What's for dinner next decade?

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While many of us are moving backwards foodwise, reveling in heritage vegetables, foraging woods for forgotten greens and enjoying farmhouse dinners, Josh Schonwald is looking towards what we’ll be putting on our tables in the years to come.
Will it be cobia, touted as “the next salmon” and prized because it grows ten times faster than most fish and is tastier than Chilean sea bass, a new microgreen or meat grown in a Petri dish?
These are topics that lead Schonwald to travel the world and chronicling his adventures in his very witty and easy to read book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food (Harper 2012; $25.99).
The taste of tomorrow is also about the taste of yesterday.
“There used to be just one lettuce,” says Schonwald who lives in Evanston, Illinois. “Iceberg.”
And it use to come in a round ball and people either tore it into pieces or cut it into wedges. Now we face rows of bagged shredded mixes of greens in the supermarket.
Schonwald became interested in how food evolves after interviewing a professor of aquaculture at the University of Miami who believed in the cobia revolution.
“What intrigued me was that there were people like him who had such strong ideas about breakthroughs in food,” says Schonwald. “And I started thinking, if there’s a new fish, is there a new cow, a new tomato?”
Though he’s somewhat hesitant to make future food predictions – after all cobia still hasn’t come to market – Schonwald does believe that purslane, a green favored by Alice Waters, herself a foodinista who changed the way we eat.
“It’s native to India and they say Gandhi loved it,” says Schonwald. “And it not only is very high in vitamin A and beta carotene, it has more omega 3’s than any leafy green plant.”
Crickets also make his list as does Sub-Sahara cuisine.
“Why some foods make it and some don’t and the people who believe in them fascinates me,” says Schonwald who also explores GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and a Pentagon lab developing food substitutes.
But for those who still yearn for the foods our grandmother made, take heart.
“I think one of the foods of tomorrow,” says Schonwald “will be the foods of the past.”

Brad Thor: Black List

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There are A lists and B lists but the one list you never want to be on is the Black List (Simon & Schuster 2012; $27), the secret government list seen only by the President of the United States and his secret team of advisors. The bad part of this list of people who are considered to be enemies of the United States is once you’re  on it, the only way to get off is because you’re dead.   
That’s a problem for counterterrorism operative Scott Harvath who must discover how he made the list, elude the myriad of killers intent on crossing his name off the list and, as if that weren’t enough, stop the massive terror attack about to take down the United States ‘digital infrastructure.
It’s the ultimate paranoia thriller and a typical Thor suspense novel – a compelling fast moving read based on both fiction and fact. Indeed, Thor, the New York Times bestselling author of  Full Black, The Last Patriot and Blowback, recognized by NPR as one of the “100 Best Thrillers,” was given the name factoid writer by Glenn Beck for the way he merges fact and fiction.
Thor, who lives in Chicago, considers himself as an entertainer but loves that people are learning as they read his books.
“I want to be the fact-ion guy,” says Thor noting that Harvath is his alter ego and gets to do things he can’t. “One of coolest pieces of email I get is when people say that they loved my book and had to read  it with their laptop open, because they couldn’t tell where the facts ended and the fiction began.” 
But writing his super-charged novels, all 12 of them, is also a learning experience for Thor.
“There’s a lot of that in Black List, primarily to do with electronic surveillance that I didn’t know about and data collection assessment and mining,” he says. “The most interesting books for me are those from which I learn things, which while I’m being entertained, I also take away an information packet. I like the idea that my books get people talking. I want people not only to get that great thrill, but I want them to walk away feeling smarter, feeling like they’ve  learned something by reading one of my books, not like a textbook or a school book, but about really cool things.”
Ifyougo:
What: Brad Thor book signing
When: Saturday, August 25 at 1:00pm
Where: Costco, 2746 N. Clybourne Ave., Chicago, IL
Cost: Free
FYI: 773-360-2053

