By The Society of Midland Authors

PRESS RELEASE
SOCIETY OF MIDLAND AUTHORS ANNOUNCES AWARDS
The Society of Midland Authors announces the winners of its annual awards. The society will hold its annual banquet and awards presentation May 13 at the Hotel InterContinental in Chicago, emceed by Victoria Lautman.
CHICAGO-AREA AUTHORS HONORED: The winners include one Chicago-area resident, Judith Testa of St. Charles, who wrote the top biography, Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber. Finalists include Tony Romano of Glen Ellyn, who teaches at Fremd High School in Palatine; Marlene Targ Brill of Wilmette; and Ann Hagedorn, who began writing Savage Peace while she was living in Chicago. In addition, Myrna Petlicki of Skokie will receive the James Friend Memorial Award for Criticism at the banquet.
The following are the winners and finalists for books by Midwest authors published in 2007.
ADULT FICTION
WINNER
Matthew Eck, “The Farther Shore, Milkweed Editions
(Author’s hometown: Kansas City, Mo.)
FINALISTS
Tony Romano, When the World Was Young, HarperCollins
(Author’s hometown: Glen Ellyn, Ill.)
Benjamin Percy, Refresh, Refresh: Stories, Graywolf Press
(Author’s hometown: Stevens Point, Wis.; formerly of Milwaukee)
Brock Clarke, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, Algonquin Books (Author’s hometown: Cincinnati, Ohio)
ADULT NONFICTION
WINNER
Patricia Hampl, The Florist’s Daughter, Harcourt
(Author’s hometown: Minneapolis, Minn.)
FINALISTS
Barbara Oakley, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend
(Author’s hometown: Rochester, Mich.; formerly Port Townsend and Seattle, Wash.)
Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919, Simon & Schuster
(Author’s hometown: Ripley, Ohio; formerly of Chicago and Dayton, Ohio)

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Posted on April 30, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“How you feel about Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon – and the Journey of a Generation may depend on how you respond to Weller’s dedication, which reads: ‘To the women of the 1960s generation. (Were we not the best?)’ If that’s the sort of thing that gets you all hepped up to pour a glass of chardonnay and order some gauzy embroidered tunics and Clarks sandals from the Soft Surroundings catalog, then you go, girl! If, on the other hand, the nakedly self-congratulatory quality of that dedication makes you want to play a record by the Slits or Hole or Sleater-Kinney, really loud, you may be in a different category, or just a different age group – not the ‘best’ one,” Stephanie Zacharek writes in the New York Times
I’ll take loud. Really loud. And I’m a fan of the 60s.
Still, Zacharek finds much of value in this book, though to my eyes it looks like the value has everything to do with emerging songwriting talent and nothing to do with anything generational. In fact, Zacharek argues that of the three, only Carole King really changed the world.

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Posted on April 28, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Former Chicagoan Liz Phair penned a review in the New York Times on Sunday of Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, by indie rock hero Dean Wareham.
It’s a mess – Phair’s review, that is. We’ll look elsewhere to get a sense of Wareham’s book.
Phair’s opening paragraph starts with a highly questionable interpretation of a Freddie Mercury quote and ends by telling us that (while reading the book, apparently) “Dominick Dunne would make sure his seat was saved before excusing himself to use the restroom.”
Or, Dunne could take the book with him.
Let’s take a quick run through the rest of Phair’s effort.

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Posted on April 10, 2008

By Daniel Strauss and Steve Rhodes

Meet Janie Fredell. From the ultra-conservative and ultra-religious community of Colorado Springs, she arrived at Harvard University wide-eyed. “From the start,” the New York Times Sunday Magazine reports, “she was awed by the diversity of the place, by the intensity, by the constant buzz of ideas.” Except for one: sex.
Like all Harvard freshmen, she was educated in safe-sex practices, including familiarizing herself with a pamphlet called “Empowering You” that taught newbies to”put the condom on before the penis touches the vagina, mouth, or anus . . . Use a new condom if you want to have sex again or if you want to have a different type of sex.”
Janie was having none of it. She founded an abstinence group called True Love Revolution and landed on the cover of the Times magazine – because the media loves abstinence stories and celibacy pledges and extrapolating large themes from the actions of small number of sheltered 18-year-olds, and this one filled this year’s quota nicely.

