Whether it is morning coffee or tea, or champagne with dinner and a glass of port after, these handy reference books offer insight into coffee and tea blends and champaigne and port vintages. Over 100 full-color photographs help to identify the "best of the best." Drink and enjoy!

Since its origins in 1967, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival has gained worldwide recognition as a model for the research and public presentation of living cultural heritage and the advocacy of cultural democracy. Festival curators play a major role in interpreting the Festival's principles and shaping its practices. Curatorial Conversations brings together for the first time in one volume the combined expertise of the Festival's curatorial staff - past and present - in examining the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage's representation practices and their critical implications for issues of intangible cultural heritage policy, competing globalisms, cultural tourism, sustainable development and environment, and cultural pluralism and identity. In the volume, edited by the staff curators Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N'Diaye, contributors examine how Festival principles, philosophical underpinnings, and claims have evolved, and address broader debates on cultural representation from their own experience. This book represents the first concerted project by Smithsonian staff curators to examine systematically the Festival's institutional values as they have evolved over time and to address broader debates on cultural representation based on their own experiences at the Festival.

This is an engaging autobiographical account of a young American woman's life in her Samoan husband's native home. Fay Calkins, a descendant of Puritan settlers, met Vai Ala'ilima, a descendant of Samoan chiefs, while working on her doctoral dissertation in the Library of Congress. After an unconventional courtship and a typical American wedding, they set out for Western Samoa, where Fay was to find a way of life totally new and charming, if at times frustrating and confusing. Soon after her arrival in the islands, the bride of a few months found herself with a family of seven boys in a wide range of ages, sent by relatives to live with the new couple. She was stymied by the economics of trying to support numerous guests, relatives, and a growing family, and still contribute to the lavish feasts that were given on any pretext--feasts, where the guests brought baskets in which to take home as much of the largesse as they could carry. Fay tried to introduce American institutions: a credit union, a co-op, a work schedule, and hourly wages on the banana plantation begun by her and her husband. In each instance, she quickly learned that Samoans were unwilling or unable to grasp her Western ideas of input equaling output, of personal property, or of payment received for work done. Despite these frustrations and disappointments, however, life among the people of her Samoan chief was for Fay happy and productive.