Boston Flora

Tag: Porter Square Books

  • Monday, June 11, 7 pm – Up on the Roof: New York’s Hidden Skyline Spaces

    In his new book, Alex Maclean directs his lens at the rooftops of New York City, showing the great complexity and life of the roofs of New York’s buildings. Depicting not only the city’s famous water towers, but pools, tennis courts, gardens, sunbathers, art, and restaurants up in the air, MacLean’s powerful images give readers a glimpse of a part of the city that usually remains hidden.

    MacLean is a photographer, pilot, and the co-author of eight books, including Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point and Designs on the Land: Exploring America from the Air. He is the recipient of many grants and awards, including the American Academy of Rome Prix de Rome.  Meet him on Monday, June 11 at 7 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge.  For more information call 617-491-2220, or visit www.portersquarebooks.com.

  • Wednesday, June 6, 7:00 pm – Change Comes to Dinner and Raising the Salad Bar

    Change Comes to Dinner takes readers into the farms, markets, organizations, businesses and institutions across America that are pushing for a more sustainable food system in America.  Author Katie Gustafson is an award-winning writer, journalist and editor whose articles and essays have been published in numerous print and online media. She has written about sustainable food, among other topics, for Yes! Magazine, The Huffington Post, Civil Eats, Change.org, and Tonic.

    Raising the Salad Bar, by Cathy Walthers, of more than 135 inventive salad recipes is timed to answer the great demand for healthy recipes with organic ingredients. Walthers offers up delicious twists on tired classics, including pasta salads, salad wraps, chicken salads, and more.  Walthers, an award-winning journalist and food writer, is also the author of the cookbook Soups and Sides. A graduate of the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts, she has worked for the past 15 years as a private chef and cooking instructor in the Boston area and on Martha’s Vineyard. She is the food editor of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine and founding member of the Martha’s Vineyard Slow Food Group and the Island Grown Initiative.

    Both authors will appear at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, on Wednesday, June 6, beginning at 7 pm.  For more information call 617-491-2220, or visit www.portersquarebooks.com.

  • Sunday, June 10, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm – The Secret Gardens of Cambridge 2012

    On Sunday, June 10, the secret’s out.  Visit 24 gardens (18 of which are new to the tour) in and around Cambridge.  Tickets are available at all Cambridge libraries and at Bonny’s Garden Center, Dickson Bros Hardware, Harvard Book Store, Nomad, Pemberton Farms, Porter Square Books, and Rodney’s Books.  The tour benefits the Friends of the Cambridge Public Library.  Since 2001 they’ve been giving people the chance to explore backyard, side yard, and roof-top gardens all around town. It’s a Sunday in late spring, the flowers are in bloom, and it reminds everyone of why, exactly, residents so much enjoy living here.

  • Wednesday, April 11, 7:00 pm – Notes from a Maine Kitchen

    There’s nothing better than settling into a nice, warm, home-cooked meal at the kitchen table. Kathy Gunst takes us into her own kitchen, introducing us to the flavors of fresh, seasonal Maine ingredients prepared in simple and inspiring ways. With essays conveying the mood of each month, Gunst gives readers a sense of Maine food and life. She follows each essay with a handful of recipes incorporating the seasonal ingredient or theme. Hear her speak on Wednesday, April 11, beginning at 7 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge.

    Gunst lives in South Berwick, Maine. She is the author of thirteen cookbooks; her most recent books include Stonewall Kitchen Breakfast, Stonewall Kitchen Winter Celebrations, Stonewall Kitchen Grilling, and Stonewall Kitchen Appetizers. She is also the “Resident Chef” for WBUR’s award winning show, Here and Now, heard on over 60 public radio stations nationwide. She has received two James Beard award nominations for her radio work. For more information call 617-491-2220, or email ellen@portersquarebooks.com.

  • Tuesday, March 27, 7:00 pm – One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place

    By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own garden. Jane Roy Brown’s book One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty’s private correspondence about the garden.  Ms. Brown will speak at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge on Tuesday, March 27, beginning at 7 pm.

    Brown is a freelance travel and garden writer with a focus on historic gardens and landscapes. She is also director of educational outreach for the Library of American Landscape History. She has published in Horticulture, Preservation, Garden Design, and the Boston Globe, and she serves as a contributing editor to Landscape Architecture.  Call 617-491-2220, or visit www.portersquarebooks.com for more information.

