Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History

Description

From ancient Egypt to modern times, bread has been essential, for survival. This work takes you through its history, examining its role in politics, religion and technology, and answers questions such as how bread caused Napoleon's defeat. It also describes the authors experiences subsisting on bread made of sawdust in a Nazi concentration camp. "In a colossal epic tale, Mr. Jacob has sketched world history--its folkways, its religion, its superstition, and its plagues, all in terms of bread." - Wall Street Journal

H. E. Jacob wrote some forty books during his prolific career, including biographies, poetry, dramas, and histories. After fleeing Nazi-occupied Germany, he moved to New York and gained American citizenship. In the early fifties he returned to Germany, where he died in 1967. Peter Reinhart is the author of many award-winning books on bread and culture, including The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread and Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor. He is a baking instructor at Johnson and Wales University in Charlotte, North Carolina.

"Rarely has a book intended for a popular audience displayed evidence of more exhaustive scholarship. . . . The amount of information Mr. Jacob has unearthed that will be new to most readers is simply astonishing." The New York Times "This is not merely a book about bread as bread, the end result of grass seed ground into flour, but about bread as a signifier of transformation, both personally and historically." Peter Reinhart, from his foreword "Rarely has a book intended for a popular audience displayed evidence of more exhaustive scholarship. . . . The amount of information Mr. Jacob has unearthed that will be new to most readers is simply astonishing." The New York Times "This is not merely a book about bread as bread, the end result of grass seed ground into flour, but about bread as a signifier of transformation, both personally and historically." Peter Reinhart, from his foreword