Books

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 […]

Number 9, number 9, number 9 . . .  No, John Lennon hasn’t booked a return engagement, but wordsmiths are singing the praises of something almost as good. More than 30 authors, representing the fair’s theme of “Our Diverse Literary Heritage,” will participate in the Ninth Annual Illinois Authors Book Fairs, showcasing their books and […]

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 […]

During the height of the Depression, central Illinois was convulsed by a vicious coal-mining war that pitted worker against worker, changed an industry, and altered the course of organized labor. It’s a dramatic story, yet largely unknown. Springfield historian Carl D. Oblinger started digging into the subject nearly 20 years ago, the result of a […]

Please allow me to introduce Mr. Moist von Lipwig, hero of Going Postal, Terry Pratchett’s latest novel in his Discworld series. But before we go any further, a confession: I am a Pratchett latecomer. More people read him than voted for George W. Bush (this may be a stretch, but it’s my review). More than […]