Chicago - A message from the station manager

By The Beachwood Relevant Books Affairs Desk
A few excerpts from Christopher Shaw’s Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games, and then an Olympic bookshelf.

Gleaned from Shaw: It’s always about real estate. There is always overspending. The pitch is always about your city being considered “world-class.” The promised jobs, tourism and legacy rarely materialize.

“The IOC and the local Games organizers were selling dreams, not facts. Games critics – academics and investigative journalists – labored mightily to provide a solid base of countervailing facts and figures but were simply incapable of disconnecting the Olympic dreams in the minds of most of the citizenry from Olympic realities on the ground. Much of the public simply didn’t seem to care that facts didn’t match the glowing expectations and promises. It was simply surreal, as if there were two parallel Olympic worlds that never coincided. Indeed, there were very different worlds, not in the sense of geography, but rather as rhetorical domains: The dominant one belonged to the IOC and its coterie of camp followers, the bid cities’ Games organizers, a compliant media, politicians of all stripes and, not least, the special business interests with the most to gain. In due course, the latter would literally own terrain, but to get there they needed to piggyback on the IOC’s ownership of something more fundamental: the ‘frame’.”

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Posted on April 23, 2009

Drop Everything And Read!

By Open Books
When was the last time you were able to sit down for more than a couple of minutes to enjoy a good book?
Open Books, Chicago’s non-profit literacy organization, wants to remind you of the joy of reading and will open its doors on Monday, April 13th to observe . . .
National Drop Everything and Read Day

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Posted on April 3, 2009

Connie’s Corner: Diary of a Bad Year

By Connie Nardini

Have you ever had a rich-looking three-layered chocolate cake and tried to decide how best to attack it? Should you eat one layer at a time? Or skip to the frosting, ignoring layerism? Reading J.M. Coetzee’s 2007 novel Diary Of a Bad Year, presents the same problems. Each page is in three layers.

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Posted on March 30, 2009

Connie’s Corner: So Long, See You Tomorrow

By Connie Nardini

To go through the door of memory, you must shrink like Alice in Wonderland; the door is tall and slotted – some light seems to filter in through the cracks. Because you can only see partly, can memory of what happened in your childhood be trusted?
William Maxwell says in his 1980 American Book Award-winning novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, “In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.” Even so, his narrator tries to again become the small boy whose world could not return to the normality of tomorrow after being visited by violence and death.
The narrator, whom I’ll call William (because he is unnamed in the novel), first meets death in rural 1920s Illinois when his mother dies while giving birth to his younger brother when he was 10 years old. He goes through the first door then: “I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune that anyone else, and that I had inadvertently walked through a door I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave. Actually, it was the other way around; I hadn’t gone anywhere and nothing was changed, as far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.”

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Posted on February 2, 2009

White House Crime Scene!

By ZATZ Publishing

ZATZ Publishing today announced the publication of an Open Letter to President-elect Barack Obama on the White House email controversy: Please treat the White House computers like crime scene evidence.
Authored by David Gewirtz, ZATZ Editor-in-Chief and the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone?, this important Open Letter makes the case that when Mr. Obama and his team enter the White House on January 20, they will be walking into an active crime scene – and they need to treat it as such.

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Posted on January 7, 2009

The 12 Books of Christmas

By M L  Van Valkenburgh

1. Best Book by a First-Time Author
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
David Wroblewski
HarperCollins
$25.95
The haunting tale of young Edgar Sawtelle, born mute but getting by on his family’s farm where “Sawtelle Dogs” are born, raised, and trained, is a masterpiece. Reminiscent of Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River in its gentle telling, it grips you without spectacle from page one and keeps your attention through good times, tragedy, murder, and revenge. Especially beautiful are the scenes where Edgar goes to live in the woods with a lively young pack of dogs. A perfect reminder of how man’s best friend can be the most comforting thing when you’ve lost everything.

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Posted on December 16, 2008

Connie’s Corner: The Master Bedroom

By Connie Nardini

“It’s not a sign. Kate refused to let it be a sign.”
Kate Flynn, the opening character in Tessa Hadley’s 2008 novel The Master Bedroom, was involved in a auto accident at the end of a long and frustrating drive. And it seemed to contain a sign – “In the dim light something fell from the sky; at first Kate thought it was a bundle of dirty washing wrapped in a sheet.” But it turned out to be a swan that bounced off a truck and hit a car in front of Kate. After the ensuing pile-up, no one was really found to be hurt but everyone involved was confused and upset. The Swan from the Sky drew a long trail of consequences behind it that seem very believable and ordinary, but who can tell a real omen from a fake one? Should omens come “wrapped in a dirty sheet?”

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Posted on December 15, 2008

Blago Books

By The Beachwood Blago Books Affairs Desk

Unless Rod Blagojevich has a sudden moment of sanity and confesses, it will probably be at least a year – and probably two – before he actually sees the inside of a prison cell. Nonetheless, we here at the Beachwood Blago Books Affairs Desk would like to offer up some jailhouse reading for the gov.
1. The Man Who Emptied Death Row: Governor George Ryan and the Politics of Crime. By James Merriner.
At least Ryan emptied Death Row and kept the wheels of government turning. Your clumsy schemes, Mr. Blagojevich, are a disgrace to corrupt politicians everywhere. In prison, you’ll be Ryan’s bitch.

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Posted on December 9, 2008

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