Charles Perry (2) (1941–)

A terrific overview of the Bay Area Vortex. The book starts with the trial of Owsley Stanley, who would quickly go on to introduce high-quality (and at the time legal!) LSD to the Bay area and help kick-start the Summer of Love. Covering the rise, decline and eventual collapse of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene, this is a detailed history that is alive with little details. Plenty of black and white photos help you set the scene. The author actually lived in the neighborhood at the time which gives the book an insider's feel.

Instead of focusing on just the music or just the drugs, Charles Perry covers all sorts of different things including the great concert posters and the artists who created them, the book stores, junk stores and coffee shops, the various big personalities and groups and their philosophies, the Grateful Dead, the Airplane, bananadeine, Ken Kesey and his acid tests, the Diggers, Sgt. Peppers and on and on. The book treats the hippies in a pretty even-handed way, showing their good side and their bad without ever feeling like it is idolizing or ridiculing what was happening. All in all, this book serves as a terrific companion to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but it also stands very well on its’ own.… (mais)

Readers of Claudia Roden's masterworks have long been aware of the continuities in Middle Eastern cookery, others have been tantalized by the influence of Islamic cooking on the medieval West, all will rejoice in this new gathering of papers and documents relating to medieval Arab food and cookery. The French scholar, Maxime Rodinson's contributions are legendary, yet have only been seen in translation in Petits Propos Culinaires. We include those already published there, together with the text of his longest paper, 'Recherches sur les documents Arabes relatifs a la cuisine', translated by Barbara Yeomans. The American scholar Charles Perry has been entertaining participants at the Oxford Symposium with regular gleanings from his researches into medieval Arab cookery, and several of his papers are gathered here, together with a new study of fish recipes, and other items previously published in PPC. Subjects include grain foods of the early Turks, rotted condiments, cooking pots, and Kitab al-Tibakhah, a 15th-century cookery book. English study of the subject was first encouraged by Professor Arberry's translation of the 13th-century cookery book Kitab al-Tabikh, published in 1939 in the periodical Islamic Culture. Readers will be pleased to have this more accessible copy, together with an introductory note and revision by Charles Perry. The book is ornamented by a foreword from Claudia Rosen.… (mais)