Books

I've always had a weakness for ongoing fictions that grow with the years. When I was a kid I liked "Gasoline Alley" because Skeezix grew up...

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, when most black women worked as domestics, scrub ladies and washerwomen, one young black woman born in 1895 in Washington,...

Summer will soon be upon us.

University of Iowa Press has just re-issued a book of poetry by Philip Levine, winner both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book...

Humorists can make hay of the least likely subjects. Like death. Remember W. C. Fields? He said he wanted the following inscription on his...

"Who's Yer Daddy?" edited by Jim Elledge and David Groff (University of Wisconsin Press, $26.95) is a fascinating look at writers and artists...

Three American presidents lead off this week's roster of books: Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. You could fill libraries...

I'm way behind in my coverage of the Scandinavian thriller surge in world publishing, not having even read a Stieg Larsson thriller, so I'll...

"I wander thro' each charter'd street Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of...

When I was a kid in a small Wisconsin grade school, one of my favorite subjects was Wisconsin history, taught to me by my sixth-grade teacher,...

River Falls poet Thomas R. Smith writes that Kristin Laurel's new book of poetry will "burn itself on your memory." Minnesota poet Deborah Keenan...

Not long ago I raved about a first novel written by a neighbor down the road in Lake Elmo, Minn.

As the River Falls Reads program winds down and folks who have read and enjoyed Michael Shaara's Pulitzer-Prize winning novel about the Battle...

I have ancestors who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century, so I'm always on the lookout for books, movies or plays about...

I have ancestors who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century, so I'm always on the lookout for books, movies or plays...