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<p>Award-winning writer Taras Grescoe admits that he has alwaysbeen fascinated by the forbidden. Never one to deny his desires, he set out on aglobal journey, determined to track down the foods and substances that killjoygovernments have often bizarrely prohibited. The result is a spread like noother: an aperitif of hjemmebrent, a powerful Norwegian moonshine; awedge of Époisses, a stinky French cheese that can carry a brain-swellingbacteria; a cup of restorative Bolivian cocaine tea; and a host of legendary andsought-after substances that Grescoe risks health and jail time to dig in to.</p>
<p>Grescoe takes us with him around the world to sample damnedfood, drink and smoke, along the way serving up a unique and irreverent feast ofunsavoury characters and customs. The culmination is a deliciously decadentfull-course meal for those brave enough to lay down a blanket, open the basketand partake of the devil’s picnic.</p>

Devils Picnic

Grescoe, Taras

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

HarperCollins, Publishers

An eye-opening look at aquaculture that does for seafood what Fast Food Nation did for beef. Dividing his sensibilities between Epicureanism and ethics, Taras Grescoe set out on a nine-month, worldwide search for a delicious―and humane―plate of seafood. What he discovered shocked him. From North American Red Lobsters to fish farms and research centers in China, Bottomfeeder takes readers on an illuminating tour through the $55-billion-dollar-a-year seafood industry. Grescoe examines how out-of-control pollution, unregulated fishing practices, and climate change affect what ends up on our plate. More than a screed against a multibillion-dollar industry, however, this is also a balanced and practical guide to eating, as Grescoe explains to readers which fish are best for our environment, our seas, and our bodies. At once entertaining and illuminating, Bottomfeeder is a thoroughly enjoyable look at the world's cuisines and an examination of the fishing and farming practices we too easily take for granted.

Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Harpercollins Canada

<p>The Devil’s Picnic is a feast like no other: start with an aperitif of powerful Norwegian moonshine; nibble on a French raw-milk cheese that can carry a brain-swelling bacteria; sip Bolivian coca tea and Swiss absinthe; maybe puff a Cuban cigar in a California bar. Award-winning journalist Taras Grescoe travels the world sampling these and other substances that have been legally banned and publicly demonized. As he partakes of forbidden pleasures and risks run-ins with the law, his experiences make for fascinating reading and for equally compelling meditations on personal freedom. Who decides what’s bad for us? What role do international politics play in the banning of certain substances? What will be banned next? </p>
<strong><p>I guzzled absinthe in the mountains of Switzerland and saw cocaine being made out of coca leaves in the Andes. I smuggled chewing gum and pornography into Singapore and puffed on Cuban cigars in San Francisco. And I’ve brought back wicked souvenirs. ―from The Devil’s Picnic</p></strong>

The Devil's Picnic

Cooking Education & Reference

Harper-perennial

Dead Seas

Pan Publishing

The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists

The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists309 pp. "In this hilarious on-th-road odyssey, Taras Grescoe crosses teh entire Eurasian landmass, plunging into places where tourists are thickest--touring France in a rental car, taking the cure at Baden-Baden, stuffing his face on a cruise ship, and following the Lonely Planet crowd from India to Kathmandu."Keywords: TARAS GRESCOE END OF ELSEWHERE TRAVELS AMONG TOURISTS ADVENTURE TRAVEL

Travel

Consortium Book Sales & Dist

<p><b>Taras Grescoe rides the rails all over the world and makes an elegant and impassioned case for the imminent end of car culture and the coming transportation revolution</b></p>
<p>"I am proud to call myself a straphanger," writes Taras Grescoe. The perception of public transportation in America is often unflattering―a squalid last resort for those with one too many drunk-driving charges, too poor to afford insurance, or too decrepit to get behind the wheel of a car. Indeed, a century of auto-centric culture and city planning has left most of the country with public transportation that is underfunded, ill maintained, and ill conceived. But as the demand for petroleum is fast outpacing the world's supply, a revolution in transportation is under way. </p>
<p>Grescoe explores the ascendance of the straphangers―the growing number of people who rely on public transportation to go about the business of their daily lives. On a journey that takes him around the world―from New York to Moscow, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Bogotá, Phoenix, Portland, Vancouver, and Philadelphia―Grescoe profiles public transportation here and abroad, highlighting the people and ideas that may help undo the damage that car-centric planning has done to our cities and create convenient, affordable, and sustainable urban transportation―and better city living―for all.</p>

