Books

Abraham Lincoln said goodbye to Springfield in a succinct, emotion-filled speech on Feb. 11, 1861. “To this place, and the kindness of these people,” Lincoln said, “I owe every thing.” Residents of the capital city should know the Farewell Address: It’s been republished frequently, and the full text is on display at the presidential museum. […]

I once had a political-science professor who believed that air conditioning had destroyed the fabric of our society. Before air conditioning, he said, people spent summer nights sitting outdoors on stoops and porches and park benches — and they told stories. They shared common beliefs. We don’t have those stories anymore. Our stories come from […]

Mary, a new novel by Janis Cooke Newman, gives Mary Todd Lincoln the opportunity to tell her turbulent life story in a voice that rings true to her bold and unconventional persona. There’s no shying away from the controversy that followed Mrs. Lincoln for most of her life: Mary tells of the First Lady’s frivolous […]

If you like books, if you really like books — if you are the kind of person whose books overrun your house, whose book budget exceeds your food budget, the kind of person who can spend an afternoon or the whole weekend in a bookstore, the BookExpo America convention is something like paradise . . […]

I used to work in a library, and the person I most envied there was the cataloger. She got to see all of the new books first and decide where they would reside in the cozy confines of the Dewey decimal system. Agatha Christie was always in the mystery section, and you could bet your […]

Mary Todd Lincoln knew a lot of grief. Her mother died when she was 6. She lost three of her four children and was sitting beside her husband the night he was assassinated. When I picture her I see a woman veiled, dressed in voluminous yards of black silk. Fate and history have not been […]

Martha Miller’s new book, Tales from the Levee, has its origins in interviews Miller conducted with the lesbians and drag queens who frequented a district of Springfield now vanished into history. The Levee — Fifth Street between Jefferson and Washington streets — still holds a notorious reputation among longtime Springfield residents, but what many people […]

It took a broken leg to get Lola Lucas moving on her book A Home in the Park: Loving a Neighborhood Back to Life, a collection of columns originally published in the Banner, the newsletter of the Enos Park Neighborhood Improvement Association. “It was a lucky break,” Lucas quips. Holing up at her mother’s house […]

I once caught a whiff of a wet woolen overcoat. Before you could say “Sister Mary Magdalene,” I was transported to the winter of 1956 and a grade-school cloakroom hung with leggings still damp from a snowy recess. The poems in Marcellus Leonard’s new collection, Shake the Thunder Down, are strung with this kind of […]

Call me cantankerous, but I didn’t want to like Field Notes on the Compassionate Life. Sure that in the background I was hearing strains from the ’60s musical Hair, I wondered, “How can publishers  be so cruel?” Do we really need a how-to book about searching for “the soul of kindness”? It was easy to […]

Chicago Noir isn’t about a newspaper, although after reading it I kept thinking of the old riddle “What’s black and white and red all over?” The stage sets in these stories are as shadowy as the characters, whose twisted psyches take them down paths colored by their victims’ blood. Anyone who has enjoyed film noir […]

Though it has been more than 10 years since my husband moved to the Midwest from Boston, his amazement at the prairie remains fresh. Driving to Chicago, he’ll point out the window and exclaim, “Look at that!” Expecting a buffalo, or something similarly unique, I see only empty space. But to him, the uncluttered landscape […]