Custodians of Wonder
Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
Climbing through Peru’s southern highlands, he encounters the last Inca bridge master who rebuilds a grass-woven bridge every year 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 he 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 from across the world have written in hopes of finding love. These are just some of the last custodians preserving age-old rites on the brink of disappearance against all odds. Let Eliot Stein introduce you to all of them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this vibrant debut travelogue, BBC Travel journalist Stein crisscrosses the globe to spotlight 10 "cultural marvels on the edge of disappearance" and the people charged with preserving them. Subjects include Balla Kouyate, a Malian djeli, or bard, who uses the balafon, a wind instrument, to perform "national epics recall family genealogies"; Paola Abraini, who wakes daily at 7 a.m. to make su filindeu, "the rarest pasta in the world," from a 300-year-old recipe passed down by her Sardinian family; and Taiwanese artist Yan Jhen-fa, one of the last people to hand-paint film posters. A particularly fascinating chapter details how Peru's Victoriano Arizapana maintains a woven suspension bridge dating from the Inca empire; once a year, he oversees thousands of villagers as they prepare braided grass cable to rebuild the bridge, offering a blessing to "Pachamama (Mother Earth)" to honor the "Incan bond with nature." Stein's reverent prose conveys the awe-inspiring nature of these arcane cultural traditions without exoticizing them ("There's something truly singular about witnessing someone do something that nearly nobody else in the world knows how to do. It's like watching a secret"). This is worth seeking out.
