By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Martin Luther King, who was by now leaning strongly toward bringing his movement north to Chicago, had his mind made up for him one sweltering summer night in Los Angeles. On August 11, 1965, a California highway patrolman pulled over a black man for what should have been a routine driving-while-intoxicated stop. But Watts, a northern-style ghetto set down among the palm trees of Southern California, responed by erupting in rioting . . .
The depth and breadth of the anger that set off the rioting struck him as a powerful argument for extending the civil rights movement to the rest of the country, and trying to improve the conditions of blacks in places like Watts.
. . .
The SCLC considered serveral large cities, including New York, for its historic journey north. But there were many compelling reasons for choosing Chicago. In terms of racial segregation, it was as bad as any major city, north or south. In 1959, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had called Chicago “the most residentially segregated large city in the nation.” The racial separation that the Jim Crow system preserved by law, Chicago had simply achieved through other means: racial steering by real estate brokers; racially restrictive covenants on house sales; and the ever-present threat of violence if established racial boundaries were crossed . . . To King, Chicago was “the Birmingham of the North.”

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Posted on January 16, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup from Shipley’s nightstand.
Hard Foul
A Rhode Island man has received a $400,000 settlement because of a faulty penile implant he received. His erection lasted TEN YEARS. In the January issue of Harper’s.
Tent Revival
Interesting sidenote: The man hasn’t purchased sweatpants for a decade.
Anticlimactic
The rest of the January Harper’s ain’t bad either. Recommended: “The Swim Team” by Miranda July and “Catching Out: Travels in an Open Boxcar” by William T. Vollmann.
Fine Wines
The latest Wine Spectator gives props to the 100 best wines of 2006. The big winner? Chateau Leoville Barton St.-Julien ’03 ($75 a bottle). Second place goes to Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon Washington ’03 ($85); third goes to Casanova Di Neri Brunello di Montalcino Tetuta Nuova ’01 ($70). My favorite, Fat Bastard Sparkling ’06, didn’t make the list.

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Posted on January 4, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup from Shipley’s nightstand.
Grading on a Curve
Entertainment Weekly, also known as ew!, averaged the votes of a collective noun of movie critics (a thumb of critics? A balcony of critics? A Goober of critics?) in its December 29th double-issue and the following movies received A-minuses: The Queen, Letters From Iwo Jima, The Departed, United 93, Borat, and Volver. You know, there’s really no pleasing Entertainment Weekly.
Congratulations, You
Time‘s year-end issue congratulated you for being Person of the Year. Congratulations! They looked past the fact that you’re socially retarded and made Dancing With The Stars a hit. I mean, let’s face it: You suck! You haven’t had a date with another country in three years (those booty calls with England don’t count) and you can’t even name your congressman. Well done! Time is impressed! Hit ’em up for dinner and a free subscription while they’re still infatuated.

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Posted on December 26, 2006

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup from Shipley’s nightstand.
Crazy Profits
According to the December 9th issue of Science News, medications widely prescribed to treat schizophrenia cost hundreds of dollars more each month than older, less-popular medication that provides similar results. “The bottom line is that the old drug is substantially less expensive and no less effective than the new drugs are,” Yale psychiatrist Robert Rosenheck tells the magazine. Just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean the drug companies aren’t out to get you.
The Poop on Face Goop
The January issue of Consumer Reports highlights tests the best wrinkle creams on the market. The verdict? They don’t do much. The wrinkle creams that did negligibly better than their face goop counterparts include Olay Regenerist, Lancome Paris Renergie, and Retin-Ox+. Le Coppertone was not tested, but we sense it would have compared favorably.

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Posted on December 22, 2006

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup of what’s on Shipley’s periodical table.
Home Office
According to the December issue of Psychology Today, employees do best when they work from home. The magazine cites a study from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York that found that stay-at-home workers who are connected to the office by phone or Internet feel more trusted and less drained. They also stay longer at their jobs then commuters. And they spend more time surfing for pictures of Angelina Jolie, because she is freakin’ hot.

