Boston Flora

Tag: Porter Square Books

  • Monday, July 18, 7:00 pm – Lost Among the Birds

    In 2013, Boston birder Neil Hayward traveled almost 250,000 miles by plane, car, boat, and kayak, as well as almost 10 feet vertically up a tree (where, you’ll be glad to hear, he successfully navigated his way back down). His quixotic quest: to see birds. His peregrinations took him to the corners of this vast continent: Barrow in the leaden, frozen north; the Dry Tortugas, dangling off the Florida Keys to the south; Newfoundland, poking out to the east; and tiny Adak, an island adrift in the volcanic Aleutian chain of the west. And a place they call New Jersey. By the year’s end, he’d netted some 749 species of bird and broken an historic record many thought was unbreakable.

    Neil Hayward is a lifelong birder with a passion for science and travel. He grew up in the UK, where birding ranks high among soccer, tea, and sarcasm as national pastimes. After gaining a Ph.D. in genetics at Cambridge University, he joined a start-up biotech company and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the managing director for the US business. He also brought his binoculars and quickly started using them. In 2011, he left his job to set up his own biotechnology consulting company. Neil will speak at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, on Monday, July 18, and will sign copies of his new book Lost Among the Birds. For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.

  • Monday, April 18, 7:00 pm – Brilliant Beacons: A History of the American Lighthouse

    In a work rich in maritime lore and brimming with original historical detail, Eric Jay Dolin, the best-selling author of Leviathan, presents the most comprehensive history of American lighthouses ever written, telling the story of America through the prism of its beloved coastal sentinels. Set against the backdrop of an expanding nation, Brilliant Beacons traces the evolution of America’s lighthouse system, highlighting the political, military, and technological battles fought to illuminate the nation’s hardscrabble coastlines. In rollicking detail, Dolin treats readers to a memorable cast of characters including the penny-pinching Treasury official Stephen Pleasonton, who hamstrung the country’s efforts to adopt the revolutionary Fresnel Lens, and presents tales both humorous and harrowing of soldiers, saboteurs, ruthless egg collectors, and most importantly, the light-keepers themselves. Richly supplemented with over 100 photographs and illustrations throughout, Brilliant Beacons is the most original history of American lighthouses in many decades. Mr. Dolin will speak at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, on Monday, April 18 at 7 pm, followed by a book signing.

    Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling In America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History; and Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. He is also the author of When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in environmental policy, he lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

  • Wednesday, April 6, 7:00 pm – Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love

    Sample a locally produced beer — all the ingredients are made here in Massachusetts — and a collection of chocolate varieties at an event that celebrates both localism and biodiversity. This Porter Square Books sponsored event takes place Wednesday, April 6 beginning at 7 pm at Aeronaut Brewery, 14 Tyler Street in Somerville. The free lecture will be followed by a book signing.

    Award-winning journalist Simran Sethi explores the history and cultural importance of our most beloved tastes, paying homage to the ingredients that give us daily pleasure, while providing a thoughtful wake-up call to the homogenization that is threatening the diversity of our food supply.

    Food is one of the greatest pleasures of human life. Our response to sweet, salty, bitter, or sour is deeply personal, combining our individual biological characteristics, personal preferences, and emotional connections. Bread, Wine, Chocolate illuminates not only what it means to recognize the importance of the foods we love, but also what it means to lose them. Award-winning journalist Simran Sethi reveals how the foods we enjoy are endangered by genetic erosion a slow and steady loss of diversity in what we grow and eat. In America today, food often looks and tastes the same, whether at a San Francisco farmers market or at a Midwestern potluck. Shockingly, 95% of the world’s calories now come from only thirty species. Though supermarkets seem to be stocked with endless options, the differences between products are superficial, primarily in flavor and brand.

    Sethi draws on interviews with scientists, farmers, chefs, vintners, beer brewers, coffee roasters and others with firsthand knowledge of our food to reveal the multiple and interconnected reasons for this loss, and its consequences for our health, traditions, and culture. She travels to Ethiopian coffee forests, British yeast culture labs, and Ecuadoran cocoa plantations collecting fascinating stories that will inspire readers to eat more consciously and purposefully, better understand familiar and new foods, and learn what it takes to save the tastes that connect us with the world around us.

  • Friday, February 12, 7:00 pm – Where Have All The Animals Gone?

    From the biographer of Jane Goodall comes an eccentric blend of travels and adventures based on the underlying story of two men, sometime friends and allies, who uncover through personal experience the tragedy of animal extinctions in Africa and Asia. By turns ironic, funny, and tender, it contemplates changing landscapes and a vanishing world.

