By Steve Rhodes

With the announcement this week that Ald. Helen Shiller would not run for re-election, I headed for my Chicago bookshelf. Here’s what I found – interspersed with comments from her interview with Carol Marin on Chicago Tonight last night.
Book: Chicago Politics Ward By Ward
Author: David Fremon
Date: 1988
Excerpt:
“Uptown over the years has seen both glamour and destitution, sometimes within blocks of each other. The rich and the poor live here, and it is uncertain which group will dominate the area over the next decade . . .
“Poor people abound in Uptown. The area has been a port of entry and home for transients ever since the first apartment hotels appeared in the 1920s. Conversion of single-family homes to rooming houses during World War II furthered the low-income population. They have been joined by Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, marielito Cubans, blacks (from America, the Caribbean, and Africa), Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Hmong from Laos, among others . . .
“Traditionally, the 46th Ward has been the scene of the closest fights in the city between regulars and independents. That tradition was continued in the 1987 aldermanic race, considered by many a class struggle as much as an election. Helen Shiller, co-owner of a graphics company and a close Slim Coleman ally, won that election by less than 500 votes over incumbent Jerome Orbach. Shiller became the first independent alderman elected from the 46th Ward. Previous ones came from the Regular Democratic Organization, although they at times showed maverick tendencies.

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Posted on August 3, 2010

The Beachwood Media Company Proudly Presents:

Poems by J.J. Tindall
Selected from The Beachwood Reporter
*
You have before you the greatest collection of American poetry published in the new millennium. By a Chicago author. For a Chicago website. If you like that sort of thing.
But then, maybe, truly, it is the best-in-class. After all, who else can claim Ode to a Hoover Bagless Cyclonic Action Quik-Broom with On-Board Tools (“Quiet machine, soft machine, I machine”) in the same breath as Five Boys On a Golf Course (“We who remained drove a van to Arlington, VA, for the military funeral, smoking joints and telling stories. The Navy bore pall for us all.”)?

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Posted on July 26, 2010

By The Beachwood Book Bike Bureau

“After all the drama last week over the fate of Gabriel Levinson’s Book Bike, cooler heads have prevailed and we now have a happy ending,” Marcus Gilmer reports at Chicagoist. “The Chicago Public Library, who’s been fighting a battle of their own lately, reached out to Gabriel and the two parties have now become partners which will allow Gabriel to continue doing what he’s been doing without having to pay the steep fees.”
A couple videos about Levinson and his bike.
1. “The whole purpose is just to give away books.”

–

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Posted on July 13, 2010

By The Beachwood Excerpt Affairs Desk

A young girl. A world war. And her fight to save her family from the Imperial Japanese Army. An excerpt from Olga’s War, the new memoir of Olga Zervoulakos Owens, by Beachwood contributor David Rutter.
–
Manila, 1942:
Olga was walking with her family to the market on Wednesday. Upon orders from the Japanese controlling all traffic, their path took them down Vito Cruz Boulevard. And then past the Rizal Memorial Coliseum, one of the jewels of the city. “It was a truly a lovely place,” Olga recalled. “They played baseball and basketball there in the open air and thousands came to see the games. There were these massive trees that ringed the Coliseum in a park.”
But as they walked down the sidewalk past the park that encased the Coliseum grounds in green, Olga peered into the near blackness under the massive acacia tree canopy. And then peered again, straining to see more clearly. Something was there under the tree.
And there. And there. And over there, another. And more.
And then she recognized what she was seeing. They were bodies. They had been strung up over the sturdiest branches of the old trees and been left to hang upside down under the limbs. The long ropes were taut around the legs, and the bodies swung in the breeze. To and fro. Gently, all the while, because the wind was but a whisper.

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Posted on July 7, 2010

By The Beachwood Booksellers Affairs Division

“Long before the advent of the megabookstore, there was a place of pilgrimage for readers and writers on North Michigan Avenue, presided over by Stuart Brent, who was not merely a merchant but literature’s self-appointed local guardian,” the Tribune reports.
“Mr. Brent, who opened his first store in 1946 and closed his last one half a century later, would periodically get up from behind a stack of publishers invoices on the round table that served as his desk to take a book from a customer’s hand and substitute another he thought would be a better read.
“Mr. Brent, 98, died Thursday at a hospital in Ashland, Wis., near his farm, said his daughter Susan Brent-Millner.”

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Posted on June 28, 2010

By Fanny Camargo

Hola!
My name is Fanny Camargo and I am the founder of The Spanglish Bookclub. I found your book club on Goodreads and I wanted to get in touch with you for a potential book club mixer I am organizing on Sunday July 18th
We are envisioning an outdoors book swap event hosted by different book clubs. Each club can have small booth with info about themselves and books they would like to swap.
We like to think of this as Chicago 1st annual Book Club Fest.

