The world-renowned “elixir of life” has been around for centuries, but its secret recipe — which has nearly disappeared several times — has never been revealed by the monks who made it famous.

Behind the gray stone walls of the 900-year-old Grande Chartreuse monastery, high in the French Alps, two monks dry, crush, and sort 130 herbs and spices into burlap bags. The "plants room" where they ...

Foreign Correspondence NEW YORK TIMES.B.C de W. New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared. *Does not ...

You must be logged in to react. Click any reaction to login. You must be logged in to rate. Click any rating to login.

One might not expect a book about Carthusians, “the Western world’s most austere monastic order,” to be a page turner, but this sensitively written volume is just that. The author reconstructs the pre ...