I'm a writer, lecturer, biologist, ecologist, and two-time Fulbright Scholar (to India and Malaysia). I'm now a fiction writer, but basically I’ve always been a storyteller who writes in a historical framework. While I feel an almost compulsive obligation to keep faith with the facts, my main objective is to tell a story—as dramatically and suspensefully and entertainingly as I can. My first non-fiction book, Papyrus: the Plant that Changed the World, tells the story of a plant that still evokes the mysteries of the ancient world while holding the key to the world’s wetlands and atmospheric stability. It changed the world as did all five of the plants on my list below.
Without this book who would know that this popular fruit is in danger of disappearing because of a disease?
Koeppel does a great job presenting the overlooked history of a fruit common to our grocery stores and corner markets. Most of the book focuses on the single variety of banana available everywhere and provides a good overview of different banana varieties used in Africa and Asia as local food staples.
The book also delves into how these varieties are threatened by plant diseases and provides a historical perspective of “Banana Republics,” controlled and manipulated by the powerful banana corporations in the early-mid 20th and 21st Cent.
The book also illustrates the value of narrative non-fiction in presenting history and science at street level. As one reader remarked, “I learned more geography and science from this book than I did from any of my high school classes.”
In the vein of Mark Kurlansky's bestselling Salt and Cod, a gripping chronicle of the myth, mystery, and uncertain fate of the world's most popular fruit
In this fascinating and surprising exploration of the banana's history, cultural significance, and endangered future, award-winning journalist Dan Koeppel gives readers plenty of food for thought. Fast-paced and highly entertaining, Banana takes us from jungle to supermarket, from corporate boardrooms to kitchen tables around the world. We begin in the Garden of Eden-examining scholars' belief that Eve's "apple" was actually a banana- and travel to early-twentieth-century Central America, where aptly named "banana republics" rose…
Not only is this book
hilarious, Banana can’t wait to be in the spotlight and keeps interrupting the
narrator—when will it be Banana’s turn?, but I love it when a book can ap“peel”
(pun intended 😊) to all the kids in the family.
It’s a counting book, so there
is math, of course, but it includes
“skip counting” too (counts 1-10 then by 10’s and 20’s but to 100), so it
stretches to fit older kids who have gone past counting from 1-10. It’s also a
book about animals (and fruit), and it’s written in spot-on rhyme. I read it
aloud, and we giggled so hard when we got to the unexpected ending!
A hilarious, mostly-rhyming picture book about a banana and narrator who can't quite agree on what their book is about. Perfect for fans of Mo Willems' We Are in a Book and Adam Rex's Nothing Rhymes With Orange!
"Mo Willems fans will give this book one, two, three, four, five stars!" --Parents
"Tillotson's rib-tickling debut is not to be missed!"--Kirkus
When a narrator starts filling this story with fruit, Banana can't wait to step into the spotlight. The book is called Counting to Bananas, after all. But as more and more fruits (and non-fruits) are added to the story, Banana…
I became curious about US imperialism and Latin American history after reading Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. While pursuing a BA in History and Spanish at Dalhousie and an MA and PhD in Latin American Studies and History at Georgetown, I learned that Marquez's fictional banana worker massacre really happened in 1928 Colombia. What made me focus on sugar, rather than bananas, is the fact that sugar’s not really food... it often takes over land where food was planted, and the lack of food leads to a potentially revolutionary situation. I've used the following books in my classes about Revolution, Populism, and Commodities in Latin America at York University's Glendon College.
How could you not love a book that explores the at times hilarious, at times tragic, but always fascinating impact of the banana in the United States and Latin America?
From the changing faces of Chiquita Banana to cookbooks and popular jingles like, “Yes, we have no bananas!” Soluri shows us how the banana became one of the most common fruits in the US diet. At the same time, he shows how US importers and marketers took control over, manipulated, and expanded, much of the production in tropical areas like Honduras.
On the production side, Soluri explores ironies like the fact that the United Fruit Company created the perfect breeding ground for pathogens by shrinking banana gene pools and shoving the same type of banana trees all in a row... or the tragic fact that “macho” banana workers became sterile after refusing to wear protective clothing.
Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores-everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.
Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in…
I was born in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, but inherited ‘travelling DNA’ from my sailor father which has led to a life of work and travel around the globe. In addition to being an audiologist and teacher, I am also the author (and sometimes illustrator) of 15 children’s picture books. Many of my books have been inspired by the special children I have had the privilege to work with as both an audiologist and teacher. My books are on a variety of topics including childhood hearing loss, dysgraphia and writing challenges, bullying and forgiveness, learning English as an additional language, and positive self-image. Some of my books are written to evoke giggles and belly laughs.
Beautiful story. I loved the ‘real’ letters from children around the world to little Julia. Children with any kind of ‘different ability’ need these kinds of stories to inspire and encourage them. A positive self-image goes a long way toward loving oneself. Children who are self-conscious because of how they look or because of a visible physical disability/challenge need to be reassured that there are things they can do and challenges they can overcome.
We are pleased to announce that the NEW upgraded version of our 5-book series is now available.
On this adventure Bentley and his friends meet children that have special needs. Listening to them talk about their own struggles, Bentley and the others reveal that they too have challenges. The children are all surprised. Looking out through a hospital room window is Julia, a sad little girl having treatment and wishing she could be outside with her friends. Bentley spots her and comes up with a plan to cheer her up
A heart-warming story of resilience, friendship, strength, and love
Growing up in a blue-collar union family in the 1950s South I learned about the depth of racial and class injustice and the power of collective organizing. The many jobs I held in my twenties before fleeing to graduate school at Stanford University left me acutely aware of workplace sexism and disrespect. I became fascinated by how work shapes our sense of self and especially curious about the distinctive feminisms, labor movements, and politics of working-class women. These questions animate all my writing and teaching. Thirty years and seven books later, I believe reimagining work and labor movements is more necessary – and possible – than ever before.
You think academics don’t have guts? You haven’t met Dana Frank.
She left her perfect little Santa Cruz campus behind to travel into the violent world of labor organizing in Central America. The fearless women she follows never give up as they take on American global corporations, corrupt politicians, ruthless landowners and bosses, and male chauvinism at home, on the job, and in the union.
Against great odds, the banana women forge a region-wide union of men and women committed to gender justice, economic fairness, and political democracy. Thank you Dana Frank for knowing this story had to be told – and for telling it with such flair and wisdom.
Women banana workers in Latin America have organised themselves and gained increasing control over their unions, their workplaces and their lives. Highly accessible and narrative in style, Bananeras recounts the history and growth of this vital movement and shows how Latin American women workers are shaping and broadly reimagining the possibilities of international labour solidarity.
I am a Scottish geographer and energy specialist. I love nature and snow and don't want to see it destroyed or lost. I wrote Carbon Choices, on the common-sense solutions to our climate and nature crises, to share my expertise and passion to help people to make a difference. People, businesses, and governments all need to understand the serious consequences of climate change. Education is the first step towards taking action. Carbon Choices focuses on the solutions, many of which are 'common sense', to protect people and nature upon which we all depend.
We need to cut our carbon footprint to 'save the planet'. But how do we do so without an understanding of the carbon footprint of what we buy. Mike's book brings this important subject to life. The impact of bananas, grown in the tropical sunshine, is not as bad as you might expect as shipping has a fairly low carbon impact, but when buying coffee it is the milk, not the coffee granules, or boiling the water that has the big carbon impact. Avoid milky lattes at all costs! A quirky and fun book.
The Carbon Footprint of Everything breaks items down by the amount of carbon they produce, creating a calorie guide for the carbon-conscious. With engaging writing, leading carbon expert Mike Berners-Lee shares new carbon calculations based on recent research. He considers the impact of the pandemic on the carbon battle—especially the embattled global supply chain—and adds items we didn’t consider a decade ago, like bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Supported by solid research, cross-referenced with other expert sources, illustrated with easy-to-follow charts and graphs, and written with Berners-Lee’s trademark sense of humor, The Carbon Footprint of Everything should be on everyone’s bookshelf.
People tend to think of food as being simple and self-evident, or at least feel it should be. In fact, almost every aspect of modern food has been dramatically reshaped by science and technology. Something that fascinates me as a historian is thinking about past transformations in our foodways and how they explain the social tensions and political struggles we live with today. My book From Label to Table tells a biography of the food label, using it as a prism to explore Americans’ anxieties about industrial foodways. I found these books to be an excellent primer for understanding the emergence of America’s packaged food economy and its many problems.
I think one of the most important yet hardest things to study with food in history is its sensory appeal.
