"Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are." This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein's erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honore de Balzac's "The Human Comedy." Balzac uses them as a connecting thread in his[...]

Seventeenth-century North America was a dangerous, untamed land, a vast wilderness where settlers, fur traders, and missionaries all struggled to eke out an existence. But the New World was also a place that attracted a special breed--men with a thirst for adventure and discovery. Robert Cavelier de[...]