Non Fiction Authors From The United States

"Nearly all the growth in the federal budget over the next ten years [2013-2022] is going to come from spending on healthcare and interest payments unless something changes. “You can’t fix this without doing health care,” says Paul Ryan. “I mean, health care is the driver of our debt.” And, as he and others routinely observe, even though the United States spends far more per person on health care than any other country, it isn’t close to having the world’s healthiest population."

"The share of income most American families pay in federal taxes has been falling for more than thirty years. Today, Americans pay less of their income in taxes than citizens of nearly every other developed country."

"... When I am alone and perhaps a little low, it is good to heat a can of and some milk or water, pour them into a warmed bowl with a sprinkle of in it, and go to bed with it."

"I never set out to be a writer. I write compulsively. I am like a drug addict. I can't help it. I do what pleases me."

"We went away, away ... in this case to the , where we consumed s and s according to our natures, and as returned amateurs seemed to grow like water-flowers under the greening buds of the s, in the flowing tides of that street."

"The first taste of bread, that day: chunks, chopped from loaves four feet long stacked at the end of the like skis, and it was the best bread I had ever eaten and I knew that forever, as of that noontime, I would be intolerant of the packaged puffy stuff called bread at home."

"Fortunately, good and premium wines are at the command of almost anyone in America who wants to drink them. Also, they are almost always dependable—a far cry from the old idea that "gentlemen" had their own s and their resultant giddy high life, and that the rest of the world lived on beer and s."

"WH Auden’s famous observation on the writer MFK Fisher – “I do not know of anyone in the States who writes better prose” – has been pressed into service on the cover of this reprint of Fisher’s most beloved book The Gastronomical Me (1943). The power of the puff lies in the fact that Auden wasn’t praising another poet or even a novelist but a food writer, a species conceived at that time as a domestic science teacher with a fail-safe recipe for . Implicit in Auden’s praise was the suggestion that Fisher should be removed from this category and set alongside Hemingway or Faulkner as a literary practitioner in her own right. These days we would get around the whole vexed business by saying that Fisher’s hybrid of culinary and memoir writing falls into the category of the personal essay, the kind of thing that has launched a thousand blogs and become a staple of the New Yorker’s annual food issue. The only hitch with this is that Fisher – or, to be formal, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher – was on record as hating the idea of the personal essay. To the proud daughter of a California newspaper man, the term signalled self-importance and, worse, over-writing. Fisher prided herself on never doing more than one draft which, if true, means she was a genius. Here she is on the food she encountered in Burgundy as a newlywed in the 1930s ..."

"I made this translation by myself, and can therefore thank none for it but perhaps my first teacher, who helped me learn to read. I have put it into the simplest words I know, since I feel that it is a singularly straightforward and unornamented piece of prose to have been written in a flowery literary period."

"B is for Bachelors ... and the wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards with such dining aplomb and kitchen chaos. Their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman."

"Most of us, unhappily, shudder and ache and rumble as secretly as possible, seeming to feel disgrace in what is but one of the common phenomena of age: the general slowing of all physical processes. For years we hide or ignore our bodily protests and hasten our own dyspeptic doom by trying to eat and drink as we did when we were twenty. When we are past fifty, especially if we have kept up this pathetic pose of youth-at-table, we begin to grow fat. It is then that the blindest of us should beware. Unfortunately, however, we are too used to seeing other people turn heavy in their fifties: we accept paunches and s as a necessary part of growing old. Instead, we should realize this final protest of an overstuffed system, and ease our body's last years by lightening its burden. We should eat sparingly."

"Who can blame Betty Fussell for wanting to get even? After reading My Kitchen Wars, I wonder only how she managed, for the more than 30 years that they were married, to direct her kitchen cleaver anywhere other than at ’s skull."

"We lived for almost three years in , which the s called without any quibble and with only half-hearted contradictions "the gastronomic capital of the world." ... ... We ate s of ten years old under their tight crusts of mildewed butter. We tied napkins under our chins and splashed in great odorous bowls of Écrevisses à la '. We addled our palates with s hung so long they fell from their hooks, to be roasted then on cushions of toast softened with the paste of their rotted innards and fine brandy. In village kitchens we ate hot with and snippets of salt pork in it."

