In Stores Now:

Bold: A Cookbook of Big Flavors
by Susanna Hoffman and Victoria Wise
Workman Publishing
Trade Paperback


  If it can be spread on bread or pulled out of a can, I can prepare it for a meal.  Unfortunately, that is about the limits of my culinary expertise.  It's not from a lack of "want to," it's more a lack of the right combination of skills.

Every year about this time learning to cook appears on my New Year's Resolutions list -- usually near the top.  I am a world-class eater but a completely inept cook.  Chefs need patience, attitude and a special cooking gene (or two).  I have none of these.

Workman Publishing has graciously sent me BOLD: A Cookbook of Big Flavors by Susanna Hoffman and Victoria Wise to review.  The back cover brags about over 250 recipes that are:

DELICIOUS !

INSPIRED !

BIG !

FRESH !

INNOVATIVE !

IRRESISTIBLE !

I do not doubt that these recipes are all of those things and more.  My plan is to scour the book looking for recipes that won't tax my brain or destroy my kitchen.  I'll let you know....


p.s. -- I think I've figured out that if a recipe has "with" in the title, I could never prepare it correctly.



From the publisher's website:

Bold is nourishing. Bold is inspired. Bold is food that means business. And Bold is big—as in 250 recipes filled with big flavors to be served in big portions. From the culinary team of Susanna Hoffman and Victoria Wise—who between them have authored or coauthored more than fifteen cookbooks including The Well-Filled Tortilla Cookbook and The Well-Filled Microwave Cookbook—Bold brings together the beloved American tradition of delicious, plate-filling meals with the lively global flavors that infuse our culture and cuisine.

This is comfort food that’s been given an exuberant 21st-century makeover—slow-cooked roasts and braises, generous steaks, brimming soups, heaping platters of salads and vegetables, hearty pastas and grains, wild game, and rich desserts.

This is Bold: Stuffed California Pork Rolls. Buffalo Chili with Black Bean and Corn Salsa. Meat and Potatoes Korean Style with Quick Kimchee. Leg of Lamb with Spicy Pecan Pesto. Chicken Pot Pie Under a Filo Crust. Crowded Corn Chowder with Cod, Shrimp, and Corn. Lime Curd Coconut Meringue Pie with a Macadamia Nut Crust. The book boasts a vibrant design that complements the recipes. Sidebars throughout offer cooking tips and advice, highlight people and places, and explore food history and traditions. Bold is America on a plate.

2013 Books I Wanted to Read But Haven't

Trading Bases
by Joe Peta
Penguin

Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
by Michael Sorkin
North Point Press / Farrar, Straus & Giroux






















The Good Nurse
by Charles Graeber
Twelve Books / Hachette Book Group



















The Receptionist
by Janet Groth
Algonquin Books / Workman Publishing





















Longest Road
by Philip Caputo
Henry Holt / Macmillian

The Billionaire Who Wasn't
by Conor O'Clery
Public Affairs Books






















This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
by Ann Patchett
Harper





















Ingenious
by Jason Fagone
Crown Publishing






















From Scratch
by Allen Salkin
Putnam Adult





















My Mistake
by Daniel Menaker
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

My Favorite Books This Year:

In no particular order:



Mumbai New York Scranton 



Hidden Cities



Lost Cat



Run Brother Run



Overlay



Slow Getting Up

On My Radar:

Ask a Science Teacher: 250 Answers to Questions You've Always Had About How Everyday Stuff Really Works
by Larry Scheckel
The Experiment Publishing
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Finally, answers to everyday questions we’ve gotten so used to not knowing that we never think to ask

How does a 500,000-pound jumbo jet stay up in the sky? How many of us really know the answer to that question? We encounter countless phenomena that have perfectly logical scientific explanations—if we only knew who to ask.

Award-winning teacher Larry Scheckel spent thirty-eight years explaining how the world works to eleventh graders. In Ask a Science Teacher, he gives us authoritative and easy-to-understand answers to 250 questions first asked by readers of his regular newspaper column. Topics include the human body, earth science, astronomy, technology, chemistry, zoology, sports, music, and the everyday conundrums that don’t fit into any category—science is everywhere, after all, and the best way to discover it is to ask a science teacher. With questions like . . .

• What makes blood red?

• Why don’t we feel the earth spin?

• How do touch lamps work?

• What makes skunks smell so bad?

• Why do we blink?

• How does gas make a car go?

. . . and 244 other questions expertly answered.

In Stores Now:

The Ariadne Objective: The Underground War to Rescue Crete from the Nazis
by Wes Davis
Crown Publishers
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Excerpt from The Ariadne Objective

The incredible true story of the World War II spies, including Patrick Leigh Fermor and John Pendlebury, who fought to save Crete and block Hitler’s march to the East.

In the bleakest years of World War II, when it appeared that nothing could slow the German army, Hitler set his sights on the Mediterranean island of Crete, the ideal staging ground for German domination of the Middle East. But German command had not counted on the eccentric band of British intelligence officers who would stand in their way, conducting audacious sabotage operations in the very shadow of the Nazi occupation force.

