Books

Every now and then I tune in to my head to see what’s playing there: sometimes nothing, sometimes a childhood song, sometimes an annoying advertising ditty, sometimes a symphonic bit I can identify, or can’t. When my sister called this noon I asked, “What’s playing in your head?” “Just bills.” “What’s this?” I sang her […]

Untitled Document Andrew Ferguson’s personal saga tracing the Lincoln industry and influence began when he was a kid, visiting New Salem and other Lincoln shrines (thus called until recently) with his family, following the Lincoln Heritage Trail. My brother-in-law, with Wisconsin Public Radio, read Land of Lincoln over the air and pressed it on me: […]

Untitled Document Book lovers, if you haven’t already discovered Jasper Fforde, don’t. Danger: addiction. Where else will you find Thursday Next, a literary detective who can jump into books and save the world for Reading? In this latest Next novel there are actually three Thursdays, the “real” one (the quotes are for you), who lives […]

Untitled Document You don’t expect a story that begins: “The brassiere is off, Louella” to gently break your heart, and that’s precisely what makes Springfield writer Carol Manley’s first collection of short stories irresistible. Church Booty, the runner-up for the third annual Tartt Fiction Award, has just been published by the University of West Alabama’s […]

Untitled Document Imagine sitting in your favorite coffeehouse, surrounded by paintings done in a riot of color. A wise friend is sharing a latte, along with stories from her life that make you smile in recognition. Subtract the caffeine and you’ve got the experience of reading Celia Wesle’s Light: Paintings and Poems. Now retired from […]

Untitled Document I’ve been reading, over the past week, the 61 poems and their commentaries that make up Dan Guillory’s The Lincoln Poems. It’s been a more moving experience than I thought possible — not that I doubted the poems, but I’ve never been a “sustained” poetry reader, and I have also been so surrounded […]

Untitled Document Christy Cameron of Pana, in addition to raising two boys adopted from Russia and a recently born daughter, managing a farm household, sometimes driving a grain truck, and frequently teaching community-college English classes, has also published two books. Who’s Watching the Kids is a lighthearted romp in the romance genre. The heroine, applying for […]

Untitled Document At one point in Daniel Pinchbeck’s fantastical personal exploration of apocalyptic myth and reality in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, he elaborates on the Global Consciousness Project of Princeton University, mentioning that one of the researchers speculates that they are “witnessing the early phases of the self-organization of a global brain.” Pinchbeck believes […]

Untitled Document Our local- and national-award-winning poet John Knoepfle has written an autobiography. Not a complete one — he begins with his roots in Ireland and Switzerland, carries us through his early education, his service in World War II and further education, his meeting with our well-known and well-loved Peg (one of the women honored […]

Untitled Document Central Illinois has many writers’ groups — I can easily name six in Springfield. Some have died: Women Writes waxed awhile, and so did the Snotty Little Writers Group. Some are lying fallow; surely some, like gas clouds in a star nursery, are forming as I write. Add all of the unorganized who […]

Untitled Document White. Magee. Kirby. Miller. Renshaw. Columbia. Zion. Fairview. Bethel. Flood. Pleasant Grove. Oreana. Progress. Hickory Point. These are the names of 14 of the 12,000 one-room schoolhouses that once graced Illinois. We are fortunate to have a book containing just about everything from the students who attended these Decatur-area schools. The title refers […]

Untitled Document The Lincoln-Douglas Debates are like the Magna Carta or the Gadsden Purchase: You kind of know that they’re important and maybe even have a rough notion of what they’re about. So why read Allen C. Guelzo’s new Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America? The prairies were a-fired up in 1858. Stephen […]