Books

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 […]

Judging from his new book of poetry From Delancey West (forthcoming by BlazeVOX [books]), Springfield poet Brian Jackson will not be poetry slamming any time soon. This is no insult. This is just to say that Jackson’s work situates him squarely as an Imagist and a worthy follower of Guillaume Apollinaire and Ezra Pound. That’s […]

The Round Barn: A Biography of an American Farm, Volume 2, by Jacqueline Dougan Jackson. Beloit City Press, 2012. 487 pages, $24.95 Imagine you’ve discovered a box of jumbled old black and white photographs of good-natured folks going about their work. Further down are personal letters, ledgers, then clippings from newspapers and farm journals. There […]

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 […]

Shadows and Starlight by John Knoepfle. 84 pages, $16.68. Indian Paintbrush Poets, 2012. Few writers remain active in their ninth decade, but John Knoepfle is one of those few; his Shadows and Starlight, a new collection of poems, places all of his poetic qualities on display, melding invention, humor and insight into a compelling perspective […]

Conversations with William Maxwell, edited by Barbara Burkhardt. University Press of Mississippi. (Literary Conversations Series) 241 pages. Hardback, $40. When Barbara Burkhardt, an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, published her biography of William Maxwell in 2005, reviewers were justifiably enthusiastic. Maxwell, who spent his early years in Lincoln, Ill., in […]

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 […]

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 at UIS and later as a dear family friend. He met my extended family, picked apples in my husband’s orchard […]

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 […]

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 President Philip J. Rock’s memoir, Nobody Calls Just to Say Hello, points to a big difference between now and then: once the […]

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 add his Frontier Humor and his Humble Origins – the whole Horatio Alger stuff. Voila! Lincoln! Our Lincoln […]