I used to work in a library, and the person I most envied there was the cataloger. She got to see all of the new books first and decide where they would reside in the cozy confines of the Dewey decimal system. Agatha Christie was always in the mystery section, and you could bet your […]
Corrine Frisch
Posted inNews
Hometown talent under the tree
Lost Survivor By Thomas R. Jones Like Henry Fielding’s famous novel (whose hero shares a name with Lost Survivor’s author), this is a coming-of-age story. But Johnny Douglas isn’t wandering the English countryside. In his world, the jungles of Vietnam, there are no lace cuffs, only flak jackets and the desire that overrides every other, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Abe’s Molly
Mary Todd Lincoln knew a lot of grief. Her mother died when she was 6. She lost three of her four children and was sitting beside her husband the night he was assassinated. When I picture her I see a woman veiled, dressed in voluminous yards of black silk. Fate and history have not been […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Whole lotta shakin’ going’ on
I once caught a whiff of a wet woolen overcoat. Before you could say “Sister Mary Magdalene,” I was transported to the winter of 1956 and a grade-school cloakroom hung with leggings still damp from a snowy recess. The poems in Marcellus Leonard’s new collection, Shake the Thunder Down, are strung with this kind of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Especially people who care about strangers
Call me cantankerous, but I didn’t want to like Field Notes on the Compassionate Life. Sure that in the background I was hearing strains from the ’60s musical Hair, I wondered, “How can publishers be so cruel?” Do we really need a how-to book about searching for “the soul of kindness”? It was easy to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Exposing Chicago’s underbelly
Chicago Noir isn’t about a newspaper, although after reading it I kept thinking of the old riddle “What’s black and white and red all over?” The stage sets in these stories are as shadowy as the characters, whose twisted psyches take them down paths colored by their victims’ blood. Anyone who has enjoyed film noir […]
Posted inNews
Summer books
AloftBy Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead Trade, 384 pages, paperback edition, 2005, $14) At one point in his life Jerry Battle may have been a daring young man in his flying machine, but now he’s run smack into that cloud called middle age. A dead wife, an estranged girlfriend, two problem kids, and an ailing father make […]
Posted inArts & Culture
books 3-31-05
Though it has been more than 10 years since my husband moved to the Midwest from Boston, his amazement at the prairie remains fresh. Driving to Chicago, he’ll point out the window and exclaim, “Look at that!” Expecting a buffalo, or something similarly unique, I see only empty space. But to him, the uncluttered landscape […]
Posted inOpinion
Matters of life and death
“No one’s death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humaneness.” — Hermann Broch, novelist (1886-1951) I have been wondering about the impression Terri Schiavo’s life and death will leave on those of us touched by her parents’ […]
Posted inArts & Culture
people’s poetry
Paul Muldoon teaches poetry at Princeton University, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2003 for his collection Moy Sand and Gravel , and has been hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.” So why, you may ask, is he coming to Lincoln, Ill.? […]
Posted inArts & Culture
books 3-3-05
Number 9, number 9, number 9 . . . No, John Lennon hasn’t booked a return engagement, but wordsmiths are singing the praises of something almost as good. More than 30 authors, representing the fair’s theme of “Our Diverse Literary Heritage,” will participate in the Ninth Annual Illinois Authors Book Fairs, showcasing their books and […]
Posted inNews
That high lonesome sound
When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated into his first term, the country did not know much about its new president. Asked to describe his education for a biographical sketch in the Dictionary of Congress, Lincoln replied with one word: “defective.” Members of the cabinet and Congress worried that Lincoln’s backwoods education and inexperience as an administrator […]