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile

Social Sciences

Times Books

<p><div><b>Straphanger</b><br /></div> <div> <div>Any time we don''t have crowding during rush hour, there''ll be a receiver sitting in the mayor''s chair and New York will be a ghost town. Why, they talk about the rush hour and the crash and noise. Why, listen, don''t you see that''s the proof of our life and vitality? Why, why, that is New York City!</div> <div>--Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, 1943</div> <div><b>1.</b> <b>The Subway that Time Forgot</b></div> <div><b>New York, New York</b></div> <div><b>S</b>omething impossibly big and powerful was moving beneath the city.</div> <div>In a portable office at a construction site in Chelsea, I could already sense its presence as a low rumbling rising through the soles of my rubber boots. As I rode a steel cage fifteen stories down a circular abyss, the physical shudder became an all-encompassing roar. The elevator touched down on the floor of a high-ceilinged chamber blasted out of gray rock,where a makeshift factory was abuzz with activity. Beside me, an arc welder''s torch cracked and sizzled; a crane hoisting stacks of precast concrete overhead emitted piercing beeps; a construction train juddered to a halt and shook a couple of dozen tons of broken rock onto a conveyor belt. Underneath it all, the earth-rattling roar never abated. At the chamber''s north end, where the ceiling lowered into parallel tubes as smooth and round as twin shotgun barrels, the tunnel on the right thrummed like Hades'' didgeridoo. It was hard to shake the feeling that a living thing had been unleashed, and was gnawing its way through the bedrock of Manhattan.</div> <div>"It''s up ahead, about a thousand feet!" my guide yelled into my ear. Rich Redmond, a consulting engineer for New York''s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), and the man responsible for day-to-day operations on this site, walked ahead of me into the tunnel. I squinted into the distance, but the tube darkened and narrowed at the limits of my vision. As my mind conjured visions of sandworms and minotaurs, I followed Redmond into the gloom.</div> <div>We splashed through murky water that purled around the ties of a single railway track, a rivulet constantly fed by groundwater seeping through the concrete walls. Ahead of us, the end of the tunnel was plugged by a vibrating disc fitted with red and green lights. Just as moving forward was becoming physically painful--it sounded like the world''s biggest wood chipper was grinding its way through a petrified forest--the roar stopped. Redmond paused and shouted back: "They must be done with the shove. If you want to see it, now would be a good time!" Quickening our pace, we came to the end of the line: a floor-to-ceiling framework of horizontal walkways and vertical ladders, draped with a cat''s cradle of coiled wires and dangling tubes.</div> <div>The monster at the end of the tube was a Herrenknect Double Shield tunnel-boring machine--a TBM for short. "This is the trailing gear," explained Redmond, as we clambered aboard the back end of the machine. "It''s about three hundred and fifty feet long; it houses the ventilation, the pumps, the electrical systems." Custom-made for the job at a workshop in Germany, the thousand-ton TBM was so massive that it arrived in New York in three separate transatlantic shipments; reassembling it, once it had been lowered down the excavation shaft, took two and a half months. The machine''s immediate goal was the cavern of a new station at Thirty-fourth Street. From there, it would veer from Eleventh Avenue, boring under Penn Station''s Amtrak tunnels, before connecting to the 7-line platformat Times Square. The 7-line extension, as the project was known, would ultimately allow New Yorkers to commute to jobs at the Javits Center and elsewhere on the far West Side.</div> <div>Weaving through pipes and beams, we came to the TBM''s nerve center, a small booth where an operator in green coveralls sat in front of computer screens monitoring the monster''s progress. "The screens show the thrust, applied pressure on the rock, and the torque of the machine," said Redmond. Guided by GPS, lasers, and radar, the operator was responsible for adjusting hydraulic levers to keep the machine''s cutting-head on course.</div> <div>Though it is made of metal and powered by electric motors running on 13,000 volts, the tunnel-boring machine moves like a living organism. Its rotating cutting-head resembles the circular maw of a lamprey eel, with forty-four spinning discs of alloy in the place of pointed teeth. Bracing itself against the tunnel walls with two convex grippers, the machine uses pistons to force the cutting-head forward; the crushed rocks fall into chutes behind the discs and are ferried away by a central conveyor belt. When the TBM has completed a five-foot "shove" into solid rock, the grippers are released, and, like a colossal caterpillar, the machine shifts its entire thousand-ton bulk forward by lifting and dropping its multiple feet.