Identical, by Scott Turow, Grand Central Publishing. $16.80. Chicago attorney Scott Turow strives to be an intellectual cut above his fellow courtroom fiction writers. His nine best-selling fiction novels have a literary quality that is lacking in many novels of this genre. The level of writing is not surprising given Turow’s continued practice of law […]
Books
Posted inArts & Culture
Wehaa Test
Amet primis id. Mus ut aenean justo amet ducimus purus tortor ullamcorper primis phasellus consectetuer dolore est donec. In vivamus aliquam tellus donec porttitor. Maecenas sociis vivamus. Justo sollicitudin enim. Id et condimentum mauris sed sem dui consectetuer nisl. Laoreet varius ante. Praesent fringilla quam elit vestibulum eros neque lacinia elit. Lorem in scelerisque […]
Posted inOpinion
Hoping for a humdinger
In May, George Ryan’s son revealed that his father, late of the Executive Mansion and the federal pen, was writing his memoirs. Ryan fils promised it would be a “humdinger,” a “no holds barred book” that will “tell it like it is.” We can only hope. It can’t be easy for a politician to plainly […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Home is where the heart is
HousePoems by Dan GuilloryMayhaven Publishing, 2013161 Pages, $19.95 HousePoems is the latest book by Dan Guillory, poet, essayist and historian of the central Illinois landscape and its people. He has presented his readers with a rich volume describing homesteads ranging from log cabins to central Illinois mansions to the White House itself – where he […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Innocence, the mystery
The Innocence Game, by Michael Harvey.Knopf. 256 pages. Mystery writers often set their stories in their hometowns. For Michael Connelly it is Los Angeles, for Sara Paretsky, Chicago. The late Stuart Kaminsky, who taught at Northwestern University, often set his mysteries in Chicago and its northern suburbs. While Michael Harvey was born and raised in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The book of baseball books
501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read Before They Die, by Ron Kaplan. University of Nebraska Press, $24.95. “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Carefully crafted poems of imagery
Judging from his new book of poetry From Delancey West (forthcoming by BlazeVOX [books]), Springfield poet Brian Jackson will not be poetry slamming any time soon. This is no insult. This is just to say that Jackson’s work situates him squarely as an Imagist and a worthy follower of Guillaume Apollinaire and Ezra Pound. That’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
downtonabbeypoem #1
well it was a crummy tricknot up to masterpiece standardsI understand the brits got hitwith both childbirth deaths onsuccessive christmas days wewere clobbered in februarymatthew it seems and maybesybil too wanted out though itmust have been making botha mint folks worldwide hangingon this glorified soap opera itreinforces why I prefer printtwo-thirds through mr rochesterdoesn’t decide […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lindsay’s ‘Little Turtle’ comes back to life
Vachel Lindsay, a lifelong resident of Springfield, internationally renowned poet and author of 20 books of poetry and stories, was born in 1879. Two years before Lindsay’s death in 1931 came the birth of George Colin, now an acclaimed artist who lives in Salisbury. Today the two central Illinois men have their works united in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A literary album of a farm
The Round Barn: A Biography of an American Farm, Volume 2, by Jacqueline Dougan Jackson. Beloit City Press, 2012. 487 pages, $24.95 Imagine you’ve discovered a box of jumbled old black and white photographs of good-natured folks going about their work. Further down are personal letters, ledgers, then clippings from newspapers and farm journals. There […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The golden boy of Illinois
Reading Golden: How Rod Blagojevich Talked Himself out of the Governor’s Office and Into Prison, is an excruciatingly painful experience. But the pain does not come from the work of Jeff Coen and John Chase, reporters for the Chicago Tribune who, like all Illinoisans, lived the Blagojevich years firsthand. In covering the atrocities of the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Minute perception and the cosmic
Shadows and Starlight by John Knoepfle. 84 pages, $16.68. Indian Paintbrush Poets, 2012. Few writers remain active in their ninth decade, but John Knoepfle is one of those few; his Shadows and Starlight, a new collection of poems, places all of his poetic qualities on display, melding invention, humor and insight into a compelling perspective […]
