This critical triumvirate is leading a literary reformation of the field. Building on the pioneering model of Jonathan Gold, they promise to tackle greater civic and social questions than the cooking on the plate. The old ideal of critic as neutral arbiter gives way to a modern vision of the critic as hip, multicultural storyteller. “I don’t see the critic’s task as one of simply deciding if a food or restaurant experience is pleasing,” writes Soleil Ho, “but rather using an aesthetic evaluation of restaurants to tell stories about the connections between people, cultures, and communities.”
Now I need to figure out how to make the cookies. I find a recipe online that seems impossibly easy to do, uses everyday ingredients, and sounds delicious. I can almost taste the success emerging from my oven. The night before the meeting, I throw pizza at the kids for dinner and lock them in their rooms by 8 p.m., giving me a full 12 hours before my 8 a.m. meeting. The recipe calls for baking the cookies for five to 20 minutes. I’ll do 12 minutes. At that rate, I figure, I can bake four cycles of six cookies each. I’ll be done in 48 minutes, then I can work on the actual meeting agenda.
It’s difficult to smooth out each round into a four-inch circle. After 25 minutes of mushing and pushing, I settle for three-inch circle-like masses. The first batch goes in — and comes out crumbly and overdone. I try for eight minutes. I get one cookie out, fold it — it works! I slip the little fortune in and drop it into a muffin tin.
I go to pick up the next one, and it cracks in my hand. I taste a crumb, and it’s yummy. I pick up the pan, forgetting my oven mitts, singe my fingers, and drop the pan on the floor. As I soak my burning fingers, I recalibrate. I will bake the cookies for six minutes, and I will only bake three cookies at a time. It is now 11:30 p.m., and I’ve made exactly one cookie. At this rate, they’ll be ready for the spring company picnic.
Canadian mountain climber, alpine guide and inspirational speaker Sharon Wood says many people have asked her this question recently, in the wake of her recent book, “Rising: Becoming the First North American Woman on Everest.” After all, as the titles suggests, she was the first North American woman to summit Earth’s highest peak in 1986, more than 30 years ago. So what prompted her to write a book now?
Many reasons, she explains.
“A buffer of three decades has given me the courage to expose both my frailties and my motivations, and allowed for admissions that I would not have had the insight or courage to disclose when I was younger.” She didn’t anticipate that Everest would never go away, that it would become an almost-daily part of her life as it led directly to her speaking career.
Lee Goldberg's Lost Hills is not only the first book in what promises to be a superb series — it's also that rare novel in which the formulaic elements of mainstream police procedurals (blood, violence and forensic science) share narrative space with a unique female protagonist. All that, and it's also a love letter to the chaos and diversity of California.
But the cruelty of this aspect of the novel’s structure is countered by the astonishing tenderness of other sections. Amid the wreckage of that downed jet, one passenger is found alive: a 12-year-old boy named Edward.