Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Flatiron Books)

“Practice erasing and overturning and re-creating the self until all I have to do is disappear.”

Daiyu has been doing this all her life. Born to parents who named her after a doomed woman in an ancient story, she is loved and cherished by them until the day they disappear. Her beloved grandmother tells the twelve-year-old girl that she too must vanish, so the captors of her parents won’t come back to take her away. Cutting Daiyu’s hair and dressing her in the clothing of a boy, her grandmother gives her a boy’s name, Feng, and sends her off to a distant city. 

As Feng, Daiyu becomes a boy, finds work as a calligraphy master’s servant, and begins to learn the characters on her own. The Four Treasures of the Study become her implements: the inkbrush, inkstone, inkstick, and paper, and she’s taken on as an after-hours student at the master’s school. One day, while exploring the city streets alone, she falls into the hands of a stranger who drugs her, puts her in a dark room, and holds her prisoner for almost a year. During that time, an old woman comes every day to teach her English and when she’s fluent, her abductor covers her body with tar and stuffs her into a basket filled with coal. “You’re going to America, to a place called San Francisco. If anyone asks, tell them you came from New York.”

But nobody asks. Instead the girl is taken from the ship as soon as it docks, is stripped naked, put into a barracoon where slaves are sold, and is quickly purchased by a Chinese brothel owner. She’s given a new name, Peony, and eventually is assigned her first customer, a young boy who helps her to escape.

Once again her hair is cut, she’s dressed in men’s clothing, and is given papers that identify her as Jacob Li. Taken to Idaho where Chinese labor is needed, Jacob lives there for three years, never once betraying his true identity. Working for two Chinese shopkeepers,  Jacob struggles with his attraction to a young Chinese man who teaches the violin. The only feminine part that now clings to Jacob is the ghost of the woman with whom the girl he once was allowed to be shared a name. Lin Daiyu’s ghostly spirit takes shelter within the body of Jacob Li, as hidden as Daiyu herself.

Then the violence begins, with the white townspeople united against the Chinese residents. Suddenly “being Chinese is something like a disease.” When the Rock Springs Massacre is reported in the Idaho newspapers, a tragedy begins to unfold and a story that has the tinges of a romance novel becomes an account of terrible history.

In 2014, Zhang says in an author’s note, her father was driving through a town in Idaho where he saw a sign that said a “Chinese Hanging” once took place there. Five Chinese men accused of murdering a white store owner had been strung up by a mob of vigilantes. Later Zhang began to research the facts behind this brief account. The more she learned, the more she “wanted to tell the story, not just of the five Chinese who were hanged, but of everything—the laws, tactics, and complicity that enabled this event and so many others.”

Through Daiyu, Zhang tells this story in the form of a fable anchored in history. Through her different names and selves, Daiyu embodies the Chinese women who were forced into American brothels, the Chinese men who looked for work under identities that were not their own, the Chinese business owners who were forced to leave everything they had painstakingly built, the Chinese who faced death at the hands of white mobs. 

Four Treasures of the Sky is a smart and compelling novel that’s almost impossible to put down. Once it’s finished, it clings on, with sorrow and a terrible unveiling of whitewashed truths.~Janet Brown



Bangkok Shophouses by Louis Sketcher

There are travelers who are perfectly satisfied with big fat guidebooks that tell them exactly where to go, where to eat, where to sleep, and where they will always be in the company of other travelers. This book is not for them. Bangkok Shophouses is slender, idiosyncratic, and fits on a coffee table as nicely as it does within a backpack. It’s a book for people who want to wander through the older streets of Thailand’s capital city, while being given an understanding of what they’re looking at. Since these are the sort of people who like to roam around on their own, unhindered by a guide or a big fat guidebook, Louis Sketcher, aka Suppachai Vongnoppadongdacha, is the man for them. 

“Because each shophouse has a story to tell…” he has taken his sketchbook, pencils, brushes, and watercolors to two of Bangkok’s oldest neighborhoods. The first is an area that almost every traveler will have on their itineraries, the historic area of Phra Nakhon that holds the Grand Palace, the city’s most revered temples, and the raucous jollity of that infamous tourist paradise, Khao San Road. The second is less renowned, Thonburi, the Brooklyn of Bangkok, that lies across the river and has just recently attracted the attention of developers. 