    Over the last fifteen years, nature historian Dale Peterson has collaborated with photographer Karl Ammann to produce three books about apes, elephants, and giraffes. For this new memoir, Peterson recounts his travels with the iconoclastic Swiss photographer through Africa and Southeast Asia, serving as his Boswell and discovering along the way magnificent splendor, unexpected humor, and tragic loss.

    Dale Peterson is the coauthor, with Jane Goodall, of Visions of Caliban (a New York Times Notable Book and a Library Journal Best Book) and the editor of her two books of letters, Africa in My Blood and Beyond Innocence. His other books include The Deluge and the Ark, Chimpanzee Travels, Storyville USA, Eating Apes, and (with Richard Wrangham) Demonic Males. They have been distinguished as an Economist Best Book, a Discover Top Science Book, a Bloomsbury Review Editor’s Favorite, a Village Voice Best Book, and a finalist for the PEN New England Award and the Sir Peter Kent Conservation Book Prize in England. He resides in Massachusetts. He will speak on Friday, February 12 at 7 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, beginning at 7 pm, and copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.

  • Wednesday, January 13, 7:00 pm – Steeped

    Get your oolong on at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, on Wednesday, January 13 at 7 pm! From morning eats to evening sweets, Steeped infuses your day with the flavors and fragrances of tea. Romance your oat porridge with rooibos, jazz up your brussel sprouts with jasmine, charge your horchata with masala chai. Annelies Zijderveld’s deliciously inventive tea-steeped recipes include:

    Matcha Chia Pudding Parfaits
    Earl Grey Soba Noodle Salad
    Green Tea Coconut Rice
    Chamomile Buttermilk Pudding with Caramelized Banana
    Earl Grey Poached Pears with Masala Chai Caramel Sauce

    This beautiful book will inspire you to pull out your favorite teas, fire up the stove, and get steeping. Annelies Zijderveld is a food writer and creator of the literary food blog, the food poet, selected by Alimentum Journal as one of their favorite food blogs. Her passion for working with good food companies started during her 8 years heading up marketing at Mighty Leaf Tea. She is the digital media newsletter editor for the International Association of Culinary Professionals and an associate editor of Poetry International. Her work has been published on Today, Edible Sacramento, Remedy Quarterly, Arthouse America and others. She holds an MFA in poetry from New England College and lives in Oakland with her husband and sourdough pet, Salvatore.

  • Wednesday, December 9, 7:00 pm – The Octopus Scientists

    At Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge on Wednesday, December 9 at 7 pm, science writer Sy Montgomery and wildlife photographer Keith Ellenbogen discuss their latest adventure, in the intriguing world of the octopus.

    With three hearts and blue blood, its gelatinous body unconstrained by jointed limbs or gravity, the octopus seems to be an alien, an inhabitant of another world. It’s baggy, boneless body sprouts eight arms covered with thousands of suckers suckers that can taste as well as feel. The octopus also has the powers of a superhero: it can shape-shift, change color, squirt ink, pour itself through the tiniest of openings, or jet away through the sea faster than a swimmer can follow.

    But most intriguing of all, octopuses classed as mollusks, like clams, are remarkably intelligent with quirky personalities. Their book The Octopus Scientists, an inquiry into the mind of an intelligent invertebrate, is also a foray into our own unexplored planet. These thinking, feeling creatures can help readers experience and understand our world (and perhaps even life itself) in a new way.

    “Part Indiana Jones, part Emily Dickinson,” as the Boston Globe describes her, Sy Montgomery is an author, naturalist, documentary scriptwriter, and radio commentator who has traveled to some of the world’s most remote wildernesses for her work. She has worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba, been hunted by a tiger in India, swum with pink dolphins in the Amazon, and been undressed by an orangutan in Borneo. She is the author of 13 award-winning books, including her national best-selling memoir, The Good Good Pig. Montgomery lives in Hancock, New Hampshire.

    Keith Ellenbogen is an award-winning underwater photographer with an emphasis on environmental conservation. His images have been published worldwide in newspapers, magazines, and books as well as on TV. He is a Senior Fellow with the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP), a Fellow with the Explorers Club, and an Assistant Professor of Photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology/SUNY.