The Ariadne Objective tells the remarkable story of the secret war on Crete from the perspective of these amateur soldiers – scholars, archaeologists, writers – who found themselves serving as spies in Crete because, as one of them put it, they had made “the obsolete choice of Greek at school”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, a Byronic figure and future travel-writing luminary who as a teenager had walked across Europe in the midst of Hitler’s rise to power; John Pendlebury, a swashbuckling archaeologist with a glass eye and a swordstick, who had been legendary archeologist Arthur Evans’s assistant at Knossos before the war; Xan Fielding, a writer who would later produce the English translations of books like Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes; and Sandy Rendel, a future Times of London reporter, who prided himself on a disguise that left him looking more ragged and fierce than the Cretan mountaineers he fought alongside.

Infiltrated into occupied Crete, these British gentleman spies teamed with Cretan partisans to carry out a cunning plan to disrupt Nazi maneuvers, culminating in a daring, high-risk plot to abduct the island’s German commander. In this thrilling untold story of World War II, Wes Davis offers a brilliant portrait of a group of legends in the making, against the backdrop of one of the war’s most exotic locales.

In Stores Now:

There is a God! : 1,001 Heartwarming (and Hilarious) Reasons to Believe
by Richard Smith and Maureen McElheron
Tarcher Penguin
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Excerpt of There is a God

This funny, tender, and inspiring little book offers 1,001 reminders for the faithful—and for doubters, too.

“There is a God!” Who hasn’t uttered these words in response to life’s true miracles? A glorious sunset. Watching your toddler take her first wobbly steps. And that supreme blessing: a hospital gown that closes all the way. In this book, New York Times–bestselling author Richard Smith and Maureen McElheron identify 1,001 miracles that prove that there is in fact a God, including:

- Watching your little girl struggle with an ice-cream cone that appears bigger than she is

- Fireflies on a June night

- Knowing that your ability to explain the difference between hollandaise sauce and béchamel impresses the hell out of your date

There Is a God! will remind you of all the many things that make life wonderful.

Out Now:

Starling
by Sage Stossel
InkLit / Penguin
Graphic Novel


From the publisher website:


"She has the power to save lives. She just has trouble living her own..."

For Amy Sturgess, life in the big city comes with even bigger problems. Her marketing career is being derailed by a conniving coworker stealing her accounts. Her family crises range from her down-and-out brother running afoul of the law to her mother’s growing affections for the house cats. And Amy’s love life just flatlined thanks to an unexpected reunion with the one that got away—who’s now engaged.

When Xanax and therapy fail to relieve her stress, Amy does what any young woman in her position would do: She uses her superstrength, speed, flight, and ability to generate 750 volts from her hands to fight crime as the mysterious masked vigilante Starling. But while Starling is hailed as a superhero, will Amy remain a super-zero?

On My Radar:

Lethal Intent: Aileen Wuornos, America's Deadliest Female Serial Killer
by Sue Russell
Pinnacle / Kensington
Mass Market Paperback
(reissue)

From the publisher website:

Female serial killers are rare but fascinating.  Perhaps none has gripped public interest as much as Aileen Wuornos, who claimed to have killed seven men. In this updated edition, award-winning journalist Sue Russell shows readers Wuornos’s abusive childhood, her brutal crimes, and her final days on Death Row.

On My Radar:

Charlie and the Angels: The Outlaws, the Hell's Angels and the Sixty Years War
by Alex Caine
Vintage Canada 
Trade Paperback


From the publisher website:

The Outlaws Motorcycle Club's story is told here for the first time in paperback, by the #1 national bestselling criminal underworld author and former infiltrator Alex Caine. They are the original biker gang, and their 60 years of war with the Hells Angels is the stuff of legend.

     Right down to their signature logo (a skull known as "Charlie"), the McCook Outlaws Motorcycle Club, formed in 1935, defined the look and sensibility of the twentieth-century biker. In the 1950s, a rising gang of toughs in California threatened to steal their thunder. But, recognizing an opportunity for expansion, the Outlaws reached out. The nascent Hells Angels sent them home to Chicago, beaten, humiliated and forever bent on the Angels' destruction.

     60 years and thousands of maimed and murdered later, the Hells Angels are a dominant criminal empire. The Outlaws, loosely allied with the #2 club in the biker universe, the Bandidos, sit at #3, though they rule in places like the UK, the Great Lakes, Florida and the US Midwest. The Outlaws continue to define the vicious biker character like few of their peers.

     Working undercover, Alex Caine witnessed a Bandidos-mediated truce between the Outlaws and Angels in the 1980s. But like every deal between bikers it soured, and a storm of unimaginable violence is brewing. The Outlaws are expanding and determined to unseat the Angels once and for all.

On My Radar:

Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets
by Lars Eighner
St. Martin's Griffin
Trade Paperback


From the publisher website:

When Travels with Lizbeth was first published in 1993, it was proclaimed an instant classic. Lars Eighner’s account of his descent into homelessness and his adventures on the streets has moved, charmed, and amused generations of readers. As Lars wrote, “When I began writing this account I was living under a shower curtain in a stand of bamboo in a public park. I did not undertake to write about homelessness, but wrote what I knew, as an artist paints a still life, not because he is especially fond of fruit, but because the subject is readily at hand.”  