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Posted on December 14, 2006

By Jonathan Shipley

A roundup.
I’m Empirically Bankrupt. So Are You . . .
In the December issue of Scientific American, there is a short discussion on a study done by political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University (home of the Mighty Brooks), who has been testing whether voters vote based on the pros and cons of arguments (Environmentalist vs. Hater of All Living Things) or emotions (Love vs. Lust), rationalizing the way they voted afterwards. Guess what? “The enlightenment model of dispassionate reason as the duty of citizenship is empirically bankrupt,” he concludes. I guess that explains the tingly feeling I get from Barack Obama.
Can You Stop Writing for Just One Second?
John Updike has a story in the December issue of Harper’s titled “Kinderscenen.” Holy cow, Updike, you write a lot! I wonder what your day is like. Wake up, write for 20 hours, eat porridge, eye doctor’s appointment, write, masturbate, sleep. How many novels have you written? 430? How many short stories? 128,307? How many essays, critiques, haiku poetry? Dude, stop already! If each sentence you’ve written was a mile and each word a spaceship, there’d be a lot of us flying out in space. And space is a scary place for just regular readers like me. Haven’t you seen, Mr. Updike, Mission to Mars and the horrible toll space played on Tim Robbins?

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Posted on December 9, 2006

By The Beachwood Booklist Affairs Desk

Featured “Christmas Super Sale” books from the Human Events Book Service.
1. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization/Thomas Woods Jr./$9.95
2. How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter/Ann Coulter/$9.95
3. The Vast Left Wing Consipracy/Byron York/$9.95
4. The Truth About Hillary/Edward Klein/$9.95
5. Radical Islam’s Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law/Paul Marshall,ed./$9.95

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Posted on December 4, 2006

By ML Van Valkenburgh

A gift guide of (almost-all) 2006 releases as determined by the Beachwood Book Laboratory, in various categories to fit your needs.
History
Conspiracy in the Streets: The Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Eight
Editor, Jon Weiner, Afterword by Tom Hayden, Ill. by Jules Feiffer
New Press
$16.95
If you’re not familiar with the Chicago Seven/Eight – one defendant, Black Panther Bobby Seale, had charges dropped when he was indicted on other charges, though not before the judge had him bound to his seat and gagged because he insisted on continuing to ask for his own lawyer or the right to represent himself – you should be. The United States of America put on trial a veritable Who’s Who of Sixties activists, including those from the Yippie movement (Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin) and the politically radical group the MOBE (Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden), and two young Ph. D students (John Froines and Lee Weiner), on charges of planning and inciting to riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The defendants lampooned the judge, the judge made a mockery of the justice system, and the entire spectacle was like a circus sideshow. This book, which mainly contains highlights from the 20,000-page trial testimony, is at once sobering and absurd, and you can’t help but compare the antics and action of the defendants to the tame activists of today, who have more than enough reason to be outraged.
Hip Novel
Wolf Boy
Evan Kuhlman
Shaye Arehart Books
$23.00
Kuhlman’s debut novel is beautifully transcendant. A comi-tragedy played out both within a family that’s falling apart and a friendship that’s cementing itself into a creative duo ready to take on everything from the emergence of adolescence to death itself, Kuhlman’s novel includes perfectly scripted and cleanly drawn comics to help the story open its wings and fly. Points to Kuhlman for (a) setting it in Downstate Illinois with all the depressing expertise that entails and (b) setting it in 1993, and actually getting his pop culture right.

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Posted on November 28, 2006

By ML Van Valkenburgh

1. Ballad of the Confessor/William Zink.
Of course you’ve never heard of it. But that doesn’t make it any less of a masterpiece. The weight of the world is on the shoulders of the working man. Being a working man doesn’t mean you’re not also a thinking man. The weight of the world is crushing the soul of our thinking, working, protaganist. We can relate.

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Posted on November 27, 2006

By The Beachwood Cultural Affairs Desk

“Most customers at the Anthropologie store in SoHo come for the delicately woven knits and the ultra-feminine floral dresses. But these days at least some are coming for the books.
“Last Sunday the merchandise and books were coordinated with near-perfect precision. Resting beside a black sweater ($68) and a jet-black skirt with orange embellishments ($118) were copies of Annie Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life: 1990 – 2005, big and black and gleaming, for $75. A pop-up book called One Red Dot echoed a display of polka-dotted canvas sneakers, while another title, The Persistence of Yellow, perfectly matched a strategically positioned yellow knit sweater.
“Books are turning up in the oddest places these days.”
– “Selling a Little Literature to Go With Your Lifestyle,” New York Times front page, November 2
A partial list of books found on a first-floor table at the Urban Outfitters on Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park, until our correspondent suddenly suffered shortness of breath and ran out of the store screaming.
1. Illustrations Now!/Julius Wiedmann
2. An Inconvenient Truth/Al Gore
3. Body Type/Ina Saltz
4. Icons of Fashion: The 20th Century (Prestel’s Icons)/Gerda Buxbaum
5. 350 Best Sex Positions (or Sex Tips, we’re not sure, possibly by the editors of Cosmo, who apparently couldn’t come up with 365)

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Posted on November 8, 2006