  • Wednesday, September 9, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – Fire and Ice

    High in the Himalayan valley of Zanskar in northwest India sits a village as isolated as the legendary Shangri-La. Long fed by runoff from glaciers and lofty snowfields, Kumik–a settlement of thirty nine mud brick homes–has survived and thrived in one of the world’s most challenging settings for a thousand years. But now its people confront an existential threat: chronic, crippling drought, which leaves the village canal dry and threatens to end their ancient culture of farming and animal husbandry. Fire and Ice weaves together the story of Kumik’s inspiring response to this calamity with the story of black carbon. Black carbon from inefficient fires–the particulate residue that makes soot dark–is the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide. It’s also a key ingredient of the air pollution that public health experts regard as humanity’s greatest environmental health risk worldwide: soot-laden smoke from household hearth fires and outdoor sources combine to kill over seven million people around the world every year. Jonathan Mingle describes the joys and struggles of daily life in the Zanskar Valley, where villagers are buffeted by powerful environmental and economic forces, while also tracing black carbon’s dark fingerprints outward from Kumik and around the world. Mingle investigates its impacts on snow, ice, and water from Mt. Everest to California, and the silent health epidemic it fuels from New York to New Delhi.  For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.

  • Wednesday, September 9, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm – Nature Walk with Clare Walker Leslie

    Join Clare Walker Leslie, author of The Curious Nature Guide, for a North Cambridge nature walk. The walk leaves the Porter Square Bookstore, 25 White Street in Cambridge at 5 pm, and returns in time for a 6:00 reception at the store.

    With dozens of simple prompts and exercises, best-selling author, naturalist, and artist Clare Walker Leslie offers adults of all ages an invitation to step outside for just a few minutes a day, reignite the sense of wonder and curiosity about the natural world, and discover the peace and grounding that can be found by connecting to nature as part of daily life. Using photography as well as the author’s own illustrations, The Curious Nature Guide invites readers to start at home, using all of their senses to notice the colors, sounds, smells, and textures of the trees, plants, animals, birds, insects, clouds, and other features that can be observed right outside their doorstep, no matter where they live. Prompts range from suggestions to note one daily exceptional nature image to learning to identify cloud types and the weather they bring, or creating a record of nature spottings on daily walks with the dog.

    Clare Walker Leslie is a nationally known wildlife artist, author, and educator. She has been connecting people of all ages to nature using drawing, writing, and observation of the outdoors for more than 30 years. Her other books include the bestsellers Keeping a Nature Journal and The Nature Connection, as well as Nature Journal and Drawn to Nature. For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.

  • Wednesday, September 2, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – A River Runs Again

    In A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka, a lyrical and intimate tapestry of five stories dealing with life, loss, and survival in modern-day India, Meera Subramanian travels in search of the ordinary people and micro-enterprises redeeming India’s natural world. An engineer-turned-farmer brings organic food to Indian plates. Villagers revive a dead river. Well-intentioned cook stove designers persist on a quest for a smokeless fire. Biologists bring vultures back from the brink of extinction. And in Bihar, one of India’s most impoverished states, a bold young woman teaches young adolescents the fundamentals of sexual health and in the process, unleashes their untapped potential. In these true stories, Subramanian discovers renewed hope for a sustainable and prosperous future for India.

    Meera Subramanian is a US-based journalist and Fulbright-Nehru senior research fellow who writes about culture, faith and the environment for newspapers and magazines around the world. Hear her on Wednesday, September 2 beginning at 7 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge. For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.

  • Thursday, September 3, 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm – Simply Ancient Grains

    Maria Speck will be back at Porter Square Books on Thursday, September 3 at 7 pm. Maria Speck makes cooking with ancient grains faster, more intuitive, and easier than ever before in this collection of recipes, most of which are gluten-free.

    From black rice to red quinoa to golden Kamut berries, ancient grains are showing up on restaurant menus and store shelves in abundance. Yet in home kitchens, many fear that whole grains are too difficult and time-consuming to prepare. In Simply Ancient Grains, Maria makes cooking with these fascinating and nourishing staples easy and accessible with sumptuous recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. Her family-friendly dishes are Mediterranean-inspired and delicious, such as Spicy Honey and Habanero Shrimp with Cherry Couscous; Farro Salad with Roasted Eggplant, Caramelized Onion, and Pine Nuts; and Red Rice Shakshuka with Feta Cheese. Maria’s tips and simplified approach take whole grain cooking to the next level by amplifying the flavor and enduring beauty of these nutritious grains.

    Maria Speck is a food journalist and the author of the award-winning cookbook Ancient Grains for Modern Meals. She is currently an instructor in the professional program of the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and has contributed to Gourmet, Saveur, Gastronomica, the Vegetarian Times, and Cooking Pleasures. Free. For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.