Both of these areas are filled with streets that hold architectural gems and other secrets, which are beautifully divulged in this book.

Sketcher’s drawings are delicate and bright with soft colors and meticulous details. He shows the carvings and elaborate sculpted designs on pediments and balustrades, the lattice work on veranda railings, the creative use of stucco and concrete. He identifies the different styles of architecture and the reign in which the buildings were constructed.  Strolling through the labyrinth of streets, he finds the diversity that exists in the oldest part of the city—the Indian section, the lane that has been the Chinese trading center from the earliest days of Bangkok, and Talat Noi, a thriving urban village which has housed Chinese, Portuguese, and Vietnamese throughout its history. He shows where to find the three shophouses that contain Bobae Market, a wholesale clothing market that’s been bustling since before World War Two. His drawings reveal the shuttered Palladian windows that lie above Pak Klong Talad, Thailand’s biggest flower market. And he tackles the overwhelming drama that’s found in Yaowarat, Bangkok’s sprawling Chinatown, plunging beneath its neon glory to point out quieter beauties, including an elegant colonial-style gem that’s been refashioned into a hotel.

Across the Chao Phraya river,  Sketcher goes to a wooden house with an ornately peaked roof and latticed walls that’s now a riverbank cafe and to a shophouse with a concrete facade that looks like a giant honeycomb, within a corner of the city that’s famous for its desserts. In the neighborhood known as Kudi Chin which was once Portuguese, he finds Windsor House, owned by an English family long ago, a wooden house in the style known as gingerbread with a profusion of carved ornaments and “exquisite wooden fretworks above the windows, eaves, and canopy.” And he shows all the reasons why readers should brave the “long and narrow lane” that twists through the riverside Wang Lang Market.

The primary delight of this book lies in the illustrations that are scattered in the margins--sketches of the people who live and work in these shophouses, the food that can be found and eaten there, the treasures that are sold within their walls. A double-page spread of delectable specialties and where to find them, along with an index of some of the shophouses with addresses in English and in Thai, add to the usefulness of this section. Yes, you can stay in the baroque splendor of the heritage hotel, buy sarees in a 100-year-old shophouse in the Indian section of Phahurat, view the river traffic in all its chaotic splendor from the comfort of a cafe in the Wang Lang Market.

Because the text is bilingual, readers have a good chance of finding everything that’s pictured—and because there’s an illustrated list of shophouse styles and examples of architectural vocabulary, they’ll be able to understand what they see. Just in case they might want to fill their own sketchbooks, there’s a list of supplies and paints that were used in making Sketcher’s drawings. A small bibliography may not be helpful to everyone since it’s largely written in Thai.

I lived in Bangkok for eight years and have lost count of how many times I’ve visited Thailand. Bangkok Shophouses has made me realize how much I missed as I walked and stared through the areas that Louis Sketcher has illuminated. I can’t wait to go back--and when I do, this book is going with me, every step of the way.~Janet Brown

Points and Lines by Seicho Matsumoto, translated by Makiko Yamamoto and Paul C. Blum (Kodansha International)

Long before the popularity of Japanese mystery authors such as Keigo Higashino, Kotaro Isaka, and Miyuki Miyabe became known to the English reading public, there were Edogawa Rampo and Seicho Matsumoto.

Matsumoto is the winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Award in 1953 for his short story Aru Kokura Nikki Den (The Legend of the Kokura-Diary). He also won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1957 for his short story collection Kao (The Face). 

Although Edogawa Rampo is considered the first Japanese modern mystery writer, his novels are often described as being part of the “orthodox school” of detective fiction—stories that follow a very conventional formula. In contrast, Seicho Matsumoto incorporates social realism into his stories in which crimes are committed in ordinary settings. They often have motives related to political corruption and social injustice and popularize the detective genre which was later called suiri shosetsu (deductive reasoning fiction) which may include non-detective fiction. 

Points and Lines was originally published in 1957 as 点と線 (Ten to Sen) by Kobunsha. The first English translation became available in 1970. The first paperback edition was published in 1986 and was translated by Makiko Yamamoto and Paul C. Blum. In English, it was also released with the title Tokyo Express.

