Bill Buford. Heat

Miriam, who can't get a pastina to roll out the dough, no longer makes handmade pasta. When her daughter takes over, will she roll it out by hand? In Tuscany, you can't get the meat at the heart of the region's cooking, so Dario and the Maestro found a small farm that reproduces the intensity of flavor they grew up with. How long will that taste memory last? The Maestro will die. Dario will die. I will die. The memory will die. Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season (Bill Buford. Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 301).

(Although I will attempt to allow these good books to speak for themselves, I cannot resist adding, that I am utterly baffled that Timothy Egan's paint-by-number The Worst Hard Time should have won the National Book Award last year -- and that Buford's exhuberant, eloquent, detailed, and lovely account of the reinvention of self did not even make the list of finalists. At the very least, Taylor Branch's magnificent At Caanan's Edge, the third and final volume of his magisterial trilogy on the life and times of Martin Luther King Jr., should have won the award for 2006. They just gave Egan the award for Hard Time as a consolation prize for having failed to give credit where credit is due: for his exquisite and memorable account of life in the Pacific Northwest, The Good Rain.)