Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man
Doubleday, 2012
A biography of Clarence Birdseye, the inventor of the commercial frozen food process that changed the course of food in much of the world, a man who held 300 patents on everything from light bulbs to fishing tackle to paper manufacturing--and one of the last of the eccentric inventors who looked for problems and solved them with odd scraps in his basement. Birdseye was a foodie from the 19th century industrial revolution who passionately believed that industry would make food wonderful.
The history of the 1964 Motwn hit song "Dancing in the Street" by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
For Riverhead Books
Coming out the same summer as the Mississippi Freedom summer, the pivotal election that gave rise to the Black Panther Party, the Misssissippi Freedom Party, The birth of the ultra conservative republican base, the song took on all kinds of unintended meanings. And with the rise of militant political movements continue to take on meaning. The song has been redone by dozens from Little Richard to Van Halen to Petula Clark to Little Richard, Neil Diamond and Mick Jagger and David Bowie and continues to be an enduring ikon that President Barak Obama recently called "the soundtrack ofthe civil rights movement." Or was it just a call to go dancing?