Amazon com: Taras Grescoe: books, biography, latest update

It was also awarded the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction by the Quebec Writers’ Federation, first prize for Literary Food Writing from the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize. Straphanger won the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction, and was one of five finalists for the Writers’ Trust Award in 2012, as well as being longlisted for the National TarasGresCoE.com B.C. Book Prize for Non-Fiction and becoming one of five finalists for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Following the publication of Straphanger, he has given dozens of keynote talks—from Portland, Oregon to Halifax, Nova Scotia—on the subject of sustainable transportation and urbanism. Born in Toronto, raised in Calgary and Vancouver, and schooled in flânerie in Paris, he now lives on an island called Montreal, which can be found at the confluence of the Ottawa and Saint Lawrence Rivers. Taras Grescoe is the author of seven nonfiction books and a widely read commentator on the interplay of food, travel, and the environment.

Like, I’ve gone to Thailand and eaten grubs on the street, that kind of thing. We have an event here in Montreal, the Insectarium, where they do bug tastings and things like that. So I’m not averse to it, but I’ve never found a way to really work them into my diet. That was the one of the big discovers when I was doing this book, the fact that a lot of the food that we ate before really brought this intensity of aroma and flavour, just sensual experience. There was the neolithic revolution which, going back 10,000 years ago we all became settled agriculturalists living in more or less urban cities settings with, you know, a rural hinterland supplying the cities. Before, we were drawing from all these different food webs as hunter-gatherers or foragers or pastoralists.

The city the German and British Romantics loved in the nineteenth century was a beautiful backwater, where sheep grazed among the ruins of the Forum. The Liberals made Rome a capital again, but in spite of their attempts to modernize—bringing in streetlights, sanitation, taking measures to limit the damage brought on by the flooding of the Tiber—it remained backwards compared to London, Berlin, and Paris. Mussolini and the Fascists focused on building new roads and triumphal routes, and “liberating” the imperial monuments they approved of, often at the expense of poor residents who were relocated from their demolished homes to makeshift hovels far from the centre of the city. It tells the story of Lauro de Bosis, an Italian-American poet and aviator, who defied Mussolini’s politics – in the air.

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According to some estimates, a quarter of the 8.7 million known plant and animal species alive today are likely to become extinct over the next few decades. I try to delve into the sources of this conflicted relationship in the book. At its apogee under the Roman Empire, the city became Caput Mundi, the capital of the world, with a population of 1.4 million. By the sixteenth century, the population had shrunk to 25,000.

• For him, Mussolini’s totalitarianism, like Minos’s tyranny, aspired to possess every-thing—every aspect of the life of its citizens.
• And the interesting thing is it’s in really high-end restaurants.
• Humanity’s backup plan, unfortunately, is to keep the seeds and semen of plants and livestock in gene banks.
• His travel essays have been published in several anthologies.
• Mussolini and the Fascists focused on building new roads and triumphal routes, and “liberating” the imperial monuments they approved of, often at the expense of poor residents who were relocated from their demolished homes to makeshift hovels far from the centre of the city.
• CasaPound, Salvini, the Lega Nord—their suspi-cion of outsiders, glorification of the Patria, and not-so-subtle nods of approval to violence and thuggery would have been more than familiar to Italians who lived a century ago.

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The transportation system in particular is a mess (though admittedly, it’s hard to make progress on digging new metro  lines in such an ar-cheological treasure trove) and corruption is a big problem. The tyrant Minos has imprisoned Icarus and his fa-ther, the brilliant Athenian inventor Daedalus. As they plot their escape, Icarus points out that “Minos may possess everything, but he does not possess the air.” Icarus, of course, comes close to escaping on wax wings, invented by Daedalus, but flies too close to the sun and plunges into the sea.

He is also a contributor to an assortment of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, and The Wall Street Journal. Taras Grescoe (born 1966)1 is a Canadian non-fiction writer. His debut book, Sacré Blues, won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction, and McAuslan First Book Prize. His fourth book, Bottomfeeder, won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, awarded to the best work of non-fiction by a Canadian writer, in 2008, as well as the IACP Award for Literary Food Writing. In the half dozen times I’ve been to Italy in the last decade, I’ve definitely seen a rise in xeno-phobic, and sometimes even Fascist, rhetoric. CasaPound, Salvini, the Lega Nord—their suspi-cion of outsiders, glorification of the Patria, and not-so-subtle nods of approval to violence and thuggery would have been more than familiar to Italians who lived a century ago.