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Americans who know something of our founding history are aware of the contribution of the Marquis de Lafayette to the Revolutionary War, but few remember the similarly pivotal role of the Frenchman with the sonorous, adopted name Beaumarchais. If he is recalled at all, it is as the author of “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro.” But, by expediting the sale of French arms to American patriots, he engaged in real-life intrigues worthy of his fictional Figaro.

In his new biography “Improbable Patriot,” Harlow Giles Unger captures the innovative, joyous spirit of “Pierre-Augustine Caron de Beaumarchais,” just as he communicated the different, but similarly indomitable, character of the great patriot Patrick Henry in the splendid “Lion of Liberty.” Read the rest of this entry »

Startups in the teeth of a recession are risky, and new publishing ventures especially so; hence, the premiere of the ambitious, earnest semiannual literary journal “Curbside Splendor” should be applauded. Originating online but based in Logan Square, it is a “city” magazine edited by Victor David Giron that casts a wider net, with stories ranging out into suburban and even exurban interests.

Karolina “Koko” Faber’s design creates an urban and urbane showcase for the stories and poems set beside striking, complementary photography by Garett Holden, Faber and others. It is a journal likewise proud of its writers and poets, placing brief bios in front of their works instead of relegating them to the back of the book.

Issue 1 includes winners from Curbside’s Winter 2010 short-story contest. Brandon Jennings’ first-place flash-fiction piece “Doc the Fifth” draws its power from the immediacy of its description of the Iraq War. Stories in both issues vary from generally straightforward narrative to the near surreal, like James Greer’s “Second-Hand Blue” in Issue 1, which demands and rewards close reading. Read the rest of this entry »

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Ulysses S. Grant earned applause in the North for his generalship during the Civil War, and even the deep respect of former enemies because of his generosity at the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his hard-fighting, haggard veterans at Appomattox, Virginia.

But the great military hero had no head for business, as he had proven in civilian life between the Mexican and Civil Wars, and again as U.S. President from 1869-1877, in an administration rent by corruption in which he had no hand but which occurred on his watch.

Nonetheless, after years of post-presidential financial uncertainty, he had every reason to believe that he had finally secured a large, comfortable nest egg for his retirement with his beloved wife, Julia. Partner in the apparently successful investment firm Grant & Ward, he went to bed one night in May 1884 thinking himself a near-millionaire only to awaken to find his accounts gutted and himself penniless. Read the rest of this entry »

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Three estranged siblings gather at a funeral parlor in fictional Stone Claw Grove, Michigan, to mourn the grandmother who seemed to find a solace in the hometown that the siblings could not. A man struggles to live outside his father’s shadow after he inherits a nightclub from the old man. A teenage runaway comes to grips with her life as a noir cliché. A preteen copes with puberty in the dilapidated apartment of his guardian.

At its core, Tim Kinsella’s “The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense” is a pretty straightforward Small Town Lives novel: a lot of characters facing obstacles, both internal and external, with the town itself seemingly the biggest among them. You’ve seen this sort of thing before. It’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” It’s Willa Cather. Heck, it’s “Garden State.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Harold K. Bush, Jr.’s “Lincoln in His Own Time” is a graceful, worthy addition to the already-massive wealth of Lincolniana. It brings a valuable perspective and literary flavor to a table already yawning with historical fare. At a well-organized just-under-300-pages, it is an accessible ying to the yang of Michael Burlingame’s recent exhaustive, 2000-page “Abraham Lincoln: A Life.”

Bush is an English professor at Saint Louis University, and his particular strength is in identifying and reproducing selections that, in addition to humanizing Lincoln, have literary interest. The collection includes several pieces almost lost to modern readers that are enhanced by the editor’s extensive introduction and knowledgeable prefatory notes. Read the rest of this entry »

Civilizations rise and fall, but Harvard University Professor Niall Ferguson has made a virtual cottage industry out of the impending fate of the West in the twenty-first century. In his fifth book in this vein, “Civilization: The West and the Rest,” he measures our current stall against the material advances of the East—especially China—and finds reasons for both alarm and hope.

Twentieth-century historians, including Oswald Spengler, saw regular, rhythmic cycles with specific stages among the world’s civilizations, but Ferguson proposes that science suggests amending that view. Civilizations, he writes, are “complex systems” (like the weather, or more broadly, climate) wherein huge changes may be wrought in a very short time by specific events.

Therein is the reason for alarm: Will the West’s economies right themselves in time after the market catastrophe of 2008 to withstand the rapid economic onslaught of China? If they cannot, “complex systems” suggests the “fall of the West”— currently led by our American “empire”—could be quite precipitous. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ella Christoph

Any woman could tell you how much easier it is to pick up guys—well, usually, let them pick you up—than it is to befriend a girl. Obviously, bars aren’t a good spot for searching out new best buds. But—maybe more than women wish to admit, or guys might believe—even places that seem almost overflowing with potential besties can end up feeling like friend deserts.

Childhood friends who lived on your street now live halfway around the country; college roommates stayed and you moved, or vice versa. Work, bars and the gym aren’t breeding grounds for best-friendships the same way recess, camp and drunken walks home from frat parties were earlier in life. But few women talk about the challenges of making friends in the adult world, worried they’ll be seen as losers, or unappreciative of the friends or significant other they already have. Never mind that it’s fine to talk incessantly about the lengths you’re going to in order to hunt down The One. Read the rest of this entry »

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A fictional masterpiece of the impending horror of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” Martha Gellhorn’s 1940 “A Stricken Field” is now generally regarded as her finest book. Sadly, she did not see it that way.

A new foreword and her own 1985 afterword to a freshly republished edition show how by making an American journalist—a thinly veiled version of herself—a central character of her novel she was “troubled by a secret shame. I had used two of my own small acts in that tragedy as part of the story. It was not my tragedy and I disliked myself for taking a fictionalized share.”

She felt she had inflated herself at the expense of the many real people she had encountered (and fictionalized) who had shown true heroism in the face of the Nazi machine advancing through Czechoslovakia in 1938. Yet “A Stricken Field” draws its power from the viewpoint of one whom we know must have been a real witness to the telling details that build one upon another to choking, terrifying effect. Read the rest of this entry »

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Like the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz,” we modern human beings can all use a little courage. In fact, Judith A. and Richard B. Schwartz argue in “The Wounds That Heal” that the need for heroic role models “is so strong that the media will manufacture pseudo-heroes in order to meet it.

“The hero exemplifies traits and demonstrates capabilities… (that) we value,” they write. “He or she extends our conceptions of the possible and helps us to focus on that which is essential rather than peripheral.”

Unfortunately, when we lack true models, we may mistake celebrity for heroism and as humans aspire to notoriety rather than real virtue and character. “The Wounds That Heal” offers guidance out of this particularly modern mess. Read the rest of this entry »

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Patti Smith has garnered plenty of critical acclaim over the past year for “Just Kids,” a memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, but she also quietly published another slender remembrance—”Woolgathering.”

At less than one-hundred pages, with Smith’s own photographs interspersed like religious relics, “Woolgathering” reads like a path through a dream, or the remembrances of a priestess. But Smith claims, in a charming introduction, that it’s truth, not fairy tale. She also endearingly writes that she hopes the book will impose a “vague and curious joy” on the reader, which is a fairly accurate way to describe how the book is absorbed. Read the rest of this entry »