Review: Dark, Rough, Brutal, and Real: Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay
Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography of a Blues Legend By Jackie Kay Vintage Books Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, liked to spend money on herself and on her friends, […]
Review: The Adventures of an Urbex Photographer in Abandoned Chicagoland: Rust on the Prairies
Abandoned Chicagoland: Rust on the Prairies By Jerry Olejniczak Arcadia Publishing I’ve always been drawn to—and repelled by—demolition sites. Crumbling walls, shattered by a wrecking ball and revealing shards of […]
Review: Mellencamp Biography Reveals a Belligerent, Multi-Talented Artist
Mellencamp By Paul Rees Atria Books/Simon & Schuster Release date September 14, 2021 The first music he loved was Motown soul music that he listened to on AM radio stations […]
Review: Visualizing and Honoring Black America, the Story W.E.B. Du Bois Told at the 1900 Paris Exposition
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America—The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert Princeton Architectural Press Black Lives 1900: […]
Review: Why Chicago Is Chicago, A History of the Chicago Portage, by Benjamin Sells
A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America By Benjamin Sells Northwestern University Press Let me tell you: I’m a huge Chicago history […]
Interview: Willa, Ernest, William, and Scott—A Talk with Dr. Michelle Moore about Chicago and American Modernism
Dr. Michelle Moore is a professor of English at the College of DuPage whose most recent book is Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald […]
Review: Complex, Dynamic, and Unruly, Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect, edited by Romi Crawford
Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect Edited by Romi Crawford Green Lantern Press Performance artist Jefferson Pinder offers, as a fleeting monument to the long-gone Wall of Respect, a […]
Review: Hope, Nature, and Racism, Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago, by Brian McCammack
Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago By Brian McCammack Harvard University Press For African Americans who took part in the Great Migration in the first half […]
Essay: True West
One Sunday afternoon a number of years ago I found a finger puppet lying outside Maclean House, the former dormitory (now apartments) named in honor of the late Norman Maclean, […]
Review: On Beyond Lincoln: Exploring the Land of Lincoln: The Essential Guide to Illinois Historic Sites
Exploring the Land of Lincoln: The Essential Guide to Illinois Historic Sites By Charles Titus 3 Fields Books I asked my non-Illinoisan Twitter followers to tell me three things they […]
Dialogs: Elizabeth Kolbert and Eula Biss Talk Unintended Consequences and Problems Caused by Solutions in CHF Panel
The Chicago River, as many of us know, once flowed the other way, into Lake Michigan. It was reversed—a triumph of engineering, at the time—to move sewage and waste water […]
Dialogs: Michio Kaku and LeVar Burton Bring Joy and Excitement to the Solar System and Beyond
What do junior high school science, science fiction, string theory, the God equation, and Elvis Presley have in common? They all played a starring role in physicist Michio Kaku and […]