</div> <div>Climbing a ladder, Redmond and I ducked beneath the ceiling of the tunnel, and scuttled toward the business end of the TBM. Three workers in hardhats and overalls were on their sides, grunting and cursing as they tightened the bolts on a curved, five-foot-wide segment of precast concrete; a half-dozen such segments made one complete circle of tunnel wall. On a good day, said Redmond, the machine could complete a shove in half an hour, lengthening the tunnel by 60 feet over three eight-hour shifts. On a bad day, when unexpected conditions were encountered, everything ground to a halt. As we backtracked through the trailing gear, Redmond reached into an open rail car and passed me an arrowhead-shaped piece of broken rock, flecked with glints of mica. "This is the muck train," he yelled. "Muck is vernacular for mined rock. You''re holding a piece of pure Manhattan schist in your hands." The TBM makes short work of the large-grained whitish-gray rock, as it does granite, which accounts for much of the bedrock undergirding the skyscrapers of New York. In less predictable ground, however, other techniques are necessary.</div> <div>"We ran into water-bearing glacial material at the very start of tunneling," said Redmond. "We had to drill holes and run tubes from the surface, fill them with liquid brine, and use a freezer plant to bring them down tothirty below zero. They basically turned the soil into a giant block of ice--which made it solid enough to mine." Once the freezer was turned off, grout was injected between the concrete walls and the rock, sealing the tunnel against seeping groundwater.</div> <div>All around us were sandhogs, New York''s legendary urban miners, broad-shouldered, stocky men in jeans and safety vests thoroughly begrimed with gray slurry. The sandhogs refer to the tunnel-boring machine as "the mole"--a nickname that is not entirely affectionate. For generations, the power behind the cutting-head was almost entirely human. Since laying the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1872, the sandhogs have dug every important sewer, water, and train tunnel in the city. These storied laborers, many of them Irish, African American, and Italian, dug the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, shored up the collapsing Trinity Church, and excavated the city''s subway lines, blasting with dynamite, tightening bolts with 75-pound wrenches, often clearing away muck with their bare hands. Working in pressurized tunnels when they dug beneath New York''s riverbeds, they died by the dozens in cave-ins and catastrophic blowouts.</div> <div>The sandhogs are still a force to be reckoned with beneath the streets of New York. An Irish flag hangs at the entrance to the excavation shaft, and before digging on the 7-line extension could begin, the city''s new Roman Catholic archbishop paid a visit, tracing the sign of the cross over bowed hardhats. Automation, which began when New York''s first TBM was lowered into the shaft of the Third Water Tunnel in 1970, has been both a blessing and a curse. With the coming of the "mole," the most dangerous part of the sandhogs'' jobs, digging into potentially unstable ground with picks, shovels, and percussion drills, was eliminated--but so were a good number of jobs. At the turn of the last century, it took almost 8,000 men, working for two dollars a day, to excavate New York''s first subway lines. Today''s sandhogs are paid far more--over $100,000 a year, with benefits--but only a few dozen are needed on each eight-hour shift. The mole, the steam-powered hammer to the underground miners'' John Henry, has turned out to be the biggest, toughest sandhog of them all.</div> <div>Around the world, hundreds of such machines are now at work, chewing through geology in an unprecedented push to increase human mobility. In Beijing, Madrid, Delhi, and Los Angeles, TBMs are drilling beneath the feet of urbanites, in one of the most astonishing bursts of transit infrastructure building in decades. As the planet enters a new phase of urbanization, cities are looking to advanced transit systems as the way out ofcongestion, pollution, and economic stagnation. The mole may have taken the danger, and thus the glamour, out of tunnel digging, but it is allowing cities to build new lines on time and on budget, with no loss of human life. The fact that New York--which for decades stood alone among great cities in that its total track mileage was actually decreasing--is finally digging a new tunnel, is a sign of the times. After half a century of freeway building, the subway is back.</div> <div>If all goes well, Redmond explained to me as we rode back to the surface, the work would be completed some time late in 2013. According to its critics, the 7-line extension, which will add exactly one stop to the existing network, is a "subway to nowhere"--a waste of precious resources in recessionary times. It was intended to serve a stadium for the 2012 Summer Olympics, but when New York lost the bid to London,</p>

