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What I am reading now?
a review of Strange Harvests by Edward Posnett.
The world is in turmoil — the Coronavirus Pandemic, the Chinese genocide in Xinjiang, mass protests in the United States against police brutality and in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement.
It feels like everything is coming to a head at the same time.
It the last of the above list which subliminally pushed me towards picking on Overdrive Strange Harvests by Edward Posnett whose title is reminiscent of Strange Fruit, the anti-discrimination protest poem and song popularized by Billy Holliday.
Introduction
Strange Harvests is a part travelogue, part history lesson on the extraction and trade of seven goods which have come to embody exotic, decadent living in the present day.
These seven range from Birds Nests, favored in South East Asia for their supposed medicinal properties, to sea silk — a fabric made from mollusk hair.
I am currently on the fifth item on that list — vicuna fiber.
Prior to this, the author covered Eiderdown, Birds Nests, Kopi Luwak a.k.a Civet coffee, and sea silk.
