All Entries Tagged With: "cool books"
Modernist Cuisine, A Cookbook For Kitchen Scientists
Sous vide, the technique of using vacuum-sealed plastic bags to cook food at precisely controlled temperatures (to maintain the integrity of ingredients) is relatively new to most kitchen dabblers. It’s especially unheard of in my household where cooking involves either pouring oil in the pan or lighting up charcoal in the grill. So far, there have been little documented work in its processes. That’s about to change with an upcoming book called Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.
Yes, it’s a cookbook. More than that, however, it’s a technological manual, detailing the application of scientific processes for creating sublime-tasting meals. Created by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, the lavish guide details how pioneering chefs have applied science and technology to advance modern culinary arts.
Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume book, totaling a hefty 2,200 pages. It claims to be the “most comprehensive guide” to cooking [...]
Clone Brews Show You How To Copy Your Favorite Beer’s Taste
Want to homebrew your beer, but can’t bear leaving the taste of your favorite bottled store fare? Grab a copy of Clone Brews and learn how to recreate the taste of popular brand name beers the world over.
A bible for beer drinkers with less exotic inklings, it shows you to how to enjoy homebrewing without embracing a more adventurous palate. Over 200 beers are available for your experimentation, ranging from American pale ales to strong-hopped India pale ales to wheat beers to English bitters.
This second edition paperback of Clone Brews adds 50 new flavors to the 150 recipes in the original book. Spanning 439 pages, it covers such popular beverages as the Guinness Extra Stout, Dos Equis and Foster’s Lager. Apart from straight brewing recipes, the book features mashing guidelines, extract instructions, and detailed reviews of materials and ingredients, allowing you to experiment on your own when trying to recreate [...]
GOAT: Champ’s Edition Is The Definitive Treatise On Muhammad Ali, Makes For Heavyweight Reading
Boxing may be dying on its knees (with the Pacquaio-Mayweather debacle serving as its latest poison), but the great memories of pugilists past will remain with us forever. Taschen’s latest opus on Muhammad Ali, GOAT: Champ’s Edition, is the definitive volume on boxing’s greatest practitioner, collecting an insane amount of content relating to the champ over the last 50 years.
GOAT (acronym for Greatest Of All Time) is one huge treatise in eight-color print – 792 pages, consisting of over 600,000 words (collecting the best essays, interviews and writing on Ali) and over 3,000 images (all gloss-varnished). It’s XXL-sized, measuring 20 x 20 inches and weighing 75 lbs. It comes with two 80 x 20 inch gatefold sequences and four silver 20 x 20 inch gelatin prints (signed by both Muhammad Ali and photographer Howard L. Bingham).
The book sports a white silk cover with pink lettering, slid inside a silk-clad box [...]
Moonfire: Lunar Rock Edition Comes With Spaceship Case, Genuine Moonrock And An Out-Of-This-World Price
There’s no better way to say “I’m rich, bitch!” than buying a special-edition book for $90,500. That’s why I’m taking my Lamborghini from my million-dollar mansion, liquidating it on JamesList and grabbing myself a copy of Taschen’s reissue of the Norman Mailer classic, Of a Fire on the Moon. Which I won’t even read.
Okay. The above were all lies. Except for the part where the “Lunar Rock Edition” of Mailer’s epic tale of the Apollo 11 launch – reprinted as Moonfire – costs over ninety grand. That part is real.
Why the exorbitant price? The book comes in a single-body aluminum case, sporting a front cover that’s been designed to feature a topographical reproduction of a section of the moon’s surface. It also gets further Apollo 11 accents, including the struts and feet, making it look like an alien aircraft rather than a coffee-table volume.
The clincher, however, is the piece [...]
Build Your Own Paper Robots Helps You Assemble Your Very Own Mecha Army
Remember the New York City papercraft models we featured not too long ago? As fun as building those paper skyscrapers might be, they’re not nearly as enjoyable as having an army of paper robots wreaking havoc in their streets. Build Your Own Paper Robots, a hardback volume with an accompanying CD, will show you how to flood it with robot invaders.
Authored by Julius Perdana and Josh Buczynski (who, as far as we know, are made of flesh and blood), the set contains 14 amazing ready-to-print robot models that you can color, print and put together. Using your PC, a printer, card stock and some glue, simply follow the step-by-step assembly instructions and set up your own army of papercraft machines, ready to terrorize your favorite display shelves. Even better, it comes with scalable, line-art versions of the characters, along with different colors and patterns, so you [...]
Koji Suzuki’s Novel “Drop” Printed In Toilet Paper Form
Like to read during toilet hour? Then you’ll love “Drop,” a nine-chapter novella printed across an entire roll of toilet paper strictly for your perusal while performing…errr…relief duties.
Written by Koji Suzuki, the same Japanese horror writer behind the hugely successful “The Ring,” the novel is a second-person narrative (yes, it puts the reader as a central character) that tells the tale of a goblin who lives inside the walls of a public restroom. That’s definitely one way to spook a reader – cast the story in the same setting that they’re certain to be in while they’re reading your work.
All nine chapters of the “book” are printed on continuous sheets, which means you can finish the entire piece of fiction by simply unrolling sheet by sheet. It’s printed several times across each roll (not sure how many) so you can “wipe down” with an entire novel and [...]
Wikipedia The Book
Wikipedia has, for the most part, rendered all forms of physical encyclopedias obsolete. Despite the difficulty of policing what gets written on the website and the numerous falsehoods that get promoted across its pages, people still use it as a default resource for most any subject on the face on the earth.
For whatever reason, Rob Matthews decided he wanted the online encyclopedia (at least, parts of it) offline. The result is Wikipedia in book form, a thick volume consisting of 5,000 pages of the website’s Featured Articles section.
Why anyone would want to print content off a website written by suspicious sources and proven to contain many inaccuracies is difficult enough to answer. To do that for 5,000 arbitrary subjects, bounding them in a single volume is about a single step short of insane – unless you’re going to jail tomorrow and need enough reading material to keep you busy for [...]
Emergency: What To Do When It Really Hits The Fan
What do you do when going gets tough and the carefully crafted world you’ve built around you falls to pieces? Most of us probably don’t even think about those scenarios but New York Times best-selling author Neil Strauss did. He documents the result of that paranoia and learning to be ready for it in his latest full-length book, “Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life.”
As with his previous works, Strauss delves into his subject and literally lives it. In the classic and brilliant low-brow tome “The Dirt,” he put himself among the members of Motley Crue during a tour, partaking in their drug-and-alcohol-addled life on the road. On the 2005 hit “The Game,” he managed to entrench himself into the inner circle of self-proclaimed pick-up artists, reveling in their nightly juvenile pursuits of winning women’s adoration. For “Emergency,” Strauss throws himself in the midst of survivalists, whose lives revolved around [...]