The story opens with three people standing on Platform 13 at Tokyo station. The people are Tatsuya Yasuda, the president of a precision tool company. Recently he has been doing a lot of business with government agencies and his company continues to grow. Yasuda is also a regular patron at a restaurant called Koyuki where he entertains many of his government contacts.  With him on the platform are two women who work at Koyuki, Yaeko and Tomiko.

All three of them witness Otoki, who also works at Koyuki, getting on the Express Train Asakaze with a man on Platform 15. A few days later, Otoki and the man she was seen with, a man named Sayama, are found dead on a beach in Fukuoka, apparently the victims of a love suicide. 

The local detective in charge of the case, Shigetaro Torigai, feels there’s something not right about the case. But at this point, his only clue is a receipt from the dining car of the Asakaze which was found on Sayama’s person. It also comes to light that Sayama may have been involved in a corruption case with government officials at a certain ministry. 

Detective Kiichi Mihara, who is investigating the corruption case in Tokyo, goes to Fukuoka to find out what happened to Sayama. Together with Detective Torigai, the two detectives discover another fact—that the Asakaze can only be seen from Platform 13 for a mere four minutes. The two detectives begin to have their doubts about Yasuda, but he has a rock solid alibi that puts him in Hokkaido when the alleged “love-suicide” occurred. 

Many of Seicho Matsumoto’s stories have been adapted into films or television series, including this one. The movie adaptation was released in 1958. It wasn’t until 2007 when the book was adapted into a television program.

The plot of this story continues to be used in crime novels and films to this day. The main theme is being able to disprove a suspect’s alibi. One of the things you must remember when reading this book is that it was written before the advent of the shinkansen or bullet train, when air travel was still uncommon. There were no smartphones or Internet either. Reading the book now, it may seem dated, but there is no doubt that it could only be set in Japan, seeing how the story is centered around the train schedules, which to this day remain very accurate. 

The story is also a great introduction to the Japanese detective fiction genre. You won’t be disappointed. ~Ernie Hoyt



Real Thai Cooking by Chawadee Nualkhair, photographs by Lauren Lulu Taylor (Tuttle Publishing)

When I first began using cookbooks, way back in the dark ages of mid-century Alaska, they weren’t embellished with photographs. Some had a few pages of garish colored photos bound into the middle of the book, others still offered dismal black-and-white pictures of a few of their dishes. Food photography wasn’t yet a category. What was in place were mere snapshots of completed recipes.

Maybe that’s why two of my favorite cookbooks have no photographs at all. MFK Fisher and Laurie Colwin provided something better. They wrapped their recipes in essays instead and as a greedy reader, I was enthralled. It wasn’t until 1982, when Christopher Idone came out with the stunning coffee table book, Glorious Food, did I begin to think that cookbooks could be objects of visual delight.

However I never cooked anything from Glorious Food because I was terrified that I would mar its pages. And I infrequently used recipes from MFK or Laurie, although I picked up their books often. Several hours later I’d pull myself away from their stories and slap together a meatloaf, just in time for supper.

It wasn’t until this year that I found the perfect ménage à trois of essays,  photographs, and recipes. Real Thai Cooking has it all.

I can hear the yawns now. Another Thai cookbook? Really? Why?

Here’s the flaw in that rush to judgment. This is a pioneer in the cookbook arena, because every portion of the trinity that lies between its covers is perilously close to perfect. 

I dare anyone to look at Lauren Lulu Taylor’s food photographs without immediately feeling hungry. But they aren’t just appetite snares--her thumbnail photographs turn the ten pages of essential Thai ingredients into a guide to shopping in Asian grocery stores and her shots of street food vendors are bright, evocative, and an irresistible invitation. This is food photography at its best.

And it has to be because those photographs exist side-by-side with some of the best food writing ever done about Thai cuisine and some of the most enticing--and often surprising— recipes. 

Chawadee Nualkhair is a food explorer. Yes, she tells how to make pad thai but she first gives the reason why it exists. (Hint: it’s a political creation, not a culinary masterpiece.) She gives two recipes for som tum but neither are the version most beloved by visitors to Thai restaurants in America or in Bangkok, where som tum, Chawadee says, is a form of fusion, adapted to the palates of that city’s residents. She provides a recipe for tom yum goong which is elevated by ingredients used in the dish as it’s made by Michelin-star-winning street vendor, Jay Fai.

