, but also got a fairly firm grounding in "the man as saint."

Cazelles also compares the saintly lady to the lady as portrayed in Courtly romance. This comparrison brings to light some surprising trends and similairities, and is explored in fascinating depth in the work.

Cazelles translations are excellent. When more than one extant poem exists commemorating a saint's life, Cazelles provides a verse translation of the copy thought to be most widely known during the period, and she provides prose translations of each of the other forms of the poem. Her translations are vivid and lively, and make these violent, exciting lives even more enjoyable to read. If one is interested in studying the Middle Ages, this book is a must read. It is well researched, well written, and illuminates an important aspect of Medieval culture.

I was raised in Lancaster County, but I have not lived there regularly in over thirty years, but I do enjoy visiting family and old friends. I bought this book to keep current with a wider set of recommendations. I am very impressed with the large number of listings, the accuracy of those I know, and the number of hard to find establishments included, and, especially, the list of purveyors of homegrown, healthy foods in small towns and the countryside I want to try. This is the best book of its kind I have seen.

This ghost town is completly gone. This book will help you find it and some of its interesting history. It was one of the first electric coal mines.

Author of "Hobo Finds A Home" editor "Of A Predatory Heart"

This book and the companion volume (Languages and Their Status, also edited by Shopen) provide and excellent introduction to linguistic anthropology through several case studies. Each chapter is written by a different author. The text does not assume any knowledge of linguistics and jargon is kept to a minimum. Each chapter focuses on one language and provides a discussion of a theoretical topic (e.g. morphemes, formality, word order) and several sections presenting a small grammatical "lesson" about the language. Coupled with a discussion of the language's grammatical feautres is a discussion of how native speakers USE the language. Thus the reader gets a nice package of some linguistic theory, grammatical description, and cultural anthropology in each chapter.

Along with the other volume in the series, "Languages and their speakers," this is one of the top 10 books on linguistics. The book consists of a set of articles/chapters on various languages. For each language, it walks the reader through an analysis of some grammatical aspect of that language, and it also talks about the social environment of that language and its speakers. For instance, in the chapter on Mohawk, it walks you through an analysis of polysynthetic morphology. (If you're not a linguist: that's a way of forming words that seems very exotic if your native language is English.) It also talks about the near-death of the Mohawk language in Canada, and how an effective language maintenance program was instituted for Mohawk there.

The book is very, very readable. I've often used chapters from it as extra-credit assignments in introductory linguistics courses, and I've read it for fun more than once myself.

It's such a relief to have the Siete Partidas available in this attractive, reasonably priced set. The venerable Robert I. Burns has given it a wonderful general introduction and the index increases its accesibility even more than the very clear translation does. No more ploughing through paragraph after paragraph of Old Spanish, in 19th-century print, to get to the enlightening and even entertaining ideas that so well characterize the 13th century and give sociological background to any kind of medieval research.

I cannot express the joy I feel to finally own this book! Written by a third generation logger, the book not only recounts the voyage of the "last raft" to be floated down the West Branch of the Susquehanna River but describes the process of Rafting and log driving in ninteenth century Pennsylvania.

Mr. Tonkin wrote much about his family's involvement with the logging industry and his efforts do much to document a facet of life that would otherwise be lost forever.

This is a reletively rare and wonderfully written book.