Alabama-born Andre Williams migrated to Chicago with his parents only to be returned to the South when his mother died in 1943. Finding that comeback infelicitous, he made his way back to his steel-mill-worker father in the Windy City, which is where his troubles began—a brief
The outpouring of concern and aid for the victims of benighted Haiti’s most recent disaster is, I suppose, some measure of comfort for the victims who inhabit one of the poorest geographies on this planet. And it’s better than the rabid utterances of that heinous Christian clergyman Pat
Reading the New York Times editorial pages—Nobel laureate Paul Krugman specifically—one might get the idea that the ruling class (the speculators and the hoaxers, and the mandarins who help them rig the financial system) were being called out for their malicious indifference to the destruction they have caused.
There are, to be sure, still people for whom the textures, subtleties, and nuances of language are of significant if not vital concern. Regular declarations of the decline of all things civilized (occasionally even I have indulged in flagrant sophomoric declinism) may just be generational ululations in the face of,
Tom Piazza, who has written well about New Orleans (his NOLA-based novel, City of Refuge, was the runner-up in last year’s Tournament of Books), is a member of the writing team for The Wire creator David Simon’s imminent HBO series,Treme, set in the Big Easy.
Despite his early books’ preoccupation with vampiric themes (which seem to be all the rage), if you haven’t heard of or read Charlie Huston (The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death), its probably because he hasn’t had a movie made from one of his books. Huston,
Every year end I stew in my own vexation as we’re bombarded by various cultural gatekeepers’ lists of the top/best/sexiest/favorite/hottest/most important books of the year. The meaninglessness of this enterprise occasionally hits critical mass when some media genius becomes enamored with the—for lack
Thankfully, due to the efforts of people like historians Howard Zinn, Sean Willentz, Ray Raphael, and others, the historical revisionism that views American history from the bottom up—so-called people’s history—has escaped the constricting cloisters of the academy and found its way into people’s conversations. Evidence
Boston, which has variously proclaimed itself the Athens of America and The Hub of the Universe, counts in its history a number of events well known to non-residents, most of which have to do with crime: the Boston Massacre; the Boston Police Strike of 1919 and also the Great
I may have to amend my recent claim that I am sparing in the use of the superlative ‘amazing’ if I continue to discover books such as Andrew Zuckerman’s amazing Bird (Chronicle Books), a compendium of 200 color photographs of a variety of over 70 avian species. As I