The stars of her recipe collection illuminate Thailand’s multicultural underpinnings: jalebi that has Persian ancestry; a pumpkin custard invented by an enslaved Portuguese aristocrat who headed a palace kitchen;  oxtail soup that’s descended from Arab traders who brought Islam to Southern Thailand; a pork pâté that came to Thailand when Vietnamese fled French colonizers in the 1880s to settle into Thai towns along the Mekong. These culinary surprises coexist happily with a recipe for Chiang Mai’s famous sausage, sai oua, which may require a meat grinder, a sausage stuffing machine, and over two hours of prep time. And just in time to combat the U.S. Sriracha hot sauce shortage, she  comes to the rescue with a recipe for the real thing, calling for fermented chilies,  as it was first invented and still made on the Thai coast in Sriracha.

Not only are these recipes clear and undaunting, they’re fun to read. When using a Thai mortar and pestle, “pound like you have a grudge against the ingredients.” If you’re brave enough to mash Thai chilies in that fashion, protect your eyes from flying chili bits by covering part of the top of the mortar “with your other hand as you pound, like watching a horror movie through your fingers.” When making salt-encrusted fish, encase it in salt “like you have murdered it and are trying to hide the evidence.” Even making a humble omelet becomes high drama when the drops of egg “bubble up like the villain in an acid bath in a James Bond movie.”

If you gather from these phrases that Chawadee Nualkhair knows how to write, you’re absolutely correct. A former journalist for Reuters and for years the writer of a delightful food column called Bangkok Glutton (http://www.bangkokglutton.com), she has studded this cookbook with a bounty of essays that have turned it into a painless and pleasurable tutorial on food in Thailand. 

She explains the differences of Thai regional cuisine, along with the history behind it all. As an ardent champion of Bangkok’s street food, she tells how it came into being and why it must survive. In a frank and possibly controversial explication of “Thailand’s Fast-developing Drinking Culture” she hazards a debatable theory as to why drinks aren’t paired with Thai food: “That is because Thais simply drink to get drunk.” In another piece about eating larb prepared with raw beef, she presents a kinder reason for drinking while consuming this dish. The consumption of alcoholic beverages “are supposed to help kill any germs.”

Her voice is as seductive as her recipes and her recipes are as easy to enjoy as Chawadee Nualkhair is herself. Even readers who may never go to Thailand can immerse themselves in the country’s food, as it’s prepared and eaten within its borders, in the company of a woman who knows it well.~Janet Brown


What I Talk About When I Talk About Running : A Memoir by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel (Vintage)

In 2007, Japanese Nobel Prize nominee Haruki Murakami wrote a nonfiction book about running and writing. It was originally published as [走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること (Hashiru koto ni tsuite Kataru toki ni Boku no Kataru Koto] which translates to What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, published by Bungei Shunju. The English version was published in 2009 and was translated by Japanologist, Philip Gabriel. The title was adapted from a short-story collection by one of Murakami’s favorite writers, Raymond Carver. He was given permission by Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, to use the title in this way. 

In this collection of essays, which Murakami wrote between August of 2005 to October of 2006, as he was training for the New York City Marathon, he writes about what running has meant to him as a person. He says it’s “just a book in which I ponder various things and think aloud”. Murakami says this isn’t a book about his philosophy, it’s more a book about life lessons he learned by running. 

Murakami had the idea of writing a book about running ten years ago but it wasn’t a serious thought until he came across an article in the International Herald Tribune about running a full marathon. Famous marathon runners were asked by different interviewers what goes on in their head when they are running. Do they have a special mantra that keeps them going to complete the race? Murakami thought their answers were interesting and profound. 

The mantra that one runner mentioned stuck in Murakami’s head. The runner replied that it was a mantra his older brother said, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” Murakami has this to say about the mantra. “Say you’re running and you start to think, Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself”. 

Although writing is Murakami’s profession, he says he became a serious runner after moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts. His idea of running seriously means he runs an average of thirty-six miles a week. “In other words, six miles a day, six days a week”. “So at thirty-six miles per week, I cover 156 miles every month, which for me is my standard for serious running”. 

Murakami says since he’s become a serious runner, he has run one full marathon every year for the past twenty-plus years. He trains wherever his schedule takes him, be it in Hawaii, Japan, or in his current home of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has also expanded his interest beyond running, has participated in triathlons, and talks about readjusting his training for the cycling and swimming portions of the event. He is also aware that he is not as young as he once used to be and accepts the fact that it is nearly impossible to improve his times on subsequent marathons or triathlons. 

