March 9, 2010
Last year while shelving CDs at the library, I stumbled across a disc by the Boswell Sisters called That’s How the Rhythm Was Born. I had never heard of the Boswell Sisters before, but something about the song titles and the old photograph on the album cover enticed me to take a chance on the […]
March 7, 2010
Former Tribune writer Evan Osnos profiles Mayor Daley in the March 8, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. “I’d been interested in Daley since I lived in Chicago a decade ago . . . and, after moving to China, I started encountering him in Beijing more often than I saw most American pols. . . […]
March 6, 2010
Did you ever wonder how James Patterson is able to churn out so many bestsellers while you sit at your computer struggling to write even a simple sentence, much less produce something that will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams? The answer, America, is in the feature, James Patterson Inc., from The New York Times Magazine. […]
March 3, 2010
March is Women’s History Month “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” We’ve seen that clever quip on mugs, t-shirts, and posters, and it’s been used by news commentators, politicos, and pundits. But who said it first? Mae West wouldn’t be a bad guess. Gloria Steinem is another candidate. But here’s the truth: Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich used it in an […]
March 3, 2010
What do you do when the whole world wants you to stay a child forever? When your juvenile self is more real and lovable to everyone you meet than the adult you? Such was the real life plight of two very different women: Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Maureen McCormick, better known respectively as “Alice in […]
March 2, 2010
It has long been a fantasy of mine to go away for a weekend and do nothing but read. No commitments, no interruptions, just me and a book. So when an open weekend, frequent flyer miles, and an understanding husband presented itself, I jumped at the chance – an entire weekend alone in warm weather […]
February 28, 2010
William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well has been a great resource to writers around the world for over 30 years. Recently, he spoke to incoming international students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism about “certain principles of writing good English.” While his original audience included writers for whom English is a second or perhaps even third or fourth language, […]
February 26, 2010
It is hard to imagine a better day on which to celebrate the birth of Edward Gorey than this past Monday, February 22nd. Looking out the library windows one couldn’t help but think that the cold, gray, gloomy, windswept day with the black tree branches shrouded skeletally with fresh snow would have pleased Mr. Gorey […]
February 26, 2010
On February 26, 1932, he was born to poor Southern Baptist sharecroppers in the tiny town of Kingsland, Arkansas. In 1950, he was stationed in West Germany to eavesdrop on Soviet radio traffic for the U.S. Air Force. By 1956, he was perched atop the Billboard charts with his song “I Walk the Line” and well along the […]
February 25, 2010
In addition to a deeper shortlist than ever before, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize announces two new awards. One is the first-ever Graphic Novel Prize, making the LA Times Book Prize the first major book award in the United States to bestow this honor in a category that has for years included a rich […]
