By Steve Rhodes

Oct. 27 – 28.
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: “Out of Tune,” in which rock critic Jim DeRogatis takes on Eric Clapton’s autobiography and Pattie Boyd’s Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me.
Normally I’d think this was a little late in coming, as these books have been discussed thoroughly before, but getting DeRogatis’s take is always interesting – even if he finds both books disappointing – because they probably are (Interior headline: “Guitar God, Boyd Both Fail To Deliver Any Deep Insight On Their Lives”).

Read More

Posted on October 29, 2007

By Kevin Davis

The third of a three-part excerpt from Kevin Davis’ Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago’s Cook County Public Defender’s Office.
– Part 1: Fun. That seemed like an odd way to describe defending a cop killer.
– Part 2: Oliver’s confession might save his life.
*
About 9:30 a.m. Placek and McBeth left the office to catch an elevator down to the main courthouse. They wheeled a television monitor and videotape player, along with a cart containing the case files, into the hallway outside the elevator bank. On the west side of the hallway was a picture window overlooking the old Cook County Jail and the newer Department of Corrections lockups that made up a vast campus of brick and stone buildings surrounded by coiled razor wire fencing. Beyond the jail complex was a view of Chicago’s sprawling West Side and the impoverished and crime-plagued neighborhoods from which many of Placek’s clients came. Along 26th Street were the mostly Mexican businesses, the supermercados, carnicerías and fruterias, clothing stores and shops that lead to an arch marking the Little Village neighborhood and gateway to the “Magnifico Mile,” a nickname for the Mexican version of the city’s opulent Magnificent Mile on North Michigan Avenue. Farther out were the smokestacks of the manufacturing plants and warehouses that helped drive Chicago’s blue-collar economy.
As Placek stepped out of the elevator and walked through the halls of the courthouse, people couldn’t help but look at her. She demanded attention, and her presence was as large as her self-described ego. She was heavy and walked with strained gait, slowed by her large frame and the deteriorating cartilage in her knees. She wheeled the case file cart past a bank of metal detectors where deputy sheriffs wearing latex gloves patted down visitors, barking orders, frisking for weapons and contraband, instructing them to take off their belts, hairpins, jewelry and shoes before entering. On the other side of the metal detectors, the men hiked up their drooping pants and looped their belts back on, their buckles clacking in a chorus. On a wall next to the snack shop, which reeked of cigarettes and the sweet smell of frying mini-donuts, were computer printouts with the daily court calls. The printouts were tacked in fifteen rows and were three pages deep. Defendants gathered at the wall to look for their courtroom assignments. Placek and McBeth continued to another set of elevators and went up to the sixth floor.

Read More

Posted on October 25, 2007

By Kevin Davis

The second of a three-part excerpt from Kevin Davis’ Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago’s Cook County Public Defender’s Office. Part 1 is here.
*
Ten minutes before Placek had to leave for court, Assistant Public Defender Francis Wolfe walked in to her office, flopped down in a beige tweed stuffed chair and slowly exhaled.
Placek looked sympathetically at Wolfe. “Hi, honey. What you got going today?”
Wolfe, who was seventy-two, was the oldest public defender in Cook County. A former commodity trader, he decided to get a law degree while in his sixties. This was his first job as a lawyer. Placek immediately took a liking to him, became his mentor and brought him along to assist on several cases during his training. Now they were close friends. Wolfe had been paying his dues in a misdemeanor court and was recently assigned to a bigger courtroom at 26th and California. He was wearing a tailored navy pinstripe suit and red bow tie, and looked like a white-haired Gregory Peck in his role as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.
“I’ve got a fraud and embezzlement case,” Wolfe said. “The guy is guilty as hell. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” He sighed in frustration.

Read More

Posted on October 24, 2007

By Kevin Davis

The first of a three-part excerpt from Kevin Davis’ Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago’s Cook County Public Defender’s Office.
*
“The odds,” Assistant Public Defender Marijane Placek said as she gathered her files for a morning court hearing, “are completely stacked up against us.”
It was just after nine on a brilliant blue Tuesday morning in late April 2003, unusually pleasant and warm for Chicago this early in spring. Outside the massive, gray stone Cook County courthouse at Twenty-sixth Street and California Avenue, a stream of government employees, cops, corrections officers, lawyers, social workers, investigators, jurors, witnesses, felons, petty crooks, drug addicts, gangbangers – the guilty and the innocent – all converged for another day in the administration of justice. Buses disgorged clusters of people out front, and at the corner near the Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits. Waves of others marched across California Avenue from the five-story parking garage, some stopping at the stainless steel paneled lunch truck for coffee and pastries.
“Everybody saw him do it,” Placek continued. She was telling me about her client Aloysius Oliver, a twenty-six-year-old unemployed ex-convict charged with fatally shooting an undercover Chicago police officer. “He did it in front of God, country, and four cops.” Soon after his arrest, Oliver gave a videotaped confession. It seemed as if the state couldn’t have asked for a better case. Placek couldn’t ask for a more difficult one. But she knew that in every case, all was never as it seemed.

