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Books

About The Tribune’s New E-Book Initiative

By Agate Publishing

I’m writing to announce the full-fledged launch of the Chicago Tribune Ebook Collection, a fast-growing library of standalone ebooks published by Agate Digital and created from the Chicago Tribune’s archive of news, feature stories, columns, and photography. We believe this ebook effort – which is now generating an average of seven new ebooks per month – represents one of the biggest and most ambitious forays into ebook publishing by any major newspaper company to date.
The scale of the project is made possible by the sheer breadth of material in the Tribune’s archive, which allows Tribune and Agate editors to develop ebooks on a diverse range of topics. Among these new books are a “best of” collection by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mary Schmich; a retrospective on former Mayor Richard M. Daley; and a variety of cookbooks drawn from the Tribune’s “Good Eating” section. These ebooks are very attractively priced at just $4.99, designed to appeal to the broad (and fast-growing) audience of readers embracing the ebook format on their digital and mobile devices.

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Posted on October 16, 2012

More Sh!t Chief Keef Don’t Like

By Haymarket Books

In a career that began with a YouTube video corralling millions of views, young Chicago rapper Chief Keef has recently skyrocketed to fame.
In a matter of months, Chief Keef’s most popular song, “Don’t Like” was remixed by Kanye West, while he was on house arrest for a gun charge. Chief Keef has also been signed to a major record deal, and investigated for the murder of a rival rapper – all to the backdrop of increasing gun violence in Chicago and heightened media controversy.
Yet, as poet-educator Kevin Coval writes, “Every institution in Chicago fails Black youth. Segregated and systematically inequitable, Chicago is a town where white kids exist in an increasingly idyllic new urban utopia, and Black and Latino kids weave and dodge through a war zone.
“The largest specter in the spectacle and circus that surrounds the city, Chief Keef has become its poster boy and scapegoat. He is a young man who looks and sounds like thousands of young people in Chicago – reared in a culture of nihilism, death, and capitalism.
“He is a young man who sings the demented measures and results of white supremacy, the legacy and maintenance of grand inequity. Chief Keef sings a tortured and tormented Chicago song. It is a song we need to listen to carefully.”

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Posted on October 15, 2012

Hungry Chicago Man’s Best And Worst Of America

Freedom Of Speech vs. The Goverment

“This nice man was holding a sign that read, ‘I’m Just Hungry. I’m Not A Bad Person, I Just Made Bad Decisions.’ Seemed like a nice man. He told us his Best & Worst Thing about America. Hopefully, he is doing better these days. Check out the book and film that grew from this project, more at USAODD.com.”

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Posted on October 9, 2012

Satan Is Not In These Books

By Steve Rhodes

“This week marks 30 years of the annual Banned Books Week, and multiple Chicago area libraries and educational institutions are holding readings and discussions,” CBS2 Chicago reports.
“Banned Books Week honors what organizers call freedom to read. The 2012 celebration will be held through Oct. 6.”
The Channel 2 report lists some local events and we’ll add value here by providing some Chicago-related banned book read-outs and inspirations culled from YouTube and a certain movie you might recall.
1. Chicago Public Library’s Teen Volume Banned-Books Read-Out Submission.
“Teens from Chicago Public Library’s Teen Advisory Council read an excerpt of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian in celebration of the ALA’s Virtual Banned Books Read Out for 2012!”

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Posted on October 2, 2012

The Chambers Report: Ayes For Atheism

By Bob Chambers

I.
Christopher Hitchens, the celebrated “public intellectual” who was born in Dartmoor, Southwestern England, but eventually became an American citizen, died of esophageal cancer on December 15, 2011, at the age of 62. As one for whom the elegant use of language was a defining attribute, Hitchens himself wryly observed the irony of ultimately losing his vocal abilities. In Mortality, his final book of essays – much reviewed recently, most prominently in The New York Times by his friend Christopher Buckley – the dying author caustically noted:

My two assets, my pen and my voice – and it had to be the esophagus. All along, while burning the candle at both ends, I had been “straying into the arena of the unwell” and now “a vulgar little tumor” was evident. This alien can’t want anything; if it kills me it dies but it seems very single-minded and set in its purpose. No real irony here, though. Must take absolute care not to be self-pitying or self-centered.

As perhaps the English-speaking world’s most famous and outspoken atheist, Hitchens on his deathbed became the unsurprising target of scores of religious proselytizers, all hell-bent on playing some role in bringing about an eleventh-hour conversion experience for the Great Heretic.
Not to worry, however, for various pages of Mortality are, in effect, continuations of Hitchens’ atheist classic God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and thus, in Buckley’s words, “devoted to a final, defiant and well-reasoned defense of his non-God-fearingness.”

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Posted on September 17, 2012

Local Book Notes: Through The Eyes Of Angels And Art

Strange Big Moons And Homegirls

Over the transom in four parts.
1. From The Society of Midland Authors:
Chicago author Mahmoud Saeed, a native of Iraq, will discuss his novel The World Through the Eyes of Angels in a Society of Midland Authors program Oct. 9 at the Cliff Dwellers Club, along with one of his translators, Allen Salter of Chicago.
Saeed has written more than 20 novels and short story collections, starting with Port Saeed and Other Stories in 1963. That same year, Iraq’s first military-Baathist government seized two of his novels and imprisoned him for a year. After being incarcerated six times, Saeed left Iraq in 1985. He has lived in the United States since 1999, and he now teaches Arabic and Arabic culture at DePaul University.

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Posted on September 11, 2012

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