Justin Spring
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Page Against the Machine
In 1999, after an impressive career as an investigative journalist, author, and critic, Nicols Fox took up bookselling on idyllic Mount Desert Island in Maine, home of Acadia National Park. I recently discussed the transformations her little bookshop has undergone there, first operating out of her small Bass Harbor home, then from a picture-perfect shop front in affluent Southwest Harbor three miles away, and most recently as a "virtual bookshop" on the Web. As author of Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives (Island Press, 2002), Fox has
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Salad Days
By the time Julia and Paul Child left the United States for Paris in the late 1940s, a couple of cooks were already beginning to establish themselves as television celebrities in America. I Love to Eat, which appeared on NBC starting in 1946, featured James Beard, an actor turned caterer and cookbook author; To the Queen’s Taste, which debuted on CBS in 1948, starred Dione Lucas and was broadcast from her New York restaurant, the Egg Basket. But both Lucas and Beard had one problem so far as the viewing public was concerned: Both were not only professional cooks but also looked it. Julia Child’s