"... food is life ... You don't have to cook. You do have to eat. Everybody has to eat. ... The basis of food is other people. ... You cannot raise everything you're going to eat. ... everything is culturally relevant to food."

"I'd hit 40 by the time I began to write real words. By then I'd married a professional writer/teacher, typed and edited his manuscripts, raised two children, entertained like crazy, finished a doctorate in English Lit, taught Shakespeare, performed in community theaters, traveled as family all over Europe, lived in , London, and Provence. And along the way I found Julia Child and the pleasures of making at home in Princeton what we were eating in . Like Julia, I wanted to tell other people about it. Not through how-to technique but how food checks time. The way travel does. The way play-acting does."

"Food for the soul is a part of all religion, as ancient savages know when they roast a tiger's heart for their god, as Christians know when they partake of Body and Blood as the mystical feast of . That is why there can be an equal significance in a sumptuous banquet for five thousand heroes, with the king sitting on his iron throne and minstrels singing above the sound of gnawed bones and clinking cups, or in a piece of dry bread eaten alone by a man lifting his eyes unto the hills. That is why, to my mind, there can be nothing irreverent or illogical about putting together in one collection of feasts such apparently disparate things as St. Luke's story of the and Lewis Carroll's tea-part for , the and 's gluttonous orgy in decadent Rome."

"… Mrs. Fisher herself believes that strolling is a lost art these days, but in fact she is the perfect rambler. A Considerable Town is one long ramble. It rambles through the city, its monuments, its quays, its shops and its cafes, but more important, it rambles through the author's mind and memory—she has known since 1932, and seems to have forgotten nothing. … Mrs. Fisher loves ships, s and s. She likes fresh fish with dry white local wine at lunchtime. She has a susceptible fondness for rogues and vagabonds, and a Dickensian taste for the scramble, the rasp, the blarney and even the petty pretensions of city life. Nobody can describe the sound of bells or the feel of churches better than Mrs. Fisher, and surely nobody in the history of has more exactly defined the pleasures of eating."

"Mom ran her fingers through my sweaty hair and looked deep into my eyes. "Sean," she asked quietly, "is this going to be a gift or a burden?" A gift? A Gift? Gifts come on your birthday. You open them up and say "Woo hoo!" Was she crazy? But before I could say anything, something magical happened. Something I can't explain with science. My calling and purpose in life came and found me."

"Treating corn as a commodity is a part of our ingrained history — but it’s only two hundred years old. To people who aren't accustomed to thinking of history at all, that’s a long time. But to us here, it’s an eyeblink."

"My parents did a tremendous job in raising me and my sister. It seemed as if they always had just the right things to say to us. One nugget of wisdom that empowered me through most of my teens was this: "Sean, there are many things you won't be able to do in your life because of your physical condition, so get busy finding the things you can do.""

"I've been asked on many occasions, "Sean, don't you get used to the pain after a while?" "No," I reply, "at best, I understand how to control it." Surprisingly, the physical pain of the condition has not been as torturous as the emotional pain."

"I've spent most of my life doing kitchen battle, feeding others and myself, torn between the desire to escape and the impulse to entrench myself further. When social revolutions hustled women out of the kitchen and into the boardroom, I seemed to be caught in flagrante, with a pot holder in my hand. I knew that the position of women like myself was of strategic importance in the war between the sexes. But if you could stand the heat, did you have to get out of the kitchen? For even as I chafed at kitchen confinement, cooking had begun its long conquest of me. Food had infiltrated my heart, seduced my brain, and ravished my senses. Peeling the layers of an onion, spooning out the marrow of a beef bone, laying bare the skeleton of a salmon were acts very like the act of sex, ecstatically fusing body and mind."

"... I found that Oklahoma was the only place in the country where you could go to the and the on the same day. Of course this is the only place in the country that even has a Cowboy or Indian Hall of Fame. It is also the only place in the country that has a town named ."