Read More

Posted on October 23, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

October 20 – 21.
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: “What Lies Beneath: Paula Kamen examines the life, death and demons of her friend and fellow writer, the late Iris Chang.”
“Chang suffered from bipolar disorder,” reviewer Mark Athitakis writes, “which gave her the energy to survive a backbreaking book tour for The Chinese in America yet exacerbated her severe depression. And her background as the child of Chinese immigrants intensified the pressure to both succeed and assimilate into the American mainstream. (She ran for homecoming court at U. of I., an odd pursuit for a bookish J-school student.) Those issues, combined with her sensitivity to the gruesome details of her research – in the final years of her life she was working on a book about the Bataan Death March – took its toll. In some instances, she grew paranoid about being pursued by Japanese activists angry about her book The Rape of Nanking and believed that Newsweek magazine postponed an excerpt from that book under pressure from Japanese advertisers.

Read More

Posted on October 22, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

A (mostly) weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Parental Pleasure
Skip the articles on the war in the latest Vanity Fair – you should know all that by now – and head right for “Moms Gone Wild,” an examination of the mothers of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Prepare to be aggravated.
And skip the friggin’ “exclusive” Camelot photos pimped on the cover. Enough! Camelot was a media creation – kind of like Obamalot – and there’s nothing new to see here. Please, everyone, get over it.
Parental Figures
Actually, the most gripping story in Vanity Fair – the true must-read, I spoke too soon – is the story of Lou Pearlman, the creepy impresario behind the Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync whose “passion for boy bands was also a passion for boys.” Yes, it’s just what you think.
*
Also worthwhile: An excerpt (not available online) from Eric Clapton’s new autobiography, and a story about the conflict between Al Gore’s presidential run and Hillary Clinton’s Senate run in 2000.

Read More

Posted on October 18, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Oct. 13 – 14.
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: “About a Boy,” a review of Nick Hornby’s new Slam.
Other Reviews & News of Note: Books editor Teresa Budasi comes up with another interesting column, this time about Rosie O’Donnell’s Celebrity Detox. While chiding Rosie for her questionable childhood “memories,” Budasi also writes that “Rosie says she never set out to steal the show when she agreed to a one-year stint [on The View]. But she did steal it, and thank goodness.” Amen, sister!

Read More

Posted on October 16, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Oct. 6 – 7.
Publication: New York Review of Books
Cover: I don’t know, I’m reading it online.
Reviews and News of Note: Russell Baker takes on on Robert Novak’s The Prince of Darkness. Perhaps most fascinating is Baker’s description of Novak’s acknowledgement of how TV turned him into a right-wing ideologue out of convenience and professional advancement. Then there is the petty, ethically abhorrent Novak, rewarding and penalizing sources in print according to how well they do or do not cooperate with him. But there is a personal side revealed in the book as well. Baker writes:
“While dispensing rough justice to politicians who have displeased him, Novak does not spare himself from critical examination. His book periodically turns somber while he confesses his vices, none of them notably depraved. We learn about his drinking (once prodigious, now modest), his gambling (heavy betting on sports), his smoking (four packs a day when young, none since), and his failures at parenthood (‘so engrossed in my work that I had paid little attention to my children’).”

Read More

Posted on October 8, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Sept. 28 – 29.
Publication: New York Times
Cover: “Stanley, I Presume?”
Other Reviews & News of Note: I was struck by reading the first passage shortly after reading the second.
1. “The Shock Doctrine is [Naomi] Klein’s ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world. ‘Disaster capitalism,’ as she calls it, is a violent system that sometimes requires terror to do its job.”
2. “In the evenings, unexpected sights appear in this city, which less than two years ago seemed beyond saving and repair.
“Women stroll on sidewalks that did not exist last year. Teenagers cluster under newly installed street lights, chatting on cellphones. At a street corner, young men gather to race cars on a freshly paved road – a scene, considering that this is the capital of Chechnya, that feels out of place and from another time.

Read More

Posted on October 3, 2007

By Connie Nardini

The experience of reading Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is not what you would call a “cozy” read – not comfort food for the mind.
The 1962 novel is, on one hand, a challenge to one’s ability to solve puzzles and, on the other hand, one of the first postmodern novels that ask the reader to do all the work himself with the smokiest of hints from the author. It seems to use the elements of an old-fashioned term paper, including a forward, a commentary and an index which encircle a long poem called “Pale Fire.” From this, Nabokov creates a novel that doesn’t seem to have coherent plot – a story that contains a do-it-yourself kit.

Read More

Posted on October 1, 2007