By Steve Rhodes
1. Professor’s Book On Gay Steelworkers Is Must-Read.
2. Duncan Hines Was A Real Guy, And Kind Of A Jerk.
3. Naperville Author’s Photo Totally Not Retouched.
Posted on May 22, 2014
Sixteen Tons Of Dark Downstate History
Gun Battles, Bombings And Assassinations
“Mother Jones once proclaimed Illinois to be ‘the best-organized labor state in America,’ and the people of the Illinois coalfields – where Kevin Corley’s enjoyable new novel Sixteen Tons takes place – were always at the center of the action,” David Markwell writes for Labor Notes.
At the beginning of the nationwide coal strike of 1897, only 400 Illinois miners were members of the United Mine Workers of America. By the strike’s conclusion, the number stood at 30,000.
The following year owners of the Chicago-Virden Coal Company brought in non-union miners from out of state. The effort to land them prompted a confrontation known in popular local history as the “Virden Mine Riot.” A number of security guards and striking miners were shot dead, and many more were injured.
But the non-union miners never got off the train, and the gains made by the 1897 strike (higher wages, union recognition) were solidified. At her request, Mother Jones was later buried in the only union-owned cemetery in America, with the striking miners who died at Virden.
Illinois miners later grew dissatisfied with what they saw as the autocratic rule of United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis. They and their families formed the breakaway union Progressive Miners of America in 1932 to get grassroots control over union decision-making.
Sixteen Tons is grounded in this historical context. Beginning in the aftermath of the 1897 strike, the book traces several decades of trying times for the Vacca family, Italian immigrants to Illinois.
Click through for the rest of Markwell’s review.
Posted on May 20, 2014
Local Book Notes: Revisiting Comiskey
Plus: 600 Eggs
1. “Everybody knows that one of the driving forces behind the 1919 Black Sox scandal was that the White Sox players were so upset with the penny-pinching ways of owner Charles Comiskey that they conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds,” Paul Hagen writes for MLB.com.
“But what if what everybody knows is wrong
“That’s the bold premise of Tim Hornbaker in Turning the Black Sox White: The Misunderstood Legacy of Charles A. Comiskey.”
Posted on May 14, 2014
Local Book Notes: Her White Chicago Friends
Plus: Michael Jordan’s Fucked-Up Family
“When Myra Greene asked her white friends to be a part of her photographic exploration of whiteness, their first question was usually, ‘Why?’ Their second: ‘What should I wear?'” Jordan Teicher writes for Slate.
“As Greene traveled the country making collaborative portraits for her book My White Friends, the answers were often ambiguous. But the conversations they spawned were fruitful, if slightly foreign, to her subjects. ‘Being asked to be in a photograph because of race has happened many times in my life,’ Greene said, who is African-American. ‘I don’t think a lot of white people have been asked to do something because of their racial identity. It changes the way they think of that experience of being photographed.’
“Greene, an associate professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago, has frequently used photography as a means to explore questions of race and its representation.”
Posted on May 6, 2014
Local Book Notes: From The Pogues To Phiraq
Plus: The Father Of Venus And Serena Williams Spent Time In Chicago As A Young Man
1. Pogues Paperback.
“In his 2012 book Here Comes Everybody (Chicago Review Press, out in paperback May 6), the Pogues’ frustrated novelist-accordionist James Fearnley wonderfully captured all of the band’s rise and fall with suitably lyrical prose,” Neil Ferguson writes for the Philadelphia Weekly.
“[Shane] MacGowan emerges as both a figure of awe and awfulness, a gin-soaked enigma whose dark self-destructive streak leads the band into frequent debates over whether he is, indeed, a genius, or, quite simply, ‘a fucking idiot.’ It’s both a picaresque road epic and an unintentionally-cautionary tale about the perils of endless touring and the machinations of the music biz. Above all, it’s as poetic, profane and profound as the band themselves. And that’s no mean feat.”
Posted on April 30, 2014
Local Book Notes: Branding The Pope
Also: Doc Emanuel & The Oldest Living Things In The World
“A small, Jesuit publishing house in Chicago won the bid to print the pontiff’s first collection of writings in the U.S. But this isn’t just any mass-market book – and it’s tricky to build a brand for the Bishop of Rome,” Emma Green writes for the Atlantic.
That publishing house is Loyola Press.
“For a small publishing house like Loyola, this is a pretty big deal,” Steve Connor, the Press’s director of new product development, told the Atlantic. “Our average books sell between 5,000 and 10,000 copies. We’ve had some great bestsellers, but they are few and far between. A book like this comes along only once in a while.”
Click through to learn more about Loyola’s papal branding strategy; the article is called “How To Sell Pope Francis.”
Posted on April 23, 2014
Black Power TV
Broadcasting While Black
“In Black Power TV, [Chicago media scholar] Devorah Heitner chronicles the emergence of Black public affairs television starting in 1968.”
*
Heitner will read from Black Power TV on Wednesday evening at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
Heitner will be joined by WBEZ journalist Natalie Moore to explore the public television show Soul! We will return to a particular moment in American television when Soul!, a national program coming out of New York, carved out a cultural space that resisted the politics of respectability, introduced audiences to a vibrant Black creative and political aesthetic, pushed past normative boundaries of gender and sexuality while entertaining viewers and valuing Black life and performance.
Featuring a DJ set before and after the program.
Posted on April 22, 2014
Our Most Magnificent Magic Realist Is Dead
Truth In Fantasy
“Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died in Mexico aged 87, his family says,” the BBC reports.
“Garcia Marquez was considered one of the greatest Spanish-language authors, best known for his masterpiece of magic realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
Posted on April 18, 2014
Inside The Mind Of A Man Who Killed His Family
And How It Could Have Been Prevented
“On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation,” Southern Illinois University Press recalls.
“The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after 17 years on Death Row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life.
“The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality: a future.
“As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration for Survived by One: The Life and Mind of a Family Mass Murderer.
“Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on Death Row, and his belief in the powers of redemption.”
Posted on April 17, 2014
The Midwest’s Best: Little Known Facts
Celebrity Skin
The third and final part in a series about this year’s Society of Midland Authors award winners, honoring the best books by Midwest authors published in 2013. The annual awards dinner will take place on May 13 at the Cliff Dwellers Club.
ADULT FICTION
WINNER: Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts, Bloomsbury. (Author lives in Evanston, Ill.)
Posted on April 13, 2014