Growing up in the Cultural Revolution

I thought I knew the story of Wenguang Huang, who will be the commencement speaker at the University of Illinois Springfield May 12. After all, I’ve known Wen for 21 years, first as my student a

Author and activist honored as ‘Defender of the Innocent’

Scott Turow headlines Downstate Illinois Innocence Project event April 9

Scott Turow is one of the foremost courtroom fiction writers in America. Millions have read his books or viewed adaptations of his works. But Turow does more than write about fictional courtrooms. He

The last Illinois statesman

Just when it is fashionable to bemoan the loss of bipartisanship in politics, along comes a book that waxes nostalgic for the days when legislators threw punches at each other. Former Illinois Senate

The selling of the 16th president

If you had to make a Lincoln from scratch, what would you toss in?You got your Basic Honesty, the Law and Politics, the Great Emancipator Business, Fighter of the War, and so forth. You would likely a

Following in Lincoln’s steps

Photographer and historian team up to produce a fine new book

Rarely in publishing is there such a perfect collaboration of writer, photographer and publisher as in the new book, Abraham Lincoln Traveled This Way. The lovely landscape photographs by Illinois pho

Putting the story in history

The biography of an American farm where there’s “life as well as a living”

The Beloit University Press has just released Volume One of Springfield writer Jacqueline Dougan Jackson’s planned three-volume opus The Round Barn – The Biography of an American Farm. It

Baseball’s perfect warrior

Stan Musial: An American Life, by George Vecsey. Ballantine Books, 2011. 397 pages. $26.If you are disturbed by multimillion-dollar athletes who seem less than grateful for their status, listen to thi

Finely crafted verse

Local poet’s new volume embraces multiple traditions well

I first met Hugh Moore in Allen Ginsberg’s living room, which often served as an auxiliary classroom for Naropa Institute, home to The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. We spent a soli

Springfield author e-cstatic over e-publishing success

Over the past 13 years, Springfield author Joseph Flynn has written 12 page-turning novels, most of them thrillers. He has been called a “master of high octane plotting” by the Chicago Tri

A Springfield author’s likeable murderers

She’s done it again! Martha Miller, our local crime-fiction author whose two previous Springfield detective books are so stellar, has a newcomer. It’s the best yet. It’s titled Retir