Taste and smell are so important to how we experience food, but don’t leave a record. Visualizing Taste is a smart, fun look at the role of the senses in food marketing, and how businesses remade markets around visual selling.
To illustrate what an incredible revolution this was, just think about the following: when you walk into a supermarket, what do you smell? Chances are, if it’s a decent one, the answer is nothing. Which is kind of crazy since food should smell!
Hisano shows us how modern marketers changed our relationship to food, elevating color over other attributes of food, such that today we rely more on sight than taste or smell to buy our food.
Ai Hisano exposes how corporations, the American government, and consumers shaped the colors of what we eat and even the colors of what we consider "natural," "fresh," and "wholesome."
The yellow of margarine, the red of meat, the bright orange of "natural" oranges-we live in the modern world of the senses created by business. Ai Hisano reveals how the food industry capitalized on color, and how the creation of a new visual vocabulary has shaped what we think of the food we eat. Constructing standards for the colors of food and the meanings we associate with them-wholesome, fresh, uniform-has been…
Hi! I’m M. Malone, a NYT, USA Today Bestseller, and RITA award winner. My ultimate goal in life is to make readers laugh in the most inappropriate places possible. When I moved away from home after college, it was difficult to make friends in a brand new city. Romantic comedies provided the joy I needed to go out into the real world and thrive. Now I get to make up stories that make other people laugh and in some cases pee their pants just a little (hey, I’m not judging).
If you’re looking twice at the title, I can assure you this story is just as bonkers as you might think. An undercover reporter gets a job at a big company and then falls for the billionaire target of her sting operation. After accidentally eating his banana in the company break room. Another billionaire romance but the side characters are so unique and quirky that it feels completely fresh and new. I’ll warn you now, this entire series is binge-worthy.
My new boss likes rules, but there's one nobody dares to break... No touching his banana. Seriously. The guy is like a potassium addict. Of course, I touched it. If you want to get technical, I actually put it in my mouth. I chewed it up, too... I even swallowed. I know. Bad, bad, girl. Then I saw him, and believe it or not, choking on a guy's banana does not make the best first impression. I should backtrack a little here. Before I ever touched a billionaire’s banana, I got my first real assignment as a business reporter. This…
I worked in Indonesia much of the time between 1979 and 2009, with people living in forests. As an anthropologist, my work was initially ethnographic in nature, later linking such insights to policies relating to forests and people – as I worked at the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor (1995 – the present). Although later in my career, I worked in forests all over the tropics, my real love remains with Indonesia, where I worked the longest and learned the most. My most recent research was in 2019, when I returned to the first community I studied ethnographically in 1979-80.
This book builds on Dove’s longstanding involvement in research on Borneo and his in-depth knowledge of the history of agricultural and nontimber forest products there. His work shows how the people of Borneo have long been involved in international trade, alternately expanding and contracting their attention to rice production as other opportunities (high prices, high demand) wax and wane. His insights contributed to my own research, showing how longstanding and ubiquitous the international involvement I have seen has been.
The "Hikayat Banjar," a native court chronicle from Borneo, characterizes the irresistibility of natural resource wealth to outsiders as "the banana tree at the gate." Michael R. Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvement of Borneo's native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and highly successful and that processes of globalization began millennia ago. Dove's analysis replaces the image of the…
Growing up as an Asian girl in the UK has its ups and downs. I was bullied at school but sought solace in cooking and learning from my mother about Indian cuisine. Now in my adult life, I’ve been awarded the British Empire Medal for cooking services to the community during the pandemic. A straightforward approach to cuisine has won me fans globally and a TV series broadcast to over 80 million viewers cooking British dishes for an Indian audience. After writing 6 books on the subject of easy cooking, I hope you like the choices on my very personal list which are dog-eared and spice stained with overuse and love.
This was my first foray into baking when I received this cookbook. Although it’s aimed at children, it’s a straightforward recipe book with step by step images of stages in a recipe. My favourite recipe from the book is a Banana Cake. It has splashes of batter on it because it has been baked time and time again and I still use this recipe a decade later.
The author, who has published several other books on cake decorating and children's parties, aims to show eight-to-12-year-olds that cooking can be fun. She reminds them that safety always comes first, and any procedure in the recipes requiring adult supervision is indicated with a special symbol. The 40 recipes provide an introduction to all the basic cooking methods and there is emphasis on the aspects which children like most, such as beating, kneading, rolling out and decorating. All the recipes have been tested by children and are graded according to difficulty.
