Books

What happens when 10 siblings decide to join forces? Add 10 cousins to the mix, and imagine the fun and frivolity. Often, downright naughty things happen. Springfield native Helene Odell Moss O’Shea, the middle child of 10, writes of her family’s escapades in A Handful of Prisms, due out July 4. The book brims with […]

Arbor Day is Friday, April 30, and the Arbor Day Foundation (www.arborday.org) is offering you a deal. You can join the Foundation and for $10 receive either 10 flowering trees or 10 pine trees. Even though these “trees” are foot-tall sprouts, it’s still a pretty sweet offer. After you’ve read (or flipped through) Native Trees […]

There should be a warning sign for anyone venturing down nostalgia way: “Caution! Platitudes ahead.” Why must reminiscences punish the present to paint the past as more precious? In his memoir Now, When I Was a Kid …, Dan McGuire avoids this pitfall. Comparisons between now and the good old days do not abound. Enthusiasm […]

Admit it. When you think of the literary capitals of the world, Springfield doesn’t leap to the top of the list. But beginning on Saturday, Springfield shines like a literary luminary on the prairie. Two major events light the match: the Eighth Annual Illinois Authors Book Fair and the University of Illinois at Springfield’s Verbal […]

Like a man to double business bound I stand in pause where I shall first begin. Claudius in Act III of Hamlet Where to be or not to be? Tonight, March 11, two downtown libraries offer excellent programs for those who appreciate good writing. It’s a choice between two Illinois notables: The state’s new Poet […]

One book. One city. In 1998, the Washington Center for the Book posed the question –“What if all Seattle read the same book?” Six years later we have the definitive answer. If the people in Seattle read the same book, then by gosh, the folks in Chicago would choose one too. Like dominoes, the cities […]

Janet Jackson’s brazen bust-baring before millions of football fans, dubbed by one pundit “a tempest in a C-cup,” got me wondering. Not about the fall of western civ as we know it, but about where the word boob comes from. Or, for that matter, tits, or knockers, or hooters (beforeHooters became a fast-food franchise). Lucky […]

Most Illinoisans could only reply with a blank expression if asked to identify the likes of Jesse Burgess Thomas or Richard Montgomery Young or Otis Ferguson Glenn or James M. Slattery. Yet, at one time, each represented the Sucker State in the United States Senate. Political fame is fleeting, a fact I discovered while teaching […]

Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become commonplace to see signs outside stores, restaurants, and union halls proclaiming “God Bless America” (often followed by various non sequiturs such as “Fish Fry Friday Night”). But when Kazimir Ladny, at the end of his book about his experiences in World War II as a Polish POW, writes, […]

Job Conger’s Strange Gold is a recent effort to encapsulate the life of Springfield’s most famous poetic son, Vachel Lindsay. Conger wisely does not attempt to outdo previous authors. Lacking the credentialed “credibility” of professors and unable to compete with insights provided by Lindsay’s peers, Conger chooses to write as someone who has read all […]

When the everyday grind gets to be too much, some of us fantasize a bucolic life, picturing ourselves tucked into a little country place full of birds and sunshine. The irony of this particular fantasy is that birds, could they daydream, might be having the same flights of fancy. In the past couple of centuries, […]