Books

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, […]

Charles Dickens would have loved the Internet. To the boy who worked in the boot-blacking factory, the digital highway would have been an endless piece of paper and a bottomless pot of ink. Dickens never knew the Net, but now the Net knows him. Anyone who has written an essay for his or her English […]

Even the casual observer knows that wars we fight now come with ready-made PR themes. But they may not realize Operation Desert Storm and Operation Enduring Freedom have tapped roots of advertising propaganda nearly a century old. World War I posters (many can be seen at www.firstworldwar.com) were designed to persuade America to enter a […]

In the mid-1980 a Chicago construction worker named Marc Smith was organizing an open-mic poetry night at the Green Mill, an Uptown jazz club once famous for its association with Al Capone. Smith had selected the venue because he hated poetry readings–they were far too genteel. He wanted to turn his evening into a knock-down […]

Sometimes real-life stories are so big they seem to be fiction. That’s what strikes you while reading Taylor Pensoneau’s latest book, Brother’s Notorious, The Sheltons: Southern Illinois’ Ledendary Gangsters. A lot of the most daring and violent bootlegging of the 1920s and ’30s took place in southern Illinois, and the Sheltons–Carl, Bernie, Earl, and Roy–were […]

For several weeks in September 1944, people in the town of Mattoon, Illinois, showed the symptoms of exposure to poison gas–nausea, vomiting, weakness leading to near paralysis, light headedness, even spitting up blood. All of the victims reported a “sweet cheap perfume odor” permeating their homes prior to the onset of sickness. Scott Maruna, a […]