By The Beachwood Outfit Affairs Desk

Nicely timed to the approaching Family Secrets trial, former Tony Spilotro associate Frank Cullotta has spilled his story to Las Vegas author Dennis N. Griffin in a new memoir, Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness.
The book is a raw retelling of Cullotta’s life of crime that takes us inside Tony Spilotro’s Hole in the Wall Gang and another view of many of the events memorialized in Casino, in which Cullotta was renamed Frankie Marino, played by Frank Vincent.
Cullotta, who spoke to author Nicholas Pileggi for the Casino book that preceded the movie, was a technical adviser on the film and re-created on celluloid the bumbling murder of Jerry Lisner, who simply refused to die no matter how many bullets Cullotta put in his head, and instead had to be chased through his Las Vegas home, endure an attempted strangling, and eventually thrown into a swimming pool where he sank to the bottom.
Pileggi writes the forward for Cullotta, opening with the sentence: “Frank Cullotta is the real thing.”

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Posted on June 15, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

A review of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Meet Mrs. R. Kelly
R. Kelly’s estranged wife Andrea speaks to Chicago’s very own Natalie Moore in the June issue of Essence. Andrea pretty much skirts around the central issue – her husband’s alleged underage philandering – as she stays loyal to the man she is divorcing and exhibits no sympathy to the alleged victims or their families. The key passage is this one:
“When asked, ‘Do you believe the allegations about your husband?’ she responds without hesitation that she absolutely does not, suggesting it’s all a lie and that her husband is not the man on the tape. ‘C’mon. Who would believe all that? That’s why they call them allegations,’ she says.
“But did she see the tape?

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Posted on June 12, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

June 9-10.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Lincoln, Reagan, and Einstein above the cover line “Legacies.” Better choice would have been “Who Doesn’t Belong?”
For multiple reviews, which we will address below.

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Posted on June 11, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

June 2-3.
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: Somewhat nonsensical but not entirely aesthetically unappealing art attached to Publisher John Cruickshank’s review of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. I’m generally uninterested in reviews and articles by the bosses, whose only qualification for writing them is usually that they are the bosess. Jeff Johnson’s review of Crystal Zevon’s I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon also starts on the section front.

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Posted on June 6, 2007

By Meghan Van Leuwen

News from Chicago’s academic presses, and other intellectual developments.
1. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Off the Presses
* Impotence: A Cultural History. By Angus McLaren.
* Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature. Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. By Robert Applebaum.
* Wannabes, Goths, and Christians : The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status.. By Amy C. Wilkins.
* Chicago’s Urban Nature: A Guide to the City’s Architecture + Landscape. By Sally A. Kitt Chappell.

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Posted on June 1, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

May 26-27.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Sara Peretsky sits on a table, for a review by Samuel G. Freedman of her latest, Writing in an Age of Silence. Didn’t read the review.
Other News and Reviews of Note: The Sun Farmer: The Story of a Shocking Accident, a Medical Miracle, and a Family’s Life-and-Death Decision. The Tribune headline: “What Price Life? This tale of injured Illinois farmer raises questions about science and ethics.” Between that and the exceedingly long book title, I sense I’m being given a really hard sell about a book that doesn’t live up to its billing.

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Posted on May 30, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Our weekly review of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Amiable Dunce
I just can’t get past the fact that even while he was president, Ronald Reagan called Nancy “Mommie.” I mean how creepy is that? He did so in writing too, according to Nicholas Lemann’s account in this week’s New Yorker of The Reagan Diaries. In conjunction with a dip into The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Lemann offers a fairly rich portrait of someone who is utterly and undeniably an inscrutable simpleton.
ALSO: New Yorker editor David Remnick’s devastating piece on how the Six-Day War shaped Israel’s political culture is a stiff dose of reality to those whose sympathies lie with the tiny Jewish nation, the Palestinians’ horrific blunders notwithstanding.

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Posted on May 25, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

May 20-21.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Nondescript photo that will mean nothing to readers promoting the review of When the World Was Young, in which “Fremd High School teacher Tony Romano offers a vivid, evocative tale of kinship and conflict in 1950s Chicago.”
Not a totally terrible choice for a cover, but something more than an author photo, please.

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Posted on May 22, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

A review of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Slump City
The recent disappointing run of The New Yorker continues with a May 14 issue with little to recommend. Elizabeth Kolbert’s story about the new supercollider under construction outside Geneva reads with an awful familiarity. I wasn’t moved to read about Richard Branson’s biofuels kick. I started the piece about a renowned maker of guitars as well as the one about an archeological find of possibly the world’s first “computer”; didn’t finish either. A Ken Auletta piece about Wall Street Journal consumer technology reporter Walt Mossberg was interesting. The cultural criticism was dull. What’s going on, New Yorker? Worst run in memory.

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Posted on May 16, 2007

By Meghan Van Leuwen

News from Chicago’s academic presses.
1. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Off the Presses
* Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City: Mary Pattillo
* When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina: W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston
* Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country: Albert Borgmann

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Posted on May 11, 2007