I’m no runner, nor am I a huge fan of Murakami’s works, although I have read a number of his novels. Even if you are not a runner and are not a big fan of Haruki Murakami, his easy-to-read journal on training for the New York City Marathon is interesting and introspective. It makes you think about your own thoughts when you are doing something that completely absorbs your mind. I exercise everyday but instead of thinking about my inner thoughts, I usually listen to music or watch a movie while working out on a treadmill. So far I haven't had any epiphanies while exercising but you never know…. ~Ernie Hoyt

Mott Street by Ava Chin (Penguin Press)

When Ava Chin first looked at a picture of the completed transcontinental railroad, she was puzzled to see no Chinese faces in the photograph. From the time she was very small, her grandfather had told her stories about his grandfather. Yuan Son came to America in the 1860s when he was still in his teens and was immediately hired as one of the many Chinese men who laid track for the railroad that would unite the country. He and his crew had won a bet for their employers by accomplishing the impossible task of putting down ten miles of railroad track in a single day. Why weren’t the Chinese laborers mentioned in her history book?

What she didn’t know was the continuing story of her great-great-grandfather who took his earnings after the railroad construction was over and moved to Idaho, a place that in 1870 had a population that was 30% Chinese. He opened two businesses and was a solid part of his community until economic turmoil struck and the Chinese Americans became a convenient scapegoat. After thirty years in the U.S., Yuan Son was chased out of his home by his white neighbors as they yelled “The Chinese must go!” He returned to his ancestral village where he was understandably reluctant to have his sons and grandsons retrace his journey to seek their fortune in the U.S.

This wasn’t the only piece of family history that Ava learned about as she was growing up. Although she often went to Manhattan’s Chinatown, she had no idea that the father she had never known lived around the corner from the building where her mother had grown up, 37 Mott Street. Nor did she know that both sides of her family, paternal and maternal, had lived for over a hundred years as neighbors in that same building. 

Long before Ava finally met her father, she learned about the tangled history of the Chins and the Wongs. It came to her in the jigsaw puzzle pieces of her grandparents’ stories about the Wong and Doshim families and through snatches of historical research about her paternal clan, the Chins. When she was in her twenties, she finally found her father, a prominent Chinatown resident who lived in the only remaining Manhattan townhouse that dated back to the days of the American Revolution, on Pell Street, only two blocks from 37 Mott Street. It was a place Ava had walked past countless times, never knowing that this place contained the hidden part of her family.

At this point, uncovering the history of the Chins , the Doshims, and the Wongs became Ava’s life’s work. Her academic training gave her the ability to do piercing and unflagging research, eventually sending her to live in China as a Fulbright scholar. However it was the torrents of memory, the oral stories, not written records, that held “the keys to truth” and revealed “the rich, loamy terroir” of both her family history and the history they inhabited on two continents.

The child of a doomed relationship between a beauty who had been Miss Chinatown and a dashing young playboy who drove a Triumph convertible, Ava’s lineage went back to the beginnings of New York’s Chinatown and continued throughout the terrible bastion of racism that was fostered by the Chinese Exclusion Act. From 1882 until 1943, her ancestors’ lives were battered and truncated by this legislation, denying them citizenship in a country they had made their home for five generations. It was only the fifth, Ava’s generation, that would have the full privileges of an American birthright from the moment they opened their American eyes.

As her ancestors worked and prospered, they did all they possibly could to prove themselves more than worthy of citizenship. During each of the world wars, Dek Foon, an uncle to Ava’s maternal grandmother and a Chinatown powerbroker and philanthropist, was at his local draft board as soon as his age group was eligible to sign up, although as a man in his late forties and then in his sixties, he wasn’t called for duty. He and his colleagues were indefatigable fundraisers for Russian Jews who suffered pogroms in !903, an act of kindness with political benefits as New York Jews took note. 

Foon’s wife, Elva May Lisk, became a pillar of strength and kindness to her husband’s family. Their marriage was a love match that was able to come into being because New York had no anti-miscegenation laws and it lasted until Dek Foon’s death. One of the most moving portions of the family history takes place when Ava discovers that Elva hadn’t been buried next to her husband. Stealthily Ava scoops earth from each of their burial sites, placing a portion of one spouse’s earth on the other’s grave, uniting them in the only way she can. 

