Toujours Provence
Author: Peter Mayl
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Taking up where his beloved A Year in Provence leaves off, Peter Mayle offers us another funny, beautifully (and deliciously) evocative book about life in Provence. With tales only one who lives there could know—of finding gold coins while digging in the garden, of indulging in sumptuous feasts at truck stops—and with characters introduced with great affection and wit—the gendarme fallen from grace, the summer visitors ever trying the patience of even the most genial Provençaux, the straightforward dog "Boy"—Toujours Provence is a heart-warming portrait of a place where, if you can't quite "get away from it all," you can surely have a very good time trying.
Publishers Weekly
British author Mayle shares his adventures in France's Midi in an enchanting book that stayed on PW 's hardcover bestseller list for 19 weeks. His new book, Acquired Tastes , will be published by Bantam in May. (June)
Library Journal
For fans of his A Year in Provence ( LJ 4/1/90; ``Best Books of 1990,'' LJ 1/91), Mayle is back with more amusing tales of ``la vie en rose'' in the south of France. Writing with affectionate humor, he recounts such adventures as sneaking through British customs with a suitcase full of expensive truffles and digging for gold coins in his backyard with his wily and greedy neighbor. He encounters truly French eccentrics like Regis, the athlete gourmet who wears a track suit to enjoy his meals, and the ambitious Monsieur Salques, the choirmaster of the singing toads of St. Panteleon who plans to celebrate the bicentennial of the French Revolution with an amphibian rendition of the ``Marseillaise.'' Describing a memorable 50th-birthday picnic that ends in a sudden rainstorm, Mayle conjures up hilarious images in vivid prose: ``Showing through a pair of once-white, once-opaque trousers, red-lettered knickers wished us all Merry Xmas.'' Recommended for all travel collections.-- Wilda Williams, ``Library Journal''
Look this: The Best Midwest Restaurant Cooking or Hors DOeuvres Everybody Loves II
Steel Pier, Atlantic City: Showplace of the Nation
Author: Steve Liebowitz
It was aptly called the "Showplace of the Nation" and it was all that and more.
For much of the 20th century Steel Pier in Atlantic City was the center of American entertainment on the East Coast.
Nearly every big-name entertainer - from John Philip Sousa and his band to Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra and the Rolling Stones - played there. And nearly every form of entertainment that could be imagined took place at Steel Pier: high wire acts, people being shot out of cannons, the Diving Bell that took you to the sea floor.
There was the Marine Ballroom, and there was rock and roll. There were circus-like animal acts - "Rex The Wonder Dog," a 70-ton Whale, Fortune-Telling Parakeets, Wild Animal Babies, and Boxing Cats.
Steel Pier was an incredible combination of Broadway, Miami, Las Vegas, Hollywood, Barnum and Bailey, and a state fair - "All For One Low Admission." Crowds were drawn from the entire country. The renown of Steel Pier was so great that A-list performers chose the Pier over other venues.
This all-in-one entertainment Mecca, novel in its day, has never been matched, not even at latter-day theme parks. Where else could you take the entire family for a day and see the World of Tomorrow, Sousa and his band, a bear on a bicycle, the High Diving Horses, take a ride below the sea, spend the evening in the marine ballroom, and see a movie - all for one ticket? It was a colossal offering of escape, popular culture, fun and fantasy - experienced on a great pier reaching out into the sea.
Author Steve Liebowitz begins with a brief history of seaside entertainment piers, and competing piers in Atlantic City (such as Million Dollar,Heinz, and Steeplechase) and carries us through incarnations of Steel Pier into the late 20th century.
Filled with 227 photographs and other images (many in color), this large-format book chronicles the rise of one of America's most remarkable entertainment venues - "A Vacation In Itself," as the advertising slogan went. For three-quarters of the last century there was nothing like it.
What People Are Saying
Vicki Gold Levi
"Steel Pier, the 'Capital of Americana,' was an entertainment destination never to be replicated. It deserves a book of its own!"--(Vicki Gold Levi, author of Atlantic City: One Hundred Twenty-Five Years of Ocean Madness, and co-founder of the Atlantic City Historical Museum)
