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 and his father got fat. Recently I've been watching reruns of the entire Walton's dramatic series. Normally, when a TV cast member died, the...

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, D.C. would spend her life on the world political and cultural stage. It wasn't all beer and skittles, however, when her lawyer father...

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 Award, and who served for a year as United States Poet Laureate. The book is "Sweet Will," published by Prairie Lights after being out of...

Humorists can make hay of the least likely subjects. Like death. Remember W. C. Fields? He said he wanted the following inscription on his tombstone: "On the Whole I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia." And then there was "Pep" Simek of Medford, who recently passed on to the big pizza...

"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 who inspired the work of gay writers and artists by the gay writers and artists themselves. Thirty-nine essays make up the book and I'll...

Three American presidents lead off this week's roster of books: Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. You could fill libraries with what has already been written by these guys, but leave it to the scholars -- they can always find a niche that's unfilled. Such is...

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 try to make it up by reviewing a finely wrought thriller by first-time Swedish author Alexander Soderberg. It's "The Andalucian Friend," (Crown,...

"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 woe/ In every cry of every Man In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear. How the Chimney-sweeper's...

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, Mrs. Lily Reich. One of our texts was a book called "Men Who Made Wisconsin" or something like that. The book contained brief profiles of...

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 writes that Laurel's work is "the start of a remarkable career." Endorsements from Smith and Keenan are good enough for me, so I plowed...

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 of Gettysburg, "The Killer Angels," are looking for new reading material, I'm happy to report that although Shaara died in 1988, his family...

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 that fabled place. My interest lies in artistic recreations of a time long past, creations like Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," Arthur Miller's...