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Posted on April 8, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics,” Michiko Kakutani writes in “The Bricklayer’s Sons: The Family That Spawned 9/11.”
“It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”

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Posted on April 3, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

An occasional look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Noodle Head
“At Noodle Bar, a junior line cook had been cooking chicken for family meal – lunch for the staff – and although he had to cook something like seventy-five chicken pieces and the stoves were mostly empty, he’d been cooking them in only two pans, which meant that he was wasting time he could have spent helping to prep for dinner,” Larissa MacFarquhar writes in her incisive profile of neurotic restaurateur David Chang in the New Yorker.
“Also, he was cooking with tongs, which was bad technique, it ripped the food apart, it was how you cooked at T.G.I. Friday’s – he should have been using a spoon or a spatula. Cooking with tongs showed disrespect for the chicken, disrespect for family meal, and, by extension, disrespect for the entire restaurant.
“But the guy cooking family meal was just the beginning of it. Walking down the line, Chang had spotted another cook cutting fish cake into slices that were totally uneven and looked like hell. Someone else was handling ice-cream cones with her bare hands, touching the end that wasn’t covered in paper.
“None of these mistakes was egregious in itself, but all of them together made Change feel that Noodle Bar’s kitchen was degenerating into decadence and anarchy. He had screamed and yelled until a friend showed up and dragged him out of the restaurant, and his head still hurt nearly twenty-four hours later.”

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Posted on March 26, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“In 2003, Colby Buzzell, then twenty-six, was living in a small room in a renovated Victorian house in the Richmond district of San Francisco, doing data entry for financial companies,” Michael Massing writes in The New York Review of Books. “Raised in the suburbs of the Bay Area, Buzzell had hated high school and, deciding against college, ended up in a series of low-paying jobs – flower deliverer, valet parker, bike messenger, busboy, carpet cutter, car washer. Data entry paid somewhat better – about $12 an hour – but even so he was barely able to get by. At one point, he ran into an old friend who had joined the Marines, and, in his telling, military life sounded like one big frat party, but with weapons and paychecks. After nearly a year of feeling stuck, Buzzell decided to visit an Army recruiter. He describes his state of mind in My War: Killing Time in Iraq, an uproarious account of his life in the military:

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Posted on March 24, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“No matter how shiny and safe a city gets, no matter how high its housing prices climb, how fast its crime rates fall and how many of its corner stores are turned into buzz-before-entering boutiques dedicated to clothing the ‘urban baby’ or are replaced by franchised coffee shops with WiFi hot spots for laptop-toting Beat poets, there is one sort of room at the city’s very core whose design schemes rarely shift upscale and whose typical occupants – be they real or fictional – resist much gentrification of the soul, let alone beautification of the hair,” Walter Kirn writes in the New York Times in his review of Richard Price’s Lush Life.
“Sometimes the hands move slowly, sometimes swiftly, but when they’re controlled by a serious storyteller, they always tell the same time: too little, too late. That’s the lesson of these ugly pens. A case may be cracked and the motives behind it exposed, but the greater mysteries always go unsolved: what good are answers when what’s done is done and something just like it, or worse, will happen tomorrow?”
Is it really possible for this book to be as well-written and seductive as its review?

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Posted on March 17, 2008

By Connie Nardini

Who knew? Iceland is hot! At least it is according to one American, author Bill Holm, who has spent many summers there when he is not teaching English at a rural branch of the University of Minnesota. He fell in love with the island when he first brought a group of students there on a field trip. Being from heavily Scandinavian Minnesota, he already had the bona fides of coming from Icelandic stock. What he found was a place at once beautiful, mysterious and unique.

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Posted on March 5, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“Wikipedia is just an incredible thing,” Nicholson Baker writes in a New York Review of Books review of John Broughton’s Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
“It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies – and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, ‘Diogenes of Sinope,’ or ‘turnip,’ or ‘Crazy Eddie,’ or ‘Bagoas,’ or ‘quadratic formula,’ or ‘Bristol Beaufighter,’ or ‘squeegee,’ or ‘Sanford B. Dole,’ and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.”

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Posted on March 4, 2008