Books

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 […]

First initial, last name. More than six feet tall. In his early 20s he made a name for himself in battle, but accounts of his heroism would later be questioned. Well-born, he nevertheless increased his fortune mightily by marrying an extremely wealthy widow. If we were doing a crossword puzzle, you might be counting on […]

The last poem in Springfield poet Siobhan Pitchford’s new book, Through the Longing Daze, employs a pun in its title: “At Daze End.” The poems preceding it are much concerned with the comings and goings of her days; the maze she carves out of them is one worth walking through. In fact, the poet seems […]

One hundred years ago, you could get more than a drink of water on Decatur’s Water Street. As Dan Guillory notes in Decatur, a photographic history of Springfield’s neighbor to the east, the thoroughfare afforded rye whiskey for the thirsty, new soles for those who were down at the heels, and a little extra cash […]

“Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on, testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade, and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!” — Anne Sexton, To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph How much did Howard Dean’s supporters love him? […]

“‘Arbolist’ … Look up the word. I don’t know, maybe I made it up. Anyway, it’s an arbo-tree-ist, somebody who knows about trees.” — President George W. Bush, USA Today, Aug. 21, 2001 Little did George W. Bush realize, when talking to reporters in defense of his initiative to allow logging in national forests, that […]

Did King James I commission Shakespeare to translate the Psalms for the now-famous version of the Bible? A case is made for that transaction in R. Gary Patterson’s new book about rock & roll. If you’re wondering what Shakespeare has to do with rock & roll — or, for that matter, where Faust, Shelley, Hawthorne, […]

No one who reads the remarkable new poems by John Knoepfle can fail to be touched by their penetrating strength. If poems from the sangamon (1985) brought history up out of the Midwest, this one goes back to Knoepfle’s place of Irish ancestry, taking everything American and Irish with him, and us, too. There are […]

Political potboilers have always scored high on summer-reading lists, and Bush’s War for Reelection: Iraq, the White House, and the People seems to qualify. Written by investigative reporter James Moore, the book seems to possess the ingredients necessary for inclusion in the genre. The difference, of course, is that this study of the White House […]

In her last book, Nine Nights on the Windy Tree, Martha Miller introduced Bertha Brannon, a Springfield lawyer who finds herself involved in a mystery. It was a good read, and I was looking forward to meeting Brannon once again in Miller’s new book, Dispatch to Death. Miller, who lives in Springfield, uses the capital […]