As an expatriate Chicagoan living in benighted eastern Massachusetts, I can attest to the geographical affliction prevalent in these and other parts of the East Coast that are apparently blind and ignorant of the United States west of Philadelphia—this year being an exception given the importance of funny sounding
I was searching for video of one of my last visits to Chicago’s Grant Park; that trip took place in August 1968, when Sen. Eugene McCarthy walked across the street from the Conrad Hilton Hotel and addressed the gathered crowd as “the United States government-in-exile.” Though I
Though he is the author of more than 20 worthy tomes that range over a broad literary landscape—novels, essays, biographies, histories—eagle-eyed cinephile DavidThomson is likely best known for a number of editions of the incomparable and valuable A Biographical Dictionary of Film and recently The New Biographical
Given the titans residing in the pantheon of aphorists—Oscar Wilde, Karl Kraus, G.K. Chesterton, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce—it takes a writer of high self-regard or no sense of history to attempt a book of aphorisms. Or like poet, editor, musician, and Scotsman
The decision by the Christian Science Monitor to no longer print a hard-copy version got me to thinking about my reading habits vis-à-vis that great American news appliance, the daily newspaper—and I was pushed into a state of befuddlement, realizing I had not picked up a
In the end, it is difficult to view perennial Countdown “Worst Person in the World” candidate and Fox Network blabbermouth Bill O’Reilly as anything other than a blustering clown with a deep streak of the bully in him. Why then, you ask, have I engaged in the selfless service
[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] Having grown up in Chicago I had the great good fortune to be introduced to Studs Terkel’s work early on—as well as the other Chicago wonders, all hidden in plain sight from the rest of America—Mike Royko, Ernie Banks, Curtis Mayfield, Sid McCoy,
The venerable and imaginative Yale University Press, which publishes a cornucopia of wonderful titles each year, including many groundbreaking art tomes (or so-called “coffee-table books”), has commissioned a series of monographs under the rubric Icons of America, of which—to give you a sense of its parameters—King’
Controversial British photographer and Magnum member Martin Parr, who was once derided by Magnum founder and photographic titan Henri Cartier-Bresson as “from another planet,” is also known as a collector and historian of photography books—he numbers his collection at around 7,000 volumes—hence the two volumes of
I don’t know about others (though the common default explanation is some variation of attention deficit) but my reading habits have seemingly transformed into something unrecognizable to the Me of just a few years ago—perhaps even before the post-millennial chattering class preoccupation with announcing and sifting through
