Freedom: The Story of My Second Life
by Malika Oufkir (Hyperion, $23.95)

"I come from a world where every crumb counts. For years, I collected and saved so many of them that if they were laid out in a line, it would lead all the way back to Morocco. In the fairy tales of my childhood, Tom Thumb used pebbles instead of bread crumbs to leave a trail back to his house, but I would have given anything never to be found again, so that I could leave behind the house that an ogre with a crown had filled with suffering. Crumbs do not count in the world of freedom, and neither does the bread they come from. It is sliced up in haste, tossed into a basket, and set out to decorate a table. At best, it sops up some sauce or is nibbled on, dipped in mustard, before the 'real' food arrives. Bread is there for amusement, because sitting at a table is almost a game, one with its codes, rules, ritual courtesies, and its decorative bread baskets that will be emptied into huge garbage cans when the meal is over, the way one empties an ashtray.

I had so much trouble getting used to stores and their kilometers of shelves, their hundred varieties of sausage by the meter, that the special realm of restaurants felt like a fresh ordeal. And an inescapable one, since the free world pivots around the table: everything connects to it--friendship, love, business, family. Eating is a passport for everything and nothing." –excerpted from the book