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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
For the Love of Cod: A Father and Son’s Search for Norwegian Happiness Eric Dregni University of Minnesota Press Eric Dregni is only partly Norwegian but that hasn’t stopped him […]
Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town By Jason Stacy University of Illinois Press It’s ironic that Spoon River Anthology—perhaps the most famous […]
A parade of artists and pop art, literary and music figures from mid-century America populate Louis Menand’s new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. The […]
The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America By Lisa Z Sigel Reaktion Books Masturbation is the only sex act that’s both universal and forbidden. Universal in that […]
Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st CenturyBy Howard ShermanMetheun Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Like most theater critics and theater lovers, I’ve seen Thornton Wilder’s Our Town […]
Fifty years ago, Daniel Ellsberg, an economist and military analyst, created a national controversy that resulted in a landmark press freedom decision by the US Supreme Court. He did it […]
Move on Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power By Aaron Cohen University of Chicago Press One of the pleasures of reading Aaron Cohen’s 2019 Move On Up: Chicago […]