The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

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What if Abraham Lincoln had survived the assassination attempt on his life?  Would he still have been considered the great statesman and hero that he is today?
Maybe not, writes Stephen Carter, the William Nelson Cromwell professor of law at Yale,  in his latest book The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel  (Knopf 2012; $26.95).
Carter, a long time fan of the 16th president who has read an immense amount of books about Lincoln, notes that highly educated abolitionists in Lincoln’s day, though vehemently against slavery were also resentful of the president. Many considered Lincoln, who had very little formal schooling and hailed from deep poverty in both rural Kentucky and Indiana, as not having the intellectual heft for the job as president. Some also thought he was moving too slowly in freeing the slaves. Besides that, Lincoln was playing to win the war, no matter what and rules were often broken.
“I think Lincoln was our greatest president; I have no question about that,” says Carter, author of four other novels including the best selling The Emperor of Ocean Park. “ But at the same time, there were a lot of things that Lincoln did during his presidency, in order to win the Civil War, which could be called into question. And so my idea was to write a courtroom drama that was crafted around that possibility. The path I sketch in my fiction is one possible path history might have taken.”
The list of what the Lincoln administration was egregious. Opposition newspapers were shuttered, editors locked up, reporters at the front who wrote unfavorable stories were subject to court martial, habeas corpus was suspended and Lincoln both ignored court orders and declared martial law.
“For Lincoln, all of this was justified by his need to win the war,” says Carter.  “And that’s the question  in my novel that the Senate has to confront — did Lincoln have a justification for the various things he attempted to do that he said were necessary?”
Asked if he thinks Lincoln could get elected today, Carter has a quick answer.
“Not a chance,” he says. “Lincoln would been dismissed as uneducated and too folksy. He also wasn’t very telegenic and had a funny voice.”

Former sex crimes prosecutor writes second mystery

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Allison Leotta, a former federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. who specialized in prosecuting sex crimes, domestic violence and crimes against children, developed the theme of her latest mystery thriller Discretion (Touchstone 2012; $25) when a colleague/friend worked on the case of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, dubbed by the press as the D.C. Madam. Palfrey ran a high level escort service used by many top level government employees including a senator from Louisiana. Convicted, Palfrey said she had 10,000 to 15,000 phone numbers of clients, many of them important powerbrokers in Washington D.C. Her body was found shortly afterwards.
“The police said she had hung herself,” says Leotta, who also wrote the Law of Attraction which was named one of the best books of 2010 by Suspense Magazine and is the first in the series about Assistant U.S. Attorney Anna Curtis.“The prosecutor in me said if the police say it’s a suicide, it’s a suicide. But the crime novelist in me said what about the phone numbers, what might have happened?’
The novel begins when a beautiful woman enters a congressman’s office for an assignation and then moments later is seen plunging to death from the balcony outside of his office. Curtis is called in to handle the case and her investigation leads Discretion, an upper echelon escort service catering to D.C.’s elite. 
“When I was prosecutor,” says Leotta, “I worked with a lot of sex worker victims.  It’s such a dangerous job.”
This background helped her with research for the book as did drawing upon friends in both the prosecutor and police departments.
And though the book is fictional, some of what Leotta, a Harvard Law School graduate, discovered while researching the D.C. Madam case was almost unbelievable.
“One of the witnesses in the case was a high-level lawyer who also worked as a tester for the escort agency,” she says. “All the secrets going on were amazing.”
Though she is now writing full time and taking care of her young children, Leotta at times misses being a prosecutor.
“Writing is my dream job,” she says noting that she is finishing up the third Curtis novel.  “But I think there is no legal job in America more rewarding than being a prosecutor.”
 Ifyougo:  Allison Leotta Talk/Reading/Signing
What:
When: Wednesday, July 18, 7:30pm
Where: Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark Street, Chicago, IL
Cost: Free
FYI: (773) 769-9299  

Murder Makes Life Interesting in Starvation Lake

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Winters are long in Starvation Lake, a fading Northern Michigan town that is devoted to hockey.  Fortunately, each season seems to bring at least one murder to keep life interesting and Gus Carpenter, executive editor of the Pine County Pilot, busy.

