Books

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 […]

Untitled Document It’s hot off the press, published Feb. 4 — and hot off the keys, cameras, and many footsteps of our own Carl (retired head of Lincoln Library) and Roberta (retired art consultant, State Board of Education) Volkmann. Here’s what the book is: 128 pages of what the title states, in five sections: “Where […]

Untitled Document As you walk through Oak Ridge Cemetery’s beautiful 365 acres, it’s easy to forget that each tombstone represents a life — a person with friends, enemies, heartbreaks, and dreams. The recently published local book In Lincoln’s Shadow: Oak Ridge Cemetery Chronicles helps us remember. In Lincoln’s Shadow tells the stories of more than four dozen […]

Untitled Document You don’t read just anything when you’re really sick. C.S. Lewis said that at his lowest all that would suffice was The Wind in the Willows. I agree, but, laid up these last few weeks, I’ve been exclusively rereading Jane Austen, occasionally breaking the print paralysis to stumble downstairs and view a BBC Austen […]

Untitled Document The subtitle of David LaVere’s Looting Spiro Mounds is a footnote to perhaps the greatest public grave robbery in history: Howard Carter’s 1924 discovery, opening, and emptying of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. That story, which ran in The Times of London and captured headlines around the world, legitimized treasure […]

Untitled Document Recently, during my family excavations, I unearthed a homemade booklet, “Books Read in 1900,” belonging to my grandmother. She’d have been 30. Inside the cardboard cover she’s quoted, “Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a good book.” She begins Jan. 1 with a virtuous book: Happiness: As Found in Forethought Minus Fearthought (1898) […]

Untitled Document I resisted opening this book, even though it was an autographed gift from the author’s sister-in-law, a longtime Springfieldian. I thought that it was another book hammering me with all the books I ought to read when I already felt guilty enough about all the books I hadn’t yet read, and never would, […]

Untitled Document Politics beats a big drum in Springfield, and those disinclined to march to that drum often seek more harmonious cadences elsewhere. This was true for Mark Foutch. The Springfield native grew up on Whittier Avenue, went for his first airplane ride at age 4, made a name for himself as a musician before […]