"In the past four years, I've branded on a ranch in , stalked in Texas, watched cows butchered by hand in a in Colorado, and toured a plant near that kills 6,000 cows per hour. I've attended conventions of the in and of a breakaway group in Denver, applauded lectures at the American Grass-Fed Society in Indiana and whooped it up at rodeos at the . I've talked with a New Jersey housewife investigating , with an ex-bull rider turned political activist, with an animal scientist who transformed . I went to Florida to see in the s, to to "Eeeeehaaaawwww" with the Cowgirls of the West in the Pioneer Days Parade. I even enrolled in Beef 101 at , in order to get some hands-on experience in how we turn cows into meat."

"The importance of every fact relating to the natural limits of animals and plants is felt in its bearing on the great question of the day—the ."

"The of mountain regions is very limited, for the number of species diminishes rapidly as we ascend in altitude or latitude. The reptilian life of any district, however, is highly interesting, as it is more natural and well defined than that of other vertebrates, because reptiles have a limited range ... and are less likely to be forced out of their original s or introduced by man. It has been supposed that in order of altitudinal range, lizards go highest, snakes next, and s and s last. There are no chelonians in the valley as far as we know; but we found frogs as high up as , and no lizards there. Gibbon found no snakes at ."

"... and coffee plantations, vast in extent, arrest the eye. Passing these, the steamer brings you alongside of broad fields covered with the low, prickly pine-apple plant; the air is fragrant with a rich perfume wafted from a neighboring grove of and s; the spreads its dense, splendid foliage, and bears a golden fruit, which, though praised by many, tastes to us like a mixture of tow and ; the exotic waves its fig-like leaves and pendent fruit; while high over all the beautiful lifts its crown of glory. ..."

"The recent addition of a specimen of this rare bird to the , is an event worthy of record. There are now three specimens in the United States; the one just mentioned, another in the , and a third in the Giraud Cabinet in Vassar College. The last is the most perfect specimen, and certainly possesses the greatest historical value, as it is the one from which Audubon made his drawing and description. It was caught on the banks of . The or Gare-fowl … was about the size of a goose, with a large head, a curved, grooved and laterally flattened bill; wings rudimental, adapted to swimming only, approaching in this respect the s of the southern hemisphere. … It was an arctic bird, dwelling chiefly in the , Iceland, , and Newfoundland."

"The age is demanding a broader, deeper, truer, . Unreasonable prejudice is hiding itself, along with the effete and narrow views of our fathers; and the world has come to the consciousness, that the culture of both sexes must keep pace with the ever-changing sphere of personal activity."

"The Ornithological in the Vassar Museum, contains nearly twelve hundred distinct species, of which seven hundred are North American, and the remainder South American. Among them are several s and others of historical interest as the originals of ."

"... precisely how we shall educate the coming woman, is still an open question. Much that has been written has been purely theoretic. Facts, however, are multiplying. Four different experiments are now in process: University Examinations, the , Mixed Colleges, and . For a great University to condescend to examine female candidates and grant certificates, is a step forward; but it does not furnish the means of education."

"There is no section of our country that may not reward a diligent search for precious or useful s. The rocks, however, between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic and between the and the Pacific furnish the greater variety and abundance. Here are found the best ores. Gold and silver seem to abound more on the western than eastern sides of both mountain-chains. A trap-region, like the shore of and the , is likely to be a good locality for copper and iron. The , or the region of , furnishes chiefly iron and lead; gold, silver and copper are seldom found. In general, where the layers of rock lie level and contain fossil shells, it is a locality good only for , ( excepted), , and salt. The regions of , , , , etc., offer the greatest inducement to search for useful minerals."

"Cheetahs hunt in the early morning and early evening. They capture their prey by stalking to within 10 to 30 meters of their prey or as far as 80 meters before beginning the chase. A chase lasts about 20 seconds and rarely longer than one minute. Only 10 percent of their chases are successful. Antelope and gazelles, hare and the young of larger antelope like s, , or and small often fall prey to the lightning fast cheetahs. Coalition males will often take larger prey like zebra or ostrich. They can accelerate from 0 to 70 kilometres per hour in two seconds. A cheetah will abort a hunt if the prey dodges and darts from it more than three or four times."

