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Monday, April 14,2008
The Hidden Pleasures of Permaculture in the Holy City of . . .
(Holy City Press), by Olde Godsil
“Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas” is a Beat poet way of describing Milwaukee. For social activist/professional roofer/part-time poet Jim Godsil, Milwaukee is a Promised Land of potential, a shining city on the bluffs above Lake Michigan. In his latest chapbook he dreams of the once-reviled Milwaukee . . .
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Wednesday, April 9,2008
Brady Street Lives
Book Preview
Brady Street has a well-established reputation as one of Milwaukee’s most exciting and diverse neighborhoods, and one that deserves respect for its resilience to great industrial, social, economic and demographic changes. A new book by Frank Alioto, a Milwaukee fire captain and columnist for the neighborhood newsletter Brady Street News, offers an engaging visual survey of the area from the mid-19th century to today.
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Monday, April 7,2008
Seduction of the Innocent?
When comic books scared America
One way of looking at the history of U.S. popular culture is to see it as periodic eruptions of condemnation of what young people—or others of “limited sophistication”—like to see, hear, read and do. Such an episode is described in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), David Hajdu’s splendid account of America’s “comic-book scare” of the early 1950s.
It is weird—to use one of comic books’ favorite words—to read about events that one has experienced. I grew up on 10-cent comic books . . .
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Monday, April 7,2008
Leopoldo Mendez: Revolutionary Art and the Mexican Print
(University of Texas Press), by Deborah Caplow
Diego Rivera was the star of the highly political Mexican art that emerged during the 1920 and ’30s, but the visual movements that arose in the country at the time produced other talents. Deborah Caplow chronicles the career of one such artist, Leopoldo Mendez (1902-1969), and shows many examples of his work. Mendez
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Wednesday, April 2,2008
Hour of the Vampire
Spreading the virtual virus
In a market saturated with vampire stories, it’s refreshing to hear a new and unique voice in the genre. John Marks, whose prior novels have garnered critical acclaim, has crafted a clever adaptation of Bram Stoker’s immortal Dracula with his latest book, Fangland (Penguin). The story takes place partly in post-9/11 New York City, where we meet the eclectic crew of “The Hour,” a weekly news broadcast modeled after “60 Minutes.” Here we are introduced to the heroine, Evangeline Harker, an up-and-coming associate producer from Texas who worked her way up the ladder by using her allure and practical nature. Harker is offered an opportunity to travel to Romania to meet an Eastern European crime lord named Ion Torgu. Despite resistance from her new fianc, Robert, and several co-workers, as well as her own fears, Harker sees this as a career-enhancing assignment that she must take.
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Wednesday, April 2,2008
A Multitude of Mysteries
Book Previews
This week, mystery lingers in the air like the teasing portents of spring. A host of wellestablished writers stop at Mystery One Bookstore to sign and read excerpts from their newest works. Chicago writer Steven Sidor has authored a new thriller, titled The Mirror’s Edge, that follows a journalist’s obsessive course to track the abductor of a pair of toddler twins.
The investigation leads to the world of the supernatural and occult, taking sharp and grisly turns and . . .
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Friday, March 28,2008
All Music Guide: Classic Rock (Backbeat)
edited by Chris Woodstra, John Bush and Stephen Thomas Erlewine
As a late boomer, I strained to read the tiny type of the 1,000 album reviews crammed into the Classic Rock guide. An early boomer might go blind. But with magnifying glass in hand, the effort of reading this handbook on the recent past is worthwhile.
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Wednesday, March 26,2008
Their Satanic Majesties Novel
Stoned in the ’60s
Zachary Lazar’s Sway: A Novel (Little, Brown) is a guide to self-involved characters slopping around in the sexual mud and quicksand of the ’60s. All of the characters are members of The Rolling Stones or were associated with them as the 1960s counterculture went the wrong way.
Many had to scream “Gimme shelter!” for real. To reference another Stones song, there had been too much sympathy for the devil. The ’60s ran out of brilliant ideas midway through, and the end of it all is what this novel is about, with the Stones as cultural vortex.
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Wednesday, March 26,2008
Fantastic Fiction
Book Preview
Whether exploring the constructs of an overwrought imagination or the disorienting results of an alien visitation, the fantastical collides with the mundane in the works of two young writers coming to Milwaukee this week. View From the Seventh Layer is a new collection of solemn and often beautiful short stories by award-winning writer Kevin Brockmeier. Like much of his work, it straddles the boundary between fantasy and literary fiction . . .
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Wednesday, March 26,2008
When Asia Was the World
(Da Capo), by Stewart Gordon
During the Middle Ages, Western Europe was a backwater. In When Asia Was the World, University of Michigan scholar Stewart Gordon explores the fertile cultural interchange that crisscrossed the vast continent along a network of seaports and caravansaries, Buddhist monasteries and Islamic garrisons, through the accounts of a slender handful of Chinese, Arab and Jewish travelers. Stewart is a compelling writer, yet the book is too short to do his topic justice.
Read more...Elections 2008
Obama seeks greater rein on financial institutions
(AP)
AP - President Barack Obama says he wants Congress to pass legislation giving the government greater regulatory authority over financial institutions like American International Group.
Sources: Pentagon to stop forced tour extension
(AP)
AP - The Army will substantially reduce use of the unpopular practice of holding troops beyond their enlistment dates and will pay $500 to those still forced to stay in the service, defense and congressional officials said Wednesday.
AIG head shares US anger of bonuses but backs them
(AP)
AP - The chief executive officer of failed insurance conglomerate AIG acknowledged Wednesday that the company's multimillion-dollar bonuses were "distasteful" to many and had provoked a firestorm of wrath. "I share that anger," Edward Liddy, chairman and CEO of the American International Group Inc., said in testimony prepared for Congress.
Analysis: White House, Dems backpedaling on AIG
(AP)
AP - For the first time since last fall's election, Democrats and the Obama administration are backpedaling furiously on an issue easily understood by financially strapped taxpayers: $165 million in bonuses paid out at bailed-out AIG.
Pence: Return AIG donations
(Politico)
Politico - House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence is urging politicians from both parties to strongly consider returning campaign contributions from AIG.
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Top Stories
AIG head shares US anger of bonuses but backs them
(AP)
AP - The chief executive officer of failed insurance conglomerate AIG acknowledged Wednesday that the company's multimillion-dollar bonuses were "distasteful" to many and had provoked a firestorm of wrath. "I share that anger," Edward Liddy, chairman and CEO of the American International Group Inc., said in testimony prepared for Congress.
Obama seeks greater rein on financial institutions
(AP)
AP - President Barack Obama says he wants Congress to pass legislation giving the government greater regulatory authority over financial institutions like American International Group.
Consumer prices rise by largest amount in 7 months
(AP)
AP - Consumer prices rose in February by the largest amount in seven months as gasoline prices surged again and clothing costs jumped the most in nearly two decades.
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