St. Martin's: Griffin

<p>On the eve of WWII, the foreign-controlled port of Shanghai was the rendezvous for the twentieth century's most outlandish adventurers, all under the watchful eye of the fabulously wealthy Sir Victor Sassoon. </p>
<p>Emily "Mickey" Hahn was a legendary <i>New Yorker </i>journalist whose vivid writing played a crucial role in opening Western eyes to the realities of life in China.</p>
<p>At the height of the Depression, Hahn arrived in Shanghai after a disappointing affair with an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter, convinced she will never love again. After checking in to Sassoon's glamorous Cathay Hotel, Hahn is absorbed into the social swirl of the expats drawn to pre-war China, among them Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Harold Acton, and a colourful gangster named Morris "Two-Gun" Cohen. But when she meets Zau Sinmay, a Chinese poet from an illustrious family, she discovers the <i>real</i> Shanghai through his eyes: the city of rich colonials, triple agents, opium-smokers, displaced Chinese peasants, and increasingly desperate White Russian and Jewish refugees―a place her innate curiosity will lead her to explore first hand. Danger lurks on the horizon, though, as the brutal Japanese occupation destroys the seductive world of pre-war Shanghai, paving the way for Mao Tse-tung's Communists rise to power.</p>

Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

St.Martin's Press

<p><b>Taras Grescoe spins the true story of a British aristocrat, an American flapper, and a Chinese poet who found themselves trapped in an unlikely love triangle amid the decadence of Jazz Age Shanghai. </b></p>
<p>On the eve of WWII, the foreign-controlled port of Shanghai was the rendezvous for the twentieth century’s most outlandish adventurers, all under the watchful eye of the fabulously wealthy Sir Victor Sassoon.</p>
<p>Emily “Mickey” Hahn was a legendary New Yorker journalist whose vivid writing played a crucial role in opening Western eyes to the realities of life in China.</p>
<p>At the height of the Depression, Hahn arrives in Shanghai after a disappointing affair with an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter, convinced she would never love again. After checking in to Sassoon’s glamorous Cathay Hotel, Hahn is absorbed into the social swirl of the expats drawn to pre-war China, among them Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Harold Acton, and a colorful gangster named Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen. But when she meets Zau Sinmay, a Chinese poet from an illustrious family, she discovers the real Shanghai through his eyes: the city of rich colonials, triple agents, opium smokers, displaced Chinese peasants, and increasingly desperate White Russian and Jewish refugees―a place her innate curiosity will lead her to explore firsthand. Danger lurks on the horizon, though, as the brutal Japanese occupation destroys the seductive world of pre-war Shanghai, paving the way for Mao Tse-tung’s Communists rise to power.</p>

Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love, Intrigue, and Decadence in Old China

Picador

Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue on the Eve of the Second World War

<p><strong>From award-winning and bestselling author Taras Grescoe comes a highly compelling new bestselling book about the twilight of Shanghai before the Second World War</strong></p>
<p><strong>Finalist for the 2016 Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction</strong></p>
<p><strong>Longlisted for the 2017 British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction</strong></p>
<p>On the eve of the Second World War, the foreign-controlled port of Shanghai was the rendezvous for the 20th century’s most outlandish adventurers, all under the watchful eye of the fabulously wealthy Sir Victor Sassoon. Emily Hahn was a legendary New Yorker writer who would cover China for nearly fifty years, and play an integral part in opening Asia up to the West. But at the height of the Depression, “Mickey” Hahn had just arrived in Shanghai nursing a broken heart after a disappointing affair with an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter, convinced she would never love again. After entering Sassoon’s glamorous Cathay Hotel, Hahn is absorbed into the social swirl of the expats drawn to pre-war China, among them Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Harold Acton and the colourful gangster named Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen, who had once lived in Saskatoon and Edmonton and later retired to Montreal. When she meets Zau Sinmay, a Chinese poet from an illustrious family, she discovers the real Shanghai through his eyes: the city of rich colonials, triple agents, opium-smokers, displaced Chinese peasants and increasingly desperate White Russian and Jewish refugees - a place her innate curiosity will lead her to discover first-hand. But danger lurks on the horizon and Mickey barely makes it out alive as the brutal Japanese occupation destroys the seductive world of pre-war Shanghai and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists come to power in China.</p>
<p>Taras Grescoe, with his trademark style and verve, brings this rich history to life in all its beautiful and intimate detail.</p>

History

Military

HarperAvenue

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Grescoe, Taras. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Grescoe, Taras

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Grescoe, Taras. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Devils Picnic

Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood

The Devil's Picnic

Dead Seas

The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile

Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World

Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love, Intrigue, and Decadence in Old China

Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue on the Eve of the Second World War