McNamee Thomas Boeken

The first authorized biography of "the mother of American cooking" (The New York Times) This adventurous book charts the origins of the local "market cooking" culture that we all savor today. When Francophile Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, few Americans were familiar with goat cheese, cappuccino, or mesclun. But it wasn't long before Waters and her motley coterie of dreamers inspired a new culinary standard incorporating ethics, politics, and the conviction that the best-grown food is also the tastiest. Based on unprecedented access to Waters and her inner circle, this is a truly delicious rags-to-riches saga.

In the early nineteenth century Tchula Homa, one of the last of the Chickasaw Indian chiefs, struggles against time to save his people's ancient way of life from the corruption and decay consuming it. At midcentury Sylvester Woodson, a Candide-like stable boy in love with his master's octoroon mistress, comes to a fitful awareness of the raging Civil War and the world beyond the plantation. A century later Woodlaw Corelli, a descendant of Sylvester's owner, an artist haunted by a disintegrating marriage and the disintegrating landscape of his childhood, struggles for order in a world of chaos and contradiction.A Story of Deep Delight sweeps through three eras of shattering change that have formed the American South, weaving imagination and history into an irresistibly engrossing tapestry of heartbreak, triumph, love, and betrayal.