January 30, 2012 / Leslie

Mailbox Monday ~ January 30th

Mailbox Monday was created by The Printed Page. It is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their home last week.

Mailbox Monday is currently on tour, hosted by a different blog each month. The January host is Alyce of
At Home With Books.

Ever since I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, I’ve been reading more about what happens to our food before it gets to the grocery store. So I was happy to get an early copy of The Taste of Tomorrow for review. I also received a couple of historical fiction books, one a win and one for review.

From the publisher for review:

Restoration
by Olaf Olafsson

Raised within a cosseted circle of British ex-pats in Florence, Alice shocked her family and friends when she married Claudio. Despite the protests of both families, they found a crumbling villa on a windy Tuscan hilltop, called San Martino, and they poured themselves into the house and the land–and what they built together bound them together. They had a son. They finished the house. They were happy. But away from her family and the ease of life to which she was accustomed, Alice begins to slip into a vast and encompassing loneliness. more.

From AmazonVine for review:

The Taste of Tomorrow:
Dispatches from the Future of Food
by Josh Schonwald

For fans of Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, TheGreenFoodTechie.org’s Josh Schonwald delivers a fascinating investigation into the trends and technologies that are transforming the world of food before our very eyes—from Alice Waters’s micro farm to nanotechnology and beyond. Building upon the knowledge base we have gained from such books as The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Schonwald takes our contemporary conversation about food a step further, debunking myths, clarifying controversies (such as the current storm over GMOs, or genetically modified organisms), and exploring the wild possibilities that food science and chemical engineering are making realities today—from food pills to new species of scratch-built fish.

A win from Nise’ of Under the Boardwalk::

Madame Tussaud
by Michelle Moran

The world knows Madame Tussaud as a wax artist extraordinaire . . . but who was this woman who became one of the most famous sculptresses of all time? In these pages, her tumultuous and amazing story comes to life as only Michelle Moran can tell it. The year is 1788, and a revolution is about to begin.

Spanning five years, from the budding revolution to the Reign of Terror, Madame Tussaud brings us into the world of an incredible heroine whose talent for wax modeling saved her life and preserved the faces of a vanished kingdom.