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 »

RECOMMENDED

Stefan Templeton doesn’t just think outside the box; he lives outside it, an American hero for the age of Obama—a boundary-breaking, biracial, one-man-NGO paratrooper who drops into and does good in remote spots so hot he sometimes passes international aid organizations on their way out.

Now in his mid-forties, his kit includes an unusual skill set—basic medical knowledge, facility in several languages, experience with weapons, expertise in karate and military tactics, logistical savvy and a fearlessness born of sheer competence. Templeton flew to Indonesia after the tsunami and Sudan after the civil war. In Southeast Asia, he traded gems for life-saving drugs.

Templeton has found his Boswell in childhood friend David Matthews, who, in “Kicking Ass and Saving Souls,” has ably chronicled Templeton’s life so far, in edgy prose that leaves no doubt that any subsequent chapter could well be the subject’s last. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

By Hugh Iglarsh

How does one write a biography of a figure like radical minstrel Joe Hill? By all rights, he should have been an invisible man, and in some ways was just that. Born into the lower reaches of the working class, Hill was another drop in the torrent of emigration from old world to new in the early years of the last century, drawn by economic osmosis to the thinly peopled rawness of the American West. There he became a human tumbleweed, bounced and jostled from place to place and job to job, until the hobo jungle and flophouse became his only home, his fellow laborers his only family.

Long stretches of Joe Hill’s short life are lost even to the most dogged of researchers. As biographer William Adler (author of the previous labor-themed books “Land of Opportunity” and “Mollie’s Job”) says of Hill’s early years in America, after his arrival in New York from Sweden in 1902, “the images are fleeting and blurry… . He was a moving target, and in that regard he was like hundreds of thousands of unskilled immigrants. His was an itinerant, uncertain life, the only constant the hunt for another job, a meal, a toehold in industrializing America.”  Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Gillis

Ostensibly a Chicago bluesman steeped in the southern traditions of Jefferson County, Arkansas, William “Big Bill” Broonzy’s recordings stretch genres—from folk music to hokum, ragtime to country. His life and legacy are equally wide-reaching. He toured Europe, fell in love with a Dutch woman, and masterminded recordings that would inspire The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and the 2009 inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama. In the intervening years, Broonzy also became a master crowd pleaser, whose compassion and appeal to white and black audiences functioned as a heart to the Chicago music scene. In 1955, he compiled an autobiography that recounted his inspirations—an uncle named Jerry, a dubiously friendly white man—his childhood with twenty-one siblings, and his time serving in World War I. The only problem was, none of it was true.

In his recent biography “I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy,” Bob Riesman uncovers the reality behind the constructed life of the master showman. In an interview with Newcity, Riesman built a list of some of Broonzy’s most enduring works, and used them to talk about the bluesman’s legacy. Read the rest of this entry »

What promises to be an interesting merger of critical theory, popular biography and memoir turns out to be little more than an expression of un-self-conscious, occasionally creepy fandom in Lila Azam Zanganeh’s “The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness”—a debut that feels three times as long as its 189 pages.

Nabokov—one of the most towering figures of twentieth-century literature—wrote profoundly complex, wildly smart novels. They were packed with human characters, treated by their creator humanely. In classics like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire,” he wove deeply felt stories into the complicated lattice of his structures and systems. And did so with an obsessive attention to detail, the kind that can only be achieved through a deep love of one’s craft.

It’s that love—of writing, of life—that Zanganeh sets out to document in her book. Unfortunately, she spends more time saying things like this: “Some days earlier, I had, in fact, had a dream. He was there. So close I could almost touch him.” Or this: “As I again sit at my desk, I realize that, for a while now, I’ve been ignoring a slight swerving. Like the onset of something; a mild vertigo, not altogether unpleasant.” Or, most cringe-inducing, this: “You’re about to begin the twelfth chapter of ‘The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness.’ Contentedly, you stack two pillows behind your head, curl up in your quilt and switch off the TV.” Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration: Donovan Foote

By Martin Northway

A confluence of anniversaries has brought Mark Twain into public consciousness this year, an apt time to recall that America’s greatest author—born and reared in neighboring Missouri—was a pretty frequent visitor to Chicago.

Further, one of the best-traveled Americans of his time—perhaps our nation’s first international celebrity—spent one of the most important evenings of his life here.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was welcomed by his Virginia- and Kentucky-native parents in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. Born during the transit of Halley’s Comet, he died 74 years later upon its return. Thus 2010 marks not just the 175th anniversary of his birth but the 100th anniversary of his death.

Coinciding with these events, the University of California Press is releasing the first of three volumes of his long-awaited autobiography; a previous version appeared long ago under the editorship of Charles Neider, but that much-shorter edition is not just incomplete but too “sanitized” to shine a bright light on its author. The book has become this season’s literary sensation, returning Twain to the bestseller lists, with six printings and more than 275,000 copies in circulation. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Acknowledged as the Colonies’ most brilliant orator on behalf of political liberty, sometimes it was as if Patrick Henry could summon thunder from the sky. But after the Revolution, for days he implored Virginia’s convention not to ratify the proposed U.S. Constitution. With George Mason, he did not believe it provided sufficient protections of the rights of citizens from the federal government.

After sessions in which he had spoken as much as seven hours, provoking the verbal wrath of his opponents, he warned of the “awful immensity” of the dangers of the proposed system. “I see it! I feel it!”

As he rose to his full six feet, spreading his arms wide to make a final appeal, the skies blackened and a bolt of lightning shook the very hall. “The spirits he had called seemed to come at his bidding,” recounted one delegate.

Henry performed brilliantly, but the strongest voice carrying the convention for the Constitution was not even present—that of his great friend Washington.

Patrick Henry was one of this nation’s most passionate figures, and in this accessible, elegantly written biography Harlow Unger brings the leonine patriot vividly to life, skillfully weaving his story together with the outsize history he helped shape. Read the rest of this entry »

Not many priests get death threats. But, then again, not many priests are so often at the center of public controversy as Chicago’s Father Michael Pfleger. He’s defaced billboards, protested against Jerry Springer and Howard Stern, paid prostitutes for their time so that he could minister to them, and fought openly with Chicago Cardinal Francis George. Pfleger made national headlines during the 2008 election, when he openly derided Hillary Clinton from his pulpit, accusing her of feeling “entitled” to the Democratic nomination because she was white. He’s often accused of blurring the line between social activism and being openly political, and he’s the subject of a new book, “Radical Disciple: Father Pfleger, St. Sabina Church, and the Fight For Social Justice” by Chicago author Robert McClory.

McClory seems uniquely qualified to author the book; beyond being a former reporter for the Chicago Reader who profiled Pfleger back in 1989, McClory himself was a former priest at Pfleger’s St. Sabina’s. He was leaving the parish right around the same time that Pfleger was coming on in the late sixties, as the demographics for the neighborhood switched from predominantly white to predominantly black, and church membership shrunk almost nine-tenths. He remembers firsthand the effect Pfleger had on the congregation. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ella Christoph

Janet Zenke Edwards’ historical account of a brilliant, independent woman who escaped Chicago for what she hoped would be the peace, freedom and beauty of the Indiana dunes is titled “Diana of the Dunes: The True Story of Alice Gray.” But ultimately, Edwards’ book isn’t about the mythical Diana, who lives on in ghost tales and in newspaper archives, where sensational accounts of fierce Diana of the Dunes and her wild lover Paul live on. Edwards’ book is here to set the record straight, to give witness to Alice Gray, the woman behind the fantasy.

The historically accurate Alice Gray cuts a strong figure in her own right. By unknown means (her family wasn’t well off), Alice attended and graduated from the University of Chicago, earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics and studying at the graduate level for four years. She worked for the U.S. Naval Observatory and studied in Germany. Even before she left for the dunes, Alice stood out as exceptional for her intelligence and self-reliance. Read the rest of this entry »

Sam Weller, Ray Bradbury, Black Francis (who wrote the new book's intro) in LA at the end of June 2010/Photo: Nathan Kirkman

The premiere episode of “Q&A” on the Newcity Video Network

By Brian Hieggelke

On the cover of a new collection of interviews with Ray Bradbury, the legendary author proclaims “Sam Weller knows more about my life than I do!” It’s probably not far from the truth, since Weller can claim to have gotten his start even before he was born: Weller’s father read Ray Bradbury to him in the womb.

Ray Bradbury was born and raised in his early years in Waukegan Illinois, just forty miles north of downtown Chicago. His family moved west to Los Angeles during the Great Depression, and Bradbury went on to be one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated writers, crafting such classics as “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man,” “Fahrenheit 451″ and hundreds of stories, screenplays and television scripts. His career has taken him far from his idyllic youth in Waukegan, but not too far:  those formative years in the Midwest were forever captured in his most celebrated stories.

Chicagoan Sam Weller has spent the better part of a decade on the Bradbury beat: first in crafting the definitive biography of the author, “The Bradbury Chronicles” and now, on the eve of Bradbury’s ninetieth birthday, he’s assembled “Listen to the Echoes, The Ray Bradbury Interviews.” Needless to say, he’s developed a special relationship with the author. Read the rest of this entry »