Books

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 […]

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? […]