Stuart Shiffman

Deep into his new novel, Testimony, author Scott Turow makes a prescient observation about trial lawyers through the thoughts of his protagonist, Willian ten Boom. “The truth is that every effective trial attorney develops a style of their own, just like good painters and singers and pitchers, one that involves capitalization on idiosyncrasies.” Turow may […]

Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers, by Debra Shattuck.University of Illinois Press, 2017. The role of women in sports has traveled a somewhat winding road, occasionally strewn with potholes and detours. The women of my baby-boomer era played few sports in high school or college. In the early 1970s, the passage of Title IX of the […]

Lincoln on Leadership for Today: Abraham Lincoln’s Approach to 21st Century Issues. By Donald T. Phillips, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In his first nationally televised one-on-one interview, Donald Trump invoked the name of the president often quoted by Republican occupants of the White House. “I can be the most presidential person ever, other than possibly the great Abe […]

Brighton, by Michael Harvey. Ecco Publishing, 355 pages, ISBN: 9780062442970. “If my bones are Chicago, my blood is Boston, and specifically Brighton,” observes Michael Harvey in the acknowledgements to his most recent mystery novel. Harvey is a multitalented journalist who has received multiple Emmy awards for news, primetime Emmy and Academy Award nominations and has […]

Fall from Grace: The Truth and Tragedy of “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, by Tim Hornbaker. Skyhorse Publishing, 296 pages. Writer Nelson Algren once observed that “Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.” Fans of Chicago’s baseball teams would certainly disagree since October is the month of baseball’s World Series and in the past […]

Creatures on Display, by Wm. Stage. Floppinfish Publishing Co. Ltd. Creatures on Display, by Wm. Stage. Floppinfish Publishing Co. Ltd. I have always believed that the only thing more difficult than reading about sex is writing about it. Creatures on Display, by Wm. Stage of St. Louis, overcomes that difficulty in an interesting and thoughtful […]

Before the Ivy: The Cubs’ Golden Age in Pre-Wrigley Chicago, by Laurent Pernot. University of Illinois Press, 198 pages. In the interest of journalistic disclosure, I confess that I am not a Chicago Cubs fan. Indeed those who know me understand that if there were a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for baseball […]

Lincoln and the Jews: A History, by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell.Thomas Dunne Books, 2015. In the weeks preceding the controversial speech of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a joint session of Congress, Jewish Americans once again faced the dilemma of dual loyalties to the United States and Israel. It is a deeply […]

Rock Island Lines, by Dean Klinkenberg. Published by Travel Passages, 2014. 258 pages. Rock Island Lines, by Dean Klinkenberg. Published by Travel Passages, 2014. 258 pages. Reading mystery novels on a regular basis brings to mind the observation that “it’s not the wand that pulls the rabbit out of the hat, it’s the magic of […]

Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement, by Thomas Geoghegan. The New Press, 2014. Gov. Bruce Rauner’s first six weeks in office have been an interesting time for Illinois citizens wondering what the next four years portend. His first formal appearance before the Illinois legislature, the State […]