Readin' Vegans -- "Custodians of Wonder"
Details
Our Readin' Vegans book to discuss June 23 will be Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive, by Eliot Stein (2024). You need not have attended a previous discussion to join us for this one. We'll discuss the book until about 8:00, followed by open conversation.
The Zoom link to the discussion is posted on the right, visible to those who RSVP. PLEASE NOTE: THIS LINK DISAPPEARS AT THE MEETUP START TIME, THAT IS, 7:00 PM. We'll be available from 6:50 on to help anyone who might need extra time to connect. If you can't get on, call us at 303-300-2368.
We hope you can join us!
If you'd like to read ahead:
July 28 - Raising Hare: a Memoir, by Chloe Dalton
August 25 - A City on Mars, by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith
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Eliot Stein has traveled the globe in search of remarkable people who are preserving some of our rarest cultural rites. In Custodians of Wonder, Stein introduces readers to a man saving the secret ingredient in Japan's 700-year-old original soy sauce recipe. In Italy, he learns how to make the world's rarest pasta from one of the only women alive who knows how to make it. And in India, he discovers a family rumored to make a mysterious metal mirror believed to reveal your truest self. From shadowing Scandinavia's last night watchman to meeting a 27th-generation West African griot to seeking out Cuba's last official cigar factory “readers” more than a century after they spearheaded the fight for Cuban independence, Stein uncovers an almost lost world.
Climbing through Peru’s southern highlands, he encounters the last Inca bridge master who rebuilds a grass-woven bridge from the fabled Inca Road System. He befriends a British beekeeper who maintains a touching custom of "telling the bees" important news of the day and crunches through a German forest to find the official mailman of the only tree in the world with its own address – to which countless people all over the world have written in hopes of finding love. These are just some of the last people on Earth still in touch with quickly vanishing rites. Let Eliot Stein introduce you to all of them.
