Books

Conversations with William Maxwell, edited by Barbara Burkhardt. University Press of Mississippi. (Literary Conversations Series) 241 pages. Hardback, $40. When Barbara Burkhardt, an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, published her biography of William Maxwell in 2005, reviewers were justifiably enthusiastic. Maxwell, who spent his early years in Lincoln, Ill., in […]

One Shot at Forever: A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach and a Magical Baseball Season, by Chris Ballard. Hyperion, 234 pages. Here in central Illinois we love our high school sports. Granted we also pay attention to the Cardinals, Bears, Cubs, Sox and other sports franchises, but nothing seems to get the juices flowing like […]

I thought I knew the story of Wenguang Huang, who will be the commencement speaker at the University of Illinois Springfield May 12. After all, I’ve known Wen for 21 years, first as my student at UIS and later as a dear family friend. He met my extended family, picked apples in my husband’s orchard […]

Scott Turow is one of the foremost courtroom fiction writers in America. Millions have read his books or viewed adaptations of his works. But Turow does more than write about fictional courtrooms. He uses his literary pulpit to speak out on important contemporary legal issues. Turow has written a short nonfiction book, Ultimate Punishment: A […]

Just when it is fashionable to bemoan the loss of bipartisanship in politics, along comes a book that waxes nostalgic for the days when legislators threw punches at each other. Former Illinois Senate President Philip J. Rock’s memoir, Nobody Calls Just to Say Hello, points to a big difference between now and then: once the […]

If you had to make a Lincoln from scratch, what would you toss in? You got your Basic Honesty, the Law and Politics, the Great Emancipator Business, Fighter of the War, and so forth. You would likely add his Frontier Humor and his Humble Origins – the whole Horatio Alger stuff. Voila! Lincoln! Our Lincoln […]

Rarely in publishing is there such a perfect collaboration of writer, photographer and publisher as in the new book, Abraham Lincoln Traveled This Way. The lovely landscape photographs by Illinois photographer Robert Shaw are complemented by the narrative of preeminent Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame. Shaw used his own company, Firelight Publishing, to assure quality control […]

The Beloit University Press has just released Volume One of Springfield writer Jacqueline Dougan Jackson’s planned three-volume opus The Round Barn – The Biography of an American Farm. It is the first step toward realizing Jackson’s original vision of the work after Northwestern University press excerpted from this “big book” Stories from the Round Barn […]

Stan Musial: An American Life, by George Vecsey. Ballantine Books, 2011. 397 pages. $26. If you are disturbed by multimillion-dollar athletes who seem less than grateful for their status, listen to this: In 1959, Stan Musial asked for a pay cut because he’d had a less-than-Musial type season. After a scorching doubleheader in St. Louis […]