Books

Untitled Document Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles! In a thundering typhoon! This is the 100th birthday of Belgian author/artist Hergé. The complete Tintin isn’t the book you’ve all been waiting for, though it should be. Right now there’s a lot of hype about graphic novels, stories told pictorially, with balloon conversations. But these aren’t […]

For many central-Illinois natives, the subject of Robert Mazrim’s new book, The Sangamo Frontier: History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln, is a surprise — the concept of archaeological research in Springfield seems as remote as the idea of growing soybeans in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. But, as Mazrim notes, archaeology is everywhere […]

Carol Manley is one of the best writers in Illinois today, but you can’t buy a book with her name on the cover — yet. She is a contributing editor to the “People’s Poetry” column in Illinois Times and occasionally contributes an article, so you may have gotten a sense of her talent. This year, […]

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 […]