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In the classic TV series “The Honeymooners,” sewer worker Norton (Art Carney) has taken up bird watching and, with binoculars around his neck, shares a park bench with his friend, the bus driver Kramden (Jackie Gleason). Kramden wants to know why anyone would take up bird watching.

“Why shouldn’t we watch birds?” Norton responds. “They watch us, don’t they?”

Norton spots—“by Jove!”—a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, and remarks they’ve never been seen in New York. He starts making a note for the birding society. Kramden asks sneeringly, What makes you think they’re going to believe you?

Hmmm. Norton writes and recites: “Bird seen: Yellow-bellied Sapsucker,” then with a wink, “Place seen:..” (pause) “Albuquerque, New Mexico”! Read the rest of this entry »

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“Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” is the first memoir by Jeanette Winterson, even though her books generally contain elements of autobiography. The memoir is a response to her first work of fiction, “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” which, when she wrote it more than twenty-five years ago, launched her into literary fame and eventually became a BBC mini-series.

Winterson, who revisits the themes of experience, biography, fiction and feminism, explains that her first book was partly a challenge to the perception that women are writers of experiential—and thus less masterful—fiction. Winterson’s goal was to express both “experience and experiment.” It’s with something like horror that any devotee of “Oranges” will read, “I told my version—faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time. I told myself as a hero like any shipwreck story… And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is ‘Oranges,’ is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Read the rest of this entry »

The ink of President Barack Obama’s pen was barely dry on the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act before the $787 billion stimulus package was already a political football. For many Democrats and economists like Paul Krugman, it was too little and nearly too late, but it was too much for Republicans who wanted to put the brakes on “big-government” spending, and who ever since have habitually inserted the words “job-killing” before any Democratic spending initiative. Thus the battle lines remain drawn.

Given the excessive rhetoric surrounding most discussions of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the plan that was supposed to restore the American economy and plummeting employment, ProPublica reporter Michael Grabell’s evaluation in “Money Well Spent?” is as accessible and even-handed as we’re likely to see. Read the rest of this entry »

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It is only natural for historians—and today, even political scientists—to speculate from time to time on the greater forces that have caused civilizations and nations to rise and fall.

But Britain’s Norman Davies, one of the very rare contemporary historians writing in the grand tradition, suggests in his thorough, richly textured “Vanished Kingdoms” that most such speculations begin in the wrong place. They derive from accounts of fallen nations wrought from the existing remnants, such as Greece and Italy, which survive as nations but once anchored empires. Or, the narratives are written from the point of view of victors.

Modern historians seek “the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards,” he warns. And the prospects for getting the broader enterprise right are not getting any better, as larger proportions of college students flee the discipline and it becomes dominated by scholars increasingly specialized and mired in “arcane, academic jargon.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Institutions of higher education are again under public attack, urged to justify and reform themselves, but this crisis is neither extraordinary nor new, writes historian and former University of Chicago president (1978-1993) Hanna Holborn Gray in “Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories.”

From time to time, higher education requires a re-examination and restatement of first principles, and Gray bravely provides this in a way that is largely successful. “Searching for Utopia” is at once a contemplative “pep talk” urging colleges and universities to rediscover a sense of both mission and individuality and a ringing endorsement of protecting the academic freedom to explore truth. Read the rest of this entry »

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Readers of Chicago history should already know the name Richard Lindberg. He has authored fifteen books, among them the 2010 Society of Midland Authors Award-winning biography “The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago’s Democratic Machine.”

Yet his newest, the product of a self-confessed “life’s mission,” may be his masterpiece. In reconstructing his own somewhat mysterious Swedish-immigrant origins, “Whiskey Breakfast: My Swedish Family, My American Life” is simultaneously a highly personal and unflinching deconstruction of and challenge to both Chicago immigrant and suburban myths. Read the rest of this entry »

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Every budding teenage writer should have a mentor and friend like Gustav Janouch had. It was his good fortune that the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institution where his father worked in Prague after the First World War also employed a lawyer named Franz Kafka, and that there was something that clicked between the young writer and the already-famed author of “The Metamorphosis.”

Kafka patiently tolerated the young man’s interruptions of his office routine, once waving him in with “Greetings from my paper dungeon!” Kafka even invited Janouch to accompany him on walks at all hours about the historic city, whose byways he knew so well.

The two discussed every subject under the sun—the puzzle of human nature being the great subject—and Janouch had the good sense to record these experiences after each session, gathering them together into a book that yields remarkable insights into this influential literary figure. “Conversations with Kafka” is an often unguarded, hair-down view of the author that, while suffused with Kafka’s voice, is yet somehow “un-Kafkaesque.” Read the rest of this entry »

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For Chicago in 1893, the Columbian Exposition was the right world’s fair, in the right place, at the right time. Occurring only two decades after the Great Fire that ravaged the city’s center, it was an opportunity to show off to the world Chicago’s recovery and exponential growth.

Perhaps more important, the fair illustrated a powerful “can-do” attitude, marshalling public and private support and employing the latest architectural and engineering resources to transform more than a square mile of undeveloped South Side land into sprawling parks, lagoons and waterways. The fair showcased striking exhibition buildings of what became known as the White City—cheek by jowl with a great public-entertainment attraction, the “Midway.”

This was done, mind you, in little more than two years, into the teeth of a widening recession that was particularly gripping our nation’s agricultural regions and silver-mining centers such as the young state of Colorado. Read the rest of this entry »

Although the United States is hurtling toward a time when paperless transactions will replace most cash transfers anyway, that change cannot occur fast enough for David Wolman, author of “The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society.”

In a provocative online essay for “Wired” (he is a contributing editor), he asserted, “In an era when books, movies, music, and newsprint are transmuting from atoms to bits, money remains irritatingly analog. Physical currency is a bulky, germ-smeared, carbon-intensive, expensive medium of exchange. Let’s dump it.”

Both the Federal Reserve and private banking systems take a piece of the currency action and the United States Treasury spends increasing effort and large sums of money to counteract increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting that threatens to undermine confidence in the United States dollar. (Wolman describes the “supernotes” North Korea produces in its own effort to battle the United States.) Read the rest of this entry »

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The possibilities of extended monographs on individual animal species were well demonstrated by the 1970s release of American West historian David Dary’s “The Buffalo Book,” now a cult classic on “all things American bison.”

Now, one by one, London’s Reaktion Books has been publishing lovely, colorful single-species monographs with wide popular appeal. The latest, Annie Potts’ “Chicken,” is the forty-fourth in the series, further dramatizing how far in the, ahem, pecking order this humble but utilitarian bird has plummeted in public estimation.

It was not always thus, as Potts demonstrates in her captivating survey of centuries of history, legend and culture involving the species, preceding her frank descriptions of modern agricultural mass production and destruction of chickens and poultry products for human consumption. Read the rest of this entry »