Books

Muhammed Ali died in 2016 at the age of 74. Upon his death, President Barack Obama eulogized him with the observation that, “He stood with King and Mandela; stood up when it was hard; spoke up when others wouldn’t.” In 2005, President George Bush awarded Ali the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of […]

Mark Twain’s often quoted observation, “write what you know” is often debated by writers. Some are critical, some supportive. But St. Louis author William Stage is a true believer in Twain’s adage. For two decades Stage worked for the weekly St. Louis newspaper, Riverfront Times. During that period, he wrote 11 books including one, Street […]

Cotton, Violins & Shots in the Night – A Timeline Visit to Rochester, Illinois By Raymond and Pamela Bruzan. 467 pages If you live in Rochester, you should pick up this book. If you live in Springfield or another town nearby, you, too, should pick up this book. What a delightful trip through history with […]

James Krohe Jr., Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves: A Plain-Spoken History of Mid-Illinois. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. This work of solid history, entertainingly told, is mistitled, or rather mis-subtitled; it should read: “A Witty and Profound Account of Life in Central Illinois from Prehistoric Times to the Present.” The author, James Krohe Jr., […]

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women By Kate Moore, 2017, Sourcebooks, 404 pages, $26.99 Back in 2007, a group of students from Ottawa High School were invited to perform a 20-minute play, The Society of the Living Dead, at an Illinois history symposium event at Illinois State University. It was a […]

Can one ever really form a true utopia – and will it actually survive? Randall J. Soland of Springfield explores six utopias formed in Illinois between 1839 and 1942, in an interesting, well-researched book, Utopian Communities of Illinois – Heaven on the Prairie. Six groups of people attempted their own “heaven on the prairie”: the […]

Of all the stories of the settling of the American West, none is as compelling, heroic and tragic as that of the Donner Party, which stepped into history on April 15, 1846, from Springfield, Illinois. Now Michael Wallis has given us an impeccably researched book that tells this history with a sparkling narrative and far […]

Deep into his new novel, Testimony, author Scott Turow makes a prescient observation about trial lawyers through the thoughts of his protagonist, Willian ten Boom. “The truth is that every effective trial attorney develops a style of their own, just like good painters and singers and pitchers, one that involves capitalization on idiosyncrasies.” Turow may […]

If not for Abraham Lincoln, New Salem would have been just another frontier community lost to history. Instead, the people, places, and events live on in books, articles, plays, and a reconstructed village aptly named Lincoln’s New Salem State Historic Site. Founded in 1829 adjacent to a mill on the Sangamon River, New Salem grew […]

Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers, by Debra Shattuck.University of Illinois Press, 2017. The role of women in sports has traveled a somewhat winding road, occasionally strewn with potholes and detours. The women of my baby-boomer era played few sports in high school or college. In the early 1970s, the passage of Title IX of the […]

Lincoln on Leadership for Today: Abraham Lincoln’s Approach to 21st Century Issues. By Donald T. Phillips, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In his first nationally televised one-on-one interview, Donald Trump invoked the name of the president often quoted by Republican occupants of the White House. “I can be the most presidential person ever, other than possibly the great Abe […]

Perhaps If You Saw One is a picture book of whimsical parade floats and enthusiastic participants. Published by Springfield’s Coalition of Rainbow Alliances, the book amounts to an informal history of activities of the gay and lesbian community over the past 13 years. Each photo layout is accompanied by a paragraph explaining the joys and […]