Containing the widely anthologized essay “On Dumpster Diving,” Travels with Lizbeth is a beautifully written account of one man's experience of homelessness, a story of physical survival, and the triumph of the artistic spirit in the face of enormous adversity. In his unique voice—dry, disciplined, poignant, comic—Eighner celebrates the companionship of his dog, Lizbeth, and recounts their ongoing struggle to survive on the streets of Austin, Texas, and hitchhiking along the highways to Southern California and back.

Guest Review:

Fiction Review

Help for the Haunted: A Novel
by John Searles
William Morrow
Hardcover

Reviewed by Robin Ayers

John Searles’ new novel Help for the Haunted is a rare book, and a book that keeps you guessing.  It draws you in from the opening paragraph and is so in-depth with details that it feels as if you are there.  Searles creates a world that you will not want to leave.

It is 1989 and Sylvie and Rose Mason are the daughters of religious ghost hunters. Late one February night, the Masons are called to the town church in Dundalk, Maryland to meet Rose, who has run off again. Sylvie waits in the car, until a terrible noise urges her inside. Rose is not there, but a murderer is. Another shot rings out, and Sylvie awakens at the hospital with tinnitus, an orphan. Released into the care of her angry, wild older sister (who has finally turned up), Sylvie must try to come to terms with her new life and all that she never knew about her parents.

Elements of ghost hunting certainly led a spooky tone to the book but I didn't feel the “ghost story” plot-line was as prominent as the author quotes on the back cover would lend you to believe.  The heart of the story is Sylvie’s journey, a journey that leads Sylvie to the truth about her parents’ career and their dealings. This story does bounce back and forth from past to present, but don't let it aggravate you; it all comes together and makes for a great novel. It also may make you think; "do you really know your family". 

In My TBR Stack:

Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires
by David Folkenflik
Public Affairs 
Hardcover

Rupert Murdoch is the most significant media tycoon the English-speaking world has ever known. No one before him has trafficked in media influence across those nations so effectively, nor has anyone else so singularly redefined the culture of news and the rules of journalism. In a stretch spanning six decades, he built News Corp from a small paper in Adelaide, Australia into a multimedia empire capable of challenging national broadcasters, rolling governments, and swatting aside commercial rivals. Then, over two years, a series of scandals threatened to unravel his entire creation.

Murdoch's defenders questioned how much he could have known about the bribery and phone hacking undertaken by his journalists in London. But to an exceptional degree, News Corp was an institution cast in the image of a single man. The company's culture was deeply rooted in an Australian buccaneering spirit, a brawling British populism, and an outsized American libertarian sensibility—at least when it suited Murdoch's interests.

David Folkenflik, the media correspondent for NPR News, explains how the man behind Britain's take-no-prisoners tabloids, who reinvigorated Roger Ailes by backing his vision for Fox News, who gave a new swagger to the New York Post and a new style to the Wall Street Journal, survived the scandals—and the true cost of this survival. He summarily ended his marriage, alienated much of his family, and split his corporation asunder to protect the source of his vast wealth (on the one side), and the source of his identity (on the other). There were moments when the global news chief panicked. But as long as Rupert Murdoch remains the person at the top, Murdoch's World will be making news.

Award-winning journalist David Folkenflik has been NPR's media correspondent since 2004. He previously covered media and politics for the Baltimore Sun and edited the 2011 book, Page One: Inside The New York Times and the Future of Journalism. He has covered Murdoch and News Corp extensively and has been a frequent commentator on the hacking scandal in both the U.S. and the U.K. Folkenflik lives with his wife, the radio producer Jesse Baker, and their daughter in New York City.

In my TBR Stack:

The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy
by Larry J. Sabato
Bloomsbury
Hardcover

John F. Kennedy died almost half a century ago—yet because of his extraordinary promise and untimely death, his star still resonates strongly. On the anniversary of his assassination, celebrated political scientist and analyst Larry J. Sabato—himself a teenager in the early 1960s and inspired by JFK and his presidency—explores the fascinating and powerful influence he has had over five decades on the media, the general public, and especially on each of his nine presidential successors.

A recent Gallup poll gave JFK the highest job approval rating of any of those successors, and millions remain captivated by his one thousand days in the White House. For all of them, and for those who feel he would not be judged so highly if he hadn’t died tragically in office, The Kennedy Half-Century will be particularly revealing. Sabato reexamines JFK’s assassination using heretofore unseen information to which he has had unique access, then documents the extraordinary effect the assassination has had on Americans of every modern generation through the most extensive survey ever undertaken on the public’s view of a historical figure. The full and fascinating results, gathered by the accomplished pollsters Peter Hart and Geoff Garin, paint a compelling portrait of the country a half-century after the epochal killing. Just as significantly, Sabato shows how JFK’s presidency has strongly influenced the policies and decisions—often in surprising ways—of every president since.

Among the hundreds of books devoted to JFK, The Kennedy Half-Century stands apart for its rich insight and original perspective. Anyone who reads it will appreciate in new ways the profound impact JFK’s short presidency has had on our national psyche.