La Place

La Place de la Concorde Suisse is John McPhee's rich, journalistic study of the Swiss Army's role in Swiss society. The Swiss Army is so quietly efficient at the art of war that the Israelis carefully patterned their own military on the Swiss model.

The full French text is accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano's first three novels, about Paris under Nazi occupation, now in a single volume; the earliest--La Place de l'Étoile--in English for the first time. Born at the close of World War II, 2014 Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano was a young man in his twenties when he burst onto the Parisian literary scene with these three brilliant, angry novels about the wartime Occupation of Paris. The epigraph to his first novel, among the first to seriously question Nazi collaboration in France, reads: "In June 1942 a German officer goes up to a young man and says: 'Excuse me, monsieur, where is La Place de l'Étoile?' The young man points to the star on his chest." The second novel, The Night Watch, tells the story of a young man caught between his work for the French Gestapo, his work for a Resistance cell, and the black marketeers whose milieu he shares. Ring Roads recounts a son's search for his Jewish father who disappeared ten years earlier, whom he finds trying to weather the war in service to unsavory characters. Together these three brilliant, almost hallucinatory evocations of the Occupation attempt to exorcise the past by exploring the morally ambiguous worlds of collaboration and resistance. Award-winning translator Frank Wynne has revised the translations of The Night Watch and Ring Roads--long out of print--for our current day, and brings La Place de l'Étoile into English for the first time. The Occupation Trilogy provides the perfect introduction to one of the world's greatest writers.

A successful lawyer is pulled back into her troubled family's life in rural Montana in the wake of her sister's death in this mesmerizing, emotionally evocative, and atmospheric literary novel For a Terrebonne, the home place is the safe haven, the convergence of waters, the place where the beloved dead are as real as the living. . . . The only Terrebonne who made it out, Alma thought she was done with Montana, with its cruel poverty, bleak winters, and stifling ways. Hard work and steely resolve got her to Yale, and now she's an attorney in a high-profile Seattle law firm, too consumed by her career to think about the past. But an unexpected call from the Montana police takes the successful lawyer back to her provincial hometown and pulls her into the family trouble she thought she'd escaped. Her lying, party-loving younger sister, Vicky, is dead. The Billings police say that a very drunk Vicky wandered away from a party and died of exposure after a night in the brutal cold. The strong one who fled Billings and saved herself, Alma returns to make Vicky's funeral arrangements and see to her eleven-year-old niece, Brittany. Once she is back in town, Alma discovers that Vicky's death may not have been an accident. Needing to make her peace with the sister she left behind, Alma sets out to find the truth, an emotional journey that leads her to the home place, her grandmother Maddie's house on the Montana plains that has been the center of the Terrebonne family for generations. She re-encounters Chance, her first love, whose presence reminds her of everything that once was . . . and everything that might be. But before she can face the future, Alma must acknowledge the truth of her own life—the choices that have haunted her and ultimately led her back to this place. The Home Place is a story of secrets that will not lie still, human bonds that will not break, and crippling memories that will not be silenced. It is a story of rural towns and runaways, of tensions corporate and racial, of childhood trauma and adolescent betrayal, and of the guilt that even forgiveness cannot ease. Most of all, it is a story of the place we carry in us always: home.

Move over pasta and pizza, here come panini, bruschetta, and crostini! The world of sandwiches, Italian style. These heavenly bread-based creations include recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, antipasti, party foods, and delicious desserts and indulgences for any time of the day.

“A wonderful cookbook with the very best authentic Italian recipes . . . Flick through it and you can feel immediately transported to a table under an olive tree” (The Sunday Tribune). Named One of the Top 100 Cookbooks of the Last 25 Years by Cooking Light! Verdura has become a classic that readers turn to as their vegetable cooking bible—with irresistible recipes representing the best of the Italian approach to vegetable preparation, an earthy yet spirited technique that celebrates fresh ingredients simply treated. Contending that eating well-prepared vegetables helps us to appreciate life’s natural cycles, Viana La Place presents recipes for antipastos, salads, soups, sandwiches, pasta, risottos, pizzas, and much more. The vegetables she explores run from the familiar—artichokes, aubergines, radicchio—to the more exotic, such as chayote, cardoons, and brocciflower. (Sautée her cauliflower-broccoli hybrid in garlic and oil—then top it with pungent provolone!) Other recipes, such as Soup of Dried Broad Beans with Fresh Fennel; Fettucine with Peas, Spring Onions, and Mint; Grilled Bread with Raw Mushroom Salad; and Baked Red Pepper Fritatta; give further evidence of the author’s original yet thoughtful way with the earth’s bounty. Desserts are also included, among them Watermelon with Bittersweet Chocolate Shavings; Grilled Figs with Honey and Walnuts; and Lemon Granita and Brioches. With a vegetable and herb guide and an ingredient glossary, Verdura provides comprehensive information while exciting the palate.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A New York Times Notable Book Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires. A Man's Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman's Story.

Often called the Newton of France, Pierre Simon Laplace has been called the greatest scientist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this compact biography, Hahn illuminates the man in his historical setting. This book reflects a lifetime of thinking and research on a singularly important figure in the annals of Enlightenment science.

In The Place with No Edge, Adam Mandelman follows three centuries of human efforts to inhabit and control the lower Mississippi River delta, the vast watery flatlands spreading across much of southern Louisiana. He finds that people’s use of technology to tame unruly nature in the region has produced interdependence with—rather than independence from—the environment. Created over millennia by deposits of silt and sand, the Mississippi River delta is one of the most dynamic landscapes in North America. From the eighteenth-century establishment of the first French fort below New Orleans to the creation of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan in the 2000s, people have attempted to harness and master this landscape through technology. Mandelman examines six specific interventions employed in the delta over time: levees, rice flumes, pullboats, geophysical surveys, dredgers, and petroleum cracking. He demonstrates that even as people seemed to gain control over the environment, they grew more deeply intertwined with—and vulnerable to—it. The greatest folly, Mandelman argues, is to believe that technology affords mastery. Environmental catastrophes of coastal land loss and petrochemical pollution may appear to be disconnected, but both emerged from the same fantasy of harnessing nature to technology. Similarly, the levee system’s failures and the subsequent deluge after Hurricane Katrina owe as much to centuries of human entanglement with the delta as to global warming’s rising seas and strengthening storms. The Place with No Edge advocates for a deeper understanding of humans’ relationship with nature. It provides compelling evidence that altering the environment—whether to make it habitable, profitable, or navigable —inevitably brings a response, sometimes with unanticipated consequences. Mandelman encourages a mindfulness of the ways that our inventions engage with nature and a willingness to intervene in responsible, respectful ways.

Home-style, elegant, and easy-to-prepare sweets -- inspired by traditional Italian eating, perfect for today's table Viana La Place, one of Morrow's most-loved cookbook authors, brings us to Italy, where the best desserts are pure and simple treats made from the freshest ingredients. Viana has a true passion for home-style cooking and eating, which she shares in her teaching and has won her numerous fans. Published in the same lush, full-color format as Viana's popular Panini, Bruschetta, Crostini, Desserts and Sweet Snacks presents such delights as ripe fruit in clouds of whipped cream, tender single-layer cakes, and delectable ice creams. Sweet Olive Oil Cake with Lemon needs only a hot espresso to make a satisfying afternoon snack; Pink Honeydew Ice Cream cools on a sultry day. For Viana, sweets are inextricably linked to experiences in Italy, which she relates in beautiful narrative reminiscences interlaced with the recipes. Desserts and Sweet Snacks is a wonderful culinary trip and a collection of recipes to be savored.