Walter Levy. The Picnic: A History. Rowman & Littlefield.
2012978-0-7591 Hardback -2180-5 978-0-7591-2182-9 • eBook
The Picnic: A History is published by AltaMira Press, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield (2013)
Picnics are happy occasions and have always been a diversion from everyday cares. We think of the picnic as an outdoor meal, set on a blanket, usually in the middle of the day, featuring a hamper filled with tasty morsels and perhaps a bottle of wine, but historically picnics came in many forms, served any time of the day. This first culinary history reveals rustic outdoor dining in its more familiar and unusual forms, the history of the word itself, the cultural context of picnics and who arranged them, and, most important, the gastronomic appeal. The Picnic draws on various media and literature, painting, music, and even sculpture, providing an engaging and enlightening history, a mixture that is sometimes conventional and often (surprisingly) outrageous.
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780759121829
http://www.amazon.com/Picnic-History-Meals-Walter-Levy/dp/075912180X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1388612343&sr=1-1&keywords=the+picnic+a+history
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-picnic-walter-levy/1115442150?ean=9780759121805
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17992943-the-picnic?from_search=true
Reviews
Walter Levy takes you on a stunning discovery of the picnic, emphasizing the sense of adventure and freedom (even alongside a hectic highway) with food that, although perhaps familiar, takes very different significances. This book looks at diners, occasions, settings, sorts of food and drinks, and makes you discover that in-door picnics once existed, that picnics have often had romantic connotations but were also organized during wars, and that they played a role in literature and painting. Reading this book is an out-of-the-common experience, just as is picnicking. (Peter Scholliers, professor, FOST Research Unit, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Who doesn’t love a picnic? The next best thing to dining alfresco is reading Walter Levy’s The Picnic: A Global History. This definitive history is brilliantly written, intellectually insightful, and a joy to read. While examining how the picnic was invented and how it evolved over five hundred years, Levy romps through European and American literature and art. All those writers and artists that may have slipped your mind return to life as they vividly describe and paint picnics past. What a delight! (Andrew F. Smith, editor-in-chief, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America)
The next time you consider repairing the great outdoors to feast upon the grass read Walter Levy’s excellent The Picnic first. Filled with delicious history and wonderful details from this meal’s long history, knowing the book will deepen your pleasure in dining al fresco. Be it a mountain of food as in the French Brothers of the Bacchic Pique-Nique, or dainty sandwiches of which Miss Manners might approve, there no picnic pleasure that will not be enhanced by Levy’s delightful and comprehensive book. (Bruce Kraig, professor emeritus of History, Roosevelt University, Chicago, Founding President, Culinary Historians of Chicago; author, Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America and Hot Dog: A Global History)
Walter Levy is the perfect guide through the surprisingly complex cultural and social history of the picnic. His wide-ranging research takes the reader from the murky origins of the word picnic, through its incarnation as a French indoor meal, to the familiar pleasure of eating on the grass outdoors on a lovely day. And since Levy knows that life is really not a picnic, he also explores the darker side of picnics in popular culture and media. From beginning to end The Picnic: A History is an engaging and informative read. (Kyri W. Claflin, Ph.D., Lecturer, MLA Program in Gastronomy, Boston University; Co-editor (with Peter Scholliers) of Writing Food History: A Global Perspective (Berg 2012))
Walter Levy. Modern Drama: Selected Plays from 1879 to the Present
©1999 • Longman ISBN-10: 0132267217
Modern Drama: Selected Plays from 1879 to the Present is published by Longman. 1998
Modern Drama is a comprehensive and balanced anthology offers a collection of 25 works of modern and contemporary drama from the 1870s through the early 1990s. It features Features twenty-five plays that often demonstrate a significant breakthrough in maturity of expression and style for each playwright — important leaders in the development of modern and contemporary drama.
*Begins with a comprehensive introduction of the development of modern drama from Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg.
*Features twenty-five plays by playwrights who were important leaders in the development of modern and contemporary drama from the 1870s through the early 1990s.
*Introduces each playwright in a substantive biographical essay which provides a sense of the playwrights life and relation to themes and characters. Includes a relevant photograph of a stage production.
*Provides photographs of most plays – showing actors and setting of the first production of each play.
*Features an appendix of 20 essays or excerpts – taken from a variety of sources – to illustrate different ways to write about drama.
*Contains an extensive glossary.
*Historical Timeline including plays, other important literature, historical events and important people.
Cover : Joseph Albers
Walter Levy and Christopher Hallowell. Green Perspectives: Thinking and Writing about Nature and the Environment. Longmans: New York, 1994/97. ISBN-13: 9780065015003
Green Perspectives: Thinking and Writing about Nature and the Environment , co-authored with Christopher Hallowell, Longman (1994/1997)
Green Perspectives is an anthology of readings aimed at engaging students with current ecological issues and the history of the environmental movement. It is chronologically organized from 1850 through 1993, and focusing on the American experience. The collection is diverse and readings expose students to historical, political and social contexts in essays, short-stories, poems, and excerpts from novels. Importantly, there is a range of many different points of view (sometimes antithetical) and disciplines.
Cover : Galen Rowell
Part 1: 1850-1914: Evolving Environmental Awareness
Part 2: 1915-1949: Spiritual, Symbolic, and Practical Responses to the Environment
part 3: 1950-1975: Conflicting Attitudes Toward the Human and Natural Environments
Part 4: 1976-1993: The Quandary of Achieving Individual and Social Harmony with the Environment