"Predators are exceptionally aware of tourists and their vehicles and sometimes use them to their advantage. If a cheetah has made a kill, it will almost certainly lose it if vehicles are present, since other predators, particularly the hyena, lion or jackal are alerted by the tourists. If the cheetah has cubs, that is a very dangerous situation for them, as they are made more vulnerable by the interference of the vehicles. Research conducted in the recorded that nearly 30% of cheetah sightings had more thant 20 vehicles surrounding it, and of these, more than 50% were less than 30 yards from the animal ..."

"Wild cheetahs in Africa need help. Suitable prey is becoming scarce and is disappearing. They are suffering from the consequences of human encroachment, from competition with other large predators in game reserves, and not least, from the complication of a limited genetic make-up. The wild population continues to sustain the captive population … The similar experiences of the world's zoos have reaffirmed the traditional difficulties of breeding cheetahs in captivity. Despite the capturing, rearing and public display of cheetahs for thousands of years, one litter was reported in the 16th century by the son of , an Indian mogul. The next documented captive reproduction did not occur until 1956 … … From 1955 to 1994, the number of world zoos holding cheetahs increased from 29 to 211, and the number of animals during this 40-year period increased from 33 to 1218. Since 1955, 1440 cheetahs have been imported from the wild and there have been 2517 births and 3436 deaths …"

"CCF's base of operations is 44 km outside , , as Namibia is home to the largest number of free-ranging cheetah with ±20% (±3,000) of the world’s estimated wild population of ~10,000. The cheetah's survival depends on a total integrated approach: an ecological system of farmland management, prey species management and habitat stability using practices such as alternative , non-lethal predator control, and relocation of problem cheetahs. CCF’s Namibian focus is to work with livestock farming communities in order to develop ways to reduce conflict. This is achieved by devising a conservation plan that secures habitat for the species, while still accommodating farmers’ land use needs."

"Large s are currently facing severe threats and are experiencing substantial declines in their populations and geographical ranges around the world (Ripple et al., 2014). Human-wildlife conflict is a risk to 31% of the global carnivore species (, 2016). The vast majority of Namibia's cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) (over 90%) and other large carnivores reside outside of s. Namibia is made up of a mosaic of land uses which includes both privately owned mixed livestock and wildlife unfenced farms, fenced game farms, and open communal and commercial conservancies. Fences are meant to protect however; fences have an ecological impact by blocking migration movements especially in arid ecosystems. The fences confine individuals in turn carnivore abundance may exceed their available resources leading to a potential rapid decline of the population or local extinction. Commercial farmers have utilised game fences to keep and protected their game which equates to their livelihood. However, game fenced farmers catch more cheetahs than that of livestock farmers (Marker et al. 2010). As more game fences are erected, the rate of human-wildlife conflict has increased, which is an issue not only for the cheetah but all large carnivores across Namibia."

"Ignorance, like a virus, can spread from one institution or claim to another: if people distrust politicians or scientists or whatever in one regard, they may and will distrust them in another. (2020)"

"Although Americans often tout religion as a personal matter, it is actually immanently and irrepressibly social and collective. (2020)"

"The experience of many disaffected Americans who voted for and persist in supporting Trump is loss—losing money, losing status, losing power, and, in sum, losing America."

"… It used to be that if you liked birds, you shot them. In any case, that's what gentlemen in England did after the country start to industrialize, in the early nineteenth century. Cities were getting big and polluted, and people were longing to reconnect with nature. The rich, who had lots of free time, began going to the woods to collect plants, bugs, and rocks. If you were a man, you might also collect birds—bloodily, with your shotgun. Once you'd shot a bird, you’d figure out what it was, then skin, stuff, mount, and display it. The idea was to amass as big and varied a collection of bird skins as possible. A few decades later, when the United States started industrializing, took hold among the upper class here."

