Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive
A vivid look at 10 astonishing people who are maintaining some of the world's oldest and rarest cultural traditions.
Eliot Stein has traveled the globe in search of remarkable people who are preserving some of our most extraordinary cultural rites. In Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive, 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 tracking down 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.
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Become an affiliate"Intrepidly reported and delightfully delivered, Custodians of Wonder is a tonic for our troubled times. From a Swedish night watchman to a Peruvian bridge weaver, Eliot Stein shines a bright and generous light on unexpected pockets of joy--and reminds us of the quiet beauty found in ancient, unbroken traditions. There is much magic, and wisdom, in these pages." -- Eric Weiner, NYT bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss and The Geography of Genius
I so enjoyed Eliot Stein's celebration of the unsung arts still faintly glowing in the shadows of all our pasts. In this charming book he has uncovered and preserved treasures across five continents that might otherwise have slipped away. As he writes, Custodians of Wonder 'invites us to fall back in love with the world'. -- Sara Wheeler, author of Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia