By Steve Rhodes

May 26-27.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Sara Peretsky sits on a table, for a review by Samuel G. Freedman of her latest, Writing in an Age of Silence. Didn’t read the review.
Other News and Reviews of Note: The Sun Farmer: The Story of a Shocking Accident, a Medical Miracle, and a Family’s Life-and-Death Decision. The Tribune headline: “What Price Life? This tale of injured Illinois farmer raises questions about science and ethics.” Between that and the exceedingly long book title, I sense I’m being given a really hard sell about a book that doesn’t live up to its billing.

Read More

Posted on May 30, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Our weekly review of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Amiable Dunce
I just can’t get past the fact that even while he was president, Ronald Reagan called Nancy “Mommie.” I mean how creepy is that? He did so in writing too, according to Nicholas Lemann’s account in this week’s New Yorker of The Reagan Diaries. In conjunction with a dip into The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Lemann offers a fairly rich portrait of someone who is utterly and undeniably an inscrutable simpleton.
ALSO: New Yorker editor David Remnick’s devastating piece on how the Six-Day War shaped Israel’s political culture is a stiff dose of reality to those whose sympathies lie with the tiny Jewish nation, the Palestinians’ horrific blunders notwithstanding.

Read More

Posted on May 25, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

May 20-21.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Nondescript photo that will mean nothing to readers promoting the review of When the World Was Young, in which “Fremd High School teacher Tony Romano offers a vivid, evocative tale of kinship and conflict in 1950s Chicago.”
Not a totally terrible choice for a cover, but something more than an author photo, please.

Read More

Posted on May 22, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

A review of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Slump City
The recent disappointing run of The New Yorker continues with a May 14 issue with little to recommend. Elizabeth Kolbert’s story about the new supercollider under construction outside Geneva reads with an awful familiarity. I wasn’t moved to read about Richard Branson’s biofuels kick. I started the piece about a renowned maker of guitars as well as the one about an archeological find of possibly the world’s first “computer”; didn’t finish either. A Ken Auletta piece about Wall Street Journal consumer technology reporter Walt Mossberg was interesting. The cultural criticism was dull. What’s going on, New Yorker? Worst run in memory.

Read More

Posted on May 16, 2007

By Meghan Van Leuwen

News from Chicago’s academic presses.
1. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Off the Presses
* Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City: Mary Pattillo
* When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina: W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston
* Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country: Albert Borgmann

Read More

Posted on May 11, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Filling in for Shipley on the magazine beat.
Wicker Fair
The June issue of Vanity Fair calls Wicker Park-Bucktown “the latest burgeoning pocket” of Chicago – umpteen years after Billboard magazine featured the area on its cover and hundreds of stories after the one-time coolness of Wicker Park has been chipped and glossed into Lincoln Park West. “Over the past few years, this run-down area has blossomed into a square-mile pulsing with sassy boutiques . . . and heavenly restaurants,” writes Punch Hutton.
Well, more like 16 years after a landmark district was first proposed for the neighborhood, which once featured anti-sassy boutiques and anti-heavenly restaurants.
Hutton praises the neighborhood’s upscale “novelty and furniture stores” without any hint of knowledge about the affordable novelty and furniture stores they have replaced, making the area safe for Vanity Fair readers.
In a final coup de grace, Punch recommends relaxing at day’s end at “one of two old-fashioned bars,” the Northside or Piece, which are about as old-fashioned as the BMWs and Hummers parked outside them.
As Keith Olbermann would say, Punch Hutton, you are this week’s Worst Person in the World.

Read More

Posted on May 8, 2007

By Steve Rhodes
Catching up with the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Katrina Myth
You know how crime has gone up in Houston because of all the Katrina evacuees who have ended up there? It’s not so.
An analysis of the data by Houston television station KHOU, retold in the March/April journal of Investigative Reporters & Editors, found that a recent spike in the crime rate – murders, in particular – cannot be blamed on Katrina victims despite what police officials have been telling the public.

Read More

Posted on May 3, 2007