 | The Mistress of Spices: A Novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $0.01 Initiated in the ways of turmeric, cinnamon, fenugreek and cloves, the spice mistress Tilo finds herself an old lady in a spice store in East Oakland, tempted between immortality and romance.
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 | Chocolat by Joanne Harris
Buy used from: $0.01 Chocolate and love in the south of France. This is an extraordinarily sensual story of postwar Provence.
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 | Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen
Buy used from: $0.01 The Wheatherby women of Bascom, KY had special knacks, and an apple tree that threw out apples which gave visions. Claire used her flowers and spices to create magical catering occasions but couldn't resist love.
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 | Prodigal Summer: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
Buy new: $10.19 / Used from: $0.01 Kingsolver's lush descriptions of Appalachia told through the intertwined stories of a ranger protecting coyotes, an elderly organic farmer's conflict with a cultivator of blight-resistant chestnuts, and a young widowed entomologist make for entrancing reading. Lessons learned: killing predators is worse than killing herbivores, even vegetarian food extracts blood.
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 | Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris
Buy used from: $0.01 A sensual story of food, wine and spices in Provence by the incomparable Joanne Harris. You can feel the sunlight and the blackberry juice on your fingers. Same locale as Chocolat.
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 | Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Buy used from: $0.01 Cooking and spices as the language of passion. Magical.
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 | A Breath of Snow and Ashes (Outlander) by Diana Gabaldon
Buy new: $11.44 / Used from: $1.78 Claire, a 20th century doctor has traveled to the past to marry Jaime Frasier, and they arrive in the new world where she must use local herbs and homegrown bread mold to treat the people around her. Beautifully written.
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 | Woman Who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health by Elena Avila
Buy new: $11.52 / Used from: $5.15 A luscious biography and story of curanderismo by the incomparable Elena Avila.
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 | Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer by Rosita Arvigo
Buy new: $11.54 / Used from: $4.09 The story of Rosite Arvigo's apprenticeship with a traditional Mayan healer in central America will fill your exotica quotient and teach at the same time.
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 | One River by Wade Davis
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $4.59 Davis's account of Richard Schultz and Richard Spruce in the Amazon, contrasted with Davis's own journeys and the stories of cocoa and curare.
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 | The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic by Wade Davis
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $3.13 Ever wondered about the ethnobotany of making people into zombies? Davis goes to Haiti and studies Vodoun in an engrosing and exotic account.
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 | Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire by Wade Davis
Buy used from: $0.01 A series of short accounts of traditional peoples across the globe. Davis vividly describes the biochemistry of toad venom, the Amazon jungle or the hallucinatory experience of ayahuasca.
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 | Witch-Doctor's Apprentice: Hunting for Medicinal Plants in the Amazon (Library of the Mystic Arts) by Nicole Maxwell
Buy used from: $2.34 Forget the title, the book itself is the fascinating account of Maxwell's many years in the jungle, searching for medicinally useful plants and the people she discovered in her journeys.
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 | The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook by Alice B. Toklas
Buy used from: $7.48 This cookbook is a cultural history, with stories of scavenging crawfish during the war, feeding Picasso, Dishes for Artists, and the famous Haschich Fudge (to be served at the meetings of the DAR.) Stein wrote the "Autobiography"- this is the real thing.
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 | Five Quarters of the Orange: A Novel (P.S.) by Joanne Harris
Buy new: $11.07 / Used from: $0.01 Postwar France in the town where Chocolat took place. The new proprietor of the cafe returns incognito to the town of her childhood after a scandal.
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 | The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World by Larry Zuckerman
Buy new: $11.70 / Used from: $4.62 The natural history of potatoes, from the Americas to Europe.
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 | The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $4.68 Pollan's premise, that plants make us propagate them, is delightful. He follows apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes in this readable book.
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 | Grandfather by Tom Brown
Buy new: $11.20 / Used from: $7.54 Tom Brown's books are among my favorites. This is is elegy to Stalking Wolf, the Apache medicine man who trained him from childhood.
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 | The Tracker by Tom Brown
Buy new: $7.99 / Used from: $0.29 This is the first Tom Brown book that I read, and it changed the way I look at nature.
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