Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive

Named one of the best travel books of the year by National Geographic, Smithsonian, and AfarEliot Steins quietly powerful new book celebrates the kind of singular, sitespecific expertise thats endangered by globalization and technology...smart, genial and occasionally astonishing...its a country mile from the news cycle, a winning collection of thoroughly uncurrent events. SF ChronicleA vivid look at 10 astonishing people who are maintaining some of the worlds 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 Japans 700yearold original soy sauce recipe. In Italy, he learns how to make the worlds 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 Scandinavias last night watchman to meeting a 27thgeneration West African griot to tracking down Cubas 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 Perus southern highlands, he encounters the last Inca bridge master who rebuilds a grasswoven 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 ageold rites on the brink of disappearance against all odds. Let Eliot Stein introduce you to all of them.