The Doshims and the Wongs were people who married for love. The Chins were pragmatic Don Juans whose passion for gambling and fast living eclipsed anything they might have felt for the women in their lives. Ava’s grandmother Rose, the smartest woman in Chinatown, a graduate of Hunter College in a time when this was an anomaly and a stunning accomplishment for a Chinese American woman, told her granddaughter scathing stories about the Chins, who made and lost fortunes and squandered their expensive educations.

Through the pages of Mott Street is an overlay to this well-told family history. It’s the shameful history of the United States that Ava uncovers in a state of rage and grief, facts that have lived in a ghostly state of forgotten truths and are now brought to light. From Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay to the immigration hell that once thrived in the small New York town of Malone, there was no recognition of the propaganda written by Emma Lazurus. No Lady Liberty was there to “lift my  lamp above the golden door.” Even for Chinese residents who had the 19th Century equivalent of a “green card,” travel outside of the U.S. was a risky business that might ensure they could never return.

This shadowed history is beautifully and scaldingly interlaced with the stories of Ava’s families, making Mott Street a book that should be required reading for every high school civics class.~Janet Brown 




Spirit of the Phoenix : Beirut and the Story of Lebanon by Tim Llewellyn (I.B. Taurus)

Tim Llewellyn is a British writer who was the British Broadcasting Company’s (BBC) Middle East correspondent based in Beirut for about ten years. He has covered the Lebanese Civil War, the Palestinian question, and was the first reporter to break the news of the massacre at Sabra and Chantila in 1982. 

Spirit of the Phoenix is Llewellyn’s treatise on Beirut and the country of Lebanon. Before you even begin to read, he provides a chronology of important dates and events in Lebanon’s history, followed by a list of leading figures in the country. We are introduced to the people who settled the country: the Maronites, the Druze, the Shia, and the Sunni. 

Lebanon is part of the Levant, an area of the Middle East which includes areas of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and Syria. It sometimes also includes current-day Cyprus, Egypt, and parts of Turkey. 

“For all the beauty of its landscapes and the attractions of its people and culture, Lebanon has coursing through its enfeebled veins all the poisonous currents of international rivalries and regional aggression, and the religious and nationalistic fanaticisms these have engendered,” making this one of the most volatile regions in the world. 

Llewellyn hopes to explain how Lebanon and the Lebanese continue to survive, given all the animosity and strife that continues even to this day. He has seen the changes in the country from the time when Beirut was considered a modern and chic city and was still in the country when the Lebanese Civil War began. 

Llewellyn’s book is part travelogue, part history, and is full of his personal anecdotes of what he has experienced living and working in the war-torn country. He revisits many of the places he has reported on and is able to talk to the people who still live there. He may not have the answer to the problems still facing the country, but he does help the reader have a better understanding of the region and its many problems. 

The most upsetting fact you will learn about the Levant is how the League of Nations divided up the Levant after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. There was a Mandate for Great Lebanon and Syria managed by France, and the Mandate for Palestine managed by the United Kingdom. It appears as if the two powerful countries were splitting the land as spoils of war. The creation of Israel on Palestinian soil in 1948 continues to be a sore point for the Palestians leading to creation of HAMAS and Hezbollah. 

Before I finished reading this book, I was shocked to discover how ignorant I was of Lebanon and the Middle East in general. The only thing I knew for certain was its location and that its capital, Beirut, was once referred to as “Paris of the Middle East.” I was surprised to find that Lebanon had a large Christian population, the Maronites. As is true of a large number of people, my knowledge of the Middle East was divided into the Jewish state of Israel and the Arab countries surrounding it being Islamic. How wrong I was!

The only other thing I knew about Lebanon was that they made great food. I knew this because I used to live near a Lebanese restaurant during my university days. Whenever I’m asked, “What would be my ‘Last Supper’ I always answer, dejaj mashwi, a Lebanese dish which is charbroiled chicken marinated in lemon and garlic, topped with a garlic sauce and seasoned with allspice. 

Until the Middle East sorts out its differences without U.S. or other external intervention, I’m afraid World Peace is still years from being achieved. ~Ernie Hoyt