Chicago -
By The Beachwood Book Signing Affairs Desk
“International superstar Ricky Martin flew the red eye Friday morning to Chicago from his previous night’s appearance at the Latin Grammys in Las Vegas to sign copies of his new memoir, entitled Me, at the Lincoln Park Borders, 2817 N Clark St.,” ChicagoPride reports.
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Posted on November 15, 2010
By Captain Logan
The Return of Bruce Wayne, Thunder Agents and Red Robin.
Posted on November 12, 2010
By Tim Bueler
NEW BOOK DOCUMENTS HOW SECULAR ELITISTS ATTACK CHRISTIANITY
Conducting interviews on this topic is the author of America’s War on Christianity, Brad O’Leary.
WASHINGTON – The battle over America’s Judeo-Christian identity is heating up, and at least one author isn’t taking the fight lying down. A powerful new book from bestselling author Brad O’Leary put the lie to secularist claims that Christianity isn’t under an intense attack.
Posted on November 11, 2010
By The Beachwood SEO Affairs Desk
1. Side Jobs: Stories From The Dresden Files. By Jim Butcher.
2. The Road To Serfdom: Text And Documents – The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works Of F.A. Hayek, Volume 2). By F.A. Hayek and Bruce Caldwell.
3. Body Work. By Sara Paretsky.
4. The Devil In The White City. By Erik Larson.
5. The Chicago Manual of Style. By the University of Chicago Press staff.
Posted on October 29, 2010
By Steve Rhodes
1. Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled The Chicago Mob.
Comment: Have.
2. The Battle For Las Vegas: The Law vs. The Mob.
Comment: Would like.
3. When The Mob Ran Las Vegas: Stories of Money, Mayhem and Murder.
Comment: I’m sensing a theme here.
4. Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise.
Comment: Please.
Posted on October 21, 2010
By The Beachwood Booksellers Affairs Division
Please join us on Thursday, October 14 for a very special presentation of J.J. Tindall’s Ballots From The Dead.
Choose your own poem to read from our Chicagoetry collection and bring books to donate to our gracious host, Open Books.
Posted on October 4, 2010
By The Beachwood Books Bureau
A Hole to China – exclusively excerpted here on the Beachwood – is now available at the amazin’ Amazon Kindle store ($6.99).
A Hole to China joins Ballots From The Dead in the Beachwood marketplace.
A rock ‘n’ roll China refresher:
Posted on September 15, 2010
Book: There Are No Children Here
Author: Alex Kotlowitz
Excerpt: “The prosecution, though, was already overburdened with cases. It didn’t want to go to trial. The three prosecutors in the courtroom where Terence’s case was to be heard handled about 450 cases at a time, up from 250 cases the year before. They suspected part of the reason was political. Their boss, Richard M. Daley, was running for mayor, so the more cases they prosecuted, particularly those related to drugs, the more convinced the electorate would be that he was a strong law-and-order man. In fact, of the twenty-five thousand drug defendants in the county the previous year, over half had their cases dismissed or their charges dropped, according to one study.”
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Posted on September 8, 2010
By Steve Rhodes
On the occasion of his death; relevant excerpts from and for the record. Links added for clarification and background.
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Book: American Pharaoh
Authors: Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
Excerpt: “Before [Martin Luther] King’s Chicago Campaign was over, Dan Rostenkowski would suggest to presidential aide Lawrence O’Brien that the White House find an assignment that would take his friend Daley ‘out of the country for a week or two.’ Rostenkowski was ‘most concerned,’ he told O’Brien, about the toll the civil rights campaign in Chicago was having ‘on the mayor personally.'”
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Book: Fire on the Prairie
Author: Gary Rivlin
Excerpts: “For a time after Daley’s death Rostenkowski was Chicago’s top political figure nationally. ‘A case study of the dangers of getting in over your head,’ the Washington Monthly wrote when ranking Rostenkowski among the country’s six worst congressman based on the views of fellow congressmen, lobbyists, staffers, reporters, and others. ‘Hogs get slaughtered but pigs get fat,’ he explained to a New York Times reporter.
“Yet the local media treated him with an affection and respect that bordered on reverential.”
Posted on August 11, 2010
By Steve Rhodes
A new book by Rickey R. Hendon (the “R” stands for “Hollywood”) is even weirder than Chicago News Cooperative columnist James Warren lets on.
It is also hugely instructive – as a field guide to door-to-door politics and a window into Hendon’s bleak soul.
It’s not a tell-all, as Hendon warns us early on, but it wants to be. Hendon takes sideways shots at several political figures known and not along the way.
It’s also a psychological portrait of a self-absorbed and paranoid pol who portrays himself as an independent reformer but acts like nothing of the sort.
It’s important because Hendon is the assistant majority leader of the Illinois Senate.
It’s laughable because Hendon preaches attention to detail while misspelling the names of familiar officeholders.
It’s disturbing because this mess is written by an ostensibly powerful member of our state’s legislative body; it’s enlightening in opening a window into the mindset of somebody who came up through a street-level, bare-knuckles culture of acquiring power lacking in the niceties of thoughtfulness about policy. Politics, to Hendon, is only about power and pork.
On the other hand, public relations visionary Hermene Hartman, also the publisher of N’DIGO, also embarrasses herself – and can’t spell the name of our hometown president correctly, as we shall see.
In fact, the best thing this book has going for it is its compact size and inspired cover art (look closely; that flagstaff is a knife, albeit a butter knife).
But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth a look.
Posted on August 10, 2010