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Posted on June 14, 2010

By The Beachwood Bureau of Adding Value

The Sun-Times’s fine book editor, Teresa Budasi, offered a package of summer reading choices over the weekend, including the following 10 nonfiction titles. We’ll add value.
Book: Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century.
Author: Michael Hiltzik.
Amazon Product Description: “Yet the story of Hoover Dam has a darker side. Its construction was a gargantuan engineering feat achieved at great human cost, its progress marred by the abuse of a desperate labor force. The water and power it made available spurred the development of such great western metropolises as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and San Diego, but the vision of unlimited growth held dear by its designers and builders is fast turning into a mirage.”

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Posted on June 3, 2010

By David Rutter

On March 28, the Sun-Times published an excerpt of columnist Richard Roeper’s then-forthcoming book, Bet The House: How I Gambled Over a Grand a Day for 30 Days on Sports, Poker, and Games of Chance.
“I’ve been on a professional lucky streak for nearly my entire career – something I try to remember always,” Roeper wrote. “Sometimes I get irritated when people say, ‘Must be nice to watch movies for a living.” [I want] to sit down with these people and tell them about all the hours I put in doing behind-the-scenes work. I want to invite them to watch crappy movie after crappy movie in a dark screening room in the middle of the day. I’d like to explain to them the challenge isn’t writing A column, it’s writing a column every day, four or five times a week, for 20 years. I’d like to make them understand that between the column and the blog and the Twittering and the Facebooking, the book projects and the TV show I’m trying to put together, the meetings and the screenings and the appearances and the speeches and the guest shots on radio and TV, it feels like I’m never not working.
“And then I realize I should shut the f*ck up.”
When a columnist and his accomplice newspaper write this sort of self-referential claptrap, two things are immediately obvious from the reader-columnist transaction.
First, under no circumstances in this space time continuum is this writer ever going to “shut the f*ck up” or even “shut the fuck up.” Because that might require some period of quiet self-reflection and introspection which we all know is a waste.
Second, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Sun-Times for saving us from that awful word with the cleverly prophylactic “f*ck”, a collection of letters than essentially cannot be pronounced in any other way than “fuck.”
Let’s all have a group wink-wink, say-no-more moment of self-recognition here.
As a writer, Roeper is a cheap date who occasionally delivers, and I sincerely hope that cheap dates don’t take offense at being lumped in with Roeper. The thinking-to-drivel ratio on his Sun-Times work is about one in 10, which might be a function of being stretched too thin in The Roeper Media Empire. Thinking takes time. Glibness is not a counterweight to insight.

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Posted on May 21, 2010

By Steve Rhodes

I’m not opposed to fiction – I get it, it’s a world of imagination that can teach us “larger truths” – but the world of non-fiction is endlessly more fascinating because it’s actually true! Give or take whatever arguments we can have over interpretation, framing, theory, etc.
Just take a look at the winners announced today by The Society of Midland Authors in the non-fiction and biography categories of the society’s annual awards for Midwest authors, as well as the finalists: from the violent history of poker to eccentric evolutionists to the “Gambler King of Clark Street” to the civil war general who later worked as a Great Lakes engineer, the stories of our lives are far more mind-blowing – and meaningful – than anything fiction writers can dream up. Fiction writing is a craft – an art form – no doubt. But I’m still trying to get over the tales told by books like these.
ADULT NONFICTION
WINNER: James McManus, Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Author lives in Kenilworth, Illinois.)
Review excerpt, New York Times:
“This time around, instead of the poker-related murder trial that frames his earlier book, and his personal adventure, McManus undertakes the story of the game itself, as his subtitle promises. ‘Poker’ apparently derives from German pochen, meaning to beat or beat up or pulverize. Aggression is at the heart of the game, which has a rich history of violence. Every duffer knows that two pairs, aces and eights, is called ‘The Dead Man’s Hand’ because those were the cards Wild Bill Hickok was holding when shot from behind by an assassin named Crooked Nose Jack McCall.”

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Posted on April 28, 2010

1. Tyler Kepner Dirk Hayhurst
Prohibition Seminar – The Way We Drank
Tuesday, May 4, 2010 @ 7:00 p.m.
Those who did drink during Prohibition had no trouble finding what they wanted. The speakeasy changed American drinking habits, and it also permanently altered the nature of urban social life, particularly in relationships between men and women. Former New York Times public editor Dan Okrent and author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, discusses this exploration of America’s wet oases during the dry years.
Venue
Chicago History Museum
1601 N. Clark St.
Chicago, IL 60614
Presenter
Chicago History Museum
312-642-4600
Tickets
$10
$8 Members
3. George Will Men at Work Cubs quote.

Posted on April 27, 2010