  • Thursday, March 15, 7:00 pm – The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance

    Porter Square Books, 25 White Street, Cambridge, hosts author Tovar Cerulli on Thursday, March 15, beginning at 7 pm. Drawing on personal experience, philosophy, history, and religion, Cerulli shows how America’s overly sanitized habits of consumption have disconnected us from our food, resulting in many of the spiritual and environmental crises we now face. In this time of intensifying concern over ecological degradation and animal welfare, how do we make peace with the fact that, even by growing organic vegetables, life is sustained by death? As a boy, Tovar Cerulli spent his summers fishing for trout and hunting bullfrogs. While still in high school, he began to experiment with vegetarianism. By the age of twenty he was a vegan. A decade later, in the face of declining health, he returned to omnivory and within a few years found himself heading into the woods, rifle in hand. Tovar split his undergraduate years between Dartmouth College and the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and has worked as a carpenter and freelance writer. An environmentalist, Tovar has also worked as a logger. He is currently enrolled as a Ph.D. student at UMass Amherst. His research is focused on food, hunting, and human relationships with nature. For more information, visit www.portersquarebooks.com, or call 617-491-2220.

  • Thursday, March 8, 7:00 pm – Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea

    When Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. Hohn’s accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive arena of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories. Moby-Duck is a journey into the heart of the sea and an adventure through science, myth, the global economy, and some of the worst weather imaginable.

    Donovan Hohn is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2010 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hopwood Awards in essay and poetry, and a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Ocean Science Journalism Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. His January 2007 cover story for Harper’s was included in The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2, and received honorable mention in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008. A former English teacher, and a former senior editor of Harper’s, he is now the features editor of GQ. He lives in New York with his wife and sons. Moby-Duck is his first book. Meet him Thursday, March 8, beginning at 7 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge. For more information, visit www.portersquarebooks.com, or call 617-491-2220.

  • Saturday, March 3, 4:00 pm – An Everlasting Meal

    Join Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, for an author signing and meet and greet with Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal, this Saturday, March 3, beginning at 4 pm.

    “An Everlasting Meal is beautifully intimate, approaching cooking as a narrative that begins not with a list of ingredients or a tutorial on cutting an onion, but with a way of thinking…. Tamar is one of the great writers I know—her prose is exquisitely crafted, beautiful and clear-eyed and open, in the thoughtful spirit of M.F.K. Fisher. This is a book to sink into and read deeply.”
    Alice Waters, from the Foreword

    “In this beautiful book, Tamar Adler explores the difference between frugal and resourceful cooking. Few people can turn the act of boiling water into poetry. Adler does. By the time you savor the last page, your kitchen will have transformed into a playground, a boudoir and a wide open field. An Everlasting Meal deserves to be an instant and everlasting culinary classic.”
    Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing

    Tamar Adler is a former editor of Harper’s Magazine, the founding head chef of Farm 255 in Athens, Georgia, and cooked at Chez Panisse from 2007-2009. Her book has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, the Irish Times, the San Francisco Examiner, among other publications. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The New Leader, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Fine Cooking, Salon.com, Gilt Taste, the Atlantic.com, and more. Tamar lives in Brooklyn, NY.

    The event is free. For more information, telephone 617-491-2220, or email ellen@portersquarebooks.com.

     

  • Monday, October 24, 7:00 pm – The Tarball Chronicles

    David Gessner eats, drinks, and talks his way into the heart of Gulf country, exploring the region’s birds, sea life, and ecosystems with the oceanographers, activists, and subsistence fishermen who call it home. Part absurdist travelogue, part manifesto, The Tarball Chronicles is overall a love song for the Gulf that asks one simple question: how much are we willing to sacrifice to keep living the way we do? Hear him speak at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge on Monday, October 24, beginning at 7 pm.

    Gessner has written eight books and numerous essays about the wild world. He has been redefining what it means to write about nature for the last twenty years. He is the winner of a John Burroughs Award and has been selected for publication in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He founded the journal Ecotone and also published My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism in 2011. This event is free and open to the public, but please rsvp to ellen@portersquarebooks.com, or call 617-491-2220.

  • Friday, October 21, 7:00 pm – Wicked Bugs

    In  her book Wicked Bugs, a darkly comical look at the sinister side of man’s relationship with the natural world, author Amy Stewart tracks down more than 100 of the worst entomological foes – creatures that infest, infect, and generally wreak havoc on human affairs. Ms. Stewart is the bestselling author of five books on the perils and pleasures of the natural world, including Wicked Plants. Her essays and commentaries have appeared on NPR, in the New York Times, and in Fine Gardening, where she is a contributing editor. Stewart is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the American Horticultural Society’s 2010 Book Award. She lives in Eureka, California, where she and her husband own an antiquarian bookstore.  Amy Stewart will make an appearance at Porter Square Books in the Porter Square Shopping Center, 25 White Street, Cambridge, this Friday, October 21, beginning at 7 pm.  If you plan to attend this free event, call 617-491-2220, or email ellen@portersquarebooks.com.