Author Bryan Gruley, a reporter-at-large for Bloomberg News, writing long-form features for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine., has just completed his third Starvation Lake Mystery, The Skeleton Box(Touchstone Books 2013; $25). His first mystery, Starvation Lake, won the Strand Magazine Critics Award and was an Edgar Award nominee and his second, The Hanging Tree garnered the #1 IndieNext Pick for August 2010, was named a Michigan Notable Book for 2011, a Kirkus Reviews Best Mystery of 2010. It has been optioned for a movie by writer-director John Gray.
Once a star hockey player until he  botched the chance for the town to win a major tournament, Gus returned to Starvation Lake after another big loss – that of his prestigious job and chance of winning a Pulitzer Prize at a major Detroit newspaper. Working to prove that a car company knew of a defect that caused horrific deaths, he broke into the company’s voice mail.  
 But life in Starvation Lake is never boring as there are secrets and murders that keep Gus busy including the latest – a string of burglaries that culminate when Gus’s mother, who is in the first stages of Alzheimer’s and her neighbor known as Mrs. B are attacked and Mrs. B, as she is dying murmurs a name the town would rather forget. Now Gus, who is trying to save his failing newspaper, has to make a decision. Are there secrets in the past that are better left undiscovered?
Maybe it’s best to break for a little geography here. There is actually a lake called Starvation just three miles from Big Twin Lake where Gruley and his family, who are from the Detroit area, spent their summers. Gruley says there’s a great bar called The Hideaway near the real Starvation Lake, but no town. Instead, Starvation Lake is based on many of the small towns up north that never quite made it as tourist destinations like the well known and popular Traverse City, Charlevoix and Petoskey.
As for hockey which is part of the weave of the Starvation Lake books, Gruley played in backyard rinks when growing up and continued to play as an adult. The idea for his first book came, says Gruley, when his former agent suggested he write about grown men who play hockey late at night. As for the setting, Gruley still travels to Northern Michigan for recreation.
“I really like small towns,” says Gruley whose complex characters belie the typical story line of small town living. “People really listen to each other all the time at the diner, the bar and at church. It hit me how rich that was. It wasn’t a simple stereotype as others might see it.  These aren’t just a bunch of buffoons.”
As for Starvation, Gruley describes it  as a small town that’s a bit down on its luck but with aspirations to greater things and filled with mostly nice, sincere people who work hard and play a little too hard sometimes as well. 
Gruley gets his ideas from his experiences up north.
The impetus for The Hanging Tree came from what he calls a shoe tree that he would often pass by on his way to visit Big Twin Lake. It was a tree where people had taken to tying shoe strings together and then throwing them up in the air to catch on the tree limbs.
“I started knowing that I wanted to write about the shoe tree,” says Gruley. “In fact I wrote a whole book which I threw out so I started over with this imagine of a woman hanging from the tree and then led to the book.”
The Skeleton Key was inspired by the true story of the 1907 disappearance of a nun in tiny Isadore, Michigan, north of Traverse City,  
Gruley, who now lives in Chicago, spent almost sixteen years with The Wall Street Journal where he shared in the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks.  Like Gus,  Gruley continues to play hockey, though has never acknowledge blowing the big game and having to move away in disgrace. He also wouldn’t trade his job for being editor of the Pine County Pilot either.
“I wouldn’t take Gus’s job on a bet,” says Gruley. “And I love my new gig with Bloomberg Businessweek. I sometimes yearn to be up north sipping a beer on the deck at Big Twin Lake, but not to live or work there. I do think Gus is part me. He’s a hockey playing journalist and I kind of like fried bologna sandwiches.”
Ifyougo:
— WHAT: Discussion and book signing with journalist and author Bryan Gruley
— WHEN: 6 p.m. Friday
— WHERE: Bridgman Public Library, 4460 Lake St., Bridgman
— HOW MUCH: Free

— CONTACT: 465-3663 or http://www.bridgmanlibrary.com