Custodians of Wonder

A vivid look at the ten key 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 rarest 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 seeking out 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 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 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 all over the world have written in hopes of finding love. These are just some of the last people on Earth still in touch with quickly vanishing rites. Let Eliot Stein introduce you to all of them.