Stuart Shiffman

SIX AMENDMENTS: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, by John Paul Stevens. Little Brown Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has earned the right to weigh in on the Constitution and how the nation can improve the document that governs so much of American life. In 1975, President Gerald Ford nominated Stevens […]

Mike Ditka, who coached the Bears in 1985, still makes a good living off the legend. The 1985 Super Bowl Champion Chicago Bears are a cottage industry. In a city starved for winners and bereft of championship rings, players and coaches of “Da Bears” are recalled and revered with unrequited love. Mike Ditka, who coached […]

Identical, by Scott Turow, Grand Central Publishing. $16.80. Chicago attorney Scott Turow strives to be an intellectual cut above his fellow courtroom fiction writers. His nine best-selling fiction novels have a literary quality that is lacking in many novels of this genre. The level of writing is not surprising given Turow’s continued practice of law […]

The Innocence Game, by Michael Harvey.Knopf. 256 pages. Mystery writers often set their stories in their hometowns. For Michael Connelly it is Los Angeles, for Sara Paretsky, Chicago. The late Stuart Kaminsky, who taught at Northwestern University, often set his mysteries in Chicago and its northern suburbs. While Michael Harvey was born and raised in […]

501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read Before They Die, by Ron Kaplan. University of Nebraska Press, $24.95. “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This […]

Reading Golden: How Rod Blagojevich Talked Himself out of the Governor’s Office and Into Prison, is an excruciatingly painful experience. But the pain does not come from the work of Jeff Coen and John Chase, reporters for the Chicago Tribune who, like all Illinoisans, lived the Blagojevich years firsthand. In covering the atrocities of the […]

One Shot at Forever: A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach and a Magical Baseball Season, by Chris Ballard. Hyperion, 234 pages. Here in central Illinois we love our high school sports. Granted we also pay attention to the Cardinals, Bears, Cubs, Sox and other sports franchises, but nothing seems to get the juices flowing like […]

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 uses his literary pulpit to speak out on important contemporary legal issues. Turow has written a short nonfiction book, Ultimate Punishment: A […]

During the first days of September, as temperatures across Illinois remain in the 80s, it is difficult to think about the cool weather of fall and the excitement of Thanksgiving weekend when high school football championships will be decided at Memorial Stadium in Champaign. Across the state, high school athletes of various heights, weights and […]

Midway through Beautiful Piece, an entertaining and gritty novel written in the noir style of mysteries, I began to have an eerie feeling. Imagine, if you will, the look on the face of Bill Murray each morning at 6 a.m. when he awakens to the sound of Cher belting out the lyrics to “I got […]

In the 1960 movie version of the H.G. Wells novella The Time Machine, the Time Traveler returns from 19th-century England to the futuristic society he has rescued from evil. Before leaving, he retrieves several books from his library with which he hopes to rebuild a shattered society. A modern-day time traveler, believing in the essential […]