Cathy's recommends featured on The Gabby Gourmet

Our Lead Buyer Cathy Langer has begun writing "The Book Lady" column at gabbygourmet.com Here's her latest article:

Several years ago the French writer Mireille Guiliano wrote the phenomenal bestseller FRENCH WOMEN DON'T GET FAT . It was all about enjoying food and life, and, yes, chocolate and wine, and still managing to be slim and healthy. I, along with millions of American women, and probably quite a few men, too, loved her philosophy and approach to life. I'm so happy to report that THE FRENCH WOMEN DON'T GET FAT COOKBOOK is hot off the presses and quite wonderful. This, once more, is the antithesis of a diet book. First of all it is absolutely lovely, simply laid out and well organized with tempting recipes and Mireille's helpful hints, family history and philosophy. Pay special attention to her Magical Breakfast Cream. Her attitude about breakfast is her one significant departure from traditional French cuisine, underscoring that breakfast is indeed the most important meal of the day and that a croissant and cafe au lait just don't cut it. 150 tempting recipes and a joi de vivre makes this beautiful volume a perfect addition to your cookbook collection. Bon appetit!


Staying with the food theme, there is a lot of buzz around Geneen Roth's new book WOMEN FOOD AND GOD. She also takes a philosophical approach to our relationship with food but goes deeper and darker, emerging into the light. Roth's basic concept is that the way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Intense and profound and important for anyone who has issues with food.


Rejoice all fans of Isabel Allende. ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA is on our shelves. Haiti and New Orleans in the late 18th Century are the stages for the unfolding of the story of Tete, born of an African mother and white sailor, a slave wed to her owner as a teenager. The Haitian revolutions upends their world. As Haiti frees itself from it's master, France, so too does Tete gains her independence, but at what cost?


One last suggestion. If you'd like a better understanding of why Wall Street imploded read Michael Lewis' THE BIG SHORT. He takes you deep inside and introduces you to characters that thought up some of the confounding financial "products" that brought us to where we are now. Informative, and perhaps as important, really well written and FUNNY. Lewis writes of two of his characters:"[They] had always assumed that there was some sort of grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now they saw that there was not."