"... once you've identified a bird, you can appreciate it on a deeper level. If you know you're looking at a Blackburnian Warbler, for instance, you also know that it spends most of the year somewhere between Peru and Panama, usually at about two thousand meters above sea level; that it subsists, for the most part, on s and beetles; that every April, it flies north across the and settles for the summer somewhere between Georgia and Saskatchewan, where it looks for a mate and builds a nest, often in a high branch in a ; and that the female lays three to five white eggs with little reddish blotches that hatch around early June."

", in some ways, is like a religion. Some people get hooked on birds gradually, but many other have an experience like Phoebe's, an awakening triggered by a "spark bird." Many religious people seek to transcend the everyday by praying or meditating; birders seek transcendence by spending time in nature. Bird clubs give them a sort of church, a community of like-minded people who offer companionship and support."

"... Phoebe married a few days after she graduated, became a housewife in the Minneapolis suburbs, and had four children in quick succession ... She tried being a teacher and a leader, but didn't take to either. Then, one sunny spring morning when she was thirty-four, when only one of her kids had started school and the youngest two were still in diapers, an neighbor took her out birdwatching. As she beheld the blazing orange throat of a that was perched in the top of a tree, she had an epiphany akin to a religious awakening."

"... Phoebe crisscrossed the globe with ever-deepening abandon, staking out rare and spectacular birds in the wildest places on earth. She still took tours, but she took increasingly fringe ones, and as time went on she took more trips on her own, hiring local guides to show her around. She slept in s, at truck stops, and by the side of the road; she traveled in tiny planes, in canoes, and on horseback. Once, she was chased by tribesmen with ten-foot-long spears; another time, she was boat wrecked in the middle of the ocean. On the island of , she was carjacked, kidnapped, and brutally assaulted by five thugs. Ten years after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Phoebe had become obsessed with the notion of seeing eight thousand species, more than any other birder in history. She had also lost the capacity to take into account her family, her health, and her safety."

"A little over a decade ago, the major players in the environmental movement tried to take on . The industry's fertilizers were polluting the , and the environmentalists asked Florida voters to approve a penny-per-pound tax on sugar companies that would yield $35 million a year for cleanup work. But "Big Sugar" responded with a multimillion-dollar campaign to portray the environmentalists as white elitists attempting to weaken an industry that employed blacks and Latinos. Jesse Jackson joined forces with the industry, telling Floridians, "We should never have a showdown between alligators and people." With the help of minority group blocs, voters soundly rejected the tax. The defeat was a wake-up call for the , and other large environmental groups, which at the time were staffed and supported mostly by white people. In recent years, these organizations have begun to devote a great deal of money and effort to engage minority groups—not just to foster a sense of inclusiveness, but to survive in a demographically changing society. Nonwhite people make up 33 percent of the U.S. population, and the expects that figure to increase to 50 percent by 2042. Meanwhile, a survey of 60 environmental groups conducted in 2002 found that minorities made up less than 13 percent of their staffs."

"Last month, the , in conjunction with several conservation organizations, released a State of the Birds report, an assessment of the health of the country’s 800 bird species. The findings were mixed. On the one hand, nearly one-third of our birds face the possibility of extinction, have suffered a serious population decline or are in danger of such a decline. On the other hand, many of the species that were in trouble several decades ago, such as the and dozens of wetland birds, are now thriving precisely because our conservation efforts have paid off."

"The banning of DDT and other toxic pesticides also has led to the recovery of the and the in recent decades, according to the report. Over the same period, s, which give hunters and bird watchers a year’s access to National Wildlife Refuges for $15, have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, nearly all of which has gone to expanding wetland refuges. As a result, wetland bird populations have increased by nearly 60% since 1968, the report found. Species that have made particularly impressive recoveries include the , and ."

"(excerpt from Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats by Maryn McKenna, pp, 24–25 of 1st edition ((isbn|1426217668}})"

"… most people read for some combination of intellectual enchantment and emotional identification. And the challenge for so many stories around is the emotional identification. How do we find something to engage the reader’s, or viewer’s, emotion in such a way that they stick with us through the technical, didactic parts?"